Internet Slave Master (2011) - Serial Killer John Edward Robinson

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

he referred to himself in emails on a BDSM website as master and that's what we knew him as the slave master anybody who really is a master it's very very rare for me to refer to themselves as master in our world that's a huge red flag because you knew somebody was getting hurt but the question was what was consensual and when did across the line it's one of those moments where everybody's jaw drops hair stands up on the back your neck there was no crime scene there was no body there was just no hard evidence to indicate that anything had happened to them he knew what rules the game were he's able to turn those rules to his own benefit FBI criminal pursuit it's the winter of 1985 in Overland Park Kansas a quiet bedroom community nestled just south of Kansas City little do residents know they're peaceful enclave is about to become ground zero in a series of investigations that will span years unearthing some of the most diabolical and sordid crimes area law enforcement has ever seen On January 11th a frantic young woman contacts the Overland Park Police Department she's concerned about her sister-in-law Lisa Stacy who she hasn't heard from in days Lisa Stasi was a troubled young woman 19 and she was involved with a man named Carl she got pregnant they got married and they had this baby Tiffany Lynn Stacy but the marriage quickly quickly fell apart within a few months the couple splits and Carl moves to the Chicago area where he reenlists in the Navy with no job and no place to go Lisa and 4 month old Tiffany soon find themselves living in a group home for women but just a few days before her disappearance Lisa's luck takes a turn when she's accepted into a coveted Kansas City outreach program the Kansas outreach program was a program that a businessman named John Osborne had started to help young women with young babies get a restart in life it's an opportunity it's too good to refuse and on january 9th at Osborne picks Lisa and Tiffany up at her in-laws house he had put them up at a hotel in Overland Park Kansas near his his office but later that same night Lisa makes a panicked phone call to her mother-in-law she's hysterical she is crying and saying they're saying you're gonna take my baby away from me you're saying I'm a bad mother and the mother-in-law said whoo you know we're not trying to take your baby wave and Lisa said it made me sign four blank sheets of paper and the mother-in-law says don't do anything don't sign anything I'm not involved in this in any way and then Lisa says they're coming now and she hangs up and that's the last time anybody hears from Lisa the following morning her in-laws call the motel in search of Lisa and the baby but they're stunned to learn that Lisa is gone checked out for Bill paid with a credit card from a local business they discover that it was not John Osborne that had rented the room but a John Robinson and they got an address for the business that he runs equi - confused and worried lisa's brother-in-law checks out the firm a young man in his 20s tall is is there and basically rudely pushes him out the door then the mystery intensifies with yet another strange phone call Stacie's family receives a call from a priest father Warrenton at a local mission in downtown Kansas City this father Martin says that he's seen Lisa and Tiffany that they're fine but that they've taken off and left town with the with a guy named Bill so the family to verify this story calls the mission and they're told that there is no father Martin at the mission and at that point the family is even more concerned and they go to the police unfortunately investigators have little to go on except for one thing the case feels eerily familiar four months earlier another 19 year old named Paula Godfrey was living in the Overland Park area when she too mysteriously disappeared she answered an advertisement for a secretary position and it involves from travel some training and things like that her parents had never heard from her again they did get a letter saying that she needed some time on her own away from her family and do you know she was off finding herself they didn't believe it was really from her Paula's mother convinced her husband to go and report it to the police but Paula is of legal age and with no evidence of a crime there's little police can do it's not against the law to be a missing person and the letters are saying yeah I'm fine leave me alone yet now a young mother and her baby have also gone missing and that has authorities growing increasingly concerned I had a couple of small kids and I understood what it would be like to lose a small child and I think that made it even more personal to me the search for Lisa and her baby goes by the book police start with the immediate family and work their way outward they question Lisa's estranged husband Carl with whom she had a turbulent relationship he had a solid out alibi with the news back in Chicago Renton I mean he wasn't even in the picture at the time investigators also interviewed John Robinson from the man in charge of the outreach program Lisa hoped would be her salvation and he told me how she was referred to me with a young baby you know I had said I would put her up in my Kansas City outreach program Lisa came to his office with a young man by the name of Bill who she said was her new boyfriend