Anyone You Want Me to Be (26 page)

T
he next delicate issue confronting Morrison concerned Tiffany Stasi. The Johnson County DA was now faced with informing several people that the baby Don and Helen Robinson had “adopted” from his brother for $5,500 back in 1985 had not come by normal channels or from a mother who’d committed suicide. The state of Kansas was not simply charging Robinson with the capital murders of Suzette Trouten and Izabela Lewicka. In late July, the DA’s office also accused him of first-degree murder in the death of Lisa Stasi and of aggravated interference with the parental custody of her infant daughter, Tiffany. In addition to these four counts, there were four more in the original indictment, ranging from sexual assault on Vickie Neufeld and Jeanna Milliron to the theft of the former’s sex toys.

That summer Morrison had approached Carl Stasi, Tiffany’s biological father, with the news of what had happened (Carl then submitted to a DNA test to prove that he was in fact her dad). To the relief of everyone, Carl hoped to be able to see his daughter but would not try to win custody of her. Morrison’s office also informed Don and Helen Robinson where Tiffany, whom they’d renamed Heather, had come from. This led to the very touchy subject of whether Heather, now fifteen and living in the Midwest, should have her name and picture revealed by the media. Both Morrison and the Robinson couple tried to protect her, but the secret was quickly out and the
Kansas City Star
ran her high school photograph on the front page.

At a press conference, Don and Helen went public for the first time with their feelings about what his brother had done back in 1985. They did not deliver the comments themselves but had FBI special agent Dick Tarpley read them to the media:

“We too have been betrayed…. We have and will continue to cooperate with the authorities investigating the allegations surrounding John Robinson. We love our daughter very much. Since her adoption, which was never kept from her, we have always assumed that as she became an adult, she would be curious about her birth family. Because we were unaware whom her birth family was, it was our intention to assist her in any way possible in her efforts in identifying and locating them.

“The circumstances surrounding the investigation of John Robinson are as distressing to our immediate family as they are to the other families victimized. Our daughter is aware of the investigation and we are doing our best to help her through this difficult time.”

The
other
Robinson family, comprising Nancy and her four children, put out its own statement after their husband and father’s arrest. They didn’t appear to have had any more grasp of his nature than did the strangers he’d been interacting with in cyberspace. Their remarks read:

“We, as a family, have followed the events of the last week in horror and dismay along with each of you. As each day has passed, the surreal events have built into a narrative that is almost beyond comprehension. While we do not discount the information that has and continues to come to light, we do not know the person whom we have read and heard about on TV…. [John Robinson is a] loving and caring husband and father…. We wait with each of you for the cloud of allegations and innuendo to clear, revealing, at last, the facts.”

Robinson’s daughter Christy, who was a medical emergency worker and married to a police officer, was the most aggressive in her defense of her father. The young woman was about the same age as some of the females whom Robinson had allegedly killed. She attempted to ward off strangers who tried to visit her father in jail and apparently sent out e-mails that extended her dad the presumption of innocence in the face of countless media reports that portrayed him as the Internet Slavemaster who may have killed up to eight people. (Privately, officials in Johnson County wondered if he hadn’t gotten rid of some people whom they’d never heard of.)

Christy had an endless and unenviable task in front of her. Almost as soon as the news broke of Robinson’s arrest, the local and national press offered up stories detailing Robinson’s long criminal record and his more recent adventures into the world of on-line sex. As these reports filtered out into the metropolitan area, people rushed forward to talk about being wronged by Robinson down through the years, usually in financial ways. Some of them called the police, but others were too embarrassed to do so.

In recent years several famous murder investigations, including the O. J. Simpson case and the JonBenet Ramsey case, had generated oceans of conversation and speculation on the Net. Everyone with a computer and a modem could now play amateur detective in solving these killings, while instantly sending his or her opinions around the world. The Robinson case, the first major one with a tangible Internet connection, immediately set off a heated debate in cyberspace. The
Kansas City Star,
which took the lead in covering the arrest, set up a chat room where people could offer their views about Robinson and the murders. The dialogue centered not so much on his guilt or innocence as on alternative sexual lifestyles, which had received a lot of attention in the days following the discovery of the bodies. Some people who were a part of the S&M subculture insisted that Robinson’s behavior in no way reflected the ideas or actions of members of that group. Those in the S&M community in and around Kansas City were appalled to learn of Robinson’s activities. They adamantly denied that he represented anything about them and stated that they would have reported him to the authorities at once—if they’d only known what he was doing.

