Anyone You Want Me to Be

by John E. Douglas

  Near the end of that decade, as law enforcement began to realize just how many different kinds of crime were being committed online, and how insidious some of those crimes were, they’d barely started to train or employ enough experts to fight back. They needed money for education, they needed funds for more and more sophisticated equipment because the technology turned over so fast, and they needed time to absorb what they were learning. Whenever they made progress, the technology surged forward again and was often being used for illegal activities. The great challenges that had always faced law enforcement, especially regarding the most serious crimes, had expanded once again.

  Every year for the past decade the United States has averaged about eighteen thousand homicides. Some years we had considerably more and sometimes the number would decrease for a variety of explanations and theories. What has happened over the years is that the clearance and /or solution rate for homicides has decreased. In 1960, the clearance rate was approximately 90 percent. Today the average clearance rate is about 64–67 percent. In 1960, most of our cases were of the smoking-gun variety, which means the subject and victim knew one another. What gradually evolved were the “stranger” homicides or crimes without apparent motive. Due to a lack of resources, both technical and personnel, the bad guys were beginning to win.

  Law enforcement responded by developing new forensic tests and other investigative tools. In the late 1970s, my colleagues and I began conducting our own research that would ultimately assist investigators and prosecutors in criminal profiling, assessments, proactive techniques, interview and interrogation techniques, and strategies for the prosecution. What compounded the investigative problem was the mobility of the criminal and the lack of technological tools to assist us in our investigations. It’s hard to imagine that even today we do not have a common technological tool where law enforcement can share information with other agencies conducting similar investigations. We are a country with over seventeen thousand different and separate law enforcement agencies and departments. Many departments don’t have the tools to link cases within their own community. How can they possibly link cases to crimes outside their jurisdiction? You have to rely on the hope that a law enforcement official takes a particular interest in a case, wait for the perpetrator to make a mistake, or get a lucky break.

  In 1985, we had a formal ceremony at the FBI Academy for a new program called VICAP. This stood for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and was the brainchild of retired LAPD detective Pierce Brooks, who saw the need for it. Brooks would go to the library to review newspapers from around the United States to attempt to link and match unsolved cases. That was nearly two decades ago. VICAP still exists, but it will never be successful if it continues to be a voluntary program. For example, it does no good if the LAPD participates in the program if smaller departments in and around Los Angeles County do not participate.

  With the advent of the computer, criminals have found an opportunity where they can for the most part remain anonymous and troll the Internet highways for potential victims. Law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep up with this new and potentially dangerous offender. Men like John Robinson know that it is difficult to catch them because no one central agency is coordinating the effort to fight these enemies, who can sit in the comfort of their homes seeking lonely and needy people who are only looking to improve themselves and make their lives better. People like Robinson believe they are superior in every way to the people they come in contact with on the Internet. These victims are merely objects to Robinson and predators like him. To kill someone whom they feel is inferior to them is like flicking a switch to turn off the lights. They feel nothing for the victims or their families.

  Law enforcement was now playing catch-up against a foe that had infiltrated every corner of the Net. In decades past, the dark world of pornography and child pornography could be found either through underground mail or in the seedier parts of town at adult bookstores or other outlets. That era had now died. The Internet brought the most taboo sexual subjects right into the privacy of one’s home or workplace computer. Everything from erotic photos of small youngsters to sadomasochistic Web sites to videos of rape and other forms of sexual violence were only a few keystrokes away. Sex had always sold and now it had found a huge new international marketplace. Money and desire were driving that market forward in every direction.

  There were sexual newsgroups for just about every imaginable taste and some that went beyond most people’s imagination. There were listings for those with a special interest in various ethnic groups, in cowgirls, in redheads, and in senior citizens. If one wanted to look at nude pictures of celebrities—including TV stars, movie actresses, and supermodels—services would provide these photos for a monthly fee. In some cases you might be looking at a star’s head placed on top of someone else’s body, but who really knew the difference? There were sites offering graphic pictures of violence being done to women and there were chat rooms where men performed virtual gang rapes on women—and virtual murders. There were pictures of dead people available for viewing.

  As disturbing as these things were, they were not as disturbing as the on-line images one could find of small children. The Net offered still and moving pictures of girls five or six years old who were naked with their hands tied in front of or behind them. They were being sexually assaulted. There were pictures of girls with belts tied around their ankles and hanging upside down from the ceiling. Adults were doing unspeakable things to them, and there was money to be made in selling such images. By the midnineties, the Internet had an estimated five thousand worldwide child porn sites, and this number would grow exponentially during the next few years. Those who created and transmitted the images were extremely clever in their ability to hide where the pictures originated and how they were being sent to individuals around the world. In e-mailing a digital photo from, say, Detroit to Miami, it could be routed through Germany, England, and Turkey before reaching Florida. Those who knew their way around the Internet could make this kind of trafficking in child pornography almost impossible to track.

