Anyone You Want Me to Be

by John E. Douglas

  There are two important areas of concern and consideration for serial killers. The first is finding or selecting a victim. As time went on, Robinson had no problem in that area. Potential victims were everywhere, especially in later years when he began to use the Internet. The second concern and consideration is how and where are you going to dispose of a victim once you get what you want. Some killers openly display their victims by dumping or posing them in an area where they will easily be found. Robinson did not have that mind-set. He was smart enough to realize that if he used that modus operandi, he could possibly be linked to his victims. He always wanted the victims’ families to believe that their loved one had met “Mr. Right” and moved somewhere to “live happily ever after.”

  By hiding or getting rid of the bodies, he was able to avoid detection for years, if not decades. He was reminiscent of John Gacy, who killed thirty-three people, burying many of them in the crawl space in his own house. It wasn’t until he got sloppy in his MO that law enforcement started investigating him.

  I personally believe Robinson knew that law enforcement lacked a method to link him as a potential suspect. In the past, he’d fallen into the cracks of the legal system, so why not perpetrate more serious crimes and do this in multiple jurisdictions? He believed he was smarter than police and invincible. In some respects, he was correct. Why was he able to commit these crimes many times over? Because in the minds of victims, potential victims, community leaders, charitable organizations, and law enforcement, John Robinson didn’t fit the profile. He was too old, too short, too nice, and so on. That is where we make mistakes—when we begin to think that serial predators like Robinson will look different from the rest of us. That is what makes them so disarming and they know it.

  These individuals do their best to find ways to fit into society. For example, the following events took place during the height of Gacy’s and Bundy’s crime sprees. John Gacy had his photograph taken with then president Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. Ted Bundy worked in a rape crisis center, was politically active in the state of Washington, and later enrolled in law school. When I conduct interviews of serial killers and other sexual predators, I look closely into the eyes of these men. To the untrained, the look appears sincere and genuine. What I subsequently do is to imagine what look was on their face when they were perpetrating their heinous crimes. I ask myself, What did the victims see before they died? The look would have been pure evil. It was a look that could change in a microsecond. A look that these individuals keep to themselves when they are being investigated, interviewed, and treated during their so-called rehabilitation. But once they’re alone and on the hunt, that look returns.

  One morning in May 1985, Robinson got in his car and headed for 8110 Troost Avenue. He let himself into a third-floor unit of the apartment complex, where Theresa Williams was sleeping. Quietly entering the bedroom, he walked up to her and grabbed her by the hair. He hoisted her up by its roots, threw her over his knee, and spanked her hard, telling her that she’d been bad and needed to learn a lesson. Despite Williams’s growing fear of Robinson and despite what she believed he was capable of, his behavior both hurt and shocked her. Yet it paled compared to what he did next.

  He tossed her onto the floor, stood over her, and extracted the revolver that he kept concealed in his shoulder holster. As she watched the man and the gun come down toward her, she began to beg and to yell for her life.

  Placing the barrel to her head, he said, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.”

  He pulled the trigger—it clicked because there was no cartridge in the chamber.

  Williams looked up at him, terrified, sobbing on the floor. Robinson removed the gun from her face and lowered it down below her shoulders, her waist, and her stomach, penetrating her vagina with the barrel and again threatening to kill her. Her screams turned into hysteria as she wailed for him to spare her life. Robinson stared at her, lying helpless beneath him. Then he slowly reholstered the gun, turned, and walked out of the apartment.

  He soon came back with a new plan, a way for Theresa to help him out of his latest legal jam. He needed to find a way to destroy the credibility of Irv Blattner, who’d recently turned against Robinson and was trying to get his probation revoked. Robinson asked Williams to enter into a diary some words that he dictated to her—words indicating that Blattner was going to kill her. The purpose of this exercise was twofold. If Theresa disappeared for good, as Paula Godfrey and Lisa Stasi lately had, it would look as if Blattner had murdered her. Second, if Blattner testified against Robinson on his probation status, Robinson could use the diary to portray his adversary as someone who could never be trusted because he had homicidal intentions. In return for her assistance with this plot, Robinson promised to take Williams to the Bahamas on June 15. That was also, according to Robinson’s orders, supposed to be the day the diary came to an end.

  On June 7, Steve Haymes and the two FBI agents he’d been working with, Thomas Lavin and Jeffrey Dancer, showed up unannounced at the Troost Avenue apartment and talked with Williams. The police startled her, but she was more terrified of Robinson than she was of them. At first she lied to the men about her involvement with Robinson, telling them that she was employed at Equi-II in data processing. They listened carefully to her story and then told her some things she didn’t know. They believed that two young women who’d worked for Robinson had vanished and perhaps been murdered. They also believed he might be planning something like that with her. As Williams absorbed what they were saying, she broke down and described the gun incident, mentioning Robinson’s plans to take her to the Bahamas. She explained how he’d put all her things in storage, and that the last day of her life in the fake diary was June 15, only a week away.

  She told them how Robinson had ordered her to write down sentences meant to sound like hers but intended to discredit Irv Blattner. And Robinson had created instructions for his lawyer to get the diary and some of her property out of a safe-deposit box.

