OLATHE, Kansas — A woman who has known accused serial killer John E. Robinson Sr. for decades testified Wednesday that she once mailed several letters for him from Europe.

Prosecutors are trying to show that the letters were sent to the relatives of Beverly Bonner, 49, Sheila Faith, 45, and her 15-year-old daughter, Debbie, all of whom dropped out of sight in 1994. The three women were found slain in Missouri.

Robinson, 58, is charged with killing six women in all and is now on trial for the murders of three women in Kansas. In order to prove capital murder charges against him, prosecutors must introduce evidence from the Missouri cases to show that all six slayings were part of a common scheme or plan.

On the stand Wednesday, Barbara Sandre, a German translator, testified that she met the defendant in 1963 when he came to Toronto to see a Boy Scout production she was involved in when she was just 15. Robinson, then 19, was with a troop from Chicago.

They struck up a pen-pal relationship but eventually lost touch. He looked her up years later and came up to visit her in Toronto around 1969. She didn't hear from him again until 1993.

"We always had a certain friendship and so it wasn't that hard to pick up," Sandre said. "We started writing and talking and went back to where we had been."

By this point, Sandre was living in England. In early 1994, Robinson wrote, asking if she would be willing to mail some letters from England and other cities for his daughter Kim. Sandre recalled mailing two letters each from France and Switzerland. Prosecutors will try to prove that Robinson forged the letters from his victims to their relatives to keep them at bay.

Shortly thereafter, Sandre said, she and Robinson began e-mailing every other day and talking on the phone about once a week. Asked his e-mail address, she said it was posseder@hotmail.com. She said it was from the infinitive of the French word that meant "to own" or "to possess."

Sandre moved back to Canada in 1998 and came for a three-day visit to Kansas in early July 1999. During that time, she testified, she rented a furnished apartment in the Hunters Point complex in Overland Park, Kansas. When she came back down a week later, she brought only her computer, a dictionary and her clothes.

She said she hoped that Robinson, who told her he was single and an assistant director for the CIA, would move in with her. On the few occasions that they were intimate, she testified, their relations never involved BDSM (bondage discipline sadomasochism).

"As far as I was concerned, he didn't have a wife," she stated. "He was never married. He was never divorced. He was most of the time out of town." Even though he supposedly wasn't married, Sandre said he told her he had four adopted children.

"What were their names?" asked assistant district attorney Sara Welch. "John Jr., Chris, Chrissy and Kimberly," Sandre replied, listing Robinson and wife Nancy's four children. "Did you meet any of these children?" Welch asked. "No," she replied. "Go to their homes?" she continued. Again, the answer was no.

In late August 1999, Sandre moved to another, unfurnished apartment in Overland Park, signing a lease with John Robinson. "He said he had furniture in storage that I could use," Sandre testified.

Even though his name was on the lease, Sandre said, Robinson didn't live with her and almost always visited during the day. She could recall only one occasion when they went out, to breakfast. Otherwise, they stayed in. By the end of August 1999, she said, he had also arrived with a host of other items, including artwork, bedding, towels, dishes, pots and pans and cutlery.

"He told me he had bought the older things from estate sales and that some things were his grandmother's," Sandre said. Sandre then identified several items shown to her by Welch as being ones that Robinson brought over, including a painting, books and two sets of bedding.

The day before, the mother of Izabela Lewicka had identified the same items as belonging to her daughter. Even more eerily, some of the bedding Sandre identified as coming from Robinson matched a pillowcase found with Lewicka's body in a barrel on the defendant's rural property.

Sandre said she got a new e-mail address and new computer from Robinson as well. She said he phoned one day and said there had been a security leak and "the powers that be" at the CIA had insisted that she change her e-mail address. "He said my old one no longer existed and I was to use a new one: barbararobinson@hotmail.com. Welch asked her for the password.

Sandre said she couldn't pronounce it but that Robinson told her it stood for "rat" in Polish. Lewicka, others have testified, used the same password.

Sandre also testified that Robinson brought her a new computer, a Dell, but insisted that she delete all the personal information before using it, which she did. Suzette Trouten, another alleged victim of Robinson's, had moved to Kansas City with a Dell computer and disappeared.

Robinson said he told Sandre about his farm in rural Kansas and that she even helped purchase it. But then he insisted that they couldn't go down there because it wasn't secure. Cell phones didn't work there, Sandre says he told her, which could be a problem in an emergency. "The powers that be [at the CIA] didn't want him there," she stated.

In the late spring of 2000, Sandre testified, Robinson asked her to provide him with a list of names and addresses of all the people she knew. "Did he tell you why?" Welch asked. "I asked him," she replied, "and he just said, I NEED it." When Robinson wanted something, she added, he didn’t take no for an answer.

At the time of Robinson’s arrest, Sandre said she was in the process of moving back to Canada.

A friend of another victim Izabela Lewicka, Dawn Carter of Columbus, Ohio, testified that Lewicka had met a man named "John" on the Internet who was interested in a BDSM relationship and was going to set her up with an apartment and a job. Carter, who met Lewicka at Purdue in August 1996, said her friend had a key to her apartment and often stayed with her or came over during the day to hang out or use her computer.

Welch asked Carter if she was aware of other interests that Lewicka had. "She loved art," she said. "She took sketch books with her everywhere she went. She also like purple ink. If she was writing a note to say she'd be home at 7:30, she would write in out in ink and decorate it." In the spring of 1997, Carter said, Lewicka told her she was going to move to Kansas City.

"She talked about John, a guy she met on the Internet," she said. "She said that John was helping her to get set up and helping her to get an apartment."

Carter said they had a little argument because she didn't think she should go and so Lewicka put her on the phone to talk with Robinson. "What did you talk about?" asked Welch. "Silly things," she replied. "I think she told him I collected fountain pens. He said he had a big collection. He said he cared about her. He said she had a lot of talent. He said he wanted to help her."

But when Carter told him she didn't trust him, she said, he appeared threatened. "Izabela took the phone," she testified. Lewicka also showed her an e-mail that "John" had sent. "We were having a conversation about her sex life and things she liked," she said. "[The e-mail] described what he was going to do to her — take her in a downstairs room, tie her up and put metal things to spread out her legs … it involved pain."

Carter, who said she was familiar with BDSM but wasn't involved in it, described her friend as being fairly open about the subject. "That was the reason she was going to Kansas City," she stated. "She’d have a job, an apartment and a master."

When Welch asked her if she knew when Lewicka left for Kansas City, she said it was June 8, 1997. "She marked it on the calendar for me," she said, her voice cracking. "I spent that evening with her and walked her to her car." At first, Lewicka kept in touch with Carter and their circle of friends at Purdue after arriving in Kansas City. But then the phone calls and e-mails came less often. "She would call or email somebody in our group of friends," she said.

But around August 1999, Carter testified Lewicka called her for the last time. "She was pretty excited," she said. "She was going to Europe. She was going to get to travel." Carter didn’t know if anybody was going with her. "She just said she was going to be gone for quite a while and not to worry. It would take her a while to get set up" and then she'd be in touch again.

On cross-examination, Carter admitted to defense attorney Sean O’Brien that Lewicka wasn't doing well in school and didn't get along with her parents. "She felt they didn't understand her. He [Andrew Lewicka] pushed her hard in school," she said. "[It was] typical late-teen stuff: I want my own apartment. I want my own life."

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.