John Robinson Is 82, Out of Appeals, and Still Won't Say Where the Bodies Are

The same week Rex Heuermann was sentenced for killing eight women, Kansas quietly denied serial killer John Robinson clemency for the same crime. Let's not forget how he ended up there.

Last week, in a Long Island courtroom, Rex Heuermann was sentenced to life for murdering eight women, and the country watched. Thirteen of the victims’ relatives rose to face him. The judge called him a coward to his face and had him hauled out while the gallery chanted. The cameras caught all of it.

The same week, Kansas refused to spare another man who had murdered eight women. His name was John Robinson. He got the news on June 18, 2026, while in prison in El Dorado, Kansas.

In a recent photo, he looks a little like Santa Claus with a shorter beard. He is eighty-two years old, and he has spent more than two decades on Kansas’s death row. The governor, Laura Kelly, denied his petition for clemency, his request to have his death sentence commuted to life in prison. Her denial runs a single paragraph: no credible claim of innocence and no manifest injustice in the trial. The sentence stands.

Eighty-two-year-old John Robinsons

One paragraph. Eight women.

The first of them is a girl who wants to wear a suit to work.

The Women

It’s the summer of 1984, and nineteen-year-old Paula Godfrey of Overland Park, Kansas, has a plan. She is going to be a businesswoman. She can picture herself with a briefcase and people calling her Miss Godfrey. She’s got what it takes: she’s a good student and a serious ice skater, and her mother gets up before dawn to drive her to the rink.

Nineteen-year-old Paula Godfrey

The man who hires her runs a consulting firm called Equi-II. He’s past forty, married, a churchgoing father, the kind of established man a girl is raised to trust. He has an office and letterhead, and he talks to her like she’s already a colleague, not a kid. He needs a sales representative. He thinks she’d be good. There’s a training course down in San Antonio. A couple of weeks ago, some of the other girls were going too, all of it on the company. He’ll handle the flights.

Robinson knows there’s no training. No other girls. No job. She wants it badly, so he doesn’t have to talk her into anything. He can tell her what she’s hoping to hear and watch her believe it. He’s done this before, and it works. While she’s thanking him, he’s already thinking about the letter he’ll send afterward, the one with her name on it. He’ll have to get her voice right.

She goes home and tells her family she’s leaving for Texas.

On the morning of September 1, he pulls up to the house to drive her to the airport. She gets in. The car pulls away from the curb.

She never checks into the hotel in San Antonio.

Two weeks come and go, and Paula doesn’t come home. She doesn’t call. A nineteen-year-old gets into a car for a company trip and, past that morning at the curb, is gone.

Her father flies to Texas to check the hotel and the dates, and finds nothing. No reservation. No record. No daughter. He comes home, goes to Robinson, and confronts him. Robinson is calm. He’s sorry. He doesn’t know a thing.

Then a letter comes. Typed. It says she’s fine. It says she’s decided to start over somewhere new, and that she doesn’t want to see her family. Paula’s name at the bottom, in her own signature.

Her mother holds it in the kitchen and reads it again. Why? What happened? Maybe Paula did decide to disappear. Maybe she’s angry about something. Maybe if they push too hard, they’ll only drive her further away. So they don’t push, and the search winds down, and after a while, no one is looking for Paula at all.

John Robinson typed it.

Nineteen years later, Paula’s father is in a Missouri courtroom, on his feet, trying to keep his voice level while he tells the room who his daughter was—a motel in Belton. Robinson came for the money she owed him; the argument turned into a fight, and he killed her with a lamp. In a rented room, over a debt. And then, on the one thing the father came for, where she is, Robinson says nothing at all."He has waited all this time to learn what happened to her, and now, finally, he hears it: a motel in Belton. Robinson pleads guilty so he can dodge a second death sentence. He refuses to answer the one question that matters to Paula’s family: where she is. Paula would be sixty-one now. No one has ever found her.

It works exactly the way Robinson planned, so a few months later, in the first weeks of 1985, he does it again. This time, there’s a baby in the middle of it.

