John Edward Robinson: Victims, Trials, and Death Row

John Edward Robinson is an American serial killer convicted of murdering eight women across Kansas and Missouri between 1984 and 2000, notorious for luring victims through early internet chatrooms under the alias “Slavemaster” and storing their bodies in 55-gallon barrels. He was sentenced to death in Kansas in January 2003 and later pleaded guilty to five additional murders in Missouri in exchange for life sentences. Now 82, he remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility after Kansas Governor Laura Kelly denied his request for clemency on June 18, 2026.¹

The Con Man Behind the Killer

Robinson was born on December 27, 1943, in Cicero, Illinois. Long before he killed anyone, he built a career on fraud. In 1964, at age 21, he got a job as an X-ray technician at Children’s Mercy and General Hospital in Kansas City using fabricated diplomas and recommendation letters; the hospital fired him once it discovered the credentials were forged.²

A string of embezzlement and fraud cases followed across the 1960s and 1970s: roughly $33,000 stolen from a physician’s office, $5,500 from an Illinois firm, $30,000 from a neighbor he told he was investing her money, and, in 1976, a federal indictment on four counts of securities and mail fraud. Each conviction produced probation rather than serious prison time. In 1980, working at a Borden Inc. subsidiary, he embezzled more than $40,000 and again avoided a long sentence, serving two months and receiving five more years of probation.³

He then created two shell companies, Equi-Plus and its successor Equi-II, that he used to give himself the appearance of a legitimate businessman. Equi-II would become the tool he used to approach and control his victims, settling their hotel bills, generating fake invoices, and, in one case, papering the illegal transfer of a kidnapped infant.⁴

Robinson also cultivated a public image that concealed all of this. In December 1977, the Kansas City Times reported he had been named “Man of the Year” for his work with disabled people. Two weeks later, the Kansas City Star revealed that Robinson had orchestrated the award himself, sending fake recommendation letters to city hall to secure a mayoral proclamation in his own honor.⁵

The Victims and the Pattern

The killings stretched from 1984 to 2000. Robinson worked from a consistent method: he approached women with promises of jobs, money, or a relationship, took control of their finances and personal documents, killed them, and then used forged letters and, later, emails to make their families believe they had simply moved away. Autopsies on several recovered victims indicated they had been killed by blows to the head with a hammer.⁶

1984–1987: The Early Victims

Paula Godfrey, a 19-year-old honor student and figure skater from Olathe, Kansas, disappeared in 1984 after Robinson hired her through Equi-II and told her family she was attending training in Texas. He later produced a forged letter, supposedly from Godfrey, saying she was fine and did not want to see her family. Her body has never been found.⁵

In January 1985, Robinson targeted Lisa Stasi, a 19-year-old unwed mother with a four-month-old daughter, Tiffany. Using the alias “John Osborne,” he told social workers at Truman Medical Center and the group Birthright that he ran a program called “Kansas City Outreach” that helped young mothers. He paid Stasi’s bill at a Rodeway Inn in Overland Park with an Equi-II credit card. She was last seen alive on January 9, 1985. The next day, Robinson handed baby Tiffany to his brother Don and Don’s wife along with fabricated adoption documents, and took $5,500 from them.⁷⁵ Lisa Stasi’s remains have never been recovered.

Catherine Clampitt, 27, from Cass County, Missouri, disappeared in 1987 after Robinson hired her as a saleswoman for Equi-II. In later Missouri plea proceedings, Robinson admitted killing her with a “tire thumper” after an argument over money and directing an individual identified in court records only as “G.T.” to dispose of her body, which was never found.⁸

1994–2000: The Barrel Victims

In 1994, Robinson connected online with Sheila Faith, a 45-year-old mother, offering her employment and medical care for her wheelchair-bound 15-year-old daughter, Debbie. Both were killed shortly after arriving in Missouri. Around the same time, Beverly Bonner, 49, of Cameron, Missouri, also became a victim. The remains of all three were stored in 55-gallon barrels inside a rented storage locker in Raymore, Missouri, where they went undiscovered for six years. Robinson continued to cash Sheila and Debbie Faith’s Social Security checks and Beverly Bonner’s alimony payments long after killing them, drawing more than $80,000 from the Faith family’s benefits alone.⁶

By the late 1990s, Robinson had shifted almost entirely online. He kept five computers in his home and spent hours each day in BDSM chatrooms under aliases including “Slavemaster,” posing as a wealthy businessman and offering women a life of luxury and travel. In 1997, he met Izabela Lewicka, a 19-year-old Polish-born art student at Purdue University in Indiana. He persuaded her to move to Kansas as his “submissive,” required her to sign a “slave contract,” and controlled her housing. Lewicka disappeared in late summer or fall of 1999. Robinson told acquaintances she had been deported and sent emails from her account to her father in Poland saying she was traveling in China. When investigators later searched an apartment she had occupied, they found hundreds of blood stains on a bedroom wall that matched her DNA.⁹

His last known victim was Suzette Trouten, a 28-year-old nurse from Newport, Michigan, whom he met after she placed personal ads on BDSM websites. He offered her a fabricated $60,000-a-year job caring for his elderly father, “Papa John,” even though his father had been dead for years. Trouten arrived in Kansas on February 14, 2000, and checked into Room 216 at the Guesthouse Suites in Lenexa. She was last heard from on March 1, 2000, the day a housekeeper noticed bloodstains on her hotel linens. Robinson then sent misleading emails from her accounts and mailed letters to her family postmarked from California and Mexico to make it appear she was traveling.⁹⁶

