By Sue Miller Wiltz
Special to Court TV
OLATHE, Kansas (Court TV) -- In an apparent surprise to prosecutors, the tearful wife of accused serial killer John Edward Robinson Sr. testified on cross-examination Thursday that her husband was babysitting their grandchildren on the morning that victim Suzette Trouten allegedly disappeared.
But prosecutor Paul Morrison, on redirect, asked Nancy Robinson why she had failed to mention that fact in the two previous times she had spoken to authorities and during her testimony at the 2001 preliminary hearing.
"You said nothing about seeing your husband that morning," he thundered.
"I guess, but I don't remember," replied the flustered witness.
Robinson, occasionally crying and dabbing her eyes with Kleenex, dropped the bombshell when defense lawyer Sean O'Brien asked her if she could recall the events of March 1, 2000, the day Trouten is believed to have been murdered. Her husband is charged with killing Trouten and two other women in Kansas in 2000 and faces the death penalty.
She testified that her daughter Christy, a paramedic, had phoned the night before and asked if her father could take care of her kids that morning because she had a meeting to attend. She testified that she left for work early. It was the first of the month, she said, and as the manager of the mobile home community where they live, she had a lot of work to do taking in tenants' rent.
O'Brien asked when she next saw her husband. "Probably as he went by to pick up (his grandchild)," she said, noting that the child needed to be fetched at school at 11:20 a.m. "My grandson, Jason, would have been with him."
Nancy Robinson's former office at Hometown Santa Barbara, or Santa Barbara Estates, is very close to the entrance of the mobile home community. When she went home for a late lunch, she said, Christy was there to pick up the kids. Nancy said she stayed with them about an hour, returned to the office, and didn't come home again until dinner.
"Probably about 6 p.m.," she said when asked what time. "John would usually have dinner ready. I'm sure we had dinner."
"Why do you remember this day of all days?" O'Brien asked.
"Because of the dog-catcher thing," she replied, alluding to an animal control officer who had come to the mobile home community that afternoon to pick up two stray Pekinese dogs that have been identified as belonging to Trouten. Under initial questioning by Morrison, she said that the clerk in her office, Alberta, had received a phone call from John about the stray Pekinese.
"She turned around and said, 'Your husband is playing dog-catcher. He wants me to call the animal control Officer." Robinson also testified about the baby that her husband had brought home in January 1985. One of the charges against Robinson is that he killed the baby's mother, Lisa Stasi, and arranged for his brother and sister-in-law to adopt Stasi's four-month-old baby, Tiffany. "She was dirty," his wife remembered. "She smelled. You just didn't hardly find dirt under a baby's fingernails."
Nancy Robinson stated that she bathed the baby and her brother and sister-in-law came to pick it up the next day. Morrison showed the court a family portrait that was taken at the reunion. In the photo, relatives surround a smiling Robinson and baby Tiffany is seated on his lap.
"What was the baby's name?" asked Morrison.
"I think it was Tiffany," she replied.
Asked how she knew, she said, "because I was told."
"By who?" the prosecutor asked.
"By John." Robinson also admitted to knowing that her husband used the alias James Turner but insisted he only did it "for research to get statistics for the magazine" he published on manufactured modular home living.
"The manufactured housing community is a very small community," she explained. "Everybody knows everybody else. If you want to find out anything, you have to kind of be somebody different." She stated that on several occasions in the spring of 2000 she had visited the rural Kansas property where the bodies of Trouten, 27, of Michigan, and Lewicka, 21, of Indiana, were discovered. She said she had also visited the storage locker in Missouri where the bodies of three other women were found.
She said she had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. During O'Brien's cross-examination, Robinson admitted that she knew her husband was interested in sadistic sex and had numerous affairs during their 38-year marriage. Twice, she testified, she came close to leaving her husband. The second time was in 1997 when she discovered he was having an affair with Izabela Lewicka, one of her husband's alleged victims, later found stuffed in a barrel on his rural Kansas property.
"Probably in his briefcase, I saw a bank statement and a canceled check where he was paying her rent," she stated. "Usually when I found out about [his affairs], it was over. This one wasn't. I truly thought he would probably leave me for her." Robinson said she even visited an attorney about a divorce but didn't go through with it because of her granddaughter, who often visited their house several times a week. "This was a way of life for her," she said. "We were like a second home. I didn't want to hurt her."
On the day her husband was arrested, she said, two detectives came into her office and told her they needed to speak in private. When they told her they were arresting her husband for aggravated sexual battery, she said, "I thought I was going to pass out."
Robinson, crying again, testified how she also lost her job at the mobile home community shortly after her husband was arrested because of all the publicity about the case. Even so, she said, she still loved her husband and continues to visit him regularly at the John County Jail. "I've always loved him," she said. "I don't understand all this."
The defendant's wife was one of 13 witnesses to take the stand Thursday. Mike Lowther, a detective with the Lenexa Police Department, testified that he had investigated the Robinson case and been one of the detectives assigned to search his property the day he was arrested in June 2000. Lowther described finding five computers in the Robinson's three-bedroom mobile home.
He also said that investigators found correspondence with the signature, James A. Turner, and two books in Robinson's office. One was called "The Heavy Duty New Identity," and the other was entitled, "New ID: How to create a foolproof new identity." This time, defense attorney Pat Berrigan appeared to be surprised.
"May I see these?" he asked, before requesting a bench conference, presumably about the books. Lowther then testified how he had executed a search warrant at Robinson's storage locker in Olathe, finding a computer hard drive, sex toys, several items belonging to Trouten, BDSM catalogs and videotapes and a book that is known as the BDSM Bible, "Screw the Roses, Give me the Thorns."
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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