Lisa Stasi is nineteen, from Alabama, and four months into being somebody’s mother. She married Carl in 1984 and had Tiffany that September. By December, she had gotten herself and the baby out of an abusive marriage, Carl was gone to the Navy, and she was on her own and broke.

nineteen-year-old Lisa Stasi

She takes Tiffany to Hope House, a shelter near Kansas City, because that’s where you go to put a floor under yourself, and from there she’s working toward her GED, a job, a place of her own, a life she builds herself for her daughter. She isn’t looking to be rescued. She’s looking for a foothold.

And then a man appears offering one. She meets him through a hospital social worker. He calls himself John Osborne, and describes a program he runs for young mothers in precisely her situation: housing, job training, daycare for Tiffany, help finishing her GED, and real work in Kansas City, Chicago, or Denver. It is the whole list she has been trying to build on her own, handed to her at once by a calm, respectable, well-spoken man who says he does this for girls like her. He puts her up at the Rodeway Inn in Overland Park and pays for the room. For the first time in months, the floor feels solid under her.

Robinson has a different view. He is seeing a young mother in need. He is looking at a healthy infant girl and the one person standing between her and a sale. His brother Don and Don’s wife, Helen, have wanted a baby for years, and they will pay. The baby is the asset; the mother is the obstacle attached to it, a claim no adoption can get around while she is alive. So he prices her the way he’d price any obstacle.

Nineteen. On her own. Family two states away. Nobody checks on her from one day to the next. Nothing about her is hard to remove. To him, what is coming is not murder. It is a clear title to the asset.

On January 8, Lisa drops Tiffany at her sister-in-law’s for babysitting and mentions, happily, the man who’s going to help her. Her sister-in-law feels uneasy and can’t say why. The next afternoon, in a heavy snowstorm, Osborne drives to the house and takes Lisa and the baby back to the Rodeway Inn. Less than an hour later, Lisa calls to say they got back safely.

Around half past four, she calls her mother-in-law, Betty, crying and scared. “They” are saying she’s an unfit mother, and they’re going to take Tiffany, she says. They want her to sign four blank sheets of paper. Betty tells her not to sign anything. “Here they come,” Lisa says, and the line goes dead. No one in her family hears her voice again.

That same snowy night, Robinson carries the baby into his own home in Stanley and tells his wife, Nancy, it’s a private adoption he’s handling for his brother. He tells Don and Helen something else: the baby’s mother killed herself, and the child is available right now. They fly in the next day. Robinson drives them to his Equi-II office, has them sign a petition for adoption, and collects thousands of dollars for an attorney named Doug Wood. They name her Heather Tiffany Robinson and fly home to Chicago. They have no idea.

A few days later, Betty gets a typed letter signed “Lisa,” saying she’s left town to start a new life with Tiffany. Lisa’s mother never believes it. Lisa could barely type, she says. And she would never have let that baby go.

For fifteen years, the man at the holiday table has been Uncle John. Heather is fifteen before anyone tells her she was born Tiffany Stasi, that her mother was murdered within days of being handed away, and that the uncle who placed her with the family is the one who did it. In 2000, DNA made it certain.

Lisa Stasi’s body has never been found.

Two years on, he does it again.

Catherine Clampitt is twenty-seven and trying to climb back from a bad few years. She was born in Korea, adopted into a family in Texas, and has a young son. She’s left with her parents in Wichita Falls while she gets steady enough to be the mother she means to be. Early in 1987, she moved to the Kansas City area to live with her brother’s family and start over.

She answers an ad for Robinson’s consulting firm, Equi-II: a job with travel and a new wardrobe, the kind of fresh start she came for. Her brother reads the same ad, thinks the wording is off, and tells her so. She takes the job anyway. But the work never quite materializes. It stays just out of reach, and she stays near it, moving between hotels, short on money, coming to Robinson when she runs out.

Twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Clampitt

In June 1987, she leaves to meet him and never returns. Her brother does not let it go. For eight months, he runs his own search, even staking out Robinson’s office, and at one point, he confronts Robinson directly. Robinson is unfazed. He’s aware of the search, he says, and has no information. He doesn’t know where she went.

Catherine was twenty-seven. Her case is still open. She has never been found. Her son grew up without her.

