OLATHE, Kan. — On a balmy morning in early June 2000, Johnson County detective Harold Hughes made a gruesome discovery when he pried open two 55-gallon barrels sitting out in the open on rural property near La Cygne, Kan. to find the decomposing bodies of two women stuffed inside. Two days later, investigators converged on a storage locker

The Stor-Mor For Less storage facility in Raymore, Mo., where authorities found three bodies in a locker rented by Robinson.

just across the state line in Raymore, Mo., and found barrels containing the remains of three more women.

Authorities say that John Edward Robinson, Sr., 58, who owned the land and leased the locker, killed a total of six women and sexually assaulted two others in Kansas and Missouri over a period of 15 years. Using the online name of "Slavemaster," he allegedly lured at least some of them through Internet chat rooms with promises of money and jobs and requests for sadomasochistic sex.

Izabela Lewicka

In Johnson County, Kan., where jury selection is underway in the first of two trials, Robinson faces capital murder charges in the bludgeoning deaths of the two women found on his rural property-Izabela Lewicka, 21, of West Lafayette, Ind., and Suzette Trouten, 27, of Newport, Mich.

Suzette Trouten

He also faces murder charges in connection with Lisa Stasi, 19, who disappeared with her infant daughter, Tiffany Stasi, in 1985. (He avoided a capital murder charge in that case because Kansas did not have the death penalty at the time).

In a bizarre twist, Robinson is alleged to have killed Stasi and arranged for Tiffany to be adopted by his brother and sister-in-law, Don and Helen Robinson, pocketing $5,500 for arranging the adoption. Tiffany, who is now almost the age her mother was when she disappeared, is believed to still be living with her adoptive parents in suburban Chicago. Authorities said that Tiffany's new parents had no idea her adoption was not legitimate and have not been charged. Lisa Stasi's body has never been found.

If Robinson is convicted of capital murder, the jury currently being impaneled will be asked to consider aggravating and mitigating factors before deciding whether to impose the death penalty or to sentence him to life without parole for 50 years. Kansas only reinstated the death penalty in 1994; the last time anyone was executed in the state was 1965. There are currently four people on the state's death row.

Once the Kansas case is completed, Robinson will face trial on three counts of capital murder in Cass County, Mo., in the bludgeoning deaths of the women found in the storage locker — Beverly Bonner, 49, of Cameron, Mo., Sheila Faith, 45, and her 15-year-old daughter, Debbie, of Pueblo, Colo.

Beverly Bonner

Johnson County District Judge John Anderson III has imposed a gag order, preventing anyone involved with the case from talking outside the courtroom. Before it was imposed, however, Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison described it in the following terms: "This started out as a missing person investigation but now this case has taken on a life of its own. There's a sex angle, an Internet angle and there's also a developing financial angle that ultimately will be a very large part of this case."

Robinson's team has yet to outline its defense, though lead attorneys Pat Berrigan and Sean O'Brien have subpoenaed one woman who says she once dated Robinson. In pretrial hearings, they reportedly told the court they wanted to check her connection to one of Robinson's fellow inmates at the Johnson County jail who said he met the woman and helped another man dispose of two women's bodies.

The Johnson County Jail in Olathe, Kan., where Robinson has been held on a $5 million bond since his June 2000 arrest.

His first defense team, whom he fired a year ago, had asked witnesses at the preliminary hearing how difficult it would be for one man to move the heavy 55-gallon barrels. More recently, Berrigan and O'Brien have also suggested that Robinson may have suffered through an abusive childhood.

Despite the intense publicity about the gruesome crimes, Robinson's family has stood firmly behind him. His wife, Nancy, and two daughters often appeared in court during the 2001 preliminary hearing. They released the following statement shortly after his arrest. "The John Robinson we know has always been a loving and caring husband and father, the type of parent who never missed a sporting event, a school function or an opportunity to be there for his family. We do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV."

A trail of disappearing women

Nothing publicly known about Robinson's boyhood suggested he might become America's first cyber-sex serial killer. The middle child of five in a blue-collar Cicero, Ill., family, his father, Henry Robinson, was a machinist for Western Electric though also, according to court documents, a binge drinker. His homemaking mother, Alberta, was the disciplinarian.

The most high point of his childhood was his 1957 trip to London, where as a 13-year-old Eagle Scout, he sang for the Queen of England and received a kiss from actress Judy Garland backstage. He also told British actress Gracie Fields that he planned to study for the priesthood when he finished Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago.

Though Robinson attended Quigley, he never got any closer to entering the priesthood, enrolling instead at the Morton Junior College in Cicero in 1961 and training as a medical X-ray technician. He next surfaced in Kansas City in 1964, when at the age of 20 he married Nancy Jo Lynch and started a family.

Within a few years, he had started the penny-ante pilfering that would continue up to-and even after-women started disappearing in 1984. According to police and court records, Robinson was caught stealing from several employers and fired. He then started a succession of his own companies, always seeking investors in his many schemes. Authorities believe that he also used the ventures to ensnare unsuspecting women.

Paula Godfrey

In 1984, Robinson hired Paula Godfrey, 19, a 1983 graduate of Olathe North High School, to work as a sales representative for his management-consulting firm, Equi-II. Telling her he would enroll her in a training course in Texas, Robinson picked her up at her parents' home to go to the airport that September. She was never seen again.

