Anyone You Want Me to Be (15 page)

T
he young woman who’d left Purdue University to come to Kansas City and be with Robinson was named Izabela Lewicka. She was born in Poland in 1979, and both of her parents had been scientists under the faltering Communist regime in that country. In 1993, when Izabela was fourteen, her family obtained permanent visas to the United States and moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, where Purdue was located. Her father, Andrzei, took a job in physics at the university, and her mother, Danuta, found work as a research assistant. Izabela was gifted at the arts—at painting, pottery, and fashion design—and pursued these things as a high school student in West Lafayette. Her rebellious instincts, her aesthetic passions, and the people she was drawn to all inclined her to take on an unconventional appearance. She was thin and petite with long brown hair, with a bohemian flair. She wore dark velvet dresses and mostly black clothes. She donned lots of silver jewelry and her nose was pierced.

At Purdue she met others with her interests at the on-campus Guru Java coffeehouse, a student-run hangout. She befriended Jennifer Hayes, who was a few years older than Izabela, and the two women shared their interests in theater, art, paganism, the gothic lifestyle, and the sexual world of bondage and discipline. Izabela told Jennifer that she had ventured to Chicago several times to explore some BDSM dungeons and playrooms. Izabela was fascinated with the darker side of life—with vampires and death imagery. The women liked to talk about the fine points of the BDSM culture and how bondage and discipline involved in-depth psychological games, while sadomasochism is about the giving and receiving of pain. Confidentiality was a big part of this world. Izabela and Jennifer were growing closer, but one did not share the details of “assignments” given by masters to their submissives.

Izabela was a gifted painter and seemed headed for an artistic career until something happened that altered her future. She may have been delving further and further into the world of BDSM but she was still living with her parents and her younger sister. At home she began surfing the Internet. Throughout the day or in the small hours of the night, when other students were sleeping or doing homework, she logged on and went into chat rooms, striking up conversations with strangers and meeting people from all over the world. She was already an imaginative person, and cyberspace allowed her to expand that part of herself.

“She was always thinking about something better,” her mother said.

On-line, she could indulge her tendency for fantasy and be anyone she wanted to be.

It was intoxicating to sit alone in a room and make connections with people you’d never seen and could only envision. It was like living in a realm of make-believe, except that it was real. She was soon going deeper into some of the Net’s less well known areas, visiting sexual sites and exploring different lifestyle options. Neither her parents nor her sister was aware of what she was doing; her mother and father only knew that her study habits were falling off and her grades were beginning to suffer, as she spent more and more time in cyberspace. The Net was like a huge game that got bigger and bigger the more one participated with it. Five contacts could easily expand into ten, and ten could grow exponentially.

Each time Izabela logged on, she might have new mail waiting or forwarded mail or she might make new connections on this endless web of people, all of whom were looking to be a part of something outside themselves. The Internet was unpredictable and exciting, the place to go to get a private rush. Every time she went on-line, she could visit new places and have more adventures with strangers. Some of those strangers might become cyber-friends. In 1997, during her many hours of surfing, she met a man in Kansas and decided that she had to meet him face-to-face. He’d told her that he was an international book agent who could employ her as a secretary. She told him about her artistic talent, and they both shared their sexual interests. He said he wanted her to illustrate some BDSM manuscripts he was working on. He presented himself to Izabela as an experienced dominant who was always looking for good students and was willing to teach her the subtleties of manipulating and controlling others. Izabela was hooked. Her ambitions of escaping Indiana, using her aesthetic skills, and becoming an apprentice to a BDSM master were about to be realized.

In June of that year, she stunned everybody who knew her by deciding to leave Indiana for the Sunflower State. When Jennifer heard about this, she cautioned her friend not to go, but Izabela was determined. She filled her old Pontiac Bonneville with her paintings, sketches, many books, family heirlooms, a Hungarian coffeemaker, and a Polish mortar and pestle, along with her clothes. One painting was a large orange impressionistic canvas. She also took several sets of sheets, one of which was dark green with maroon zigzag patterns given her by her mother. She’d told her parents that in Kansas she would be working at an internship with a man she’d met on-line, but she was vague. Her mother and father tried to dissuade her but couldn’t. After arriving in Kansas City, she e-mailed her family that her new address was on Metcalf Avenue. She corresponded little with them because she felt they disapproved of what she was doing. Her father in particular had tried to convince his independent daughter to use caution, but Izabela was adamant about staying in Kansas and finding a new life.

For two months her parents waited patiently to hear from her again, and when they couldn’t make contact, they drove west to look for her. They were surprised to discover that the Metcalf address was not an apartment but an Overland Park mailbox service. The company policy of the service was not to give out the home address of anyone who used their business. Discouraged and confused, the Lewickas spent only one day in Kansas City before going back to Indiana without finding their daughter or talking to law enforcement.

“We hoped she would be back for the beginning of the fall semester,” her father once said.

Shortly after they returned home, they began receiving e-mails from Izabela. Her father, sensing something might be wrong, wrote e-mails to her in Polish to make certain that he was communicating with his daughter. He was only reassured after she responded to him in Polish with information that no one outside their family would know. Most of her messages were short and simplistic, saying things like “I’m fine, don’t worry” or “I want to live my life on my own.” The words gave no specifics about her internship or her personal situation or the adventures she was having in Kansas City.