For a while, the disappearances stop, because in 1987 the frauds finally catch up with Robinson and the courts sentence him as a habitual criminal and send him to prison, first in Kansas, then in Missouri. Inside, he does what he always does: finds the easy job, makes himself useful, and makes himself liked. He ends up in the library. The librarian is a married woman named Beverly Bonner.

forty-nine-year-old Beverly Bonner

She’s forty-nine, married to the prison’s doctor, with two grown sons. She has run a library, raised a family, and kept a household; she is nobody’s fool, and she is bored. And here is this inmate clerk in her library, funny and quick and full of plans: a hydroponics business he’s building, property he means to buy, a future with room in it and a place for her in the middle of it. He treats her like the most interesting person in the building, and no one has done that in a long time.

He doesn’t have to push her; he just keeps it up. What he’s actually looking at is a woman with standing, a checkbook, and an alimony settlement on the way.

By the time he’s released in early 1994, she’s filed for divorce, told her husband she’s going to help Robinson with his business and take a job in Chicago, and left Cameron and her sons. Her family never sees her again after the final hearing. On paper, he makes her the president of his hydroponics company, Hydro-Gro.

Robinson rents a storage unit in her name. She’s his sister, he tells the manager, off in Australia and having too good a time to come home. He redirects her thousand-dollar alimony checks to a post office box he controls and cashes them month after month. Her brothers get letters, typed and signed in what looks like her hand, postmarked from Australia, France, the Netherlands, and Kansas City, all about her wonderful travels.

She didn’t come to her brother’s wedding in 1995. She doesn’t come, that October, to her own son’s funeral. The real Beverly would have been at both; the one in the letters is always overseas. To Robinson, the letters are bookkeeping: a few minutes at the typewriter every couple of months, so the checks clear and nobody comes looking. They finally stopped in 1997, and her family called the police.

Beverly Bonner is in a barrel in a storage unit in Raymore, Missouri. The letters about her wonderful travels kept arriving while she was in it.

Beverly’s checks are still landing in the Olathe box when Robinson goes looking for the next one. He has a new way to hunt now: a computer, a modem, chat rooms where strangers find each other. It widens the field past anyone who’d have to walk into his office.

Sheila Faith is forty-five and widowed; her husband died in 1993. They’d had one child, Debbie, born in 1978 with cerebral palsy, a girl who uses a wheelchair. After his death, Sheila moved from California to Colorado with Debbie, who had a friend there. Now it’s the two of them on about a thousand dollars a month in government checks, and under the monthly arithmetic is the worry she can’t put down: what happens to Debbie if something happens to her. There’s no one else. It’s her, her girl, and the checks.

forty-five-year-old Sheila Faith

Debbie is fifteen. A teenager first, a wheelchair second: bored some days, funny on others, half-excited and half-miserable about moving somewhere new and leaving the one close friend she writes to.

A man finds Sheila online, and what he offers is aimed at the one person who matters most to her. He’s warm, unhurried, wealthy, he says, a businessman with room in his life for both of them. He’ll see to Debbie’s care. A real home. A cruise. Money is no problem at all; all they have to do is come to Kansas City. He has found the one thing that can move her, and he holds it out: not a way out for herself, but safety for her daughter.

What Robinson hears is simpler. Two government checks every month, Sheila’s and Debbie’s, arrive for exactly as long as the paperwork says the two of them are alive.

In the summer of 1994, he came to help them move. No one ever sees them again. He reroutes both checks, Sheila’s and Debbie’s, to a mailbox in Olathe, the same one he used for Bonner, and collects them for years. Sheila’s sisters get the same overseas letters Bonner’s brothers did, and they don’t believe a word of them.

Debbie’s check takes more upkeep. Disability benefits have to be recertified, so when the Social Security Administration mails a form asking whether the girl still qualifies, Robinson fills it out himself. He forges her dead mother’s signature, attaches a fake medical report for a child he has already killed, and mails it back. It is approved. The payments keep coming. In a government file, Debbie Faith stays alive and eligible for years after her death; fifteen, disabled, entitled to care, a dead girl kept current on paper because the checks were worth more than she was.

Sheila Dale Faith was forty-five. Debbie Lynn Faith was fifteen. Two of the three barrels in Raymore were theirs.

