Anyone You Want Me to Be (32 page)

“In John Robinson’s world,” Morrison said, “when he’s done with you, he throws you away. These are trash barrels for John Robinson and tombs for his victims.”

He tapped the lid slowly now, seven times in a row, and let the taps spread out through the room.

“Can you think of a better, faster way of killing someone than a couple of blows to the head? Only Sheila Faith had a defensive wound.”

All of those checks from Beverly Bonner and the Faiths, he said, lined Robinson’s pockets while they sat dead in the barrels for at least half a decade.

“The misery this defendant has inflicted all those years is beyond human comprehension,” he said. “This is your opportunity to hold the defendant accountable for his actions.”

He stared right at the jurors and his folksy manner was gone.

“I hope you do.”

F
ollowing the closing arguments, some members of the viewing public lingered outside the courthouse in the square, as they often do when a murder trial is about to conclude. They wanted to hang on for a little while longer to the special feeling of community these events create. The case had brought a feeling of movement and excitement to the heart of Olathe and to the coffee shop that sat cater-corner across the street. All day long people chatted in the shop and watched the lawyers coming and going and the TV trucks that circled the courthouse, broadcasting fresh reports on the trial at noon and then again in the evening. All day long police sirens and train whistles bounced back and forth across the square. The coffee drinkers provided a running commentary on everything that happened in the courtroom, from the sex toys to the motel video to the arrival of the yellow barrels. The trial was the most riveting thing that had happened here in recent memory, and by the last week of October it was almost finished.

The hundred-degree days that had lain on eastern Kansas at the start of jury selection had given way to damp and foggy forty-degree weather. The leaves on the oaks and maples in the square had turned red and orange and purple, before falling and collecting in the gutters. They blew across the courtyard and rattled on the ground. The fountain in the center of the square, holding the sculpture of the two pioneer children, had been turned off for the winter and would soon be drained. The wooden benches surrounding it were empty, and the gazebo, which had seen picnics and barbecues at the time of Robinson’s arrest in June 2000, was all but abandoned now, except for a few smokers trying to escape the bitter wind.

On Tuesday, October 29, after deliberating for eleven hours, the jurors found Robinson guilty of all six charges. His daughter Christy had come to the courtroom for the verdict, and when her father was led in that afternoon to face the judge and jury, she looked at him and mouthed the words “I love you.” When the verdict came down, he showed no emotion, but Christy began crying and quickly left the courthouse, covering her head with her coat. Kathy Klinginsmith and Betty Stasi, who was Lisa Stasi’s mother-in-law, were also there, and they too began weeping. Carol Trouten had “no comment” on the verdict and did not seem much relieved by what the jurors had done, but resigned to what lay ahead.

After giving the jury a day off, the judge began the sentencing phase of the trial. Would Robinson become the first man to be executed in Kansas in the past several decades, or would he receive life in prison? Before this phase could begin, Sean O’Brien asked the judge to delay this part of the trial so that more psychological testing could be done on the defendant, but again the judge had said no.

The state called no witnesses but the defense was expected to be quite aggressive in arguing for the jurors to keep Robinson alive. Nancy Robinson was their key witness and she gallantly made her last appearance on the stand in Judge Anderson’s courtroom. It was her job, finally, and no one else’s, to save her husband from the grave. She called the thought of him being put to death by the state “devastating, absolutely devastating.” She said that her family members “have listened to the facts presented in court but they grew up with someone else”—not with the man who’d been convicted of these terrible crimes. Sometimes denial is the only option left, and it is not just denial about another but also about oneself. What kind of a person would she be, after all, if her husband had really done all these things over all these years and she hadn’t even noticed? How do you live with that self-image?

She talked about Robinson’s four children and seven grandchildren, describing how “he was everything” for these youngsters. She mentioned that soon after his arrest, one of his granddaughters had visited him in jail and seen him wearing the standard prison garb, an orange jumpsuit. She’d run up to her grandfather and given him a big hug.

“Papa,” the child had told him that day, “orange is not your color.”

Hearing these words spoken in court by his wife, Robinson lowered his head and cried publicly for the only time since his incarceration.

In his twenty years as a prosecutor, Paul Morrison had never asked a jury to put someone to death, until now. He and his office, which was only a handful of steps down the hallway from Judge Anderson’s courtroom, were determined to see Robinson not just convicted, but executed. That meant finishing the business at hand and taking on the defendant’s wife one more time. Morrison did not seem to relish this task, but it had to done.

While cross-examining Nancy, he asked her if she had any reasons to leave her husband now—after hearing about all of his affairs with women both living and dead. This question did something that his others hadn’t been able to do and broke through her politeness and self-control.

“I don’t know,” she fired back at him, her eyes flaring with anger.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not,” the DA said, “a great description of a family man, is it?”

“It’s not a great description of a great husband,” she conceded.

Instead of pushing harder and trying to get her to show more of her emotions to the jury, the DA decided to back off.

On Friday, November 1, the two sides made their closing arguments for the sentencing phase. Morrison raised the possibility that if Robinson was allowed to live, he might get hold of computers in prison and start playing his cyber-games with women all over again. The defense said that would not happen and contended that he would not be a threat to anyone behind bars. Taking his life, Berrigan told the jury, would bring “grief and loss” to his family.

Morrison spoke of how Robinson had been moved to tears only once during the trial, when Nancy had recounted her granddaughter visiting him in jail.

“He did not cry for Suzette Trouten,” the DA said. “He did not cry for Izabela Lewicka. He cried for himself. That says it all. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”

Berrigan asked the jury for compassion for his client: “I’m not telling you that John Robinson is deserving of mercy. We don’t give mercy to people who deserve it. We choose to give mercy to people who do not deserve it…. In granting it, we’re almost godlike. Wedon’t have to kill this man.”