How He Was Caught

Trouten’s disappearance broke the case open. Her family reported her missing, and police discovered her two Pekingese dogs abandoned at the mobile home park where Robinson lived. A task force of roughly 30 investigators formed at the Lenexa, Kansas, police department. Detectives followed Robinson to his 16-acre property in rural Linn County, rented hotel rooms next to his to observe his meetings with women, recorded his calls with Trouten’s mother, and sifted through his household trash. Shredded documents from that trash, once reassembled, pointed them to a storage locker in Raymore, Missouri.⁶¹⁰

Robinson was arrested on June 2, 2000, at the Santa Barbara Estates Mobile Home Park in Olathe, Kansas, initially on sexual assault charges involving two women he had met online, with bond set at $5 million. The next day, officers executed a search warrant at his Linn County farm. Cadaver dogs alerted near a trailer on the property, and investigators found two 55-gallon barrels. When one of the barrels tipped during the search, a thin line of blood seeped from its seam. Inside were the remains of Suzette Trouten. The second barrel held the body of Izabela Lewicka.⁶

Two days later, on June 5, police searched the Raymore storage locker. There they found three more barrels, packed with kitty litter to mask the odor, containing the remains of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, and Debbie Faith. All five recovered victims had been killed by blows to the head.¹⁰

Trials and Sentences

Kansas

Robinson went to trial in Johnson County, Kansas, before Judge John Anderson III, with District Attorney Paul Morrison leading the prosecution. He was charged with two counts of capital murder for Trouten and Lewicka, first-degree premeditated murder for Lisa Stasi, aggravated kidnapping of Trouten, aggravated interference with parental custody for the abduction of Tiffany Stasi, and theft.¹¹

Described as the longest criminal trial in Kansas history, the six-week proceeding featured more than 110 witnesses and 500 pieces of evidence, drawing on over 23,000 pages of police reports. Prosecutors introduced Robinson’s fingerprints on the plastic sheeting covering the barrels in Missouri and on Social Security checks belonging to Sheila and Debbie Faith, DNA from envelopes he had mailed, blank letters bearing victims’ signatures that he used to impersonate them, a “slave contract” and BDSM videotape, and surveillance footage from the Guesthouse Suites showing Robinson checking out of Trouten’s hotel room and loading her belongings on the morning she vanished. A woman who had survived a sadomasochistic encounter with him also testified.¹¹¹²

On October 29, 2002, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts in less than a day. In January 2003, Robinson was sentenced to death on the two capital murder convictions, life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years for the murder of Lisa Stasi, and shorter terms on the remaining counts.⁶

On November 6, 2016, the Kansas Supreme Court, in a 415-page opinion by Justice Caleb Stegall, upheld one capital murder conviction and death sentence but reversed the second as multiplicitous. It was the first time the Kansas Supreme Court had upheld a death sentence since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1994.¹³¹⁴

Missouri

Robinson also faced murder charges in Missouri for Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Paula Godfrey, and Catherine Clampitt. Cass County Prosecutor Christopher Koster negotiated a plea agreement: Robinson would plead guilty to all five in exchange for life sentences rather than the death penalty. Part of the point was to induce him to reveal where Godfrey, Clampitt, and Lisa Stasi had been buried. He took the deal in October 2003 and received life sentences, but he never disclosed the locations of the three missing bodies.⁸

During the plea proceedings, Robinson described striking Godfrey in the head with a lamp at a motel in Belton, Missouri, while an associate named Irv Blattner prevented her escape.⁸

Where the Case Stands Now

Robinson is held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas and remains on death row. Kansas has not executed anyone since 1965, and no one has been put to death under the statute reinstated in 1994.¹⁵

In May 2026, Robinson was among eight of the state’s nine death-row inmates who filed formal requests for clemency. His attorney, Madeline Cohen, asked that his sentence be commuted to life without parole, arguing that at 82 it was “nearly certain” he would die of natural causes before the state could execute him.¹⁶

Governor Laura Kelly denied the request on June 18, 2026. “As the existence of a credible claim of innocence or evidence of manifest injustice are absent in his request, I have denied John Robinson’s request to commute his death sentence,” Kelly said.¹ His legal team has said it will continue seeking post-conviction relief in the Kansas Supreme Court, citing what it called “egregious errors” at trial, including ineffective counsel.¹⁷

Tiffany Stasi: The Baby Robinson Gave to His Brother

Lisa Stasi’s daughter is the case’s most unusual thread. After murdering Lisa in January 1985, Robinson gave four-month-old Tiffany to his brother Don and Don’s wife with forged adoption papers that used the names of a real lawyer, judge, and notary. Don and his wife, who had been trying to adopt through legitimate channels, believed the paperwork. They paid Robinson $5,500 and raised the girl in Illinois as Heather Tiffany Robinson, not knowing the truth for fifteen years.¹⁸

After Robinson’s arrest in 2000, Don’s daughter searched for news online and found a missing-persons report for Lisa Stasi. Helen Robinson, Don’s wife, compared old family photos to pictures of the missing infant and recognized them as the same child. FBI fingerprint analysis and DNA testing confirmed Heather’s identity. At 18, she was legally adopted by Don and his wife and kept the name Heather Tiffany Robinson. She built a relationship with her maternal grandmother, Pat Sylvester, but chose not to pursue one with her biological father, Carl Stasi.⁷

In 2019, she gave her first public interview on ABC’s 20/20, describing growing up unaware of her origins and her ongoing search for her mother’s remains. “I will never stop trying to find her,” she said. “I will never back down.”⁷ Lisa Stasi’s body has never been recovered, and Robinson has refused to reveal where it is.

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KSHB. Kansas Gov. Kelly Denies Clemency Request From Serial Killer John E. Robinson
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