The key thing in S&M relationships, the posters said, was not danger but trust; you were able to enter into these situations and explore them because of the confidence and the belief you placed in another that you would not be hurt. It took more faith and more trust to do this, they suggested, than to engage in conventional relationships. In the wake of the discovery of the bodies at Robinson’s farm and in his storage locker, the Internet was proving to be an educational forum, and people logging on to the
Kansas City Star
chat room gave hints for avoiding trouble in cyberspace. The main one, underlined again and again, was to meet your potential partner in a safe and public setting
before
getting involved sexually—because you never knew who this person might be.

Some of those of who entered the
Star
’s chat room felt that anyone who was fooling around with sexual alternatives or with men like John Robinson was naive and inviting danger. Others said that they’d lost a relationship or marriage because their lover or spouse had hooked up with someone on-line. Others argued that these postings were nonsense because they’d developed good relationships from Internet contacts. And others accused some chat room participants of being Robinson family members in disguise, who’d logged on to explain or defend the accused man. Still others said that they’d known Robinson personally and he’d either seemed harmless or he’d swindled someone inside their own family.

The most intriguing posting came from a close relative of Suzette Trouten’s, who dismissed the notion that all of the victims in this case were either looking for trouble or were self-blinded or ignorant individuals. This poster contended that Suzette was not a trouble-seeker but an intelligent young woman who was not easily taken in. According to this person, Trouten had met Robinson at least twice before getting close to him, and the man had worked the situation diligently before Suzette had agreed to take up with him. Robinson was not an obvious deviant to be avoided, but a clever man with a remarkable ability to appear normal.

Following the opening of the barrels and the identification of the victims, almost all of the dead women were described by those who’d known them as smart and resourceful people. What they had in common was that they were looking for something—or someone—to remove them from their circumstances, and especially from the economic circumstances they found themselves in. They were searching for somebody who could rescue them and offer a fast escape into a different life. In the days and weeks after the bodies were found, the papers were filled with articles from psychologists and other experts about the dangers of hunting for romance on-line. Women from coast to coast were advised in the strongest possible terms to be careful when surfing the Net for love or other forms of support. It had taken a grotesque tragedy to bring these warnings to the surface. Cyberspace had a dark side that could no longer be denied.

While all of these activities were unfolding outside Olathe’s Adult Detention Center, Robinson sat in his cell and began devising his legal strategy for beating seemingly insurmountable odds. He was being charged with three murders in Kansas (of Lisa Stasi, Izabela Lewicka, and Suzette Trouten), plus three more in Missouri (of Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, and Beverly Bonner). Chris Koster was also charging him with fifty-six counts of fraud and forgery linked to his financial scams in Missouri. As Robinson pondered the charges, the Burlington Northern & Sante Fe trains ran right behind the jail, blowing through town all day and all night long. The screech of the whistles startled some people and for others evoked freedom and movement. There was nothing like the sound of a train, especially at night, to make one feel lonesome or want to be someplace else. The constant whistles must have been maddening for Robinson, who had pursued his passions and his freedom so relentlessly. His uncounted hours of driving all over Kansas City, of cruising back and forth to his farm, of spending full days locked in conversation with women in cyberspace, of planning the next seduction, had suddenly ended. All he could do now was think and wait and try to come up with a way to win his trial. If he lost, he was looking at being the first person executed in Kansas since 1965.

Immediately after his arrest, he declared himself indigent and unable to afford legal counsel. All he had for income, he told the court, was a small government check and his wife’s salary. The court accepted this claim and appointed him a three-man team, headed by Ron Evans, from the Topeka-based Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit. The lawyers in this office, as in other similar offices across America, did this kind of work exclusively and were often regarded as the best possible defenders of those being tried on capital murder charges. They were usually not only excellent at parsing the legal fine points of capital cases but had strong personal feelings against the government putting people to death. Robinson, by saying that he could not pay for an attorney to defend himself against the state of Kansas, was given three of them who were thoroughly committed to keeping him alive.

