Just Killing Time

If you've ever felt like the official story just doesn't add up, you're in the right place. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton unravels true crime cases and the conspiracies lurking beneath them — one uncomfortable truth at a time.

Just Killing Time is a true crime podcast hosted by Elizabeth Stanton, with 31 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Elizabeth Stanton hosts Just Killing Time, a true crime show with 31 episodes published.

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  Episode #32

  SLAVEMASTER - The First Internet Serial Killer

  Aug 20, 202632 min

  The first serial killer to hunt his victims on the internet sealed 8 women in barrels — and used forged emails to keep them "alive" for years. In June 2026, Kansas decided if he lives or dies. This is the John Edward Robinson "Slavemaster" story. John Edward Robinson Sr. was an Eagle Scout, a Sunday school teacher, a Scoutmaster, a father of four — and a lifelong con man responsible for at least 8 murders across Kansas and Missouri between 1984 and 2000. When he got out of prison in 1993 and discovered the earliest internet chatrooms, he became "Slavemaster" — trolling BDSM chatrooms under fake identities, isolating women with promises of jobs, money, and travel, then killing them and using pre-signed letters and hijacked email accounts to convince their families they were still alive. ️ How Robinson pioneered using the internet to hunt victims — decades before online predators became a mainstream fear Lisa Stasi's disappearance and the forged adoption that put her infant daughter, Heather, in the home of Robinson's own brother ️ The barrels found on Robinson's Linn County, Kansas farm and in a Raymore, Missouri storage unit The dog that cracked the case: how one detail from a grieving mother unraveled sixteen years of cover-up ⚖️ The longest trial in Kansas history, the 2005 Missouri plea deal, and the 2015 Kansas Supreme Court ruling BREAKING NEWS: Governor Laura Kelly's June 2026 denial of Robinson's clemency request, his attorney's pushback, and what it means for one of the oldest men on death row in the country ️ Elizabeth's full, clearly-labeled opinion on the clemency decision, capital punishment, and why six of Kansas's fifteen death sentences since 1994 came out of Sedgwick County alone Victims: Lisa Stasi, Paula Godfrey, Catherine Clampitt, Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Izabela Lewicka, and Suzette Trouten. As always on Just Killing Time, documented facts and Elizabeth's personal opinions are clearly labeled and separated throughout the episode. Got your own Time Killer File — a true crime case, a conspiracy, or a piece of hidden history you want covered? Email Elizabeth directly. Your story could end up in a future episode. JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. New episodes of true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history every week. #JustKillingTime #TrueCrimePodcast #JohnRobinson #Slavemaster #KansasTrueCrime #SerialKiller #TrueCrime #DeathRow

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  Episode #31

  NINE LIVES ON 1-35 - The Verna & Roger Stafford Murders

  Aug 18, 202632 min

  This episode is dedicated to my best friend who I call sister, Dena Tackett. We have driven up and down I-35 for each other for decades. Right now, while this episode is live, a decision is sitting on Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt's desk that could put a mass murderer back on the street. In August 2026, a divided Oklahoma parole board voted 3-2 to recommend release for Verna Stafford — a woman who, alongside her husband Roger and his brother Harold, was part of one of the most brutal killing sprees in Oklahoma history. In the summer of 1978, the Staffords staged a fake highway breakdown on Interstate 35 near Purcell, Oklahoma, luring an Air Force family — Melvin Lorenz, his wife Linda, and their 12-year-old son Richard — to their deaths for six hundred dollars. Three weeks later, they walked into a Sirloin Stockade restaurant in Oklahoma City, robbed it, and murdered six employees — a pastor filling in for a night shift and four teenagers working summer jobs — inside the restaurant's walk-in cooler. This episode covers all of it: the highway trap, the massacre in the cooler, the drunk phone call Roger himself made from a Chicago payphone that accidentally broke the case wide open, Verna's plea deal and testimony against her husband, Roger's execution in 1995, and the parole hearing that happened just this month — including the raw, emotional testimony from victims' families and Verna's own statement to the board. I'm also sharing exactly where I land on her "controlled wife" defense, and I don't think everyone's going to agree with me. This is a hard one, Time Killers. Nine names, nine families, and a case that is very much not over yet. If this episode moved you, the best way to support the show is by leaving a rating or review wherever you're listening — it genuinely helps other true crime listeners find us. And if you've got your own highway story, a case from your home state, or a piece of hidden history you think belongs on Just Killing Time, email me directly — that's what the Time Killer Files are for. Thank you for Killing Time with me tonight. Sources referenced in this episode include Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals records (Stafford v. State), OSBI investigation reporting, The Daily Oklahoman, the Muskogee Phoenix, The Oklahoman, and reporting on the August 2026 Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board hearing. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton is a true crime, conspiracy, and hidden history podcast. New episodes drop regularly — subscribe so you don't miss episode 32.

