OLATHE, Kansas — The mother of murder victim Suzette Trouten testified Wednesday she tape recorded a phone conversation with her daughter's accused killer in an effort to find out more about her disappearance.

At the suggestion of police investigators, Carolyn Trouten said she recorded a conversation with John Edward Robinson Sr. in April 2000 and quizzed him on her daughter's whereabouts. Robinson, 58, suspected of killing six women in all, is on trial in Kansas for the slayings of three victims.

Trouten had testified that she last spoke to her daughter about 1 a.m. on March 1, when she was about to take off on a trip to California with Robinson, whom her daughter had described as a new employer.

When a week or two had passed, Trouten said Wednesday, she first called Robinson's cell phone number in a panic but a message said the phone was turned off. When she finally reached him several days later, he told her Suzette had decided not to take the job and had run off with a man named Jim Turner.

"I knew it was a lie," she testified. "She might have met somebody else but she never would have gone off without calling home. I thought, 'Something is radically wrong here.'" She said she also was suspicious that Robinson didn't seem the slightest bit upset. (Prosecutors believe Trouten had been dead for two weeks by the time her mother made that call.)

"She had gone back and forth three times [to Kansas City] and he had spent all this money," she said. She contacted police a short time later and that's when they suggested she tape a call to Robinson.

A copy of the tape was played in court Wednesday for the jury hearing evidence in Robinson's trial. On it, Robinson is heard telling Trouten that he had received a postcard from Suzette, 27, and Jim saying they were off on an adventure. "I wouldn't get nervous," he told her. "From what I understand they were on a boat somewhere and were going to sail around the world."

When Trouten told Robinson she was thinking of calling the police, he told her that her daughter "was a big girl." She also said that Jim Turner was once a lawyer but he was so rich he didn't need to work.

"I really wouldn't worry," he said.

"You don't think I should notify someone," Trouten asked him.

"Why?" he replied sharply, noting that he often didn't hear from his daughters for months when they traveled in Europe. "You know how young people are today."

Both Trouten, her sister, Marshella Chidester and ex-husband Harry Trouten testified Wednesday that several family members received e-mails and letters purportedly from Suzette that contained postmarks from Mexico and California beginning that March.

"We really didn't know what to do," Carolyn Trouten said. "All of us decided it wasn't Sue." Her testimony followed that of Jean Glines, a California woman who said she struck up an e-mail and phone relationship with Robinson and mailed three pastel-colored letters for him in March 2000.

Carlos Ibarra, who worked in the mobile home community where Robinson lived, also testified that the defendant had asked him if his visiting mother could mail four or five pastel-colored letters upon her return home to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Robinson, he added, gave him $10 for the postage. His mother said she mailed the letters in May 2000. Both sets of letters, purportedly from Trouten, are part of the prosecution's circumstantial evidence against Robinson.

Glines, who knew Robinson because she had once worked with his wife, Nancy Robinson, in a mobile home park in Clayton, Missouri, testified that she agreed to mail the letters for Robinson, who said he was doing a friend a favor. Glines said he told her the friend was in an abusive relationship and wanted her husband to think she was living in California.

The bodies of Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka, 21, were found stuffed into barrels on Robinson's rural property in Kansas in June 2000. He was charged with three murders in Kansas and three in neighboring Missouri.

A former correspondent for Newsweek and People Weekly, Sue Miller Wiltz is currently writing a book about Robinson for Pinnacle Books. She is covering the trial for Courttv.com.