by Linda Wolfe
Perhaps their reasons were loving. Perhaps they were overly cautious about their son because he was their only child and there would never be another; doctors had warned the aging Mrs. Douglas not to attempt a second pregnancy. Perhaps they were overly strict because they yearned—for the boy’s own good—to see him achieve a higher, more respected place in American society than theirs. Or perhaps they secretly disliked their son, wanted to crush his spirit. It can happen. Whatever their reasons, they overprotected and undersocialized the boy, placing upon him fierce demands for self-control and achievement. As a young child, Bill struggled hard to meet those demands, and when he transgressed and was punished, he apologized, made himself abject, promised he’d never be bad again. And eventually he learned to behave so well that his parents gave him the approving appellation “Little Man.” But in light of his subsequent behavior, there is no doubt that behind his façade the “Little Man” was in much more turmoil than his parents knew, or wanted to know.
All through the spring of 1982, Bill played the “Little Man” role in relation to both his women. With Nancy he was uxorious, dependent, telephoning her several times a day to ask her opinion about a planned activity or to inquire whether there were any tasks she wanted him to perform on his way home. With Robin he was ingratiating, accommodating, always offering to help out with her domestic chores, to move furniture for her, to pick up her mail, to get broken objects repaired. And for a time it must have seemed to him that, cooperative and cajoling, he could handle having two women, could ride the crest of a secret affair without crashing to the shores of discovery and disgrace. Indeed, only one thing worried him in the beginning: he really didn’t have the money to afford Robin. At least not for much longer. Within just a few months of his seeing her, he’d gone through his and Nancy’s entire personal savings, some $16,000. Then one day in the late spring it occurred to him that he might be able to get the money with which to swing the high cost of Robin Benedict. His grants entitled him to hire personnel. Why not employ Robin, put her on the payroll of some of his research projects at Tufts?
It was, he thought, a brainstorm of an idea. Robin had told him—as clearly so many of the girls at Good Time Charlie’s tell their customers—that she was only going to be a hooker for a short time, just long enough to get some capital together. Then she was going to look for more respectable work. His willingness to believe her was part of his whole fantasy about her, his notion, not that she was a hooker with a heart of gold (even he knew that wasn’t the case), but that she was a hooker with a golden brain. (He was so persuaded of her intellect that he eventually enrolled her in one of his scientific groups, the Tissue Culture Association, although there may have been vanity as well as admiration in this. He published scientific papers in the association’s journal, In Vitro, and no doubt hoped she would read them, or at least notice them, and be impressed.) Therefore, putting Robin on the Tufts payroll seemed a solution to his dilemma that had advantages all around. Not only would it enable him to go on affording her, but it would bring her closer to him, give her an awareness of his importance in the scientific world, and start her out on her path toward respectability.
Soon thereafter, he sat down at his desk in the lab and wrote Robin a lengthy memo setting forth his plan. He would tell Tufts that she was working for him. Tufts would pay her for that work $200 a week, by university check, which would cover his first two-hour visits with her each week. He knew she might find it a nuisance to be paid by check, but in the end she might discover that it was in fact beneficial to earn money this way because it would legitimize her. “When you retire from ‘business,’” he pontificated, “your résumé will not have a five-year gap.”
Robin liked the scheme, and from that time forward, he claimed she was a graduate student from MIT whom he had hired to illustrate cell cultures.
The woman who had caught the fancy of the odd but respected professor was only twenty years old and had been out of high school for only two and a half years. But she was already well entrenched in prostitution. Robin Benedict had turned up in the Combat Zone in the beginning of 1982. Almost immediately she came to the attention of the Boston Vice Squad. Detective Billy Dwyer spotted her on the street, told her to get moving (Boston permits solicitation only indoors, not out), and received a sharp, sarcastic response. “She was irritating, aggressive, too full of backtalk for her own good,” he told me one night.
He and I were taking a tour of the Zone in Dwyer’s unmarked car, his partner at the wheel. Dwyer, so intense that he conveys the sense of having banked but still-smoldering fires within, was talking to me over one shoulder, over the other keeping an eye out for any problems. From time to time he’d bark something at a hooker or a pimp—he knew them all—and they would startle and look uneasy. He shouted at a girl who seemed to be ogling a man across the street that she’d better get moving; at another, who’d just been released from jail on a robbery charge, that he wanted to see her release papers, so she’d better double-time it over to the car. Dwyer is known in the Zone as Billy the Driver, and everyone he shouted at complied with lightning speed. But apparently Robin hadn’t. “She was one tough little number,” Dwyer said. “The kind of girl you just knew would get into deep trouble. In fact, one day my boss said to her, ‘Do you have any tattoos?’ She snapped, ‘Why?’ And he told her, ‘Just so that when we fish you out of the river—and I’ll bet we have to someday—we’ll know who you are.’”
Robin’s parents described her differently. They maintained that, despite her line of work, she was sweet-tempered, a good girl, a devoted daughter.