The arrival of the death penalty team indicated not only that Robinson would be well-defended during his trial—for free—but that he was focused not so much on winning his case as on what would happen if he was convicted. Often defendants bring in death penalty defense experts only after they’ve been found guilty; Robinson was effectively bringing them in right after his arrest. Because the case was so complicated, and because it had led to the creation of more than twenty thousand pages of documents and had potentially eight hundred witnesses, his attorneys soon asked for more time to prepare for the preliminary hearing. They also filed forty motions challenging the evidence against their client and questioning the validity of the Kansas death penalty law. The motions were heard in the chambers of Judge John Anderson III, the son of a former Kansas governor. He ran a no-nonsense courtroom that was committed to moving through the process as quickly and efficiently as possible, but even he would come to understand that nothing in this case would happen fast. And at times, it seemed that it wouldn’t happen at all.

First, Robinson’s lawyers sought a delay for the October preliminary hearing. It was pushed back to November 2000. Then they sought another delay and it was pushed back further, to February 2001. Despite these developments, Robinson did make an occasional trip from the detention center to Judge Anderson’s court. For these appearances, he donned a sharp blue suit and tie, looking like the legitimate businessman he’d so many times claimed himself to be. He sat quietly and calmly, gazing at the judge or the prosecutors or taking notes with a pensive expression. He grew paler and thinner, his hair going grayer and then whiter. His eyes seemed to retreat farther into their sockets. He revealed none of his gift for banter that had charmed so many people over the years.

He allowed no one in court to see his flash point of rage, which lay just below the surface of his bland expression or his smile. In an instant he could transform himself from a pleasant-looking businessman into a red-faced, foot-stomping boy throwing a tantrum. His fury emerged when he was surprised by someone (as Retia Grant had surprised him that day when he was digging a big hole in his barn) or when he came up against something he couldn’t control. Now, sitting in jail, he would try to devise a strategy to control and orchestrate the legal circumstances surrounding him. Now he would do whatever he could to delay the process. His penchant for busyness had a new focus.

J
ohn Robinson’s was the most spectacular crime yet connected to the Internet, but it was only one of thousands that were being uncovered at the turn of the new millennium. In recent years, the biggest explosion of on-line lawlessness had occurred in the realm of child pornography. In 1999, the FBI had opened up fifteen hundred new cases of child porn in America alone, and many experts contended that it was the fastest-growing criminal frontier in cyberspace. In 1998, five thousand child porn Web sites had been identified by police working in high-tech crime units. By 2000, the number had grown to twenty-three thousand and the next year it climbed to one hundred thousand. Mainstream magazines like
Newsweek
were now running cover stories on the dangers of letting youngsters explore certain corners of the Net, and Web sites were providing tips and clues for how parents could protect their children from on-line predators.

By the end of the nineties nearly every week saw arrests of suspects (almost always men) who’d gone on the Net looking for a pedophilic connection but who’d instead made contact with an FBI agent or a police officer posing as a minor. When the adult tried to hook up with the “child,” in a physical location, he got busted. The authorities had become adept at setting traps for these men. Even citizens were playing a role in these stings. In 1997, Randy Sluder, a Disney employee, snared a predator in Florida named Billy Charles Burgess after Sluder had told Burgess via the Internet that he was a blond-haired, blue-eyed, thirteen-year-old girl named Maggie 284.

In 1998, the U.S. Customs Service broke up the largest Internet child porn ring yet uncovered. Called Wonderland, it had buyers and sellers in at least twelve countries and thirty-two American cities.

Numerous professional people were involved in the ring, and some of them could not cope with the consequences of their actions and the public humiliation that came with charges of being a pedophile. Within a few days of their arrests, four men associated with Wonderland—a veterinarian and a former military officer among them—committed suicide. The need for fantasy and exploitation had always existed—just as it had for John Robinson—but the Internet afforded countless more opportunities for people to explore these desires. Unlike Robinson, some of those arrested for on-line crimes were shamed into self-destruction.

In September 1999, an even bigger bust occurred when a team of computer specialists and U.S. postal inspectors entered the home of Thomas and Janice Reedy of Fort Worth, Texas. Investigators soon determined that the Reedys’ Internet business, Landslide Productions, provided access to three hundred child porn sites around the globe, reaching thousands of people across the United States and nearly 320,000 clients worldwide. Thirty federally financed task forces were involved in the dragnet against the Landslide owners. The Reedys, parents of a nine-year-old daughter, were earning $1.4 million a month from Landslide, and at the time of their arrest, the family was living in a large suburban home and driving a Mercedes-Benz. The uncovering of this business caused postal inspectors to create Operation Avalanche, a much larger investigation into on-line child pornography, and a year later the operation led to one hundred more arrests.