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  Episode #30

  THE BLOODY BENDERS OF KS - The True Story of America's First Serial Killer Family

  Aug 17, 202652 min

  The Bloody Benders of Kansas: America's First Serial Killer Family | Just Killing Time The Bloody Benders were a German-speaking family of four — Pa, Ma, John Jr., and Kate Bender — who ran a roadside inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas between 1871 and 1873, and murdered at least eleven travelers before vanishing without a trace. Historians still debate whether their true victim count exceeds twenty. This week on Just Killing Time, host Elizabeth Stanton digs into the full, documented history of the Benders — the hammer-and-trapdoor murder method, the disappearance of Dr. William York that finally exposed them, the discovery of "Hell's Half-Acre," and the century-and-a-half-long mystery of what actually happened to the family after they fled Kansas. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: • How the Bender family used their cabin's canvas curtain and hidden trapdoor to kill guests seated at their own dinner table • Why Kate Bender's spiritualist "healing" business — she advertised as "Professor Miss Katie Bender" — was actually a system for identifying vulnerable travelers • The full list of known and suspected victims, including George Longcor and his 18-month-old daughter, Mary Ann • How Dr. William York's disappearance — and his brother Colonel Alexander York's manhunt — finally brought the Benders' killing spree to an end • What searchers found when they dug up the Bender property's orchard, garden, and well in May 1873 • The competing theories on the Benders' fate: vigilante lynching, escape to the Texas–New Mexico border, or something else entirely • The 1889 Michigan trial of two women accused of being Ma and Kate Bender — and why it collapsed • A real hidden-history connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie family, who lived near the Bender inn • How the Bender case still fascinates true crime historians today, including a modern-day University of Kansas excavation of the property This case has been called America's first documented serial killings, and it happened along a trail some of you have quite literally driven past on Highway 400 near Cherryvale, Kansas — closer to home than you might think. Got your own Time Killer File? Kansas frontier history, Osage Trail family stories, or your own true crime theories — I want to hear them. Email me directly, and you might hear your story on a future episode. New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton drop weekly — true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history from the heart of Kansas and beyond. Sources referenced include the Kansas Historical Society, Kansas Memory archives, University of Kansas / Kansas Geological Survey field research, and period newspaper accounts from 1873–1890. #BloodyBenders #TrueCrimePodcast #KansasHistory #KateBender #SerialKillerHistory #OsageTrail #LabetteCounty #CherryvaleKansas #AmericasFirstSerialKillers #HiddenHistory #TrueCrimeCommunity #JustKillingTime #KansasTrueCrime #FrontierCrime #ColdCase

