Olathe ? The Kansas murder trial of a man accused of killing three women there as well as two other women and a girl in Missouri will proceed as scheduled in September.

Johnson County District Judge John Anderson denied the defense request for another delay after four hours of arguments Thursday.

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Attorneys for John E. Robinson Sr. had asked the judge to push the trial back another eight months, saying the amount of evidence gathered in the last two years makes it impossible for them to be ready for the trial starting Sept. 16.

“We simply need more time to prepare,” said Sean O’Brien, one of four attorneys now representing Robinson. The defense lawyers piled boxes of evidence in front of their table for Thursday’s hearing.

Some of the information received just recently from the state was gathered by police two years ago, the defense attorneys said. O’Brien said some of the new information coming to them sometimes alluded to other reports they hadn’t seen yet.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” he said.

Prosecutors objected to the delay, arguing that many of the evidence problems stemmed from Robinson having changed attorneys twice since he was charged in June 2000.

Last summer Robinson fired his initial defense team and hired an attorney with little experience. But that attorney had to leave the case in February because of a conflict of interest involving a potential witness he once represented.

O’Brien and Patrick Berrigan, both experienced in death penalty cases, had been appointed to the case last year, and two other attorneys were later appointed to assist them.

The Johnson County case involves a young woman who disappeared in 1985 and two other women whose bodies were found two years ago in barrels on rural property Robinson owned in Linn County.

The case in Missouri’s Cass County involves two women and a girl whose bodies were found in barrels inside a storage locker.

According to testimony Thursday, massive amounts of computer information were turned over to Robinson’s attorneys in January 2001, but it was not passed along to the new defense team.

Dist. Atty. Paul Morrison testified that much of the evidence recently provided to the defense had been provided previously as well.

Sara Welch, an assistant district attorney, noted that while the defense attorneys were seeking a delay in Johnson County they also told a Missouri judge that Robinson wanted to go to trial there as soon as possible.

The judge said he knew it would not be easy for the defense lawyers to prepare for the trial but that he thought they could do it.

He said the defense team members made up “probably the finest capital defense team in the Midwest, if not the nation.”

The next hearing July 31 will consider a defense request for more specific information about the allegations against Robinson.