By now, he has somewhere to put them. In the mid-nineties, he buys seventeen acres of nowhere in Linn County and moves a trailer onto it; he has the chat rooms, the mailboxes, the aliases, the forged signatures. A whole machine, running smoothly. The next one he keeps close and keeps for two years.

Izabela Lewicka is nineteen when she leaves for Kansas, and she has already crossed an ocean to get this far. She was born in Poland and came to West Lafayette, Indiana, with her family when she was eleven. She started at Purdue in the fall of 1996. She draws and paints, and she’s pulled toward the edges of things (paganism, goth, the BDSM scene), the way an art student reaches for whatever feels truer than the town she grew up in.

Nineteen-year-old Izabela Lewicka

In the spring of 1997, she tells a friend that an international book agent in Kansas City has offered her a commission to illustrate manuscripts. To an art student, that’s the part that matters: a man with money and reach telling her that her drawing is worth paying for. To her parents, she frames it smaller, a summer internship, back at Purdue in the fall if it doesn’t pan out. She gives them an address, 9280 Metcalf in Overland Park, and an email. On June 8, 1997, she fills her car and drives to Kansas.

The address is a rented mailbox. The book agent is Robinson. He sets her up in an Olathe apartment, and from there her name comes apart in his hands. To one contact, she’s his adopted daughter; to another, his niece, though that one notices them touching in a way that doesn’t fit a niece. She enrolls in a drafting class as Izabela Lewicka-Robinson and tells the instructor she’s married to an older man; she tells her parents the same, but never gives them his name. Somewhere in those two years, she signs a contract making herself his property, and another making him her power of attorney.

Sometime in late summer or fall of 1999, she’s gone, age twenty-one. Her Polish passport, her resident alien card, her diploma, and her library card all turn up later in his keeping. She’s in a barrel on his farm near La Cygne. A jury will sentence him to death for her murder; years later, on a technicality, the Kansas Supreme Court will throw that conviction out as a legal duplicate of the count for the woman who came next.

Izabela is barely gone before Robinson is working the next. This time, the first person to feel something wrong is a mother in Michigan.

Carolyn Trouten talks to her daughter, Suzette, almost every day. Suzette is twenty-seven, a licensed practical nurse in Monroe, the youngest of five, and she has two Pekingese, Peka and Harry, that go everywhere with her. The job she describes to her mother is one a man named John offered her in the BDSM forums where she’d looked for this kind of arrangement before: private nurse to his wealthy, elderly father, sixty-five hundred a month, traveling the world while the old man sees the places he always wanted to. To Carolyn, it sounds like a great deal of money and a long way from home. To Suzette, it sounds like her own wishes read back to her, her nursing and her travel, and her appetite for the world folded into a single offer. She researches colleges in Switzerland and Belgium, because John says they’ll be abroad long enough for her to take classes. She fills out a passport application. Her aunt helps her write up a list of every friend and family member’s number before she goes.

Twenty-eight-year-old Suzette Trouten

On February 12, 2000, she drove to Kansas in a moving truck Robinson rented, the two dogs riding with her. She has packed up her own life and driven it to the address he gave her; to him, she is an arrival to be processed, nothing he has to work for. She checks into a hotel in Lenexa. It has a no-pet policy, so two days later, Robinson takes Peka and Harry and boards them at a kennel.

Suzette calls and emails her mother almost every day, the way she always has. And then the calls stop, and only the emails are left.

They keep coming. Suzette is busy. Suzette is traveling. Suzette will call soon. A letter even turns up with a postmark from Mexico. Carolyn reads them on her screen, one after another, and whoever is writing them knows enough to sound almost right, yet still gets her daughter wrong. Her daughter would not go quiet. Her daughter would not leave the dogs. She calls the police, and this time, when they start pulling the thread, it doesn’t break.

The Barrels

By the spring of 2000, two women Robinson met online had walked into police stations. One says he assaulted her, one says he stole from her. The theft is enough for a warrant. A task force is already on him, renting the hotel room next door while he meets women. When it looks like he’s about to take another woman out to the farm, they decide they’ve seen enough.