Morrison was up against a worthy opponent and death-penalty expert in Berrigan, and perhaps that caused him to reach farther down into the emotional well than he ever had before. He told the jurors that Robinson had denied the victims the “tender mercies” of life. He’d taken away their right to hear the sound of rain coming down on a rooftop or to enjoy a fresh cup of coffee in the morning or to watch a sunrise or simply to sit and talk with people they loved. Yet now John Robinson was asking them, the jury, to grant him the tender mercies of his own life inside of prison for as long as he would live.

Capital punishment, Morrison concluded, was only for the most severe crimes and the worst criminals.

“If not him,” he said, looking at the defendant, “who?”

The jurors left the courtroom and deliberated for about three hours on Friday evening but were unable to make a unanimous decision. They took a brief vote before retiring to their hotel rooms for the night: eight were for the death penalty while four were uncertain. The next morning they went back to work at 9
A
.
M
. and within a few minutes all twelve had voted to execute Robinson. After taking this vote, they spent a few moments in silence to think about what they’d just done. A male juror had brought with him from his hotel room a Gideon Bible. When the silence was broken, he began talking about how various scriptural passages had helped him conclude that it was all right for Robinson to die. Other jurors listened to what he was saying, and word of his unexpected comments quickly filtered back to the judge. His Honor was about to come as close to panicking during a trial as this sober Kansas gentleman ever did.

The news now reached the lawyers on both sides. Morrison tried to dismiss the Bible incident as a harmless error, but inside he was deeply concerned. He knew that this one act by a lone juror could derail the entire prosecution and void the conviction. To his extreme dismay, the defense immediately asked for a mistrial. The judge had to make one more difficult ruling.

During the next five hours, Judge Anderson individually questioned each juror about the biblical passages in question, saying that they could play no role whatsoever in the deliberations. He was painstakingly assured and reassured by every juror that the passages had not affected anyone’s decision. At 3
P
.
M
. the judge sent the jury back into the deliberation room with a final instruction to disregard the Bible. Thirty minutes later they came back and said they’d once more reached a unanimous decision: John Robinson was to be put to death.

For his sentencing, the defendant stood but again showed no reaction to the final verdict. Suzette’s sister Dawn Trouten had come to the courthouse that afternoon because she’d wanted to see the look on Robinson’s face if he received death.

“I’m sorry he deserves to die,” she later told the
Kansas City Star.
“A death sentence is what we were hoping and praying for…if there had to be a purpose to my little sister’s life, it’s that she stopped this man from hurting another soul.”

Her remarks carried an underlying irony and truth: the very women Robinson had wanted to control had ended up controlling him—even from the barrels. Ultimately, the power of women over him was greater than his ability to destroy them. He’d been conquered by those he’d sought to crush.

T
he appeals process following a death-penalty conviction could go on for years. Now that the Kansas trial was over, Robinson was also scheduled to go on trial in Cass County, Missouri, in the spring of 2003 for the murders of Beverly Bonner and the Faiths. Eventually, he would likely be transferred to a prison in Lansing, Kansas, near Leavenworth, to await execution. His stay in the Olathe jail across from the courthouse had cost taxpayers about $80,000. Since 2000, he’d been represented by a total of eight lawyers at a cost of around $500,000. The total expense of prosecuting him in Kansas was estimated by the
Olathe Daily News
to be about a million dollars.

Once he’d been transported to Lansing, he would spend twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. For an hour each day he would be moved into a ten-by-twenty-foot yard with a pull-up bar and a basketball hoop. If all of his appeals failed, he would be allowed a last meal from the prison kitchen or given as much as $15 worth of food from a local restaurant. Then Robinson, who as a promising youngster had once sung for the queen of England and been kissed by Judy Garland at the Palladium, would be led into his last room. There his body, wrists, and ankles would be strapped to a gurney and two IV catheters would be inserted into his veins. As many as thirteen witnesses could watch as sodium pentothol entered his bloodstream first and put him to sleep. Pancuronium bromide would then stop his breathing and potassium chloride would stop his heart. He would become the twenty-fifth man executed in the history of Kansas.

About a month after the death-penalty verdict, a few jurors indicated to the
Kansas City Star
that they hadn’t had much difficulty in recommending Robinson for execution. It might have made a difference, they said, if one or more of the defendant’s children had come into the courtroom during the sentencing phase and asked them to spare their father’s life, but that hadn’t happened. During their first set of deliberations, a couple of jurors had taken the opportunity to examine the evidence more closely and to handle the yellow barrels for themselves. They’d wanted to see how much the barrels weighed and if one person could move them by himself, even if it contained a body. The jurors were satisfied that one man could do this alone. The jurors also talked about how hard it had been for them to watch the video of Suzette Trouten and Robinson in the motel room; even with their eyes closed, the sounds and words were still terribly disturbing. The group that had sat in judgment of Robinson had bonded during this ordeal, and with their work as a jury done and the holidays approaching, they’d made plans to get together outside the courtroom.

By now autumn had descended on eastern Kansas. The damp fog had given way to cold, driving rains that knocked the last leaves off the branches and turned the fields into standing bodies of water and mud. The rain came down in sheets and made the land seem grayer and more open all the way to the horizon. Winter was coming fast. The naked limbs of the elms down by La Cygne had dropped their big cocoons holding the webworms—the maggotlike creatures were at last gone for the year and would not return until next summer. Everything in the countryside that had not yet died was about to. The snows would soon fall and cover the rolling landscape with a blanket of white.