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  Episode #29

  AFTER THE SHOT - Amy, Mary Jo, & the Man the Media Made a Hero

  Aug 8, 202637 min

  On May 19, 1992, seventeen-year-old Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her Massapequa, New York home. Amy Fisher was having a relationship with Mary Jo's husband, Joey Buttafuoco, that began when Fisher was sixteen and Buttafuoco was thirty-five. The case became a national tabloid sensation known as the "Long Island Lolita" story. In this episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton, Elizabeth breaks down the fully documented facts of the Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco case: how their relationship began at Buttafuoco's Long Island auto body shop, how Fisher was steered into escort work at sixteen, the May 1992 shooting of Mary Jo Buttafuoco, Amy Fisher's 1992 guilty plea and seven-year prison sentence, Joey Buttafuoco's 1993 statutory rape conviction and four-month jail sentence, and his subsequent decades of legal trouble — a 1995 prostitution solicitation plea, a 2004 felony insurance fraud conviction that permanently barred him from the auto body industry in California, and a 2005 illegal ammunition charge. Elizabeth also examines how 1992 and 1993 media coverage branded a minor who was sexually exploited by an adult as a "seductress," while Joey Buttafuoco was welcomed onto the Howard Stern Show and a nationally televised Celebrity Boxing match. The episode covers Mary Jo Buttafuoco's decades-long recovery, her 2009 memoir, and her advocacy work, and where Amy Fisher, Joey Buttafuoco, and Mary Jo Buttafuoco are today. Elizabeth Stanton was fourteen years old, watching this story unfold live on the news from Derby, Kansas in 1992 — and thirty years later, she's telling it with the facts the tabloids left out. Content note: this episode discusses the sexual exploitation of a minor and gun violence. Thanks for killing time with me. Keywords: Amy Fisher, Joey Buttafuoco, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, Long Island Lolita, true crime podcast, 1992 shooting, Massapequa New York, statutory rape, media bias, grooming #JustKillingTime #TrueCrime #AmyFisher #JoeyButtafuoco #LongIslandLolita #TrueCrimePodcast

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  Episode #28

  FROM YOUR LOVING WIFE - The Lobster Boy Murders - Episode 3

  Aug 4, 202646 min

  She paid fifteen hundred dollars to have her husband killed. Then she sent flowers to his funeral. The banner on them read: "From your loving wife." Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. A fifty-five-year-old man sits on his couch in his underwear watching a movie, cigarette going, glass of iced tea beside him. At some point he pauses the tape, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why. Outside in the dark, a seventeen-year-old neighbor is looking at him through the window. The man on that couch was Grady Stiles Jr., the sideshow performer billed as Lobster Boy. Fourteen years earlier he had shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death in Pittsburgh, been convicted of third-degree murder by a jury, and served zero days in prison — because no Pennsylvania facility could accommodate his condition. He came home. And every single person in that trailer knew exactly what that meant. This is the finale of a three-part series, and it's the hardest thing I've written. Because this is a murder. A man was killed in his own home for money and I'm not going to soften that. But it's also the only case I've ever covered where the judge who sentenced the killer said on the record that he had no doubt she was telling the truth — and then sentenced her anyway. He told her there's a price that has to be paid, as unjust as that may seem to you. Both of those things stay true for the next hour. Try to hold both. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. 06:30 — Welcome in, and a full catch-up if you're starting here 10:00 — Why did she go back? Who Mary Teresa actually was 19:00 — Four years: what that trailer looked like from inside 27:00 — The kid: Chris Wyant, seventeen years old, and the $1,500 34:00 — The night, and the morning after 39:00 — How the law sorted the blame 44:00 — Tampa, July 1994 52:00 — The verdict and the sentence 58:00 — The family's version 62:00 — What happened to everybody 67:00 — The question underneath 71:00 — Time Killer Files 73:00 — Close WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why a woman remarried a man convicted of murdering her own daughter's fiancé. Why the man who pulled the trigger got twenty-seven years and the man who never touched the gun got life. What the battered woman defense argued in Florida in 1994, and why the prosecutor's answer was legally airtight. What happened at Grady Stiles' funeral, and why it means something specific in a carnival town. And one contradiction I cannot resolve — a claim about that night that comes from the carnival industry's own museum and appears nowhere in the court record. SOURCES Tampa Bay Times (then St. Petersburg Times), July 1994. Associated Press sentencing coverage, August 1994. The Washington Post, July 1994. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting. The International Independent Showmen's Museum. Fred Rosen, "Lobster Boy" (1995). Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (2005). AMC's "Freakshow" interviews with Grady Stiles III. Where sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why. TIME KILLER FILES Four asks. The medical examiner's report. Any record that confirms or kills the window-tap claim. Gibsonton family stories — the ordinary ones, not the sensational ones. And anything at all about Jack Layne, the eighteen-year-old who died in Pittsburgh in 1978. He is the only person in three episodes who did nothing wrong. ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas. If you came in at the finale, go back and start with Episode One. It will change how this one sits. And if this series stayed with you, a rating and a review is the biggest thing you can do to help somebody else find it. Content note: this episode discusses homicide, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

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