XII
Before finally entering prison for an extended stay, Robinson was linked to one more event that went far beyond a financial scam or wearing down his creditors. In January 1987, Catherine Clampitt had left Wichita Falls, Texas, to start a new life up north. Because of substance abuse problems, she’d had difficulty raising her young son, Ryan, so he’d stayed behind with her parents in the Lone Star State. She moved in with her brother, Robert Bales, who lived in a Kansas City suburb, and soon began looking for work. The Korean born Clampitt had been adopted by the Bales family and had grown up with a reputation that split off in two different directions. One depicted her as being quite intelligent and the other as possessing a wild streak. Everyone who knew and cared about her saw this split and wanted to help her manage it. Her brother, anxious to see her settled in a job, began scheduling interviews for her with businesses in the area, but she was willful and took steps of her own after spotting an ad that Robinson had placed in a community paper. A company called Equi-II was offering a well-paying position that involved travel and other benefits: her employer would even provide her with new clothes tailored to the image of his business. She called the number and got an appointment with Robinson, who quickly hired her. As soon as she started the job, she began spending much less time at her brother’s home, but it was unclear where she was staying. She was either traveling out of state or spending time at local hotels or someplace else…. For days and nights in a row, her brother was notcertain what had become of her.
When she didn’t show up for a week, he called the police. He also phoned Robinson’s office, but Catherine’s employer was unresponsive to his questions. Bales decided to stake out the Equi-II address and asked law enforcement to help him investigate. Once again, the police took the limited steps they’d taken before when someone who’d been working for Robinson had vanished without a trace; they interviewed him about the missing woman but concluded that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to connect the man to the disappearance. This perception on the part of the authorities was as maddening for Bales as it had been earlier for Paula Godfrey’s family and for Lisa Stasi’s relatives, but the cops lacked the evidence to pursue Robinson as a suspect.
Catherine Clampitt would never be heard from or seen again.
Robinson was about to be incarcerated for several years, but that would only open up new opportunities for when he was once again free. Behind bars he would go much further into the technological realm of computers that he’d been introduced to in the early eighties, and this would ultimately show him new doorways into crime. He would use the training he received in prison not to rehabilitate himself but to widen his repertoire for contacting, charming, exploiting, and seducing those who met him. He was discovering a technology worthy of his imagination and skills.
He was middle-aged but his energy and stamina showed no signs of flagging. He was, in fact, just finding himself and his career. If he represented the harmful side of creativity, he was almost endlessly productive in uncovering new ways to fool and exploit. He had an astounding capacity for juggling, and in recent years he’d handled numerous relationships while running several business fronts and staying deeply involved in both family and local affairs. When he wasn’t working for the neighborhood association, he was an activist in the local S&M underground, a part of the International Council of Masters, an entrepreneur, a forger, a fraud, a baby seller, and a pimp who kept two or three prostitutes busy working for him around the clock. He may have looked pudgy and out of shape, but he had incredible drive and determination when pursuing women of all ages and backgrounds, or when chasing new business schemes back and forth across the state lines of Missouri and Kansas. There were barely enough hours in a day to do all that he wanted to do, but in prison he would have plenty of time to think and to plan—to decide what he wanted to do after being released from his cell. He had time to explore his own ever-expanding identity. It seemed to have no borders or boundaries at all.
If some men were capable of deep sexual aggression and violence, the vast majority of them, especially when they were husbands and fathers, held these things in check. They denied the darker impulses, got them out in other ways, kept them buried inside. They learned how to manage their demons, held back their propensity for evil. They were committed to decency, even when it was a daily struggle. Society demanded that they not act out every urge, and they went along with these civilizing influences. They did it to be less of a threat to women and to try to have a beneficial effect on children. They did it to avoid trouble or unnecessary conflict. They did it to live their own version of the “common good.” They fought these inner battles with themselves and usually won.
For Robinson the battle did not exist. At some point in adulthood, he had decided to express every part of himself—including the savage—just because he could. His world was not either/or. It was both /and. His ability to be different people in different situations was exceptional. Serial killers are often known for their massive deceptions, but he’d taken this game to new depths. He was unusual in his ability to play both the domestic and the predator’s role to this degree. He could be both a doting father and someone who kept hiring young women who disappeared. He could be both a soccer referee and someone who ran a bordello or hired women out for S&M encounters in basement dungeons. He could be both a churchgoing husband and someone who sold an infant to his brother. He could stretch every boundary until someone made him stop—and that someone was not his wife or children. Their normality seemed to feed his need for the abnormal. Their support seemed crucial to his aberrant behavior. The flip side of his violence was his deep domesticity. This was an interactive dance that nothing could alter and that no prison psychiatrist would ever penetrate. Perhaps his rage was fed by his many emotional and financial responsibilities, his profound need for his family.