and that you know they were gonna go off together and they were gonna start a new life and she really thanked Robinson for all of his help and for being there to support her but she really thought it was coming together and she was just gonna go start a new life bill investigators have heard the name before the mysterious father Martin had also spoken of a bill claiming that he and Lisa had run off together now police wonder what they have a case of impetuous young love or perhaps something more lethal it was just part of the confusion that was this case as to how does how does this all tie together according to reports she'd recently joined a Kansas City outreach program for young mothers but hit a roadblock when she met a new boyfriend a man police know only his bill and from there the trail goes cold there was no evidence of a crime there was no crime scene there was no body there was I mean there was just no hard evidence to prove that anything had happened to them then suddenly a new twist in the case these letters begin to surface Lisa's mother lock out one the battered women's shelter got one and in this letter Lisa had told the mother-in-law I've been down and out things haven't been going good but I've got an opportunity here to start a new life and I'm gonna do that so thank you for all that you've done but I'm gonna go off and start a new life and I'm just fine there's no mention of Bill but the rest of the letter seems sincere except for one thing this letter was typed Lisa didn't know how to type and it just didn't sound like Lisa at all but with little else to go on the case of Lisa and Tiffany Stacey slowly goes cold two years later in June 1987 another Kansas City resident reaches out to Overland Park Police he's searching for his stepsister 27 year old Catherine Clampett a recent transplant to the area who he hasn't heard from in weeks this she was gonna move up here to try to improve her life she answers an ad in the newspaper for an executive secretary working for a busy CEO and she goes to work for a man named John Dawson but not long after starting the new job catherine goes AWOL or so it seems a short time later her mother back in Wichita Falls Texas gets a letter a typewritten letter that's signed by her daughter but it doesn't sound that much like her daughter and she grows concern Catherines stepbrother calls her office and asked to speak to her boss John Dawson but it's told that no such employee exists her stepbrother meant to her belongings he found a receipt for the hotel where she had stayed and it was signed by a John Robinson not John Dawson in fact it's the very same John Robinson who recruited Lisa Stacey into the women's outreach program two years earlier a quick check reveals that Robinson is the owner of the company where Catherine works a consulting firm called equi 2 so Catherine Clampett stepbrother pays a visit to the to the equity offices only to find out that they're closed and that John Robinson is actually starting to serve a prison sentence as it turns out Robinson had been arrested just weeks earlier on charges of fraud and theft that he was just a small-time con man there was no indication that he had been involved in anything really much more than that investigators waste no time questioning anyone who may have information on Catherine but leads are few and far between when the detectives started talking to potential witnesses you know there was always a yeah I saw her a couple of weeks ago or you know I know that she didn't go to work for Robinson after all witnesses memories are spotty and contradictory but there's an even bigger problem the connection wasn't made immediately between Paul Godfrey Lisa Stasi in Katherine Clampett the cases were being distributed to different detectives now you can type in the names and a query can be popped up and searched in 15 seconds back then everything was done by hand and police have little reason to cross-reference old files when there's no concrete evidence that a crime has been committed in the first place there were three disappearances connected to Robinson but all three involved troubled women who were going off elsewhere who had sent letters home and wanted to be left alone the police were just treating these as typical missing-persons reports where these women probably just did not want to be found more than ten years pass and one by one the cases go cold then in March of 2000 a Michigan woman named Carolyn Trouty grows concerned about the welfare of her 27 year old daughter Suzette Suzette Trouten had told her family that she was moving to Kansas because she was gonna go to work for a wealthy businessman that did a lot of international traveling and she was going to take care of this business man's ailing father while they traveled but within just a month of her arrival Suzette appears to have vanished without a trace taking matters into her own hands Carolyn Trouten calls her daughter's employer demanding to know Suzette's whereabouts he tells her that Suzette has decided to take off with a man named Jim Turner and they were gonna be sailing around the world and she was not gonna be working for him after all Suzette Trouten was a Mama's girl was always in contact with her mom either through email or on the telephone Carolyn knew that her daughter would call her and let her fill her in on what was going on she knew something terrible had happened to her police are worried too they've heard this