In June, they go in. Cadaver dogs hit near the trash by his trailer at La Cygne. There are barrels. A deputy tips one, and a thin red line runs down the side, and a fly drops onto it, and that’s the moment they’re sure. Inside are Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka.

Across the state line, in Raymore, two units are leased in Beverly Bonner’s name. Investigators found them by taping shredded documents back together from his trash. Cat litter is scattered on the floor to soak up what leaks and cut the smell. Three more barrels. Beverly Bonner. Sheila Faith. Debbie Faith.

One at a time, the barrels are opened on a table. Inside the first is Beverly Bonner, curled up, still fully dressed for cold weather; her head has been struck so many times the examiner can’t name a single fatal blow, because any of them would have done it. Then, Suzette Trouten had a soft nylon rope around her head, and beneath it a strip of cloth that served as a blindfold, which slipped down past her eyes. Then, Izabela Lewicka, knees drawn up, in a short-sleeved nightshirt, had three pieces of duct tape in the barrel with her. Sheila Faith, wrapped in plastic. And Debbie Faith (fifteen, the girl in the wheelchair), still in her clothes and an adult diaper, three blows to her head, any one of them enough. It is the same wound, barrel after barrel: a heavy blunt object, a rounded face—a hammer.

Five women in five drums. And three more (Paula, Lisa, Catherine) with no barrel, no grave, nothing at all.

In 2002, in the longest criminal trial in Kansas history, a jury convicted John Robinson of everything. He gets death for Suzette and Izabela, life for Lisa, whose murder came before Kansas had a death penalty to give. His wife testifies that he was a caring husband. His children sit behind him in the gallery. The next year, in Missouri, rather than face a second capital trial, he pleaded to the other five (Paula, Catherine, Beverly, Sheila, and Debbie) for five life sentences. The prosecutor’s one condition is that he lead them to the three women who were never found.

He refuses. He has refused ever since.

The Boy from Cicero

He was the third of five. His father, Henry, is a machinist at Western Electric and a heavy drinker. His mother, Alberta, runs the house on discipline and on appearances: the children clean, well-dressed, pushed to excel and to be seen excelling. Of the five, John is the one she expects the most from, the child she is sure will go furthest. He will later describe her, flatly, as detached.

He does well early, at least on paper. Eagle Scout at thirteen. A choirboy. In 1957, he travels to London with a group of Scouts, performs at the Palladium in front of the Queen, and gets kissed on the cheek backstage by Judy Garland. It makes the Chicago papers. For a few days, the boy from Cicero is, in print, somebody.

But some of the people around him already sense something off. His Scout leader back in Cicero, a man named Richard Shotke, would remember a driven, motivated boy whose ability never quite matched his ambition: shrewd, sparing with his words, careful to talk only when talking would get him the effect he wanted. He was aspiring, Shotke said, to more than he was capable of.

He keeps getting into respectable institutions and washing out of them. The seminary he entered to become a priest expelled him within a year: failing grades, a discipline problem, and being the class clown, where a future priest was supposed to be. He enrolls in a junior college to train as an X-ray technician and drops out before he finishes. Then he skips the part he didn’t finish: around 1965, at his first real job in the Kansas City area, a children’s hospital, he papers his office walls with diplomas and certificates he never earned. A coworker named Josephine Bermel can see straight through it. I don’t believe this man is a certified technician. He hasn’t demonstrated the ability to position small patients on the table or to talk a frightened child through holding still for the machine; the staff has had to teach him the job he claims to have already. It gets him fired. But the lesson he keeps isn’t that he was caught. It’s that the diplomas on the wall worked right up until someone stood close enough to read them.

He lands on his feet, in a laboratory run by a doctor who’d once been Harry Truman’s personal physician, Wallace Graham, established and trusting, who puts him near the money. Within a few years, $33,000 is gone from the practice. In 1969, he was convicted of his first crime, and the court gave him three years’ probation. He never pays it back.

He keeps going. He takes insurance money. He steals stamps from an oil company. He runs a medical-consulting firm that consults on nothing. When a friend’s wife is dying, and the friend needs money for her care, Robinson sells him on a hydroponics venture with guaranteed returns in ninety days, takes twenty-five thousand dollars, and keeps it. The wife dies. The money is gone.