  In the past, pedophilia had been viewed as perhaps the greatest taboo in modern society. People engaged in it usually had to pursue it alone and keep it extremely secret. The Net offered pedophiles at least some degree of privacy and had support groups for those interested in molesting children. These sites not only encouraged such predators but advised them on how to lure kids away from their parents and told them the best techniques to seduce children without getting caught.

  An entirely new criminal realm had exploded across the face of the globe, and it truly was, in every sense of the word, without boundaries.

  Inevitably, scandals started to erupt. In 1996, in Belgium, several children connected to a pornographic ring were murdered. The next year another scandal was uncovered in Spain, and that same year 250 people were arrested in France for selling or possessing videotapes of small children being raped and tortured. In 1998, the Dutch police found a group of child pornographers in Zandvoort who were selling images of kids on the Internet to buyers in Europe, Great Britain, Russia, Israel, and the United States. These images shocked even the most hardened investigators of child porn.

  “For professional reasons,” an unnamed psychologist who worked as a police consultant on the Zandvoort case told the New York Times,

  “I have seen a lot of porn, but this left me speechless. It looks like the perpetrators are not dealing with human beings but with objects.”

  Predators become predators because they can turn people into objects—and they often save parts of their victims after the killing to remind themselves of what they’ve done. They keep vivid reminders of what they are.

  As the twentieth century gave way to a new millennium, the people committing sex crimes on the Internet would cut across all racial, religious, economic, geographical, and professional lines. Doctors would be arrested for soliciting sex with youngsters, as would teachers, police detectives, pr
iests, and a fifty-eight-year-old rabbi in Boca Raton, Jerrold Levy, who pled guilty in federal court to using the Internet to arrange a meeting with a fourteen-year-old boy in a parked car. Rabbi Levy’s other counts of employing the Internet to e-mail child pornography videos were dropped. In 2001, the county of Gwinnett, Georgia, saw twelve criminal cases involving Internet child pornography or child sex.

  For some people, the only thing stronger than the urge to express themselves sexually on the World Wide Web was the belief that they would not get caught. In the midnineties, this appeared to be true, because law enforcement was so far behind in detecting many of these developments and it would take years to catch up.

  In the last half of the 1990s, with the Net entering tens of millions of American homes, criminals had begun using the new technology to commit fraud, theft, and many other violations of the law. At the same time both law enforcement and private agencies were beginning to study behavior—particularly sexual behavior—in cyberspace and were developing statistics about their findings. The results revealed that huge numbers of people used the Internet for some form of sexual exploration. Self-imposed restrictions were fading and people often did things on-line they might never have done anywhere else. The cyber-world had become the new sexual playground for countless Americans. Something had been released and was running through the Net—from the mainstream to the fringes.

  XVII

  Into this wide-open world of explicit Web sites, raunchy chat rooms, and cyber-sex came John Robinson, ready to apply the skills he’d been learning and honing throughout the past three decades. His ambitions, his libido, and his intelligence were stimulated by the new technology. He had to get educated about and involved in this new thing called the World Wide Web. He saw how it could be employed in his more legitimate businesses and used to expand his contacts with women everywhere. As always, he needed more money and was eager for more connections with the opposite sex. Now he could do some of the things he’d been doing elsewhere for many years without even having to leave home. If he was making plans to transfer his criminal skills to cyberspace, no one in his family suspected a thing.

  Late in 1995, Robinson celebrated his fifty-second birthday with his wife and children at their home on Valeen Lane in Belton, Missouri, where his family had moved while he was in prison. One of the guests was the fiancé of his youngest daughter, Christine—a young man named Kyle Shipps, who worked as an officer with the Prairie Village Police Department. Of all his children, Christy, as she was called, seemed the closest to her father. She was pretty, she was loyal, and she could be fiery. She admired and loved her dad, and in the future that love would be tested in ways most people never experience.

  The party was festive and Robinson was in a good mood, as his fortunes seemed to be rising once again. He had money coming in from various sources, and he and Nancy had recently made a down payment on a $95,000, two-bedroom, ranch-style house and an adjoining lot in Big Pine Key, Florida. The Robinsons wanted to make this home a gift to their eldest son, John Jr., and his wife, Lisa, who’d just given them their first grandchild (there would eventually be half a dozen more). The new grandpa couldn’t have been prouder.

  John senior and junior went down to Florida to refurbish the property, which the younger couple eventually hoped to convert into a kindergarten. The senior Robinson intended for his son’s family to live in the house, while he and Nancy would build a home on the lot. It was time, John had decided, for them to relocate in another state, far away from his troubles in Kansas City. It was time to start over where both his past and law enforcement were not hovering so close by (he still had to regularly visit his probation officer). He could always find new ways to do business, no matter where he lived, and the Internet would keep him in close touch with the world. Florida looked like the answer for his future, but then his plans went awry. The lot had a sinkhole and held old septic tanks that made building a home on the site off-limits. Robinson threatened to sue the Realtor who’d sold him the property, but when the Realtor made counterthreats, things fell apart and Robinson decided to stay in the Kansas City area. He was still edgy for change.