  After hearing this, Haymes and the agents took immediate action. Within hours, they’d moved her out of the apartment and to another part of Kansas City. Because of her allegations that Robinson had given her marijuana, had illegally carried a gun, and had sexually assaulted her, Haymes felt confident that he could get Robinson’s probation revoked and have him locked up for the next seven years. With a witness to some of his crimes in police custody, it appeared certain that his days of freedom were about to end.

  When he learned that the authorities had taken Williams from the Troost apartment (in their haste to transfer her to another location, they’d accidentally taken the landlord’s television), Robinson exploded into more anger and more activity. He frantically began hunting the Kansas City area for her, looking everywhere he thought she might have gone. The FBI was aware of his movements and kept the young woman hidden by transferring her to three different addresses in the next three weeks. Robinson intensified his search by hiring a private detective to run her down, a former police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department named Charles Lane. It wasn’t Lane who ultimately found Williams but Robinson himself, after spotting her parked car. Lane then contacted the landlady where Williams was staying and confirmed she was there. During one of Lane’s attempts to talk with Theresa, Special Agents Lavin and Dancer arrived and broke up the conversation. They were so alarmed that Robinson’s private detective had found her that they quickly got money and a plane ticket from the probation service and hurried her out of town, this time relocating her in another state. This move may have saved her life, but it would complicate everything and ultimately cost the authorities in their efforts to put Robinson behind bars.

  When the two agents and Haymes appeared at the probation hearing in a Clay County courtroom, they were more than reluctant to talk about Robinson’s chief accuser or to reveal where Williams had gone.

  Robinson’s lawyer, Bruce Houdek, fired back that these tactics were unfair and outside the law.
There was “no rational reason,” Houdek told the court in a motion, why the state of Missouri and the FBI agents could not produce Theresa Williams so she could give a sworn deposition on the case. Without her appearance, he argued, Robinson’s probation should not be revoked. Clay County circuit judge John Hutcherson disagreed, also feeling that the young woman could well be in danger and did not have to be physically present to make her accusations known. In late July, Robinson went before the court and was told that he’d violated his probation on three counts. It now seemed a given that he was going to jail for an extended period, but he was unwilling to give up.

  He tried to convince the judge that his stellar civic life should keep him out of prison. He enlisted a private organization called the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives to create a handsome booklet that outlined for Judge Hutcherson his many volunteer efforts and his reputation in his community as “an honest and generous person.” The report mentioned Robinson’s work as a Sunday-school teacher and a church elder in Stanley, adding that “Mr. Robinson and his wife have always been involved in community activities.”

  The brochure cited his work as an Eagle Scout and as a cubmaster and a scoutmaster in the 1970s. It did not mention that in a statement put out by the Boy Scouts of America in the early eighties, the organization declared that John Robinson had been ousted as a cubmaster in December 1981 after he pled guilty to stealing from Guy’s Foods.

  “Thereafter,” the statement read, “his registration in the Boy Scouts of America expired and was never renewed.”

  In one last desperate attempt to help himself, he forged yet another letter, this one from a “Linda White,” which outlined how Robinson and his children had brought food and clothes to her home last Christmas Eve. White was supposedly an out-of-work pregnant mother of three kids, who’d already decided to give away the infant she’d delivered a few weeks after the holidays. Because of Robinson’s great warmth and giving spirit, she’d changed her mind and kept the baby.

  The judge was not persuaded by either “Linda White” or her heartfelt letter. In late August 1985, he revoked Robinson’s probation and sentenced him to seven years in a Missouri prison. Before the sentencing could begin, Robinson was freed on a quarter million dollars’ bail and quickly set about filing an appeal. Throughout the appeal period, he was ordered to report to Officer Haymes daily and to call him on the weekends. Haymes was more dogged than ever in his tracking of Robinson, never letting him far from his sight or his telephone.

  “I was the bulldog that wouldn’t let go,” he says. “After the revocation in 1985, the FBI closed their file on Robinson at that point, but I kept showing up and haunting him.”

  But haunting wasn’t enough. To his shock and then to his pervasive dismay, Haymes soon learned that his efforts were not enough to put the man away. During the appeal process, Robinson argued that he’d been denied his constitutional right to confront his accuser, because Theresa Williams had never shown up in the Clay County courtroom. In May 1986, a Missouri appellate court threw out Judge Hutcherson’s ruling and sided with Robinson.

  In the opinion of Judge David J. Dixon of the Missouri Court of Appeals’ Western District, “There cannot be the least doubt that the actions of the probation service and the FBI agents denied petitioner due process of law.”

  Robinson was free to go, free to do what he did best. Haymes could only imagine—or perhaps he couldn’t imagine—what the man might do next.

  XI

  Robinson resumed working at Equi-II, and in August 1985, only days after Judge Hutcherson had initially revoked his probation, he appeared on the cover of Farm Journal, a national agricultural magazine. He was pictured standing in the middle of a cow pasture, wearing a dapper sport coat and tie, smiling out at the world. He is happy, calm, and confident, and he would use this favorable publicity to promote Equi-II as a successful consulting firm that advised ranchers on the tax benefits of limited partnerships. In print, he came across as an expert in both finance and farming.

