letters from her beginning in January 1994. The first one was handwritten. In it, the recently divorced and even-more-recently dead Beverly 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 travelling to Europe. In subsequent letters, all typewritten, the deceased woman said her new job was ‘wonderful’, and that she was working with her boss, Jim Redmond.
* * *
Sheila was interested in BDSM and used the internet and personal ads to meet men. She would start talk about BDSM, and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear it. It’s not my thing.’
Nancy Guerrero, close friend of Sheila Faith, 1994.
One of three sisters, 45-year-old Sheila Dale Faith was a widow. Her husband John died of cancer in 1993 and she was left to raise Debbie, their fifteen-year-old daughter. Debbie had been born with spina bifida, had cerebral palsy and she spent her life in a wheelchair, with barely enough strength to manipulate the chair’s joystick controller. Since the death of the patriarch, mother and daughter had lived a lonely life in Fullerton, California. Looking to ‘start over’, they upped sticks and moved to Pueblo, Colorado, in a beat-up white van.
As with so many thousands of lonely women, Sheila began trying to meet a man on the internet and she made a number of bad choices before making the fatal choice of John E Robinson. Sheila told family and friends that she had met her ‘dream man’, John, who had promised to take her on a cruise. He portrayed himself as a wealthy man who would support her, give her a job and pay for Debbie’s therapy.
One night in the summer of 1994, without prior warning, Sheila’s ‘dream man’ called at her home and she and Debbie were whisked away to live in the Kansas City area. As was the case with other women who were befriended by JR, the Faiths were never seen alive again. When they did eventually turn up, they were corpses in barrels.
Both of Sheila’s sisters later received typewritten letters from Sheila and her daughter after their disappearance. ‘She always hand-wrote letters,’ said her sister, Kathy Norman, who received correspondence postmarked Canada and the Netherlands. ‘This isn’t Sheila,’ said another sister, Michelle Fox. ‘It was a happy letter and Sheila wasn’t a happy person.’
The fatal fiscal attraction for JR was that Sheila had been receiving disability benefits from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for herself and Debbie. Now these payments were being directed to a mail centre in Olathe, where JR collected them.
In the autumn of 1994, according to court documents, Robinson filed a medical report to the SAA. In it, not to be diverted from his scheme by the mere technicality of a morbid deception, he wrote that Debbie was totally disabled and would require care for the rest of her life. Under the circumstances, it was not strictly true: she was already dead. The report bore the forged signature of William Bonner, the doctor that JR had befriended in prison and who had, until recently, been Beverly’s husband. When he was eventually questioned on the matter, Dr Bonner categorically denied ever having met Sheila or Debbie Faith, and had certainly never treated them. In any event, JR would continue to collect the Faiths’ disability cheques for almost six years. In July 2000, Cass County prosecutors alleged that, between 1994 and 1997, Robinson defrauded the US government of more than $29,000 in Social Security and disability payments by forging documents to suggest that Sheila and Debbie Faith were alive.
It was also later proven that JR received more than $14,000 in alimony cheques that should have gone to Beverly Bonner. Colleen Davis, the owner of the mail centre from which Robinson retrieved the cheques, told police that she knew JR as James Turner.
If we are to give John any credit, we would have to say that, at the very least, JR was going through a lifetime of psycho- pathologically determined trangressional retro-development with great consistence. In other words – words that John would understand – he was an out-of-control sado-sexual sociopath and spiralling downhill fast. Indeed, at the time of writing he still hasn’t bottomed out, as the following extract from one of his diatribes to the author proves:
You will have seen all the tripe published or on the internet. Eighty percent of which is grossly incorrect, exaggerated fiction with small tid bits of fact thrown in. For example, the moniker given – internet slave master – hype provided by a prosecutor looking for votes and carried through to sell books and enhance TV ratings. According to reports I was an internet stalker who waited in ‘chat rooms’ to locate victims. Great for publicity but factually incorrect and both the police and prosecutors knew it was a fabrication.
John E. Robinson, letter to the author, 10 January 2008.
For the record, JR’s interest in sadomasochistic sex had continued to flourish and he upped the ante by starting to place adverts in the personal columns of the Kansas City newspaper Pitch Weekly. He met and had relationships with a number of women before he fell in with Chloe Elizabeth, who described herself as a ‘businesswoman’ from Topeka, Kansas. She claimed that JR sent her a wealth of publicity material selected to show him in a good light. He included newspaper clippings describing his appearance before the Queen when he was a Boy Scout, his hydroponics brochure, details of his ‘Man of the Year’ award, and a Kansas University brochure containing pictures of two of his children. It was altogether an odd portfolio for someone wishing to engage in a BDSM encounter – the term widely used to describe relationships involving bondage and sadomasochism. Unsurprisingly, JR’s lengthy and distinguished criminal record received no mention whatsoever.
In later years, Chloe Elizabeth described an event that took place during the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1995: ‘I was to meet him at the door of my house wearing only a sheer robe, black mesh thong panties, a matching demi-cup bra, stockings and black high heels. My eyes were to be made up dark and lips red. I was to kneel before him,’ she recounted.
Some red-blooded male readers would find nothing wrong with JR’s request at this point… indeed, there might be thousands of men who would applaud John for his imagination. However, as events would later prove, things would turn sour, for upon his arrival JR took a leather-studded collar from his pocket, placed it around Chloe’s neck and attached a long leash to the collar. After a drink and some small talk, he made her remove all her clothes except for her stockings, and then took from another pocket a ‘Contract for Slavery’ in which she consented to let him use her as a sexual toy in any way he saw fit (it was a template contract he had downloaded from the internet).
‘I read the contract and signed it,’ said Chloe Elizabeth. ‘He asked if I was sure. I said, “yes, very sure”.’
With her signature on the dotted line, he promptly tied her to the bed, whipped her and carried out a variety of imaginative acts on her breasts with ropes and nipple clamps; JR was in his element. Sweating profusely, he concluded their first date by making her perform oral sex on him. The submissive Chloe Elizabeth, it seems, was delighted with her ‘Dom Slave Master’ and he was pretty much delighted with her.
‘That was the first date,’ she later told the judge at Robinson’s trial. ‘It was sensational! […] He had the ability to command, control, to corral someone as strong and aggressive and spirited as I am.’
In any event, before the perspiring and head-to-toe- trembling JR left the house that evening, he told his new slave that she had been stupid for allowing him to do everything he had done to her. ‘I could have killed you,’ he said, with a smirk on his face.
For JR, this master-slave contract with the amply proportioned Chloe Elizabeth had to be about as good as it could get; however, she was not as naïve as he may have thought. Without his knowledge, she had taken the precaution of having a male friend stationed in another room of her house, listening vigilantly, upturned tumbler to the wall, for any sound of excessive behaviour – as if the aforementioned was not excessive enough.
The relationship between JR and Chloe Elizabeth blossomed and they were meeting at least twice a week before it waned as she started to find out that Robinson was not all he claimed to be.
Although this author has no personal experience in such matters, I am reliably informed that it is not unusual