Andrzei Lewicka feared that if he acted on his suspicions or told the police about the e-mails Izabela had sent him, he would stop receiving them. Since this was the only link he had to his daughter, he decided not to speak to the authorities. Things remained muddy and in limbo, with uninformative e-mails continuing to reach the Lewickas, and with Izabela’s parents continuing to keep whatever they’d learned about their daughter to themselves.

In 1997, not long after coming to Kansas City, the young woman had filed for a marriage license with a man calling himself John Anthony Robinson. Anthony was not Robinson’s middle name, but the birth date on the application was the same as his. No record exists of their getting married. The following year Lewicka enrolled at Johnson County Community College using the last name Lewicka Robinson. She took a beginning drafting class and wore a ruby ring on her wedding finger, which she showed off to her teacher. Izabela liked to brag that she was married to an older man. Robinson never publicly said that he was married to Izabela but introduced her to people as his adopted daughter or as his cousin from Czechoslovakia. Because of her outlandish gothic appearance—black lipstick, black clothes, and numerous body piercings—Robinson sometimes distanced himself from her when they were meeting with his business associates. Other times he openly groped her in public. When asked why she didn’t live with her husband, Izabela said this wouldn’t be “proper” and that people had treated the couple rudely so they thought it best to keep separate addresses. Since she was only nineteen and he was fifty-four, most observers would not understand or accept their age difference.

What neither Robinson nor Izabela told anyone was that she’d agreed to become his “slave.” Their arrangement included a contract that apparently listed more than one hundred conditions that she had to meet, including the detailed sexual conduct expected of her. In return for her fulfilling these conditions, he would support her financially so that she could devote most of her time to her painting and her voracious reading of occult literature. Another part of the contract allowed Robinson to take nude photos of her, with a leather flogger lying across her stomach, her legs spread, while she reclined on a bed covered by the green-and-maroon-patterned sheets she’d taken from home.

In March 1998, Robinson rented an apartment in Olathe from a property manager named Jennifer Boniedot. He told her that he operated a business called Specialty Publications and that he would be using this space to train his employees before they went on to Nashville, Tennessee. He intended to bring in women from around America and they would be working in the apartment at night but would require quiet during the day. As far as Boniedot could tell, only one person ever moved into the apartment: Izabela Lewicka. Robinson told the property manager that the young woman was his adopted daughter and that he’d rescued her from abusive parents.

To fill up her days, because Robinson was so busy with other women, his businesses, and his family, Izabela began to meet other people. She frequented a used-book store in the Overland Park area that specialized in rare and out-of-print titles. The owner of the store, Robert Meyers, thought she stood out in this suburban community because of her Eastern European accent, her long black velvet dresses, and ornate jewelry. She also impressed him because she was so articulate, polite, and courteous. Izabela bought academic and art books, but was most interested in the world of the occult, purchasing tomes on the Salem witch trials, on poisonous plants and medicinal herbs, and on the history of witches and vampires. She bragged to Meyers that she was proud to have Eastern European blood because that was the land of Dracula. She told the proprietor that she was married to an “older man,” and on one occasion she came into the bookstore with a male several decades her senior. If Meyers was struck by his appearance, which he once described as “corpulent,” the bookstore owner was taken aback by Izabela’s. She was wearing a spiked dog collar.

Izabela was becoming more daring in her looks and in her time away from Robinson. She met a young man named Eric Collins, who was part of a group that enjoyed vampire role-playing. The group was taken with Lewicka after she claimed to have roots in Dracula’s homeland. They would get together outside a suburban shopping center and go into the nearby woods. Moving among the trees, they would act out a fantasy game involving driving a stake into someone’s heart. The game had elaborate rules, rituals, statistics, but no violence. The stake was nothing more than a piece of paper with the word
stake
written on it. The game was great fun for the fanciful Lewicka, who could use her imagination and artistic bent in acting out these scenes. Her name inside the group was Special. Her parents could never have imagined her darting through the woods at night in this make-believe realm with her newfound friends. Lewicka also saw Collins at his workplace, Express Signs in Overland Park, where she went to order a banner for Specialty Publications. One day she came there with Robinson to pick up the finished banner. He met Collins and noticed a book on vampire role-playing by the cash register. Robinson was unaware that Izabela knew Collins and casually remarked, “My wife here plays that game too.” Izabela said nothing, not revealing that Collins was one of the people she’d played with in the forest.

Robinson had moved Izabela into a fourplex at 901 Edgebrook in Olathe. He told the property manager, Julia Brown, that he needed an apartment to bring women from all over the country who would be training for his Specialty Publications business. He signed a year lease, but the only women Brown ever saw occupying the apartment was the young girl with the exotic looks and European accent.

While Izabela was role-playing as a vampire with Collins and as a niece/daughter/wife/employee/slave with Robinson, her parents were growing more and more worried. She had stopped e-mailing them in Polish and declared that her future messages would be in English. She told them that she was getting married and would only be communicating to her relatives in the language of her American husband.

Her mother, Danuta, desperate for clues about her daughter, went into Izabela’s room at home and looked closely at the few things she had left behind. Danuta came across a photo of an older man, dressed all in denim and boots, who was standing in an open field and smiling. She was surprised that Izabela would have a picture of this much older man and she wondered if the person in the photo was involved with her daughter now. She was puzzled and disheartened about why her daughter had moved away and couldn’t understand her not acknowledging birthdays or holidays.