Thomas Reedy was the main focus of the allegations and was given the opportunity to work with the FBI to catch other child pornographers, in exchange for a twenty-year sentence. He declined the offer and chose to go to trial, perhaps thinking that successfully prosecuting on-line child porn charges was a new and difficult case to make. He was wrong. Reedy was convicted on eighty-nine counts and his wife on eighty-seven, although she was viewed as an accomplice and received only a fourteen-year sentence. He got 1,335 years in prison—the first life sentence ever given in a federal child porn case where the defendant was not accused of actual molestation of a youngster. With Reedy’s arrest and subsequent conviction, the government had made a huge statement to potential on-line predators: you didn’t have to harm children physically to be put away forever.

You only have to take illicit pictures of kids or buy and sell their photos on the Internet.

In March 2002, the FBI announced the breakup of yet another vast Internet child porn ring, arresting eighty-six people in twenty-five states. Those busted in the government’s Operation Candyman—Candyman was the on-line name of this group of offenders—included two Catholic priests, six other clergy members, a child photographer, a school bus driver, a preschool teacher’s aide, and at least one police officer. In August 2002, the government broke up still another American and international on-line gang called the Club, which had allegedly sent out about a million child porn images, many of them depicting group members molesting their own children. By now it had become clear that those engaged in such crimes were no more obvious or exotic-looking than John Robinson. And it was frighteningly apparent that these types of criminals were proliferating at an alarming rate. But it was just as clear that the government was catching up with the cyber-criminals.

“A new marketplace for child pornography has opened up in the dark corners of cyberspace,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said at the time of the Candyman arrests. “There will be no free rides on the Internet for those who traffic in child pornography.”

Sex wasn’t the only growing criminal realm on the Net. There were many elaborate check-kiting scams as well. In a popular one throughout the Midwest, con artists were going to the yellow pages and scanning logos from well-known corporations. Then they added that logo to a phony check they’d created by using Internet software. Then they wrote a payroll check to themselves and cashed it at a local convenience store. A small group of people would quickly do this in one major city, cashing a lot of checks at many different locations, before leaving town for the next score. In one day, they could easily cash $10,000 worth of checks. The method worked well because most convenience-store employees would not think of refusing to cash a check with a logo from a Fortune 500 company, especially not when a respectable-looking person was asking them to do this. Corporations weren’t the only entities having their identities stolen. The country’s largest personal-identify-theft ring, which was using databases to carry out their scam, got busted in New York in November 2002.

In the spring of 2000, the U.S. attorney’s office in New York City filed charges against 120 persons, including several prominent members of organized-crime families, who were charged with allegedly swindling stock-market investors out of more than $50 million. Among those named were Anthony Stropoli and Frank Persico, reputed associates of the Colombo crime family, and Robert Lino, an alleged capo in the Bonanno family. According to the authorities, the suspects used phony press releases to falsely hype certain stocks over the Internet to boost the price of securities that they already owned. As soon as the stock prices had been inflated, those generating the false information sold their securities and left other investors with shares that were basically worthless.

In September 2001, the use of the Internet to create much larger crimes became shockingly apparent after international terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center and drove another commercial aircraft into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of people. Investigators eventually discovered that the terrorists had left “footprints” in cyberspace, communicating with one another through the Internet and writing cryptic messages behind on-line pictures. The attackers had employed the ancient Greek practice known as steganography—a method of placing secrets on the back of images. Following the deadliest attack ever on the United States, FBI agents set about obtaining records from Yahoo! and America Online, as well as confiscating computers that the terrorists had allegedly used in Florida and Virginia. As one part of its response to the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration created a new high-level, high-tech office designed solely to fight cyber-terror.

The age of on-line innocence was over. In less than a decade since it had achieved mass popularity, the Internet had revealed an astonishing range of abilities. It could be used as a global tool for the highest purposes of communication and education—or as a force for mass destruction. It was as good or as evil as the human beings who were punching its keys.