Anyone You Want Me to Be (13 page)

I
nto 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 Faith—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.

The S&M subculture had its own lingo and “safe words.” When those words were spoken, they acted as a signal that things had gone beyond what was agreed on and it was time to stop. Another type of S&M known as Gorean had no safe words and no rules; submission to the dominant was total. The Gorean concept had been laid out in twenty-five science fiction novels about the planet Gor, written by a philosophy professor named John Norman. On Gor, all the women were slaves to men and had to satisfy their every sexual desire. Since the books’ first appearance in the 1960s, the Gorean novels had gained a cult following and were highly valued by book collectors. With the development of the Internet, Gorean adherents also had a strong presence on-line. Cyberspace was the perfect place to meet people with like desires.

Robinson was naturally drawn to the Gorean realm. He’d always relished being in control, especially in his relations with women. Now he’d found a locale where females willingly put themselves into submissive roles. Some would even go so far as to sign contracts for their “masters,” in which they gave up not only control of their bodies but in some cases their financial assets. The three things that Robinson had pursued so relentlessly and aggressively over the years—money, sex outside of marriage, and power over others—were now literally falling into his lap or, more accurately, his laptop. He no longer had to create complicated baby-selling scams or business fronts that enticed young women who were looking for employment. He no longer had to pretend that he was an enlightened male who was interested in sexual equality, inside or out of the bedroom. Now he could be more of himself. The Internet provided him with a huge new arena in which to ply his trade.

Through ads in cyberspace and those in an alternative newspaper in Kansas City called
Pitch Weekly,
he looked for women who were interested in the games he wanted to play. He found one in the “Wildside” section of the paper, an attractive African-American woman in her late twenties named Alecia Cox. She had a velvety voice and what some people would describe as a sassy manner. Her personal ad in the paper read: “SBF [Straight Black Female] looking for mature male to take care of me—I’ll take care of you.” The aspiring radio personality was now working in Kansas City as a receptionist and had a young daughter who lived with her mother in Salina, Kansas. She wanted to get into the entertainment business; she had a professional head shot made up of herself with her résumé on the back. Her on-air name was Lisa Fox. She was ambitious but down on her luck. After Robinson answered her ad, they quickly reached an agreement: he would pay her as much as $2,000 a month, while she agreed to be his mistress. He wanted her available for sex whenever he desired it. When he arrived at her apartment, he demanded that she be waiting for him naked. He only visited during the day. He told Alecia that he was married but not having sex with his wife and he was about to get divorced. He also told her that he was a successful entrepreneur with a pool supply store and a hydroponic business. He bragged about knowing many important people, including President Clinton, whom he’d met during a flight on Air Force One. He also told Alecia that she was a “bright girl” who would make an excellent personal assistant. She was impressed enough by Robinson to join forces with him.

Their sexual encounters were generally conventional, but he did put clips on her nipples and a dog collar on her that restrained her hands. Underneath her feminine exterior was a tough, street-smart woman, cocky and self-assured, and for once, Robinson had met his match. Alecia wasn’t afraid to ask for what she wanted and she asked Robinson for a lot. He didn’t give her as much money as he’d originally promised and he occasionally reneged on his agreement to pay up, but the relationship lasted for a couple of years. On one occasion, when he demanded that she sign a slave contract, she complied, just to please him. For a while she worked at an athletic club where she had to disrobe in front of other people. Robinson wrote his initials on her hip with a pen, as if this were his private brand. The letters even resembled a brand, with the
J
and the
R
connected. He wanted other club members to see that she was someone’s property.

He offered her gifts of clothing, which struck her as an unusual thing for a man to have. Many of the items weren’t her style or size and looked worn. In the back of his pickup, she once saw an entire rack of women clothes, and in the apartment he rented, he showed her other boxes of women’s clothing. As Alecia sorted through the dresses, looking for something she might like, she wondered where all this apparel had come from, eventually choosing a white camisole, a black velvet shirt, and a green velvet dress. Robinson explained to her that the clothes had been left behind by ex-employees of his businesses. Alecia didn’t ask too many questions and he didn’t offer any more information. It didn’t occur to her that the dresses had once belonged to women who’d gotten involved with Robinson, in much the same way that she was doing now.

Robinson gave Alecia a gold band and said he wanted to marry her. He also wanted her to tell him how much she loved him, especially when they were making love. He wanted to hear it from her over and over again during moments of passion. The words were as important as the sex. He may have been trying to hook her deeper emotionally, but she was satisfying some equally deep emotional longings within him. Robinson was profoundly entangled with women—a rage of need and desire and weakness and violence. He spent all his time with women, whether he was at home or somewhere else. Male friends did not figure into much of his existence, unless he was hustling them for gain. It was the company of women that he craved. And it was women whom he was always planning to get rid of.