Robinson always had a loving home to return to, no matter where he’d been or what he’d done. In April 1986, Nancy was interviewed by the police and given the chance to describe the man she’d married more than two decades earlier. She said that she and John had grown closer since his recent legal troubles, and she described him as a good provider, a good husband, and a loving father. They had a good relationship, she said, but one could only imagine the kind of pressure she was under to help him shorten his time behind bars.
Also in 1986, Dirk Taiff, a presentence investigator, studied Robinson and wrote, “The defendant displays much anger and frustration regarding his legal problems, accepts minimal responsibility for his actions and attempts to portray himself as a hard-working, dedicated family man.”
The investigator had talked to Steve Haymes about Robinson. By now Haymes had been examining the man’s background since early 1985 and drawing his own conclusions. He wrote to Taiff, “In almost eleven years of work as a probation and parole officer, this officer has never seen an individual as criminally-oriented as John E. Robinson…It’s this officer’s belief that Robinson is a dangerous individual who has put forth no effort to rehabilitate himself through three prior probations in the state of Missouri.”
A week after the inmate entered the Kansas State Penitentiary in Hutchinson, the Kansas City Star printed a two-page story headlined, “Kansas Prison Awaiting a Convincing Talker.” Robinson was described as “a thief, a charmer, a skilled conversationalist and a crafty con artist who should have been locked away years ago. Only now, eighteen years after his first conviction, is the Johnson County businessman seeing the scales of justice crash down, ending a compulsion for white-collar crime that some authorities say they think may have had a darker side.”
Not long after Robinson went to prison, his wife found a nursing job and early in 1988 she cashed out the four-acre estate and took a much cheaper apartment in Stanley. The family was facing hard times and widespread shame, as John would not only be locked up for years to come, but had generated terrible press for all of them. His criminal career had grown large enough that it could no longer be hidden
from public view. His wife and children carried on, putting their lives together as best they could, not turning against their husband or father, always willing to grant him another opportunity and to take him back. Nancy was holding them all together.
XIII
Robinson began serving his sentence on May 16, 1987, and during the next four years, he would be regarded as an excellent inmate at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility. He was placed in South Unit along with 160 other medium-security inmates, and almost the first thing he did after arriving at the prison was to start complaining about severe chest pains. He went to the institution’s doctor and asked for medication, receiving daily prescriptions of Tenormin and nitroglycerin. He apparently took the medicine but continued his vocal worries about his health. When he wasn’t consumed with his medical problems, he found time to work, and here, inside the state’s penal system, he received his initial training in the world of computers. He was chosen for this duty because of his obvious intelligence, his passion for learning new things, and his desire to please the authorities. They in turn were happy to have someone so competent and willing to take their instructions.
Robinson was a quick study and soon became a standout at this job. He not only reorganized the computer maintenance office but also, after a few months, was able to write new software programs, a process that would save Kansas roughly $100,000 a year. He’d found something he was good at and something that had a positive effect on everyone. Robinson was much admired by the staff, and in 1989 his physical plant supervisor, Jim Jestes, wrote of the inmate and his innovations on the job, “Even when he leaves, this office should function well.”
Robinson made a similarly good impression on the medical and mental health staffs. Like many serial criminals, he was excellent at adopting the language of psychiatry and making himself appear normal. He knew just what to say and how to say it, and his intelligence was useful in these circumstances. Being examined in prison was one more chance for him to do what criminals do best: play the game of conning others and then win. Unfortunately, this happens all too often inside penitentiaries.
On a recent visit to New Zealand, I was taken to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. I was to give a presentation to staff psychologists and psychiatrists regarding my research and experience with the criminal mind. Upon entering the classroom, I observed about thirty to thirty-five mental health personnel, who sat with their arms crossed on their chests and uninterested looks on their faces. I turned to my publicist and whispered, “Why did you book me to speak to this group?”
Early in my career I saw similar looks when I spoke to task forces. I found that the best way to handle the situation was to directly address a “problem” rather than to ignore it. Speaking before the New Zealand audience, I asked them what was wrong, and someone said he didn’t like the way I put down the mental health professionals in my books. I went on to tell them my personal beliefs and experiences with the criminal personality. I told them that to understand the criminal you must look at the crime. The crime is a reflection of the offender. Almost in unison they said that if they did look at the crime, it would prejudice them during the treatment. I asked them how they knew if the offender was telling the truth, and they said they were taught to detect deception in their training. I told them that they must be much better than me at detecting self-deception because if I only relied on self-reporting from the criminals, I would think that the convicts were all innocent or themselves victims. Not all mental health professionals exclude case information and materials during an assessment, but some do and this can have dire consequences.
Two respected doctors at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility, Supervising Psychiatrist George M. Penn, M.D., and the Kansas Department of Corrections’ Director of Medical Services, Ky Hoang, M.D., put together a nine page analysis of Robinson. Entitled “Report of Clinical and Medical Evaluation,” this November 1990 document characterized him as a “model inmate who…has made the best of his incarceration…. He is a non-violent person and does not present a threat to society…. He is a devoted family man who has taughthis children a strong value system.”