All through these years, he also keeps up the respectable life: Scoutmaster, baseball coach, Sunday school teacher at a Presbyterian church, though he’d been raised Catholic. In 1977, he talks his way onto the board of a local charity for people with disabilities, forges a run of letters between its director and the mayor praising his own generosity, and gets himself named the charity’s Man of the Year. He throws himself a luncheon. He stands up and accepts the award he wrote for himself.

Seven years later, he hires a nineteen-year-old named Paula Godfrey.

Who He Was

Robinson didn’t hunt the way the nickname suggests. The Slavemaster persona was real, but it wasn’t the driver. Where investigators could name a reason for a killing, it was money: a baby placed with his brother for a fee, Beverly Bonner’s alimony, the Faiths’ Social Security and disability checks, all of it rerouted to a mailbox and cashed. With the others, no one could ever say for certain why. The domination was how he held them. The killing was how he closed the account.

These were practical killings, not the explosive violence of a man overtaken by rage. The proof is in what he did afterward, every time. He sat down and wrote. A forged letter in the dead woman’s own name, mailed to the people most desperate to find her. A signature. A check. A few lines that kept her mother off the phone with the police. Years later, when a criminologist tested the saliva that had sealed one of those letters to a victim’s mother, the profile came back his.

Was he a psychopath? He was never given formal clinical tests in any public record, and he raised no questions about his own mind at trial. His lawyers argued the evidence was thin, not that their client was ill. But the behavioral picture is about as complete as these get: the lifelong, deliberate lying; the grandiosity of a man who hands himself an award; the decades spent living off other people’s money; the range, from fraud to forgery to kidnapping to murder; and across sixty years and eight killings, nothing anyone has ever been able to point to as remorse. Underneath all of it, other people were never quite real to him. They were useful while they were useful, and disposable when they weren’t.

The lying held to the very end. When the case reached its penalty phase and his life was on trial, his lawyers produced a different John Robinson: an abused child. Through retained experts and his own account, they described a mother who beat him from the age of five, who told him she wished he’d never been born, who blamed him for a younger brother’s death from illness, and never forgave him. It came forward only when his life depended on it, and it rested almost entirely on his own telling. The family’s public record, including five children, an alcoholic father, and a strict mother, carries no sign of the beatings, and the younger brother he was said to have been blamed appears nowhere in it.

The jury heard all of it and returned a death sentence. It reads, in the end, like one more document authored in someone else’s name: a childhood, written in his mother’s, with her cast as the monster, produced at the single moment it might have bought him his life. The same hand that typed all the other letters.

The clearest sign is in who he chose, and it’s not what the word victim usually suggests. He didn’t go after weak women. He went after strong ones, each caught at a hinge in her life and reaching for something just ahead of her: a career, a fresh start, a safe home for a disabled child, a way back to a son, the whole world. What they shared wasn’t weakness. It was forward motion, and the reach was the opening. He found what a woman wanted and made himself the man who could hand it to her. He didn’t have to force his way in. She let him in herself, because he came as the thing she wanted most.

For most of sixteen years, it worked.

It’s worth setting him beside the man who shared his week in the news. Rex Heuermann hunted women he thought the world would be slow to miss, picking them off the margins. The families proved him wrong: at his sentencing, a cousin of one of the dead told him to his face that he chose small women because he was a coward. Robinson worked the opposite edge. He chose women someone would miss; a father who flew to Texas to check the hotel himself, a mother who never once believed the letters, and beat the search anyway, on paper. One man counted on no one looking. The other made the looking stop.

The Names

El Dorado, Kansas. 2026.

He’s eighty-two, in a cell, and the death sentence he carries rests now on just one of the eight: Suzette Trouten, the last of them, the one whose mother would not stop calling. He was condemned to death twice, for Trouten and for Lewicka; the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the second sentence a legal duplicate of the first, threw it out, and let Trouten’s stand. Kansas, which hasn’t executed anyone since restoring the death penalty in 1994, will almost certainly never carry it out. He’ll die of old age first, where he is.

