Town note
Twelve years before Lenexa was platted, James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill Hickok, staked a claim on 160 acres at what is now the corner of 83rd Street and Clare Road.
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Lenexa, Kansas, is a suburb of Kansas City in son County, about twenty minutes from downtown Kansas City and three and a half hours from Kingman, the town of an earlier Kansas episode. James describes it as a wealthy little suburb with a population of 56,755, a median age of 38.3 and a median household income of $96,477. The town's motto is I like Lenexa.
His father drank heavily and his mother was often absent. In 1955 he joined the Boy Scouts, sponsored by the Holy Name Society of Mary Queen of Heaven Roman Catholic Church, and in the autumn of 1957 he entered Quigley Preparatory Seminary to train for the priesthood. In November 1957 he was named an Eagle Scout and travelled to London with 120 boy scouts to sing at a Royal Command performance at the Palladium, where he met Judy Garland and Gracie Fields and bowed to Queen Elizabeth. He was a poor student and a discipline problem, and he left Quigley after his freshman year.
In 1964 he moved from the Chicago area to Kansas City and married Nancy Jo Lynch. In 1965 he talked his way into an X-ray technician's job at Children's Mercy and General Hospital with fake diplomas and fake references, and was sacked when the hospital discovered he had no training. In 1966 Dr Wallace Graham hired him at the Fountain Plaza X-ray lab, where he embezzled $33,000 and slept with much of the staff. Selling insurance for R. B. Jones, he embezzled $5,586.36 and had his probation extended.
In December 1977 the Kansas City Times reported that he had been named Man of the Year by a group for the disabled; two weeks later the paper revealed that he had forged the letters and arranged the award himself. Neighbours found him arrogant, and he was soon known for propositioning women and bullying his wife and children.
He went on to run a series of frauds. In May 1984 he posed as an attorney to take $200 and a car from a woman who wanted a divorce.
In September 1984 he hired 19-year-old Paula Godfrey as a sales representative and collected her from her parents' home; she was never seen again. That summer he rented a duplex in the company's name and turned it into a brothel specialising in rough sex, run by Linda Stevens Jones, and he became a leading member of a BDSM group called the International Council of Masters, where he was known as the slave master. In November 1984 he told Karen Gaddis, a social worker at Truman Medical Center, that he ran a programme for young mothers and asked for referrals of white women in their teens or early twenties with a newborn baby and no family support.
Lisa Stasi was 19 and had a four-month-old daughter, Tiffany. On January 9 he collected her and Tiffany from the sister-in-law's house in a snowstorm and took them to the Roadway Inn in Overland Park. Less than an hour later she telephoned to say she had arrived safely. The following afternoon she called her mother-in-law, Betty Stasi, in a panic, saying that people were claiming Betty meant to take Tiffany away and wanted her to sign four blank sheets of paper. Betty told her not to sign anything, Lisa said here they come and the line went dead. A few days later a typed letter signed Lisa arrived, saying she had left to start a new life; Betty said Lisa could not type.
The paperwork that followed in July 1985 bore the forged signatures of Douglas Wood and Judge Michael H. Farley and the name of a woman who had never been a notary. His probation officer, Steve Hames, was not convinced, and in March 1985 Erv Blatner began cooperating with the Secret Service.
In April 1985 he took in Theresa Williams, a 21-year-old from Boise, Idaho, as his mistress and prostitute; in late May he let himself into her flat, spanked her, put an empty revolver to her head and threatened to kill her, then went to his son's soccer game.
Catherine Clampett, 27, answered a newspaper advertisement promising travel and a new wardrobe in 1987 and disappeared; she was reported missing on June 15, 1987.
In 1997 Beverly Bonner was formally reported missing. Isabella Lewicka, a 19-year-old Purdue student born in Poland, had answered his advertisements and moved to Kansas City in June 1997 to work for him and train as a dominatrix; she signed a 115-item slave contract. She disappeared in the late summer or autumn of 1999. She checked into room 216 at the Guest House Suites in Lenexa on February 14.
Detective David Brown of the Lenexa police was already investigating. The searches found Lisa Stasi's signed stationery and the Roadway Inn receipts, two barrels in an Olathe storage garage holding the bodies of Beverly Bonner and Sheila and Debbie Faith, and, at his sixteen acres near La Cygne, two more barrels holding Suzette Trouton and Isabella Lewicka, both killed by blows to the head with a hammer.