In the summer of 1984, Paula Godfrey of Overland Park, Kansas, was nineteen and had a plan to be a businesswoman. A man named John Robinson offered her a job with training. Her family never saw her again. Her body has never been found.
Robinson was born at Cicero, Illinois, in December 1943. He was an Eagle Scout who had once been chosen to sing for Queen Elizabeth II in London and had considered the priesthood, and he spent his adult life as a fraudster: embezzling from employers, forging documents, inventing companies, awarding himself a citation as Kansas City Man of the Year on a fake letterhead, and running a bogus adoption scheme.
He was the third of five children of Henry and Alberta Robinson, an abusive alcoholic father and a strict mother, and was born on December 27, 1943. He lasted a year at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago and two at Morton Junior College, training as a radiographer. In 1964 he moved to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch, and they had four children. In 1969 he was arrested for embezzling thirty-three thousand dollars from the medical practice of Dr. Wallace Graham, where he worked as a radiographer on forged credentials, and got probation; there were further embezzlement and fraud arrests in Chicago and Kansas City through the 1970s. He was a Scoutmaster, a baseball coach and a Sunday school teacher, and in 1977, sitting on the board of a local charity, he forged letters that got him named its Man of the Year and hosted a luncheon in his own honor. In 1982 he served sixty days for embezzlement and check forgery, and then took twenty-five thousand dollars from a friend who needed it for his dying wife's medical care.
The method never really changed, only the medium. He advertised work. He invented a charity for disabled people. From the mid-1990s he used internet chat rooms and bulletin boards devoted to sadomasochism, where he called himself Slavemaster, and offered money, travel and a dominant-submissive arrangement. The women he chose were isolated, in financial trouble, or estranged from their families.
He had them sign powers of attorney and write letters to their relatives explaining that they would be traveling and out of touch. Then he killed them, and went on collecting their disability and alimony payments for years. In one case he took a victim's infant daughter and arranged her adoption by his own brother, who paid what he believed were legal fees. That child, Heather Robinson, grew up as his niece.
The women named in the record are Paula Godfrey, nineteen; Lisa Stasi, nineteen; Catherine Clampitt, twenty-seven; Sheila Dale Faith, forty-five, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Debbie Lynn Faith; Izabela Lewicka, twenty-one; Beverly Bonner, forty-nine; and Suzette Trouten, twenty-eight.
What ended it was Trouten's mother, who would not stop telephoning. Two women he had been involved with reported him for assault, and on June 2, 2000 he was arrested. Officers searched his property near La Cygne in Linn County and found two eighty-five gallon chemical barrels with bodies inside them. Three more were in a storage unit he rented at Raymore, Missouri.
He was convicted in Johnson County, Kansas in October 2002 on two counts of capital murder, one count of first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping, and sentenced to death on January 21, 2003. To avoid a second capital trial he then pleaded guilty in Missouri to five further murders and took life without parole.
On November 6, 2015 the Kansas Supreme Court ruled on the Kansas case in a 415-page opinion by Justice Caleb Stegall. It affirmed one capital murder conviction and the death sentence, the first the court had upheld since Kansas reinstated capital punishment in 1994. It reversed the second capital count as multiplicitous, because prosecutors had used the same victims to support more than one charge. The surviving conviction covers Lewicka and Trouten together, which is what Kansas law requires of a capital count. Justice Lee Johnson dissented, arguing that the death penalty violates the Kansas Bill of Rights.
Kansas has not executed anyone since 1965, and has executed nobody at all in the thirty-two years since it restored the penalty. Nine men are on its death row.
In June 2026 Robinson asked Governor Laura Kelly to commute the sentence to life. Her denial ran to a single paragraph: no credible claim of innocence, no evidence of manifest injustice. His lawyer, Madeline Cohen, put the counter-argument in terms of arithmetic rather than mercy. He is almost eighty-three and one of the oldest men under sentence of death in the United States; given his age, his medical condition and his continuing appeals, he will die of natural causes long before Kansas is in a position to execute him, so the state is committed to defending a sentence it will never carry out instead of resolving the case for life without parole. A post-conviction appeal is still pending before the state supreme court. The denial came on June 18. Cohen said he was almost eighty-three and in poor health, that he would almost certainly die of natural causes before Kansas could execute him, and that his case was still pending on a post-conviction appeal in the Kansas Supreme Court. He remains at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.
The label attached to him, the first internet serial killer, is roughly right in the sense that matters. The technology did not change what he was. It changed how many isolated people he could reach, and how plausibly a woman could be made to disappear while her family believed she had simply moved on. Paula Godfrey, Catherine Clampitt and Lisa Stasi have never been found.