Fullerton Connection to Serial Killings

Police fear that a Fullerton woman and her daughter, last seen five years ago, were victims of an accused serial killer who is already charged with murdering five women in Kansas and Missouri.

Sheila Dale Faith, who would now be 51, and her daughter, Debbie Lynn Faith, who would be 21, had “known connections” to the suspect and may have moved from Fullerton to the suspect’s Kansas hometown in 1994, authorities said.

Investigators, citing a court-issued gag order, declined to elaborate on the nature of the link between the suspect, John Edward Robinson Sr., and the former Fullerton residents. But they asked the public’s help Thursday, urging anyone who has seen the women over the last five years to call police.

“We’re concerned about them,” said Sgt. Rick Roth, a member of the Lenexa, Kan.-based task force probing the slayings. “Their tie with John Robinson would lead anyone to be worried for their safety and welfare.”

Police believe the women are among six people linked to Robinson who have been missing for years. The grisly case began June 3, when authorities discovered the bodies of two women in barrels on Robinson’s property near La Cygne, Kan.

On June 5, three more bodies were found in barrels in a storage locker in Raymore, Mo., east of Kansas City and about 40 miles from La Cygne. Two of the bodies not yet identified are not the remains of Sheila and Debbie Faith, according to the Jackson County, Mo., medical examiner’s office.

Authorities have said Robinson, 56, trolled the Internet for sex under the name “slavemaster” and may have met some of his victims online. Authorities in Missouri, who have filed three murder counts against Robinson, said they will seek the death penalty.

Robinson is being held under a $5-million bond in Kansas, where he is charged with two murder counts, one count of aggravated kidnapping and two counts of sexual battery. Kansas authorities have not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty.

Authorities said Robinson was also being investigated in connection with the disappearance of three women and a baby in the mid-1980s.

In Fullerton, Sheila and Debbie Faith lived in a large apartment complex on Orangethorpe Avenue with Sheila’s husband, John. It’s unclear how long they lived in the city, but officials believe they lived in California at least four years.

One neighbor remembered them as a tight-knit family who rarely ventured from their two-bedroom apartment. Debbie Lynn Faith was developmentally disabled and used a wheelchair.

Kevin Belland, son of the apartment complex owner, said Shelia Faith kept to herself, but “she seemed to have a close relationship with her daughter,” he said.

A year after John Faith’s death in 1993, Sheila called one of her sisters in Texas and told her she and her daughter were heading to the Kansas-Oklahoma area, police said. The sister told investigators she thought Sheila Faith was calling from Colorado at the time.

Police believe the two women journeyed to Colorado sometime in 1994 to visit a hospital, perhaps to seek treatment for Debbie Faith.

Since that last phone call, the family has never reported the two women missing. Still, family members told police that they worried about the pair’s safety, police said. The women’s last known address was a post office box in Olathe, Kan., the hometown of suspect Robinson. Several other people believed to be victims also had post office boxes in the city as their last addresses.

An intensive search for the women across the country has failed to turn them up, police said.

“Their name surfaced in this investigation, and they’re linked with Robinson, and we haven’t been able to find anything about the Faiths for a few years now,” said Roth of the task force.

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Times Staff Writer Jack Leonard contributed to this report.