  “For every dollar the limited partner invests,” Robinson said, “he gets $2 to $4 in tax write-offs, along with a return of 25 percent to 50 percent on his investment over the life of the partnership.”

  As he’d done earlier when fleecing Harry Truman’s physician and then scamming Ewing Kauffman’s corporate office, Robinson again crossed the path of another prominent local figure. The Farm Journal article on limited partnerships quoted Sam Brownback, a Kansas State University agricultural law professor who would go on to become a U.S. senator from Kansas. Robinson used this periodical to speak optimistically about the future of partnerships for cattle ranchers looking for solid investment strategies. One man who actually got involved with Robinson in the limited partnership business, Bob Lowrey of Norwich, Kansas, lost $10,000. So did his associate, Bill Mills. Steve Haymes’s fears were being realized: Robinson was only getting better at his ability to work con games. Yet he had made mistakes in the past that were about to ensnare him.

  For months, Johnson County (Kansas) officials had been investigating Robinson’s connection to Back Care Systems, which in 1982 had hired Equi-Plus to market its seminars. Robinson had promised to deliver a number of services to the company—promises that were unfulfilled—but he’d sent them invoices for his work. Early in 1986, while he was appealing his probation revocation in Missouri, Robinson went to trial on the Kansas side of the border over these financial practices. In late January, a jury found him guilty of submitting $3,600 worth of false billing. Because the defendant had been investigated for so many crimes in recent years, Assistant District Attorney Steve Obermeier asked Johnson County district judge Herbert W. Walton to apply the Habitual Criminal Act when deciding Robinson’s sentence. Judge Walton followed this suggestion and ordered him to spend five to fourteen years in prison and to pay a fine of $5,000.

  Before the sentence could begin, Johnson County filed still more charges against Robinson, this time for stealing $50,000 when acting as a middleman in a condominium sale in Page, Arizona. Robinson had allegedly collected $150,000 from a Kansas buyer but passed along only $100,000 to the seller. This was a sizable score compared to some of his earlier ones, but he needed more income than ever before. In addition to his ever-mounting legal bills, his family had continued living on their four-acre estate at Pleasant Valley Farms and two of his children were in college, while the twins were still in high school. With the conviction in the Back Care Systems case, Robinson’s wife now realized that her husband’s days of avoiding prison were coming to a close. He was about to be convicted on the middleman theft charges in Arizona as well, and he now faced a total of six to nineteen years behind bars. His crime spree appeared to be over and his income could obviously not be maintained while he was in prison. Without his ongoing money scams, his family would not be able to stay at Pleasant Valley Farms. Nancy was about to put the house up for sale and start looking for work. Her children could not escape the reality of their father’s criminal past. His activities had not only harmed countless people outside of his family but profoundly affected those inside it as well, both economically and emotionally.

  While these events were unfolding, the Kansas City–based Business Journal wrote a scathing exposé of Robinson that outlined his almost twenty-year-long criminal record. Through interviews and other research, the publication uncovered Robinson’s trail as a phenomenally good chameleon.

  “Apparently,” wrote the Journal’s Delbert Schafer, “Robinson has developed a convincing manner of gaining the confidence of business people over the years. He has the ability to ferret out information and then use it to tell the listener exactly what he wants to hear.”

  After a couple of years of investigating the con man, Steve Haymes had noticed that whenever Robinson received some really bad publicity like this, the probation officer’s phone started to ring with calls from strangers. These people had also encountered Robinson and some of his “investment strategies” in years past. Until now, t
hey hadn’t been able to bring themselves to tell the authorities what had happened.

  “When someone kicks in your front door and burglarizes you,” says Haymes, “you’re always going to call the police. But when someone tricks you out of money, the police sometimes don’t get called. There are certainly indications that there were some neighbors [of Robinson’s] whom he was able to convince to give him money that was soon gone and to my knowledge this was never reported to the police. There was some embarrassment on the part of the victims. Probably in some of Robinson’s business dealings, he just wore people down. He was good at wearing people down. He would come up with receipts and excuses and eventually people would just say, ‘I give up.’

  “Looking at most criminals I’ve dealt with over the years, you say, ‘How did they get there?’ and it’s a fairly easy path to follow back. They didn’t have a lot of guidance or bad guidance or perhaps they fell in with the wrong people or got involved in drugs or alcohol, and at least you have some idea of how they got where they are. With Robinson, it’s not very clear-cut. He had many opportunities as a young person. His siblings did well. His parents, as far as I know, were good people and worked hard. So I don’t know what made him make that turn.

  “It was fairly late, well into his twenties, before the crimes started showing up. I think there were some dysfunctions in him that just continued to grow. The sex thing grew over the years, and other things, but what turned him to go the easy route?”

  Pondering his own question, Haymes shakes his head. Then he shakes it again, still haunted by his inability to answer it.