OLATHE, Kan. — Before she disappeared forever, Lisa Stasi was homeless. She had split from her husband and moved with her infant daughter into a battered women's shelter called Hope House.

Then she met John Osborne. A Johnson County businessman purportedly involved in helping young mothers, Osborne wanted to help Stasi find a job and get her GED. He put her up in a hotel, although against her sister-in-law's wishes.

Lisa Stasi

"I told her she ought to be cautious because, for one, she didn't know him all that well," the sister-in-law, Kathy Klinginsmith, testified Friday. "She didn't know what his intentions were."

His intentions, prosecutors now say, were the worst possible: to kill Stasi and give her baby to his brother for adoption. They allege that the man called Osborne — who was actually John E. Robinson Sr. — killed Stasi and five other women, two more in Kansas and three in Missouri.

Stasi's body was never found, but the bodies of the other two Kansas women, Izabela Lewicka and Suzette Trouten, were found stuffed into barrels on Robinson's rural Kansas property. Three other bodies were found in barrels in a Missouri storage space.

Klinginsmith identified Robinson in court Friday, the 10th day of testimony in his trial for the three Kansas murders, as the man who came to pick Stasi up on that snowy afternoon in January 1985, the last day she ever saw her sister-in-law alive.

Prosecutors have spent nearly two weeks calling some 60 witnesses to testify about Trouten and Lewicka. Through e-mails, videotapes and letters, they have sought to demonstrate how Robinson lured the women to Kansas City with promises of jobs, money and sadomasochistic sex. But ultimately, they allege, he killed them both with one or two powerful blows to the head.

Friday they moved on to testimony about Stasi’s disappearance in 1985.

Her husband at the time, Carl Stasi, testified that he’d met his wife through a friend and they had gotten married in Huntsville, Alabama, where Lisa had grown up, in August 1984. Lisa was eight months pregnant at the time. "We were going to stay there and start our lives there," Carl Stasi testified. "But I didn’t have no insurance and the baby was due and so we came back here."

Tiffany Stasi

Their daughter, Tiffany Lynn, was born a few weeks later at Truman Medical Center in Independence, a hospital well known for its care of the indigent.

Broke and without a home, the Stasis’ marriage quickly went downhill. "It was shaky," Carl said. "I was irresponsible and I wasn’t working at the time. It was going down from there." He and Lisa separated in mid-December, he said, and Stasi returned to service in the Navy, just outside of Chicago, a few days after Christmas.

Klinginsmith, Carl’s sister, explained to the jury that she looked after 4-month-old Tiffany when Stasi dropped her off and went out for the day and evening on Jan. 8, 1985.

"I fed her, she slept a long time, she took a bubble bath," said Klinginsmith.

Returning to fetch Tiffany the next morning, Stasi told Klinginsmith that "Osborne" had put her up in the Rodeway Inn in Overland Park and now he was looking for her, Klinginsmith testified. Stasi called the front desk of the Rodeway and left a message for Osborne to call her at Klinginsmith's house. The phone rang a few minutes later and Klinginsmith gave Osborne directions to her house.

"He came to the door about 25 minutes later, rang the doorbell," said Klinginsmith. "I went to the door with my son, who was 5, and Lisa put on her coat." He didn't waste any time on pleasantries, she said. "He didn't say anything to me. He just stood there and looked at me."

Then, she said, Lisa carried Tiffany to Osborne's car, which was parked down the street. She left her own yellow Toyota Corolla and many of her belongings behind.

Betty Stasi, Lisa’s mother-in-law testified Friday that she received a call, presumably later that day. "I took it for granted she was at her motel," she said. "She was crying real hard, hysterical. She was telling me that ‘they’ said I was going to take her baby from her, that she was an unfit mom."

"Did she say who ‘they’ were?" asked Assistant District Attorney Sara Welch.

"No," she replied.

In the same conversation, Betty Stasi testified, Lisa also told her ‘they’ wanted her to sign four blank sheets of paper. "I said, ‘don’t sign nothing, Lisa. Don’t put your name on anything.’"

Her daughter-in-law calmed down, Stasi said. “Then she said, ‘Here they come’ and she hung up,” she testified.

That was the last anyone in the Stasi clan saw or spoke to Lisa.

The next morning, Klinginsmith phoned the Rodeway Inn, only to discover that Lisa and Tiffany had checked out of Room 131 and that the bill had been settled by John Robinson, not John Osborne. She reported him to the Overland Park Police and the FBI.

Within the next few weeks, Betty Stasi said she received a typed letter with Lisa’s signature at the bottom. “She was going out town somewhere and she was going to start a new life for her and Tiffany,” she stated.

By this time, probation officer Steven Haymes was on Robinson’s trail. He testified that in December he had a received a call from Birthright, a pro-life organization for young mothers. They had concerns about a man named John Robinson, he testified.

Though he wasn’t asked about it on the stand, Haymes testified at the preliminary hearing that Robinson had misrepresented himself to Birthright in talking about Kansas City Outreach, his so-called philanthropic organization for young mothers.

Haymes, who had done a little checking on Robinson and found that he had spent time in jail for fraud and theft, decided to call him in for a meeting. Robinson, Haymes testified Friday, told him that he and five other businessman were involved in a group called Kansas City Outreach that helped young women find homes, training and jobs. He declined to provide Haymes with a list of his colleagues.

In a second interview, Haymes testified, Robinson admitted to Haymes that he knew Lisa Stasi and that he had put her up at the Rodeway Inn in Overland Park with her baby. He also said that "she had come to his office on Jan. 10 with a young man named Bill and told him she was going off to Colorado to start a new life."

In a third interview, in March, Haymes said Robinson told yet another story. "He told me that Lisa and the baby had been found in the Kansas City area," Haymes testified. Lisa, he continued, had been babysitting for a young woman, and the girl had contacted his office to see if he had an address for her.

In the meantime, prosecutors say, Robinson had already arranged for Tiffany to be adopted by his brother and sister-in-law, Don and Helen Robinson, telling them the baby's mother had committed suicide. He then pocketed $5,500 for arranging the adoption, they allege. Tiffany, who is now almost the age her mother was when she disappeared, is living with her adoptive parents in suburban Chicago.

Robinson's wife, Nancy, testified earlier in the trial that he brought home an unkempt baby in early January who smelled and had dirt under her fingernails. His brother and sister-in-law are expected to take the stand next week.

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.