While imprisoned, Robinson suffered a number of small strokes that caused a minor slackness on the right side of his face but did not affect his speaking ability. According to the report, “his verbal skills [were measured] in the high average range, performance skills in the very superior range.”
In conclusion, the experts who examined him at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility wrote that Robinson’s behavior while incarcerated had been “remarkable” and he had displayed “concrete signs of rehabilitation.” He was “a docile, non-violent individual who does not pose a threat to society. It is unlikely that further incarceration will be of any benefit to either Mr. Robinson or society.” They recommended his immediate release.
In January 1991, Kansas took this advice and paroled Robinson, much to the concern of one person who’d never stopped following the progress of inmate #45690 at Hutchinson or thinking about the women who’d vanished after coming into contact with this prisoner. Steve Haymes was not at all convinced that Robinson—despite what the medical and psychiatric personnel in Kansas had written about him—was a changed man. Back in 1986, he’d characterized Robinson as the most criminally oriented person he’d ever met. Nothing in the past five years had altered this view.
“There wasn’t a month that went by,” Haymes says, “that I didn’t wonder about him, and about Lisa and Tiffany. For several years, around that wintertime that Lisa disappeared, I would contact her family to see if there had been any additional news or if they’d heard anything. They hadn’t and I was somewhat haunted by this because I had never gotten any answers to the most important questions I had at that time.”
Haymes had other, more pressing reasons for staying aware of Robinson’s activities in Hutchinson, reasons that had become increasingly personal.
“He wrote a letter complaining about me after his parole was put off in Missouri,” Haymes says. “He blamed me for all the bad things that had happened to him, saying that it was a personal vendetta on my part to harm him.”
The inmate had let a number of people know that someone within the legal system had, as he put it back in 1986, “a hard-on for John Robinson.” According to what Haymes had picked up from various sources inside and outside the walls of the penitentiary, Robinson’s criticisms of him were turning more serious. He wondered if once Robinson was set free, he would come after Haymes or his wife or his two young children. That was just one more reason for Haymes to do everything possible to ensure that the prisoner stayed locked up for as long as possible. The officer worked hard to make certain that even though Robinson had been freed in Kansas, he still faced up to seven years of jail time for violating his probation in Missouri. Haymes’s views were adopted by the authorities, and the day that Robinson was let out of prison in Hutchinson—January 23, 1991—he was transferred over the state line to Missouri and taken a hundred miles east of Kansas City, where he was checked into the Moberly Correctional Center for more psychiatric and medical tests. He claimed that his health had become so frail during his stay at Hutchinson that he should be able to walk out of the Missouri prison and go home to his family. One of Missouri’s examining physicians, Dr. Fred King, agreed with Robinson’s assessment and described the patient as a “very sick man.” Dr. King went on to state that Robinson’s medical condition “should be considered in any parole hearing he has.” He soon wrote another opinion that Robinson’s problems were “life threatening” and he “should be released without delay.”
When Steve Haymes learned of this recommendation, he was both frightened and livid, more determined than ever to take action to keep Robinson behind bars. He created his own report on how dangerous he believed the inmate to be and delivered his views at a parole hearing in April 1991.
The next month, while waiting to learn his fate at Moberly, Robinson penned a letter to the Clay County circuit judge in ch
arge of his case and in effect pleaded for mercy and for his freedom.
“I taught my children to believe in the basic fairness of our system of justice,” he wrote. “They know now that justice is just a word and that the concept of justice in America is something that can be manipulated and used as a weapon by those empowered to enforce the law.”
Robinson singled out Stephen Haymes as his nemesis—saying that the probation officer had lied and bent the law to keep him in jail:
“I guess we all underestimated the power of Mr. Haymes from the probation and parole department and his ability to keep me incarcerated. Since 1986, this man has done everything within his power to keep me in prison and to assure that the hand fell heavy on me and my family.”
Then Robinson made a direct appeal for clemency to the judge himself:
“I am not asking you to release me as I know that would be an improper request which the court could not consider. What I am asking is that the court enter an order to the Missouri Department of Corrections and the Missouri Parole Board to remove all the false and misleading information from my file, consider the information available from the Kansas Department of Corrections and all medical recommendations. Unless I can obtain an order from the court that directs the Board of Probation and Parole to use only factual information, I will never have an opportunity for a fair hearing. Since two courts have already ruled on this issue, the problem seems simple and should not pose any ethical questions.
“Without such an order, I will remain in prison. If lucky, I will live long enough to get out but there will be little left. My illnesses are degenerative and without proper rehabilitation, testing and long term treatment will continue to get worse. My physical impairments and right sided paralysis will not get better. Bruce [his lawyer], my family and I all realize that decisions made by the Clay County Court and the Missouri Parole Board amount to a sentence of death. Our only question, is this what is considered proportionate for my crime in Missouri?”
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