story before several times and when Carolyn Troughton reveals the employers name it is one they know all too well John Robinson ironically the the sergeant and the watch commander that reviewed that the missing-persons report that night both had dealings or were aware of John Robinson from the 1980s this time local police are determined not to let him slip through their fingers and it isn't long before agents from the FBI's Kansas City field office join the investigation we spent a lot of our time scratching our heads and and just trying to figure out what it is that that he was up to at the time he supposedly was running a business it was basically a magazine for mobile-home trailer parts Robinson's also married with four children and has worked hard to gain respect within the local community but police files tell a different story we knew he was a con man we knew he was a thief John had a number of convictions over the years mainly for small-time con artists types of activities embezzlements those sort of things he never worked a legitimate job that he did not cheat the company out of some kind of money still investigators find themselves facing a number of troubling questions first and foremost what would a two-bit con man be doing mixed up in the cases of four missing women and how do you go about mounting an investigation with no evidence of an actual crime being committed that we really needed to find all these individuals make sure number one they were alive and find out what kind of contact he was having with them what was he trying to do authorities are particularly concerned about Tiffani Stacy who disappeared at just four months old we were all getting together on this trying to get a handle on it and we didn't know what was gonna be at the end of this road we had no idea soon investigators get a new lead when letters and emails begin arriving at the home of Carolyn troughton all signed by her missing daughter Suzette then they started receiving letters from California and then there were a letter from Veracruz Mexico that kind of threw us for a loop the mother never believed them she said you know I've read these letters and I can tell by the way they're written by the fact that there's no spelling errors by the wording that she uses the phrases that she used she said I can tell my daughter is not writing these letters but the perplexing thing to her and all this way she said the signatures my daughter's the pattern is a familiar one but police hold off on confronting Robinson they don't want to tip their hand just yet instead they begin interviewing Suzette's family and friends looking for anything that might bolster their case what they discover next turns the entire investigation on its head well Suzette Trouten was kind of a free spirit she was in the BDSM lifestyle she was always on the internet with people in that lifestyle and she was ready to be on her own BDSM stands for bondage and discipline dominance and Submission sadism masochism a great deal of what this comes down to is somebody is enjoying the fantasy of having power and somebody is enjoying the fantasy of being powerless though legal BDSM is a practice often conducted in secret none of us really knew anything about it so while we're trying to work the case we're trying to learn about this lifestyle pain is part of this lifestyle so slapping or spanking someone that's natural according to her friends Suzette was a sexual submissive or slave who often surfed the internet looking for a master a master is usually a person who owns a slave the slave has acknowledged that person as their master and they are held with a certain level of respect in the community investigators learned that Suzette had recently found a new master but this time she was in way over her head anybody who really is a master it's very very rare for them to refer to themselves as master according to Suzette's friends she was a member of the bondage and discipline dominance and Submission sadism and masochism community or BDSM more people have joined the community since the 90s since the stigma has started to fall away police also learned that prior to her disappearance Suzette corresponded with a BDSM master online and relocated to Kansas City to work as a nurse's aide for his elderly father she come to this area at the behest of this guy named John Robinson but while Robinson has a checkered background to say the least on the surface there's nothing to suggest the suburban father of four would have been involved in something like BDSM let alone anything dangerous for missing-person name of the social worker I never ever had the feeling that this John Robinson was a killer our impression of John Robinson was that he was a small-time con artist who had been involved in a number of of con schemes over the years but nothing really more than that still with connections to a string of mysterious disappearances there's no denying Robinson is more than he appears to be mr. Robinson had his hand in a lot of different areas he was in in various businesses he made contact with hospitals about unwed mothers he'd also made contact with charities about unwed mothers helping them out this was very bizarre he was after these women for some strange sexual reason I'm not sure what it was we knew that he was involved with at least three women that had been reported as missing to us in the 1980s so we had a pretty good history on him we had a pretty good feeling that