The Bodies in the Barrels

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He stands almost 6 ft. tall and weighs 195 lbs., but John Robinson was nearly invisible. No one knew what he did for a living. He worked mostly at home, tapping away at a computer, speaking vaguely about some businesses he ran and occasionally disappearing in his pickup truck. The lot around the gray mobile home he kept on a hilltop in the east Kansas town of Olathe is well trimmed, with a weathered figurine of the Virgin Mary set on the lawn and a grill on the back porch. Most of his neighbors couldn't recall ever seeing him, but a 13-year-old girl walking near his home last week said she knew the burly 56-year-old as someone to avoid. "He said things to girls in the neighborhood. I thought that was creepy, considering he's married."

Robinson's camouflage of drab normality fell away last week, revealing what authorities say is a stealthy serial murderer with a taste for sadomasochistic Internet sites and a likely connection to the killings and disappearances of nine people in Kansas and Missouri going back to 1984. If true, this would make him the most prolific serial killer to strike this region in a decade, and authorities say they are not done searching for bodies.

Investigators tracing Robinson's steps have uncovered a gruesome harvest. Three large drums from a Missouri storage locker he rents were pried open. Each contained a body. Across the border, Kansas police combing farmland Robinson owns unearthed two more drums. These too contained bodies. One of those was that of Suzette Trouten, 28, a Michigan woman who met Robinson online and traveled to a Kansas motel where he promised her work. Another is thought to be Izabela Lewicka, 22, a Polish immigrant who struck up a friendship with Robinson and, possibly, Lisa Stasi, a Texas single mom whom he employed.

As prosecutors prepare formal charges of murder against Robinson, they are holding him on charges of assaulting two other women he met in an S&M chat room. His livelihood was criminal as well, according to District Attorney Paul Morrison of Johnson County, Kans., who paints a portrait of an intelligent and agile criminal who wove a tapestry of fraudulent deals, rubber checks and phony companies. "He had no real employment, unless you consider figuring out ways of scamming people out of their money to be real employment," says Morrison. Between 1969 and 1991, Robinson was convicted at least four times of embezzlement. He then allegedly used his financial gains to snare young women, promising them jobs and cash. He shifted his activities behind the cloak of the Internet, police say, when he believed suspicion might fall on him for the disappearances.

Robinson's wife and four children released a statement calling him "a loving and caring husband and father," adding that they "did not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV." At the QT filling station down the road from Robinson's farm, where he regularly stopped for gas and soda, the manager put it a little differently: "I guess there are a lot of people who don't know a lot about him."