The following January, Lisa Stasi and her 4-month-old daughter met Robinson while staying at a Kansas City shelter for battered women. While separated from her new husband, Carl, she still kept in touch with his family. She told them that a businessman named John Osborne, later identified as Robinson, had put her up at a local hotel. She also told them he promised to set her up with a job in the Chicago area and, ominously, asked her to sign her name to four pieces of blank stationary. Then she, too, disappeared.

Tiffany Stasi

The night of Jan. 10, 1985, Robinson hosted a joyous family reunion with his brother and sister-in-law. The childless couple had been trying to adopt a baby for years and Robinson had told them he might be able to help. That morning they flew from their home in the Chicago area to Kansas City, just a day or so after Robinson called to say he had finally found the perfect baby, a girl.

Police investigated both the Godfrey and Stasi cases. In both, family members received typewritten letters bearing the signatures of the two women that said they had decided to move out of town. Those who knew them immediately suspected foul play, but police dropped the investigations when they could find no evidence of wrongdoing. Though her body has not been found and no charges have been filed, authorities have long suspected that Godfrey was Robinson's first victim.

Lisa Stasi

Catherine Clampitt was the next woman with a connection to Robinson to mysteriously disappear. The 26-year-old woman had moved in with her brother and sister-in-law in Overland Park, Kan., and told them she had found work at Equi-II. She vanished in the spring of 1987, about the same time that Robinson was convicted on several charges of fraud and began serving a four-year sentence in Kansas Hutchison Correctional Facility. Like Godfrey, though, her body has not been found and no charges have been filed.

After serving in Kansas, Robinson was transferred to two prisons in Missouri to serve a sentence for violating probation on an old fraud charge. At the Western Missouri Correctional Facility, he befriended prison librarian Beverly Bonner.

A few months after Robinson was freed in 1993, Bonner filed for divorce and moved from Cameron, Mo., to the Kansas City area. She told friends she had a job lined up with Robinson's company Hydro-Gro, Inc., which would involve foreign travel. She dropped out of sight in January 1994, though her mother continued to send her ex-husband's monthly alimony checks to a mail box in Olathe at a business called The Mailroom.

Sheila Dale Faith

In the summer of 1994, a man known only as "John" whisked Sheila Dale Faith and her teenage daughter, Debbie Lynn Faith, from their home in Pueblo, Colo., Faith, friends have said, was a very lonely woman whose husband had died of cancer, leaving her to care for Debbie, who was confined to a wheelchair with spina bifida.

Sheila, who likely connected with "John" through a newspaper ad, told friends she had found her "dream man,"

Debbie Faith

who promised she'd never have to work. He'd take her on a cruise, take care of her daughter and teach her toride horses in Kansas. After she vanished, one friend discovered their mail-including Debbie Faith's government disability checks-was also being forwarded to a post office box at the Mailroom. As was the case with Bonner, Robinson allegedly picked up the checks.

A new hobby

By 1996, their children grown, Robinson and his wife had moved to their immaculate gray-and-white mobile home in Santa Barbara Estates, where he had discovered the Internet. He presided over five computers in his new home, including three desktops and two laptops, and allegedly spent a lot of time browsing BDSM (Internet lingo for bondage discipline sadomasochism) Web sites.

Robinson's gray-and-white trailer at 36 Monterey Lane in Olathe's Santa Barbara Estates.

Izabela Lewicka allegedly met Robinson online in early 1997 while she was a freshman studying fine arts at Purdue University in Indiana. She told her parents she had obtained a summer "internship" in Kansas City but refused to give details, mentioning only that it would enable her to use her artistic training. While her parents never saw their daughter again, and authorities believe she was murdered around August 1999, they continued to receive emails purportedly from her up until Robinson's arrest.

After staying at the Guesthouse suites in Lenexa, Kan., Suzette Trouten disappeared. Her body was found three months later in a barrell on Robinson's rural property.

In the fall of 1999, Suzette Marie Trouten, 27, a nurse's aide from Michigan, told her family she had met a man on the Internet who offered her $60,000 to move to Kansas and care for his diabetic, wheelchair-bound father. In February 2000, Trouten drove to Kansas City with her two Pekinese dogs, calling her family on arrival to let them know she'd arrived safely and was staying at a hotel in the suburbs. On March 1, she called her mother for the last time. After not hearing from her again, the alarmed Trouten family called police. It would take nearly three months before their worst fears were confirmed.

In the meantime, authorities reopened the investigation into Robinson. Not only was Trouten missing but two Texas women had claimed to have met him on the Internet and, in separate encounters, traveled to the Kansas City suburbs in the spring of 2000 for the purposes of engaging in sadomasochistic sex. Robinson, they alleged, had been more brutal than they ever imagined or wanted. One of the women also alleged that he stole more than $500 in sex toys from her.

On June 2, 2000, authorities pounded on Robinson's door with a warrant for his arrest on charges of aggravated sexual battery and felony theft. Investigators stayed for nearly six hours, carrying out computers, fax machines and several cardboard boxes filled with photographs of women he'd met on the Internet. The next morning, they descended upon his rural property and made their grisly discovery.

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.