the guy was up to no good Paula Godfrey Lisa and Tiffany Stacy Kathryn Clampett and now Suzette Trouten the question is could any of these missing woman's still be alive could they be serving as sex slaves or something police haven't even considered this was the type of case that you know you went home at night and that's all you thought about is one of my Missy what could I have done what should I be doing you're thinking of that as you drive to work those you're going through the file you're going there's got to be something here I'm missing determined to prove once and for all that this small-time crook is up to something more sinister local police and FBI begin to dig deeper I'm told in all the retired detectives that it you know worked his cases the FBI agents the Missouri probation officer we were looking into his criminal background trying to find any clues that we could use against him I believe the the baby was probably still alive someplace Tiffany Stacy missing since 1985 would be 15 years old by now we actually thought that he may have been involved in some sort of a baby selling ring there was also activity of prostitution involved in his background as well we had a couple of informants one was a guy who was in the topless bars he was bird dogging women for John Robinson I had another informant who actually posed for some pictures and did some stuff with John John tried to recruit her telling her that she could make two to three thousand dollars in a weekend if she would fly around the country doing these these bid these jobs form we thought perhaps that he might have been taking the women and selling them into prostitution maybe cross state lines maybe even international lines it was hard to figure out exactly what he was doing you know it seemed like he was a con man on one hand but on the other hand he seemed to be involved in these other things which were darker with a mounting list of circumstantial evidence but still no proof of an actual crime investigators set up surveillance so they can track every move their suspect makes he didn't want to tip our hand at any time to let Robinson know we've contacted him the gig was up and he would start you know denying everything and possibly sending us on goose chases within a matter of weeks investigators learned that Robinson is in fact living a dual life well at home he's a family man he's got four children married and very suburban middle-class lifestyle during the day he's frequenting inner-city Kansas City hanging out with these sort of sketchy underworld characters and you know prostitutes strippers and lots of and lots of different kinds of women we followed him to homes in the Johnson County area and we followed him to motels where he had women meet him there the man was just in total action until 5 o'clock when his wife got off work Robinson thought he was smarter and brighter than anyone else that if he got caught he would just tell another lie as he had done for so many years and he didn't believe that there was anyone that was going to to hold him accountable we did a wiretap we would subpoena records for internet usage we got some search warrants for his email accounts we had two women in Canada that were sharing emails that he was sending to them and they were sending it to us so we were getting almost real-time his communications with them that kind of gave us some insight into what he was doing as investigators suspect Robinson is frequenting the BDSM web sites in search of slaves what a me he seemed like just a very commonplace little man who you would never suspect being involved in S&M type activities he referred to himself in emails on the BDSM web site as master and that's what we knew him is the slave master his pattern is if anything consistent Robinson agrees to play master too eager submissives enticing them further with the offer of a job he promised them the moon and a lot of these women just took it we're hooked and came to Kansas City investigators are shocked to learn how many women would come to town to be a complete strangers slave at the master slave level the the trust is considered to be inviolate and that's a two-way street the master has to have a complete trust the slave just as much as the slave has trust the master the authorities soon set up stakeouts at motels where Robinson entertains his out-of-town guests and through the walls a secret world comes alive or they could hear talking a lady's voice his voice they they could hear what they thought was maybe six laps and we knew that he was into this BDSM lifestyle and that probably was taking place in that room it was a really tense time for law enforcement because you knew somebody was getting hurt but the question was what was consensual and when did across the line police get an unexpected break in the case one of Robinson slaves a woman named Brenda comes forward with a familiar tale Sheehan came to Lennox to work for a man she knew as James Turner she was down on her luck she was unemployed at the time had no money but when she begins meeting with Turner at a local motel Brenda gets a whole lot more than she bargained for one of the times they had an argument and she was struck by him a little too hard she went up to the desk to inquire who had rented the room and she was told James Robbins and so she knew something wasn't right Brenda files a complaint with police accusing Robinson alias James Turner of sexual battery we ended up document