His lawyer is right about the arithmetic. Keeping an eighty-two-year-old man on death row for an execution that will never come will cost money; he’ll die in his cell first. But a death sentence is not an invoice. Twelve people sat through that trial, heard all of it, and decided this was the rare case that called for the ultimate penalty, and the families of the dead sat in that room while they did. I don’t believe in the needle myself. But those jurors and those families earned that judgment by being in the room for what he had done, and the argument about cost walks right past them.

Three families are still standing where they stood in 1984, in 1985, in 1987. Paula Godfrey would be sixty-one now. Catherine Clampitt’s little boy is a grown man. None of them has a grave to visit, because Robinson still won’t say where the bodies are. Investigators have asked for twenty-six years.

The method was always the same: turn a person into a typed letter, a forged signature, a check rerouted to a box, until even her own family stopped looking—sixteen years of it. The names are still here.

I keep their names. I grew up a small-town girl in Alabama, the same place Lisa Stasi started, with the same sheltered, narrow sense of how big and how dangerous the world outside it could be. When I read her file, I recognized her. But she was braver than I am. By nineteen, she had already gotten herself and her baby out of an abusive marriage. An aunt took her to a shelter, but the rest she did herself: working toward her GED, looking for work, reaching for a program that promised a real start, building a life for her daughter out of almost nothing. At that age, in that kind of trouble, I would have run straight back to my Nana’s house. Lisa kept going, and the man who answered had made himself look exactly like the help she was after.

Paula Godfrey. Lisa Stasi. Catherine Clampitt. Beverly Bonner. Sheila Faith. Debbie Faith. Izabela Lewicka. Suzette Trouten.

And the baby he turned into someone else’s child is a grown woman now, the one who grew up calling him Uncle John. She knows exactly what he did, and she’s said so out loud, in her own voice, under her own name. Not one he typed for her.

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoy it, please pass it along to a friend. See you next week!

Sources

The psychological analysis in “Who He Was” draws on the peer-reviewed literature on psychopathy and instrumental violence listed below. Factual claims are grounded in the Kansas Supreme Court’s opinion, the Missouri plea proceedings, Governor Kelly’s clemency record, contemporaneous reporting, and the principal book-length accounts of the case.

Peer-reviewed and scholarly references

Cornell, D. G., Warren, J., Hawk, G., Stafford, E., Oram, G., & Pine, D. (1996). Psychopathy in instrumental and reactive violent offenders. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(4), 783–790. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.64.4.783

Hare, R. D. (2003). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (2nd ed.). Multi-Health Systems.

Skeem, J. L., Polaschek, D. L. L., Patrick, C. J., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2011). Psychopathic personality: Bridging the gap between scientific evidence and public policy. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(3), 95–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100611426706

Woodworth, M., & Porter, S. (2002). In cold blood: Characteristics of criminal homicides as a function of psychopathy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111(3), 436–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.111.3.436

Legal and primary sources

State v. Robinson, 303 Kan. 11, 363 P.3d 875 (2015).

State v. Robinson (Cir. Ct., Cass County, Mo., Oct. 2003) (guilty plea to five counts of murder; five sentences of life without parole; Prosecutor Chris Koster).

Office of the Governor of Kansas. (2026, June 18). Governor Kelly denies John Robinson’s request for clemency [Press release]. https://www.governor.ks.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1060/55

Secondary sources

ABC News. (2019, October 4). For 15 years, he was just Uncle John, until she learned he was a serial killer who had murdered her mother. https://abcnews.com/US/15-years-uncle-john-learned-serial-killer-murdered/story?id=65958840

ABC News. (2019, October 8). ‘He didn’t look dangerous’: The truth about serial killer, con man John Robinson. https://abcnews.com/US/dangerous-truth-serial-killer-con-man-john-robinson/story?id=65855274

Burgess, B. (2026, June 18). Kansas governor denies death sentence clemency for serial killer. Kansas Reflector. https://kansasreflector.com/briefs/gov-laura-kelly-denies-death-sentence-clemency-for-serial-killer/

The Charley Project. (n.d.). Lisa Stasi. Retrieved June 2026, from https://charleyproject.org/case/lisa-stasi

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