Anyone You Want Me to Be (7 page)

I
n 1984, twenty-one-year-old Theresa Williams had come to Kansas City from Boise, Idaho. She’d worked around town at a Kmart and a self-service laundry before meeting Robinson at a McDonald’s, where he initiated a conversation with her by telling the pretty young woman how much he could improve both her present and future life. His pitch worked and she soon became his lover, moving into the empty Troost apartment and performing sexual favors for men who paid for her services. In return, Robinson took care of her bills and supplied her with marijuana. Several things about him made Williams uncomfortable, but she was being provided for and didn’t say too much. One was the gun he carried in a shoulder holster—in violation of his probation. Another was that he seemed to have a penchant for violence, including sexual violence, but this didn’t prevent her from sleeping with or posing nude for him.

The longer she stayed with him, the more demanding Robinson became. On the evening of April 30, 1985, he had her don a sexy dress, paid her $1,200, and instructed her to leave the Troost Avenue apartment and wait in a nearby park for a limousine. When the car arrived, she jumped in and the driver blindfolded her and took her to another part of Kansas City. The car stopped at a mansion and the blindfold was removed. She was escorted inside, where a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man in his sixties accompanied her down to his basement. The man, known to her only as the Judge, had built a dungeon on the bottom floor of his home, designed for sadomasochism and various forms of sexual torture. After Williams stripped, he placed her on a device resembling a medieval rack and began to tighten the controls. Williams was experienced in the underground world of Eros and something of an adventurer herself, but this was more than she’d bargained for. This wasn’t pleasurable but crossing the line into terror.

As she lay stretched out on the rack and he slowly increased the pressure, the pain overwhelmed her and she screamed out to be released. He wound the device tighter and the pain grew more intense, until she thought she might lose consciousness. She screamed again, louder this time, begging him to stop, until the Judge finally relented and took her off the rack. Shaken and hurting, she left the dungeon, was reblindfolded, taken out of the house, put in the car, and driven back to Troost Avenue, where she had to confront an enraged Robinson. He was upset because she’d failed to perform as she was supposed to. The Judge was not satisfied and that reflected badly on Robinson. Word of all this would get around town and that was not good for business. Williams endured Robinson’s contempt and was forced to give him back the $1,200. Their relationship was becoming more volatile by the day.

While Robinson conducted these activities in Kansas City, he was still living with his wife and younger children in the suburb of Stanley. He was still playing a visible role in his community as an elder at the First Presbyterian Church, still attending his son’s soccer games and serving as a referee. He was still generally being perceived as a good neighbor at Pleasant Valley Farms. People in Stanley knew him as a God-worshiping member of the congregation, a devoted father, a husband who provided well for his family, and a social asset. They had no reason to imagine that he was anything other than these things or to suspect that he had another life altogether when he left the suburbs and drove into the city. They had no concept of his real identity, no concept of his growing skills as a predator.

There are two important areas of concern and consideration for serial killers. The first is finding or selecting a victim. As time went on, Robinson had no problem in that area. Potential victims were everywhere, especially in later years when he began to use the Internet. The second concern and consideration is how and where are you going to dispose of a victim once you get what you want. Some killers openly display their victims by dumping or posing them in an area where they will easily be found. Robinson did not have that mind-set. He was smart enough to realize that if he used that modus operandi, he could possibly be linked to his victims. He always wanted the victims’ families to believe that their loved one had met “Mr. Right” and moved somewhere to “live happily ever after.”

By hiding or getting rid of the bodies, he was able to avoid detection for years, if not decades. He was reminiscent of John Gacy, who killed thirty-three people, burying many of them in the crawl space in his own house. It wasn’t until he got sloppy in his MO that law enforcement started investigating him.

I personally believe Robinson knew that law enforcement lacked a method to link him as a potential suspect. In the past, he’d fallen into the cracks of the legal system, so why not perpetrate more serious crimes and do this in multiple jurisdictions? He believed he was smarter than police and invincible. In some respects, he was correct. Why was he able to commit these crimes many times over? Because in the minds of victims, potential victims, community leaders, charitable organizations, and law enforcement, John Robinson didn’t fit the profile. He was too old, too short, too nice, and so on. That is where we make mistakes—when we begin to think that serial predators like Robinson will look different from the rest of us. That is what makes them so disarming and they know it.

These individuals do their best to find ways to fit into society. For example, the following events took place during the height of Gacy’s and Bundy’s crime sprees. John Gacy had his photograph taken with then president Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. Ted Bundy worked in a rape crisis center, was politically active in the state of Washington, and later enrolled in law school. When I conduct interviews of serial killers and other sexual predators, I look closely into the eyes of these men. To the untrained, the look appears sincere and genuine. What I subsequently do is to imagine what look was on their face when they were perpetrating their heinous crimes. I ask myself, What did the victims see before they died? The look would have been pure evil. It was a look that could change in a microsecond. A look that these individuals keep to themselves when they are being investigated, interviewed, and treated during their so-called rehabilitation. But once they’re alone and on the hunt, that look returns.