about 17 false identities that he used with various people over the years it just went on and on the war you investigated the more the deeper and more complex this case God aliases con games violence sex police are now certain they're con man is up to something more criminal and the time to act is now days later another woman comes forward and files a similar complaint sexual battery Plus robbery against John Robinson with two accusations and search warrants in hand police finally have enough to make an arrest we felt like this was going to be our probably last best chance to catch this guy On June 2nd authorities descend on Robinson's home in Olathe Kansas we were all a nervous read it was just very tense and kind of nervous time I think for everybody he answered the door if we knock on it I was was polite was you know kind of carefree and bite us in we told him that he was under arrest we told him that we had actually been investigating him for quite a while the arrest warrant charges Robinson with sexual battery and robbery but investigators waste no time raising the subject of missing persons Lisa and Tiffany Stacy Paula Godfrey Kathryn Clampett and Suzette Trouten Robinson kind of turned pale he started like almost hyperventilating I memory turned back and looked at me because Jesus Christ like that just kind of collapsed on the chair I think it was a real shock to him and I think you knew we had him but when we walked him out of the house you know he picked himself back up and he was kind of back to his arrogant self and he said you know you guys really making a big production out of this aren't you Police confiscate Robinson's computer and files dating back years leaving nothing to chance they also secure warrants for several storage units here Anson Olathe Kansas in Raymore Missouri along with a family farm in Linn County it is at these three locations that investigators worst fears are confirmed the Olathe storage locker proved to be a treasure trove of evidence birth certificates driver's license social security cards belonging to several of these and women the kinds of things that you don't give up unless you're dead it it sort of confirmed what we'd been thinking all along and that is we're thinking more these letters color from it's an impressive haul but a good defense attorney can argue a simple fact where there's no body there's no crime the next day a team hits the Lynn County farm along with the Missouri search and rescue k9 unit down the Lynn County property we found a mobile home we found a storage shed some other items out by it when we did the the perimeter search where the shed was and the barrels were we found specifically to a large 88 gallon hazmat barrels we were actually going to move the barrels out in order for the dog to get a good scent there and when I rolled the barrel out and brought it up right then we saw blood coming out we ended up finding Suzette's body she was decomposing pretty well by then you know you're kind of sad because obviously she's gone but you're you're elated because you finally have got something on the sky investigators open the second barrel and are stunned by what they find a second body but the corpse does not bear any resemblance to the other missing women they've been searching for the second barrel that we open took us into a whole new realm of you know who's this and what have we gotten into now now instead of one murder investigation we had two and we were starting all over with this one meanwhile across the state line at one of Robinson's other storage units investigators have their own mystery to contend with three more barrels three more bodies in varying states of decomposition it was just a sick feeling I mean I was just dumbfounded I remember I just walked through that night and that whole weekend I mean I remember just in haze investigators wonder if the long search for Lisa Stasi Paula Godfrey and Kathryn Clampett has finally come to an end on June 12th a pathologist identifies the body found in the second barrel on Robinson's farm is Isabella la visca a 21 year old Polish immigrant Isabel Ola visca had never been reported missing and it came as quite a shock to that family they thought she was traveling over in Europe by then because John Robinson had covered his tracks in that case too and they had received letters and emails supposedly from Europe according to an autopsy report Isabella and Suzette Trouten both died from blunt force trauma to the head the likely weapon a small ball-peen hammer most the women had no defensive injuries which suggested to us that they didn't know it was coming meaning they were asleep maybe look in the other direction by the end of June comes another shock autopsies completed on the remaining three bodies revealed they are not in fact Lisa Stasi Paula Godfrey or Katherine Clampett on the contrary these remains belong to three entirely new victims Beverly Bonner Sheila faith and her disabled fifteen-year-old daughter Debbie all killed by blunt force trauma when you think of the enormity and all the people that that he killed uh it kind of boggles a mind even stranger police find no missing person reports filed for any of the three new victims an investigation soon reveals that Robinson's seduced Beverly Bonner a prison librarian while he was incarcerated during the 1990s the affair continued even after his release he pretty quickly discovers that she's getting $1,000 a month alimony checks