By Sue Miller Wiltz
Special to Court TV
OLATHE, Kansas — Nearing the close of the prosecution's case against accused killer John E. Robinson Sr., friends and relatives took the stand Tuesday to testify about the two women and teenage girl whose bodies were discovered in the defendant's 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 rural property he owned. He is also accused of 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. And 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.
He won't be tried for the Missouri murders until after the Kansas trial is over. However, in order to prove capital murder in Kansas, prosecutors must show that all six murders were part of a common scheme or plan.
The prosecution has already called more than 80 witnesses to testify about the deaths of Trouten, Lewicka and Stasi in Kansas. On Tuesday, prosecutors focused on Robinson's alleged Missouri victims: Beverly Bonner, 49, Sheila Faith, 45, and her 15-year-old daughter, Debbie.
A close friend described Sheila Faith as a lonely widow who left Colorado with her teenage daughter in the summer of 1994 and never returned.
"Sheila and I were close as sisters could be," said Nancy Guerrero, of Pueblo, Colorado, who met her friend in Santa Ana, California, when both of their daughters entered a school for the handicapped in the 1980s. Faith's daughter, Debbie, was wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy, she testified.
Not long after Faith's husband John died of cancer, she and Debbie moved with Guerrero and her family to Pueblo, Colorado. Sheila and Debbie were very poor, surviving on Social Security checks, Guerrero testified. "That's all they had to live on," she said. "We helped them as much as we could."
Guerrero also admitted that her friend was interested in BDSM (bondage discipline sadomasochism) and used newspaper personal ads to meet men. "She would start to talk about [BDSM] and I said, "I don't want to hear it. It's not my thing."
In 1994, she testified, Sheila told her friend that she had met a Missouri man named John. "She told me he was an executive in a big firm and that he was very wealthy," Guerrero said. "He promised to take her on a cruise and to put Debbie in a very good private school."
A few weeks later, the Faiths took off on a trip in their beat-up white van to visit relatives in Texas, Guerrero testified, but they told her they planned to stop first in Missouri and meet John. "It was just supposed to be a short trip and she was supposed to be coming back," said Guerrero.
The Faiths were never seen again.
Two of Sheila Faith's sisters also took the stand Tuesday, saying they began to receive typewritten letters from Sheila and her daughter after their disappearance. "She always hand-wrote her letters," said her sister, Kathy Norman, who received letters postmarked in Canada and the Netherlands. "This isn't Sheila," testified another sister, Michelle Fox, referring to a letter she received from her sister in 1995. "It was happy. Sheila wasn't a happy person."
Two of Beverly Bonner's brothers testified that they, too, received several letters from their sister beginning in January 1994. The first one, they said, was handwritten. In it, a recently divorced Bonner wrote that she had taken a new job in the human resources department of a large international corporation and would be training in Chicago and then traveling to Europe. In subsequent letters, all typewritten, she said her new job was wonderful and that she was working closely with her boss Jim Redmond.
Larry Heath, a truck driver from Florida, said his family didn't grow overly concerned about his sister until the letters stopped coming in early 1997. After all, Bonner was traveling the world, as evidenced by the letters postmarked from Australia, France and the Netherlands.
Assistant District Attorney Sara Welch asked Heath what they did when the letters stopped coming. He started crying. "Can I have some water?" he asked.
Regaining his composure, he said: "We contacted the State Department and the FBI. I wrote to my Congressman. My mother also wrote to her Congressman."
"Were you able to find her?" asked Welch. "No," he replied.
Colleen Davis, who owns the Mailroom in Olathe, testified that the defendant rented two mailboxes in 1994 but used the name James Turner instead of Robinson. He told her that one of the mailboxes, rented in January 1994, was for Beverly Jean Bonner. "He told me she was working for him and was going to be going to Australia and he was going to take care of her mail," she testified, adding that Robinson provided copies of Bonner's identification to open the mailbox.
Robinson rented the other mailbox in June 1994 for Sheila and Debbie Faith, Davis said. "Mr. Turner picked up mail at least once a month," she said. "He received two government checks monthly in the names of Sheila Faith and Debbie Faith."
Davis testified that she never saw anyone except Robinson pick up the checks. "How long did he receive them?" Welch asked. "It would have been June (2000) because they were still sitting here when Mr. Turner (Robinson) was arrested," she replied.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Pat Berrigan appeared to question Davis' ability to remember just who rented the mailboxes since it was so many years ago. "In my business, we try to remember our customers and to speak to them on a regular basis," she replied.
Earlier in the day, several witnesses testified about discovering the bodies of Bonner and the Faiths in Robinson's locker at the Stor-Mor For Less storage facility in Raymore, Missouri.
Douglas Borcherding, an Overland Park police officer, testified that Locker E2 was cluttered with junk when he looked inside in June 2000 but he still spotted three barrels near the back. "We started removing boxes from the front," Borcherding stated. "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, Missouri, crime lab, who examined the three barrels. Winer said that two of them were blue and wrapped in plastic and gray duct tape. Stuck to the plastic and 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. Upon 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.
Investigators sent the three barrels to the Jackson County morgue, where Dr. Thomas Young performed autopsies on the three women. He testified that he found that each of them had been killed by several powerful blows to the head. He also testified that the murderer used a blunt object that was consistent with a hammer and that one of the women, later identified as 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 six years, Young said.
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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