John “J.R.” Robinson, a fleshy man of 41 with wavy brown hair and a winning smile, left his four-acre estate in the horsey exurbs southwest of Kansas City, Missouri, and drove to an apartment in the city where he kept the woman he called his mistress. The trip from the rolling Kansas prairie across the Missouri border to the gritty, urban precincts of Troost Avenue took barely half an hour. It was still early on this Saturday morning in late May of 1985.

Robinson let himself into the brick apartment building—he had his own keys—and then into the apartment itself, a two-bedroom unit on the third floor. The woman in residence, Theresa Williams, 21, had been asleep but bolted awake when Robinson barged into her bedroom.

J.R. grabbed Theresa by the hair, pulled her over his knee, and started spanking her.

“You’ve been a real bad girl,” he snarled. “You need to learn a lesson.”

Theresa, momentarily speechless, started screaming. J.R. threw her to the floor and drew a revolver from a shoulder holster.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.” He put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click. The chamber was empty.

Cowering and crying softly now, Theresa stiffened as J.R. slid the gun down her torso and stuck the barrel into her vagina.

“I’ll bet you’ve never had a blowout,” he said.

“Don’t do that!” she pleaded.

J.R. withdrew the gun from Theresa’s body, holstered it, and left the apartment as suddenly as he had entered. The terrified woman, her sobs slowly ebbing, did not summon help. She felt helpless. One did not cross J.R. Robinson.

J.R. drove from Troost Avenue back across the state line to his Kansas home, where he arrived in time to attend his teenage son’s regular Saturday soccer game. To all appearances, J.R. Robinson was a doting father and husband. A skilled handyman, he had built a soccer goal in the family’s spacious yard so his son could practice at home. He attended his daughter’s flute recitals and band concerts, and refereed school volleyball games.

His neighbors knew J.R. as a successful businessman and entrepreneur, always talking of new ventures. He was a neighborhood activist, an officer of the residents’ association, and chairman of its rules committee. He was also a founding elder of the nearby Presbyterian Church.

Neither his neighbors nor his children knew that J.R. Robinson led a second life—secret and sordid—dating back nearly two decades. (How much his wife knew was unclear, even years later.) J.R. was a swindler, an embezzler, and a forger. He was a sexual predator, a deviant, and a pimp. And in the mid-80s in Kansas he was becoming something much more sinister—a murderer of women.

Indeed, J.R. Robinson is rare in the annals of American crime: a genial con man and a homicidal monster all in one. Unlike Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, who chose their victims impulsively and killed them with dispatch, Robinson developed relationships with his. Using the Internet and his own considerable charm, he lured them to Kansas with offers of employment and sadomasochistic sex. He exploited them financially, enticing them into giving him their life savings and retirement accounts, cashing their disability checks, and, in one case, selling a victim’s baby to his brother and sister-in-law. Then, prosecutors allege, he beat at least five women to death with a blunt object, most likely a large hammer.

“I’ve dealt with a wide variety of characters, but never anyone like Robinson,” says Stephen Haymes, 49, who has been a probation officer for 26 years and who saw through Robinson far sooner than anyone else in law enforcement. “He’s just chilling. There are so many sides to him. There is the con man after money. There is the murderer. There is the sexual deviant. There is the cover-up artist—the lies, endless lies.”