Long before "don't meet up with strangers from the internet" was common-sense advice, there was a reason it needed to become one. John Edward Robinson built an entire double life out of exploiting exactly that trust, years before most people even had a word for what a chat room was.
A Life Built on Small Cons Before the Big Ones
Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1943, the third of five children to an alcoholic father and a strict, disciplinarian mother. By thirteen, he was an Eagle Scout, polished enough to travel to London and perform before Queen Elizabeth II. He briefly considered the priesthood, dropped out of a seminary over poor grades and discipline problems, then drifted through a radiology program he never finished — though he still managed to land a job as an X-ray technician using forged credentials.
That pattern — genuine charm paired with outright fabrication — would define the next three decades of his life. He married in 1964 and had four children. Underneath the image of a Scoutmaster, baseball coach, and Sunday school teacher, he ran a long string of embezzlement and fraud schemes through the 1970s, repeatedly arrested, repeatedly given probation, repeatedly finding a new fake business or forged document scheme almost as soon as the last one collapsed. He even forged his own community award once, naming himself a local "Man of the Year" through fabricated letters.
None of it, on paper, looked like the beginning of a murder case. That's part of what made him so effective.
The First Disappearances
In 1984, Robinson hired 19-year-old Paula Godfrey for a sales job at one of his shell companies. She vanished not long after. Her family eventually received a letter, supposedly from her, saying she was fine and didn't want contact. Because she was a legal adult and there was no evidence against Robinson, the case went cold. Her remains have never been found.
The following year, Robinson met Lisa Stasi, a young mother who had recently separated from her husband, at a Kansas City women's shelter. He offered her a job and housing, had her sign a stack of blank documents, and killed her shortly after gaining her trust. He then convinced his own brother and sister-in-law — who couldn't have children — that he'd arranged a legitimate adoption for Stasi's infant daughter, taking thousands of dollars from them in the process. That little girl grew up as Heather Robinson, unaware for decades that her "uncle" had murdered her mother and orchestrated her adoption through an elaborate lie. Her story later became the subject of a 2025 Lifetime film, bringing renewed public attention to the case a quarter century after Robinson's arrest.
In 1987, a 27-year-old woman named Catherine Clampitt left her child with her parents in Texas and moved to Kansas City for work, reportedly after contact with Robinson. She disappeared that June. Her case remains unsolved to this day, and her remains, like Godfrey's and Stasi's, have never been recovered.
A New Hunting Ground
After another prison stint in the late 1980s on theft charges, Robinson was released in 1993 and discovered something that would change the scale of what he was capable of: the early internet.
Using the alias "Slavemaster," he began frequenting BDSM chat rooms and message boards, presenting himself as a wealthy businessman looking for women interested in submissive, master-slave dynamics. It made him, by most accounts, the first known serial killer to systematically use the internet to find and groom his victims — a grim historical footnote that's followed the case ever since.
His pattern from here repeated with eerie consistency. In 1994, he connected with Sheila Faith, whose teenage daughter Debbie used a wheelchair due to spina bifida. Robinson offered to cover Debbie's medical costs and give Sheila work. Both moved to Kansas City and disappeared. Robinson continued cashing Sheila's pension checks for years afterward.
By the late 1990s, he'd become a known presence in online BDSM communities. In 1999, 21-year-old Izabela Lewicka moved from Indiana to be with him after he offered her a job and a "slave" arrangement; she signed away near-total control of her life, including her finances, before disappearing that summer. Around the same time, Suzette Trouten, a licensed nurse from Michigan, came to Kansas City planning to travel the world as Robinson's submissive partner. Her mother received typed letters suggesting Suzette was traveling abroad — postmarked, oddly, from Kansas City.
The Arrest
By 2000, Robinson's name had come up often enough in missing-persons cases that investigators in Kansas City were paying close attention. He was arrested in June of that year, after a sexual battery complaint and an unrelated theft accusation gave police the legal grounds to search his property.
What they found on his farm near La Cygne, Kansas, ended any doubt about what had been happening for sixteen years: the decomposing remains of two women, later identified as Lewicka and Trouten, sealed inside chemical drums. A search of rented storage units across the state line in Missouri turned up three more bodies in similar drums.
Conviction, Appeals, and Where Things Stand Now
Robinson stood trial in Kansas in 2002, in what became the longest criminal trial in the state's history. He was convicted of murdering Trouten, Lewicka, and Stasi, along with kidnapping charges tied to the fraudulent adoption of Stasi's daughter. He received a death sentence for the Trouten and Lewicka murders and life imprisonment for Stasi's killing, since Kansas hadn't yet reinstated the death penalty at the time of her death. He was later convicted in Missouri as well, receiving additional life sentences without parole for the deaths of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, and Debbie Faith.
His convictions haven't gone unchallenged. In 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court vacated one of his capital murder convictions and a related first-degree murder conviction on a double jeopardy technicality, while explicitly upholding his death sentence overall — making Robinson's case the first time Kansas's highest court had upheld a death sentence since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1994. He's continued pursuing appeals since, including a 2022 attempt to vacate his conviction entirely, without success.
As of recent reporting, Robinson is in his early eighties and remains on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas, where prison records show a handful of minor disciplinary incidents over the past decade — a notably quiet coda for a case that once dominated national headlines.
The Victims
The women known to have died at Robinson's hands span sixteen years and two states:
Paula Godfrey, 19 — disappeared in 1984; remains never recovered. Lisa Stasi, 19 — killed in 1985; remains never recovered. Catherine Clampitt, 27 — disappeared in 1987; case remains unsolved; remains never recovered. Beverly Bonner, 49 — remains found in a Missouri storage facility. Sheila Faith, 45, and her daughter Debbie Faith, 15 — remains found in the same Missouri storage facility. Izabela Lewicka, 21, and Suzette Trouten, 28 — remains found buried on Robinson's Kansas property.
Investigators have long suspected the true number of victims may be higher than the eight officially confirmed, given how many of his early schemes involved isolating vulnerable women who had few people checking in on them.
Sources
John Edward Robinson — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward_Robinson
John Robinson Today: Inside the Serial Killer's Life in Prison — Biography.com https://www.biography.com/crime/a64969943/john-robinson-now-heather-robinson-kidnapping
Death Penalty Upheld for Kansas Serial Killer — Courthouse News Service https://www.courthousenews.com/death-penalty-upheld-for-kansas-serial-killer/
Internet's First Serial Killer Used Early Internet Chat Rooms to Lure Victims to Their Deaths — USA Herald https://usaherald.com/internets-first-serial-killer/