  He and Nancy soon left Belton and moved into a trailer-home park in Olathe, Kansas, called Santa Barbara Estates. The streets were named after California locales, and the Robinsons lived at 36 Monterey Lane, putting a double-wide home on one of the better lots. Nancy was hired as manager of the park’s 484 mobile units, but her husband, as far as the neighbors could tell, did not have a job. They often saw him leaving his house, coming and going in his pickup. While he seemed unemployed, he also seemed very, very busy, constantly on the move, never having much time for conversation. His wife had become a well-known presence at Santa Barbara Estates, but nobody was certain what her husband did throughout the day. Occasionally, they saw him landscaping the backyard or putting in pink geraniums on the front patio or placing a statue of St. Francis in a flowerbed or installing a mock Liberty Bell on his property. A sign near the bell read “Grandpa’s Place. We Spoil Grandchildren.” During the summer, his lawn was immaculately kept, and when the holiday season came around, he called attention to his home by putting up the best Christmas decorations at Santa Barbara Estates.

  Robinson would eventually try to boost his income by starting a new company called Specialty Publications, which featured a trade magazine, Manufactured Modular Living, about the mobile home industry. The periodical, which was free and survived on advertising, closely resembled another publication put out by John Woolfolk in the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village. When Woolfolk became aware of this, he fired off a “cease and desist” letter to Robinson. Woolfolk was not the only one in the mobile home business who felt that his competitor was hurting the industry’s reputation by telling homeowners to do things that were at best inappropriate, if not in direct violation of accepted standards. Robinson was unfazed and kept on publishing.

  He brought the same friendly and charming personality to this field that he’d used earlier with Equi-II, Equi-Plus, and Hydro-Gro. He’d given up the suits and ties, replacing them with golf shirts and expensive loafers, and he talked about the mobile home industry with enough knowledge to disarm a number of people. If many of his professional contacts were taken with Robinson’s new role and his casual wardrobe, some female residents at Santa Barbara Estates found him to be rude and flirtatious, often making sexually suggestive remarks. They thought he was just an irrepressible middle-aged man.

  Nobody who lived next to Robinson—and quite possibly nobody who lived with him or spent time in his home—realized that each morning he waited until Nancy had gone to work at eight-thirty before turning on at least one computer (he had three desktops and two laptops). Then he went to his real job, which didn’t have much to do with selling ad space for Manufactured Modular Living. He got on-line and surfed chat rooms and Web sites, establishing new relationships with women he’d never seen. He paid enormous attention to them, as he had to so many other women he was getting to know in the past, asking them all about themselves and then asking them to send him their picture. In time he would send out his own photo, by setting up a digital camera outside in the natural light and snapping pictures of himself dressed like a dude farmer. He wore a dark Western-style hat, cocked jauntily on his head, shiny black cowboy boots, crisply pressed blue jeans, a blue-jean shirt, and a bolo tie. He had an open, friendly smile and looked confident and approachable, exactly the way he wanted to look.

  He assumed different identities in cyberspace, sometimes coming across as a highly successful entrepreneur and sometimes as a gentleman farmer. He called himself a variety of names, from Jim Turner to JT to a new name: Slavemaster, the same handle he’d once used when associated with the International Council of Masters. He used this last name when visiting sadomasochistic sites that had recently sprung up on the Web. He went onto them looking for women who said they enjoyed being submissive to a dominant male, and he often told them the same things that he’d once told Sheila F
aith—all about his prosperous life in Kansas and his desire to help people.

  He sprayed out into cyberspace the message that he was hoping to hook up with a member of the opposite sex because he wanted to be a lover and a friend and a supporter. He might become their provider or be able to find them a good job. He would help them come to Kansas and they could meet face-to-face for intimacy and perhaps something more. He established contacts with females all across the United States and beyond America’s borders, offering them the chance to explore their on-line fantasies with a flesh-and-blood man. Some women did not respond to him, but others did, and they started thinking about taking up his offer. One day they would make plans to come see John Robinson or Jim Turner or JT for themselves.

  Robinson was intrigued with all of the Internet, but he was especially interested in the sadomasochistic sites, with their emphasis on “masters” and “slaves.” If the S&M world featured whips and chains, dungeons, dog collars, handcuffs, leather clothing, riding crops, and all manner of body restraints, it also had well-defined rules. Its rituals were about taking control and giving up control, and for many participants it was about learning to trust someone else in an alternative sexual encounter. Pain might occur, but the purpose was not to inflict permanent harm and certainly not to cause death. For many people, the world of S&M was a brief respite from the rest of life, from dreary routines or boring jobs.