John Edward Robinson

Victims: 8 - the Kansas capital murder conviction that survived appeal covers Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka; 5 first-degree murder convictions in Missouri account for five more; and the Kansas conviction for the 1985 killing of Lisa Stasi, whose body has never been found, was REVERSED on appeal in 2015 as multiplicitous, so eight killings are attributed to him and six are covered by convictions that still stand
Years active: 1984 - 2000
Location: Kansas/Missouri, USA
Method: One or two blows to the head
Status: Arrested on June 2, 2000. Convicted in 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. He later pleaded guilty in Missouri to five further first-degree murders to avoid a second capital trial, receiving life without parole. On November 6, 2015 the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed one capital murder conviction and the death sentence in a 415-page opinion by Justice Caleb Stegall, the first death sentence the court had upheld since Kansas reinstated capital punishment in 1994; it reversed the second capital murder conviction and the first-degree murder conviction on the ground that prosecutors had relied on the same victims to support more than one charge. Governor Laura Kelly denied his clemency application in June 2026, and a post-conviction appeal remains pending before the state supreme court. He is held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility, is in his eighties and is among the oldest prisoners under sentence of death in the United States; Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965.

John Edward Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1943. He was an Eagle Scout who had once been chosen to sing for Queen Elizabeth II in London, considered the priesthood, and spent his entire adult life as a fraudster: embezzling from employers, forging documents, inventing companies, awarding himself a citation as Kansas City Man of the Year through a fake letterhead, and running a bogus adoption scheme.

From 1984 he was also killing. He recruited women through personal advertisements, through a fake charity for disabled people, and from the mid-1990s through internet chat rooms and bulletin boards devoted to sadomasochism, where he used the name Slavemaster. He offered work, money, travel, and a dominant-submissive arrangement, and the women he chose were isolated, in financial trouble, or estranged from their families. He had them sign powers of attorney and write letters home explaining that they would be travelling and out of touch, and then he killed them, and went on cashing their disability and alimony cheques for years afterwards. 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. The American press called him the Internet Slavemaster, after how he found the women.

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.

He was arrested in June 2000 after two women he had been involved with complained of assault. Officers searched his farm at Linn County, Kansas, and found two eighty-five-gallon chemical barrels with bodies in them, and then three more in a rented storage unit at Raymore, Missouri.

He was convicted in Kansas in October 2002 of three murders and sentenced to death, and in 2003 pleaded guilty in Missouri to five more to avoid a second capital trial. At least eight women are attributed to him and investigators believe there are others.

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.