Theirs was a cross-cultural marriage. Shirley Benedict, Robin’s blond and buxom mother, grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. John Benedict, Robin’s father, is a handsome Hispanic Trinidadian with high cheekbones and deeply set eyes that make him look like the sculptures of long-ago Amerindians. Color was an issue in the family. Robin indicated to friends, back in the days when she was in high school, that her father did not approve of her dating black men.
John was a commercial photographer employed by the Raytheon Corporation in Lawrence. Shirley worked as the manager of a jewelry store in a shopping mall there. They had five children—three boys and two girls. Robin was the fourth child and first daughter. This gave her a certain distinction; when she was born, her father hung a sheet across the front of the house, trained a slide projector on it, and displayed in majestic, magnified letters the message: “It’s a girl!”
He had longed for a girl, and from the time she was an infant, he and this first daughter developed a special, exclusive attachment to one another. He said of Robin once, “I have five kids. But I just have one little girl.” She said of him, “My daddy is my daddy.” He shot thousands of pictures of her as she was growing up, and she early mastered a self-confident grin and a model’s easy poise.
The Benedicts raised their children in Methuen, a small city in northern Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border. In the early years of this century, it was a thriving milltown, attracting to its hilly streets a scrambled mix of immigrants. But eventually the mills shut down, and Methuen, like many New England towns, sank into lethargy. Unemployment grew severe, and crime flourished. Later, as a result of new high-tech plants, there was some economic revival, but there is still so much traffic in heroin and cocaine in the area that Lawrence—the town that borders Methuen and where Methuen teenagers go for high school—has an unusually high crime rate.
There are a handful of nice streets and houses in both Lawrence and Methuen. But for the most part, this is a region of dilapidated housing projects, rambling oversize Victorian houses that have begun to crumble and decay, and small ill-kempt ranch houses on quarter-acre lots. Robin grew up in one such ranch house, a tiny green home with graying white shutters, which must have been cramped indeed when all five of the Benedict children were living there.
Still, the Benedicts managed. And they had fun as a family. John managed a marching group, the White Eagles Drum
and Bugle Corps, and the children, carrying flags and brandishing shiny sabers, participated in holiday parades in the nearby New England towns. Summers, all the children went on vacation trips with their parents, and on holidays Shirley would dress the boys in suits and the girls in prim little coats with matching bonnets, and John would take their pictures.
In 1975 Robin entered the Greater Lawrence Regional Vocational Technical High School, known as the Voke. By then, she was a popular, fashion-conscious teenager who aspired to being voted her class’s best-dressed member. She also had some artistic proclivities, according to one of her teachers, who said she was “one of the most talented people in the commercial art department.”
She seemed, in those days, no different from other teenagers. She became a jogger, and whenever she felt she was gaining weight, she would put in extra time, running around a reservoir close to her house. She took up the flute, and whenever she felt dreamy or troubled, she would sit cross-legged on her bed and play, favoring in particular the sweet tunes of Barry Manilow and the urgent ones of Michael Jackson. She learned to drive, and her father taught her to crawl under the old Pinto to change the oil and keep the car in shape.
To look at photographs of Robin in those days is to see Everygirl: in a bouffant, off-the-shoulder dress for her Junior Prom; in a slinky, black spaghetti-strap number for the Senior Prom; playing the flute in the high school talent show; working on the yearbook with a camera slung around her neck.
But she must have found life dull. I was struck, as I wandered around Methuen inquiring into Robin’s adolescence, by how little the town has to stimulate teenagers or to satisfy their longing for excitement and glamour. The main street is shabby. There are no lively gathering places. Teenage lovers drive to the Methuen Water Tower, a historic structure high on a hill, and stare at the view, daydreaming of places beyond Methuen. Or they neck in the one really private part of town, the Bellevue Cemetery. No wonder that in high school, Robin eventually began hanging out with a crowd of Hispanic teenagers from her school who knew where to find whatever action there was in the area. They would drive to discos in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Salisbury, Massachusetts, and Robin, who was light on her feet, would frequently win disco dance competitions. She also had her first sexual experiences. And, at around the time she was seventeen, an abortion.
One of Robin’s high school boyfriends, a young man who eventually became an auto mechanic, remembered her from those days as “strong and smart,” the kind of girl who was beautiful and knew it—and who knew as well that she wanted something more for herself than the life of a Methuen housewife.
One night during her senior year, Robin glimpsed a way to get the kind of life she daydreamed about. She had gone with a high school beau to attend a promotional football game that pitted the New England Patriots against the faculty of the Voke. After the game, there was a celebratory dinner, and Robin and her boyfriend got to talking with Ray Costic, a linebacker with the Patriots. Costic, a black from Mississippi, had been feeling out of place with many of the people he’d been meeting in New England, but he took a liking to Robin and her crowd and decided to join the group after dinner. They went to a disco and danced and drank, and Costic entertained the students with tales of his famous team, the places he’d been, the games he’d won. Robin found Costic, tall and muscular and far more worldly than the high school boys she was accustomed to dating, fascinating.