from her ex-husband and so he kills her and then starts pocketing her alimony checks like Isabella the viscous family the Bonners are shocked by the news they knew that something wasn't quite right but she also was writing letters and catching alimony checks so they never quite could figure out if she was missing her knob Sheila and Debi faith meet a similar fate after she'll encounters Robinson in an online chat room I don't think that John Robinson had any interest in Sheila romantically he just had an interest in their disability checks and he started cashing their checks and cashed them for six years it now seems almost certain to investigators that Lisa Tiffany Paula and Kathryn are also dead and while Robinson's motive for killing these women remains unclear his ability to manipulate them was undeniable Robinson had a an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of the women that he was preying on and getting them to write or sign batches of letters was the key to his deception he was able to convince these women to write these letters to sign their names on blank pieces of paper because what he would tell them is we're gonna be traveling in China or Paris you're not gonna have time to write letters so what I want you to do is fill out some letters now but Robinson's audacity astounds even the FBI when they come across a strange and disturbing new tip it floored me I mean I think it just absolutely shocked everybody chasing down a tip authorities soon learned that Robinson helped his brother adopt a baby for $5,000 back in 1985 one of the really shocking moment was when mrs. Robinson handed me a photograph I looked at my partner and we were kind of stunned we knew that well that's definitely Tiffany the photograph was given to them by Robinson the day he delivered the baby to her new home just as Lisa and Tiffany Stacy were reported missing we believe that the John Robinson met and ended up taking Lisa Stasi specifically for Lisa's baby Tiffany and I imagine that he killed her I mean you look at Social Security you look at credit cards bank accounts she's never been hurt or seen from the bureau soon makes a preliminary ID using Tiffany Stacey's footprint from the day she was born it's a perfect match how possibly can you be that cruel not only to kill the mother adopt the kid out to your own brother and actually charged him several thousand dollars for it they thought everything was on the up and up they had the papers they had the adoption forms that look like been signed by judges and attorneys they had no clue the teenage girl once called Tiffany is shocked to learn the truth but ultimately she decides to stay with the Robinsons they considered her their their daughter they had raised her and they wanted to keep her and they were victims of mr. Robinson's just like all these other many more on October 7th 2002 58 year-old John Robinson stands trial in Johnson County Kansas for the murder of Lisa Stasi Suzette Trouten and Isabella la visca he pleads not guilty I think John Robinson was the kind of person that thought that that the world was his I think he he thought whatever he needed or whatever he wanted he would get it didn't matter who it belonged to in January of 2003 a jury sentences Robinson to life imprisonment for the murder of Lisa Stasi and to death penalties for the murders of Suzette Trouten Isabella La visca I was elated I could not think of a man that deserved to suffer the ultimate punishment and John Robinson as a cop I mean that's that's a highlight of my career this is what you go into law enforcement for and and I feel great about what we the work we did it was a great case that we put together and we took a very dangerous person out of out of society to this day no one can say for sure what caused Robinson a family man and two-bit con artist to become a serial killer there's no clear picture as to say this is why he turned out this way Robinson came from a middle-class religious suburban family he has several siblings you know they're not involved in criminal activity he was somebody who didn't really have the ability to empathize with anybody he was sort of conscious Ellis the game was everything the con was everything winning was everything after his trials in Kansas Robinson makes a deal with prosecutors in Missouri a state that also has the death penalty in exchange for a life sentence he pleads guilty to the murders of Paula Godfrey Katherine Clampett Beverly Bonner and Sheila and Debbie faith to this day the bodies of Lisa Stasi Paula Godfrey and Katherine Clampett have not been recovered I think that there are more victims than the ones he's admitted to some of the families didn't even realize that their loved ones were no longer alive there's probably possibly other victims out there he's got people that he's killed he's got people that he's heard he's got people that he's stolen from I mean to include family members all just for his own gain for his for his own pleasure whatever I mean it's just it's made some fathomable like what you got here is a conman who's also serial killer you know I'm not sure which came first you

Info

Channel: darkdocumentaries

Views: 1,139,135

Rating: 4.4404478 out of 5

Keywords: John Edward Robinson, Serial Killer, Baton Rouge Serial Killer, Documentary

Id: Q7wP9bzf3YQ

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 46min 6sec (2766 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 06 2013

Reddit Comments