One morning in May 1985, Robinson got in his car and headed for 8110 Troost Avenue. He let himself into a third-floor unit of the apartment complex, where Theresa Williams was sleeping. Quietly entering the bedroom, he walked up to her and grabbed her by the hair. He hoisted her up by its roots, threw her over his knee, and spanked her hard, telling her that she’d been bad and needed to learn a lesson. Despite Williams’s growing fear of Robinson and despite what she believed he was capable of, his behavior both hurt and shocked her. Yet it paled compared to what he did next.

He tossed her onto the floor, stood over her, and extracted the revolver that he kept concealed in his shoulder holster. As she watched the man and the gun come down toward her, she began to beg and to yell for her life.

Placing the barrel to her head, he said, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.”

He pulled the trigger—it clicked because there was no cartridge in the chamber.

Williams looked up at him, terrified, sobbing on the floor. Robinson removed the gun from her face and lowered it down below her shoulders, her waist, and her stomach, penetrating her vagina with the barrel and again threatening to kill her. Her screams turned into hysteria as she wailed for him to spare her life. Robinson stared at her, lying helpless beneath him. Then he slowly reholstered the gun, turned, and walked out of the apartment.

He soon came back with a new plan, a way for Theresa to help him out of his latest legal jam. He needed to find a way to destroy the credibility of Irv Blattner, who’d recently turned against Robinson and was trying to get his probation revoked. Robinson asked Williams to enter into a diary some words that he dictated to her—words indicating that Blattner was going to kill her. The purpose of this exercise was twofold. If Theresa disappeared for good, as Paula Godfrey and Lisa Stasi lately had, it would look as if Blattner had murdered her. Second, if Blattner testified against Robinson on his probation status, Robinson could use the diary to portray his adversary as someone who could never be trusted because he had homicidal intentions. In return for her assistance with this plot, Robinson promised to take Williams to the Bahamas on June 15. That was also, according to Robinson’s orders, supposed to be the day the diary came to an end.

On June 7, Steve Haymes and the two FBI agents he’d been working with, Thomas Lavin and Jeffrey Dancer, showed up unannounced at the Troost Avenue apartment and talked with Williams. The police startled her, but she was more terrified of Robinson than she was of them. At first she lied to the men about her involvement with Robinson, telling them that she was employed at Equi-II in data processing. They listened carefully to her story and then told her some things she didn’t know. They believed that two young women who’d worked for Robinson had vanished and perhaps been murdered. They also believed he might be planning something like that with her. As Williams absorbed what they were saying, she broke down and described the gun incident, mentioning Robinson’s plans to take her to the Bahamas. She explained how he’d put all her things in storage, and that the last day of her life in the fake diary was June 15, only a week away.

She told them how Robinson had ordered her to write down sentences meant to sound like hers but intended to discredit Irv Blattner. And Robinson had created instructions for his lawyer to get the diary and some of her property out of a safe-deposit box.

After hearing this, Haymes and the agents took immediate action. Within hours, they’d moved her out of the apartment and to another part of Kansas City. Because of her allegations that Robinson had given her marijuana, had illegally carried a gun, and had sexually assaulted her, Haymes felt confident that he could get Robinson’s probation revoked and have him locked up for the next seven years. With a witness to some of his crimes in police custody, it appeared certain that his days of freedom were about to end.

When he learned that the authorities had taken Williams from the Troost apartment (in their haste to transfer her to another location, they’d accidentally taken the landlord’s television), Robinson exploded into more anger and more activity. He frantically began hunting the Kansas City area for her, looking everywhere he thought she might have gone. The FBI was aware of his movements and kept the young woman hidden by transferring her to three different addresses in the next three weeks. Robinson intensified his search by hiring a private detective to run her down, a former police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department named Charles Lane. It wasn’t Lane who ultimately found Williams but Robinson himself, after spotting her parked car. Lane then contacted the landlady where Williams was staying and confirmed she was there. During one of Lane’s attempts to talk with Theresa, Special Agents Lavin and Dancer arrived and broke up the conversation. They were so alarmed that Robinson’s private detective had found her that they quickly got money and a plane ticket from the probation service and hurried her out of town, this time relocating her in another state. This move may have saved her life, but it would complicate everything and ultimately cost the authorities in their efforts to put Robinson behind bars.

When the two agents and Haymes appeared at the probation hearing in a Clay County courtroom, they were more than reluctant to talk about Robinson’s chief accuser or to reveal where Williams had gone.

Robinson’s lawyer, Bruce Houdek, fired back that these tactics were unfair and outside the law. There was “no rational reason,” Houdek told the court in a motion, why the state of Missouri and the FBI agents could not produce Theresa Williams so she could give a sworn deposition on the case. Without her appearance, he argued, Robinson’s probation should not be revoked. Clay County circuit judge John Hutcherson disagreed, also feeling that the young woman could well be in danger and did not have to be physically present to make her accusations known. In late July, Robinson went before the court and was told that he’d violated his probation on three counts. It now seemed a given that he was going to jail for an extended period, but he was unwilling to give up.

He tried to convince the judge that his stellar civic life should keep him out of prison. He enlisted a private organization called the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives to create a handsome booklet that outlined for Judge Hutcherson his many volunteer efforts and his reputation in his community as “an honest and generous person.” The report mentioned Robinson’s work as a Sunday-school teacher and a church elder in Stanley, adding that “Mr. Robinson and his wife have always been involved in community activities.”