That summer, after graduation, she took a job at a small graphic arts company and, although her parents had made it clear that they didn’t want her dating black men, set her sights for Costic. He’d said he was lonely, so she invited him home. Her parents were football fans and, unaware of her romantic interest in the athlete, entertained him and politely asked him to come again. He did and brought several of his teammates. Soon he was going to the Benedicts’ regularly, enjoying Sunday dinners with them, getting them tickets to his games, driving them home afterward. But he made no move toward Robin. He knew that her father disapproved of him, and besides, he had a girlfriend back home in Mississippi, a woman who had borne him a child. But Robin didn’t care about either of these facts, and one lazy summer afternoon, while Ray was at one of her parents’ backyard barbecues, she cornered him in a foyer, declared her admiration, and kissed him ardently. Her passion overrode his reluctance, and not long afterward he invited her to live with him in his expensive and fashionably furnished apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Robin was “good in bed,” Ray told reporters. But he liked her for her artistic abilities, too. Having decided to become an illustrator, she was taking some art courses at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. Costic was impressed with the skill with which she could draw his likeness and paint delicate oils of trees and flowers.
Ray “treats me like a queen,” Robin told one of her former teachers. But she liked him for his way of life as well. That fall she traveled with him to all the Patriots’ games, stayed in good hotels, went to a dizzying round of glittering parties. She loved the fast track she was on, loved entering a crowded room with Ray and, the beauty and the ballplayer, being the center of attention. (One day, much later, there would be a rumor that she was a “mule” for former Patriots, carrying in drugs for them. The Boston police received an anonymous tip that she was delivering cocaine to onetime players. But although she was investigated, no evidence to support the accusation was found and the investigation was dropped.)
She didn’t, in those days, seem to let the admiration she increasingly received from men go to her head. She didn’t seem to covet anyone’s love but Ray’s. She wanted him to marry her, and she tried to make herself indispensable, doing his cooking and cleaning and all his errands. And because it was important to him, she abandoned her own religion, Catholicism, and took instruction in his, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. By the late fall of 1980, she even began going with the Witnesses as they knocked on doors, preaching the Gospel.
One night around Christmas 1980, Ray took Robin to a particularly lively party in the apartment of a friend of his in the housing complex. There were several prostitutes at the party, as well as a man Ray would later say he thought was a pimp, a short, compact, stern-looking black man with a fat diamond ring on his finger. The man, Clarence J. Rogers, whom everybody called “J.R.,” kept staring at Robin. And at one point in the evening he observed to Ray, “That’s the kind of child that you put out on the street.”
If Ray became angry, he didn’t indicate it. Perhaps he merely thought that the man, J.R., was a bad judge of character. After all, he knew Robin as a good girl, a decent girl. “Nice,” “straight,” were the adjectives he used about her.
But although she was so nice, so straight, at around that time he decided he didn’t want to go on living with her. He felt an obligation to the woman back home in Mississippi who was the mother of his son. Reluctantly, but convinced he was doing the right thing, he told Robin that he was going back home to get married to his old girlfriend.
Robin felt cruelly abandoned. She cried. She pleaded with Ray not to leave her. And then she did an odd thing. Impulsively and recklessly, she telephoned Ray’s hometown and, speaking with some of the Jehovah’s Witnesses there, some of the very elders who would be performing the wedding, informed them that not only had the ballplayer been committing the sin of fornication with her, but he had been taking drugs with her as well.
Her attempts to hold on to her lover didn’t work. If anything, those attempts, smacking as they did of emotional blackmail, made Ray surer than ever that he wanted to leave her. Ignoring her tears, he went back south and got married.
She was different after that. Depressed and disheartened, she continued for a while to take religious instruction, but soon she began telling her instructors that she was also taking drugs. Shortly she stopped attending Witness meetings altogether. She was still working at the graphic arts company, but soon her coworkers began to notice that when she left work, she didn’t go home alone anymore. She was picked up b
y a black man driving a brand-new Mercedes.
Some of her friends in the eight-person office, a place so small it was difficult to keep a secret, kept asking her about him. But Robin wouldn’t say a word about the man with the Mercedes or about what he did for a living. Her boss, suspecting he might be involved in some kind of illegal occupation, advised her not to see him, but Robin paid no attention. “She didn’t want to hear it,” her boss said.
He and her other friends at work kept badgering her about her new relationship, and one day Robin just upped and quit her job and said she was going to California. Her friends didn’t see her around anymore.
Late in 1981, Ray Costic had a change of heart about Robin. His little son had been killed in a motel fire in Florida, and he and his wife were fighting all the time. Still down south, he began thinking nostalgically about his former girlfriend, and he asked some of his old Patriot friends what she was up to. She was seeing J.R., they informed him.
Ray called Robin’s mother and tried to get her telephone number. But Shirley Benedict wouldn’t give it to him, not even when he told her he thought J.R. was a pimp. Finally, friends got him a number for her at an apartment she was sharing with J.R., Savi Bisram, and Savi’s two-year-old son, Taj—whose father was J.R. This odd extended family was living in the suburbs of Boston.