News

Woman Learns She Was Adopted by Family of the Serial Killer Who Murdered Her Mom

NewsPublished Oct 8, 2019
By Kaitlin Stanford
Heather Tiffany RobinsonABC News

Like many children of adoption, Heather Tiffany Robinson grew up fantasizing about the mother who gave her up. Was she still out there? Did she really want to keep her but ultimately felt another family could give her a better home? The truth would take her years to learn -- and it would shock Heather to her very core. At age 15, Heather discovered that her mother, Lisa Stasi, had been murdered by a serial killer at just 19. And that serial killer was none other than her uncle, John Robinson.

In Friday's airing of ABC's '20/20,' 34-year-old Heather details the shocking truth behind her mother's death and her mysterious adoption.

John Robinson, who has since been linked to 10 other murders in two different states, reportedly killed Lisa Stasi one night in 1985. To this day, her body has not been found, but the details surrounding what happened after the killing came tumbling out one day in 2000, when Heather and her family learned the shocking news: Not only was her "Uncle Jim" a serial killer who killed her birth mother, but he had also abducted Heather at just 4 months old. Robinson then forged adoption papers and gave her to his brother Don Robinson and his wife, who'd been struggling to have a child of their own.

No one was more floored than Heather's adoptive parents, who she says couldn't believe what her uncle had done.

"When I heard that John had been arrested … I remember [my adoptive mother] running up and down the stairs panicking," Heather told ABC.

"'How could he do this to us?'" she recalled her mother saying. "'We're going to go to jail. This is horrible. Our lives are over.'"

"That was the first time I ever saw my dad cry," she said.

But Heather somehow wasn't shocked by her uncle's crimes. As 20/20 host Amy Robach later told People, “She says she always got an uneasy feeling from him growing up.”

That "feeling" would turn out to be prophetic.

Heather had been born Tiffany Stasi, but after her "adoption," she was renamed Heather Tiffany Robinson.

Her birth family had assumed she'd vanished along with her mother and knew nothing of the girl's whereabouts in the years since.

It wasn't until police began tying John Robinson to multiple murders in Kanas and Missouri that detectives discovered that the missing baby, who had long been presumed dead, was actually alive -- and being raised by John’s brother Don. 

As it turns out, the investigation into John led police on one plot twist after another. Authorities first arrested him in 2000 on charges related to theft and sexual battery. But that arrest led them to search a property he owned elsewhere in Kansas, which turned up the bodies of two missing women, found stuffed in large barrels. That wasn't all they found, either -- two other bodies were also recovered from a storage unit rented in John's name.

John was convicted of three murders in Kansas and was sentenced to death, People reports. He also pleaded guilty in Missouri for the murders of five more women, for which he received five life sentences without parole. Lisa is one of three other known victims whose remains have yet to be recovered.

Now, Heather has made it her mission to find out what happened to her mother.

"I want to find out where she is. I want to know who she was," Heather told 20/20's Amy Robach. "She was a scared, abused,19-year-old girl with a newborn, desperate to keep her child [and] be a mother. That was the whole reason John got her. .. I know I will. I'll find her."

Now a mother herself, Heather's will to learn the truth has only strengthened as the years have passed.

“Becoming a mother inspired Heather to search for answers about her birth mother and her early life,” Robach told People. “Heather’s dedication to finding out more about her mother -- how she lived and how she died -- is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time.”

Cafemom Logo
This is motherhood #nofilter

AboutTermsContactPrivacyPRIVACY SETTINGSSUBMIT A STORY
© 2024 WILD SKY MEDIA.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PART OF WILD SKY MEDIA
| FAMILY & PARENTING
CAFEMOMMAMÁSLATINAS
LITTLETHINGSMOM.COM
This site is owned and operated by Bright Mountain Media, Inc., a publicly owned company trading with the symbol: BMTM.