By Sue Miller Willtz
Court TV
OLATHE, Kan. — Nearing the home stretch of the prosecution's case against John E. Robinson Sr., several witnesses testified Tuesday morning about discovering the bodies of two women and a teenage girl in his Missouri storage locker.
Robinson, 58, is on trial in Kansas for two counts of capital murder in the deaths of Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka, whose bodies were found on his rural property. He is also accused in the first-degree murder of Lisa Stasi, whose body has never been found, and with arranging for his brother and sister-in-law to adopt Stasi's 4-month-old baby, Tiffany. Finally, he faces one count each of aggravated sexual assault and theft involving a Texas woman who is expected to take the stand sometime this week.
Once this trial is over, he will be tried for the Missouri murders. However, in order to prove capital murder in the Kansas case, prosecutors must show that all six murders were part of a common scheme or plan. They have already called some 80 witnesses to testify about the deaths of Trouten, Lewicka and Stasi.
After discovering Lewicka and Trouten's bodies in barrels on Robinson's rural property in June 2000, investigators converged upon his Stor-Mor For Less locker in Raymore, Mo.
Overland Park Police Officer Douglas Borcherding testified Tuesday that when he opened Robinson's 10-by-15-foot locker, E2, he spotted three barrels near the back of the locker that were partially hidden by a plastic swimming pool, a brown tarp and sheets of plastic.
"We started removing boxes from the front," Borcherding said. "After less than 10 minutes, there was a very foul odor that with my past experience I associated with a dead body."
Investigators quickly called in Kevin Winer, a senior criminalist with the Kansas City, Mo., crime lab, who proceeded to examine the three barrels. Winder said that two of them were blue and wrapped in plastic and gray duct tape. Adhering to both the plastic and duct tape, he said, was gray kitty litter that appeared to be soaking up fluid leaking from the barrels.
Winer also spotted a black barrel, sitting by itself in a back corner with the words 'rendered pork fat' on the label. Opening it, he said, he found a light brown sheet, some shoes and a pair of glasses inside.
"I lifted up one of the shoes and there was a leg attached," he testified.
The three barrels were then sent to the morgue, where Dr. Thomas Young performed autopsies on the three women found inside. Each had been killed by several powerful blows to the head, he said. He also testified that the killer used a blunt object that was consistent with a hammer and that one of the women, later identified as 45-year-old Sheila Faith, also had a fracture on her right forearm that was consistent with a defensive injury.
The bodies of the women were badly decomposed and could have been dead five or six years, Young said.
Prosecutors believe that Robinson killed Faith and her daughter, 15-year-old Debbie, in the summer of 1994. They allege that he killed Beverly Bonner, 49, earlier that same year. Members of the Faith and Bonner families are expected to take the stand later Tuesday or Wednesday.
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
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