Three times a week John Edward Robinson mowed the lawn outside his farmhouse and grilled hamburgers at the local cookout. That was the Robinson that his neighbours in the prairie town of Olathe, Kansas, saw. On the internet, however, he called himself The Slavemaster.
To the FBI, Robinson has other names. He is emerging as a monster with two distinctions in the history of American crime: the Cyber Ripper - the first serial killer to lure his victims to their death by stalking them on the web.
An even more grotesque detail has emerged in the case of the Kansas killer: one of the women he is accused of murdering left a daughter - who is now in her teens - who was adopted by Robinson's brother and raised in the family of her mother's killer.
It is believed that the victims were killed because they had children. His motive was not only sado-sexual, but part of an adoption racket.
Robinson was arrested in June after two women told the police that they had been assaulted and robbed by Robinson, having arranged meetings over the internet in order to have sado-masochistic sex. He was charged with sexual battery.
The investigation was intensified after a Michigan woman, Suzette Trouten, was reported missing after leaving to work for Robinson. Meanwhile, a Texas woman said that she had escaped an attempted murder after meeting Robinson as the result of another internet rendezvous.
The Robinson case then twisted into a nightmare: as the FBI began excavating his land in Linn County, Kansas, they found the rotting bodies of five women stashed into 55-gallon drums. Two of them were sitting in the yard, swathed in plastic.Three more bodies were discovered in a storage locker rented in Robinson's name.
Two of the victims were a mother and daughter, Sheila and Deborah Faith. Deborah, a teenager, was disabled. The investigation revealed fake letters, received by relatives of the disappeared women and purportedly from them. One was sent to Mrs Faith's brother saying that Sheila had met a man from Australia who was taking her home 'to be happy'.
Another letter written to the killer, by one of the women he had killed, Paula Godfrey, was addressed to John, and signed 'Love Ya, Paula'. The letter, found in a business associate's brief case, was a crucial piece in the jigsaw that led to Robinson's arrest.
Most chilling of all was the addition to the indictment of a baby who went missing in the late 1980s. But even these investigations did not touch the bitter core of the case, the tragedy of Lisa Stasi and her daughter Tiffany. Tiffany Stasi was only a few months old when her mother - then aged 19 - disappeared in 1985. Lisa vanished after accepting a job with Robinson. Lisa was reported missing in January, 1985.
The body of Lisa Stasi was never found, but the FBI added her name to a list of six women with whose murders Robinson is charged.
Last week the FBI revealed that Tiffany had been adopted by a Midwestern couple who had changed her name to Tiffany Robinson. They were Robinson's brother and sister-in-law.
All investigators would tell The Observer on Friday was that 'the inquiry obviously directs towards the adoptive family of the girl, who we have spoken to'.
One FBI officer said: 'We shall be looking carefully at whether the other victims lured over the web or otherwise had children, and if so what happened to them.'
But just to complete the drama, a bizarre reunion is now planned, whereby Tiffany will be reunited with her real father, pending a series of surreal DNA tests.
Now that Robinson's brother has been accused as a party to the grotesque adoption, Kansas state law assigns responsibility for a minor to the widower of a dead woman.
