Anyone You Want Me to Be (14 page)

In the fall of 1998, Alecia wanted Robinson to use his influence to help her get a job in entertainment. She gave him some of her publicity photos and he said he needed some documents holding her Social Security number. She gave up her apartment after he told her that he wanted to hire her to travel overseas on business with him. He wanted her to “schmooze” clients in London, Paris, and Australia. He put her up in a Best Western hotel before the trip commenced and said he’d take care of her passport application. The departure date kept shifting, and Alecia’s family members grew skeptical about the job. Robinson asked her to write travel letters to her relatives on pastel stationery. When she asked why she needed to do this now, he explained that they would be so busy while abroad that she wouldn’t have time for such details. He told her to date them in the future and gave her the actual dates, insistent that she do this.

The evening before they were supposed to leave for London, Robinson did something unusual, in spite of his decades of infidelity. He spent the entire night outside his home with one of his lovers. When he arrived at the hotel in his white Dodge Ram pickup, Alecia noticed that it had a trailer hitched to the back and a rack of clothing on the bed. The next morning Alecia woke up around five while Robinson was still asleep. She awakened him, which angered him. He was upset because she’d gotten up before him. She didn’t understand why he was so annoyed. He jumped out of bed, showered, and quickly left after saying that he had errands to run. He told her to meet him at a restaurant at ten that morning to make final preparations for the trip. She went there and waited for him but he never arrived or called.

She phoned him again and again to ask what had happened, but he never responded. She was left without a job or a place to live and was forced to stay with relatives. A few months later, Alecia placed another ad in the same alternative paper and once more Robinson answered it. She was glad to hear from him, eager to resume their affair. Like many other women, she genuinely liked him, even when he wasn’t giving her money. His attraction to women was so strong that some females found him irresistible. He explained to her that he’d bolted earlier because he was embarrassed by her behavior, accusing her of infidelity. He couldn’t travel with someone he didn’t trust. He couldn’t tolerate someone he couldn’t control. They restarted the relationship, and in the summer of 1999, Robinson convinced her to give him Power of Attorney over her affairs. By this time he was seeing a number of other women, so he and Cox gradually drifted apart.

Only much later did Alecia have a major revelation. She believed that the morning Robinson had angrily awakened next to her in the motel, he was making plans of a sort that did not involve world travel. She felt that he was going to kill her later that same day. That was why he’d wanted her to sign the papers and give him the Power of Attorney. The trailer on the back of his pickup, she realized, could have been used for transporting a body. She’d disrupted his plans by getting up before him, and he’d left the motel in a fury, something she hadn’t understood for several more years. Then it made sense. Her accidental awakening that morning had saved her life.

B
y the midnineties, Robinson stayed extremely busy romancing women of different ages, ethnic backgrounds, physical types, and educational and economic circumstances. If he’d seemed in a hurry before, now he was a whirlwind of activity, both on-line and off. He had cyber-affairs going on in, among other places, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, England, and Canada. He tried to persuade women in the United States and internationally to come to Kansas City and be a part of his life. Some turned down his requests but a few others would willingly and optimistically agree to uproot themselves and travel to meet this charming and persuasive country gentleman. He also asked a number of them to sign “slave contracts” similar to the standard one below:

SLAVE CONTRACT

This is a basic contract that may be used between a Master and a Slave.

The contract allowed the slave to use a “safeword” when things became too painful or harmful, either physically or emotionally. The slave agreed to finish any assignment within two full days and to answer all the master’s communications within twenty-four hours. The contract continued:

To Robinson’s delight and perhaps to his amazement, there seemed to be an almost unlimited pool of women willing to let a powerful figure take charge of their lives. For them, the “master/slave” relationship was based more on an emotional dependence than a physical one. None were looking for someone to damage them physically, but all were searching for an emotional escape through elaborate fantasies. They were easy targets for someone like the “successful entrepreneur” and “gentleman farmer” from Kansas.

Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Jim Jones all had personalities similar to Robinson’s, but none of them had employed their skills in cyberspace. None had had the chance to control the world from a distance just by sitting at a keyboard and luring people in. All three were dynamic and articulate, but more than anything else, they knew how to read and exploit others. Each promised a better life to everyone who joined up with him. (As Manson once said in a prison interview, “Everyone is looking for something to believe in. You just have to find out what it is they’re looking for.”) Robinson quickly found out what these women were looking for, and over the years he was improving his skills as an astute “victim profiler,” adept at speaking their language, whether he was addressing a mayor’s assistant or a prostitute or a stranger on-line. His cherubic appearance, captured in digital photos of himself, made him seem nonthreatening, and he always turned this in his favor. Once he spotted weaknesses—and there are weaknesses inside every human system and every human being—he knew what to do next.

But what about the women who responded to him? What were they drawn to and why would they expose themselves to such a man?

Says a female who’s dabbled in on-line romance herself, “In my own life, the more volatile a man was and the more he reflected anger or rage, the more I wanted to comfort and nurse him. Men have elevated aggression and sexuality. Women have elevated nursing and caretaking. The more of a caretaker you are, the more you will be drawn to a predator with aggravated sexual proclivities. Always with the idea of making him better, improving him. You always convey to him, in one way or another, ‘If you can use my time, my skills, my brain, my body, go ahead. Everything I have is yours.’ This is the mechanism of mating, of pair bonding, and you do it in order to make the best life possible together. That’s hardwired into women. This holds true for Robinson’s wife and for the other women, even those involved in the S-and-M world.

“The latter group wants to walk hand in hand with danger. That’s the highest tightrope you can be on, the biggest thrill. It’s like going to Las Vegas and putting all your money down on one roll of the dice. The risk is that you’ll lose it, but it’s no fun if you don’t bet all of it. Being with a dangerous man is the highest thrill. And the more damaged and unstable you are, the more you will seek the highest thrill of self-endangerment. If a man can understand having all that sexual aggression and all the violent impulses that men sometimes express—but not using those things against women—then maybe he can understand how a woman could put herself in danger but not think that something will go wrong.

“There’s a denial at work here, of course, and that’s what enables you to take the risk. The denial comes from our relationship with the life force. That’s a very large thing with women—that fundamental connection to giving and nurturing life itself. Some women over-rely on it when they are in very bad relationships. They say to themselves, ‘Something bad won’t happen to me. I will be saved.’ They go into these things knowing they’re putting themselves on the line, but they will somehow be protected and come out of it. The only thing that can really save any of them is their own decision to get out of these circumstances.”

Says another woman who has engaged in cyber-sex, “For many women, fooling around on the Net is about power. You can create the fantasy and carry it out and stay in control of the situation. You can use your sexuality to have power over the man, but you can do it in the safety and privacy of your home. You don’t actually have to be there with him. You don’t have to have anyone lying on top of you, doing something you might not like. And if it gets to be too much, you can just log off and it’s over. No questions asked.”

Says another woman who’s flirted in chat rooms, “Many, many women have been in relationships they knew were not quite right, because they wanted to be supported or helped out financially. Money caused them to go along with things they never would have otherwise.”

Robinson was in some ways like a pimp with a stable of women both on-line and off. In the world of prostitution, a pimp has to assess each of his women’s needs and vulnerabilities. Some have to be supplied with the drug of their choice. Others crave an emotional fix and to be told how much someone cares for them. Still others respond most deeply to fear. One way or another, the man must psychologically pinpoint the core desires and fulfill them to keep everything functional and running smoothly. The pimp’s role requires innate intelligence, flexibility, resourcefulness, and a peculiar sensitivity to women. The police believed that Robinson had been involved with prostitution in the 1980s, and he now seemed to be transferring those skills to other realms. In the nineties, he was a father figure to some women, a lover to others, a husband to his wife, and even played the part of a fiancé. Virtually any need he saw in the women around him, he was both anxious and able to fill.

Robinson met a woman from Tennessee in a chat room and offered her a position working with computers at his new company, Specialty Publications. She was more interested in pursuing a personal relationship with the “Slavemaster” than she was in taking the job. He had her sign a slave contract, and one of his demands was that she turn over to him about $17,000, including all the money that over the years she’d placed into an individual retirement account. She made a check out to Specialty Publications and he promised to reinvest her money, but she never saw the funds again. Later, when she questioned him about this and eventually tried to get her money back, Robinson ignored her inquiries and demands.

Like other women and men he’d conned, she was at first hesitant to come forward and go after her lost savings, because of the nature of their relationship. She didn’t want to be embarrassed by the slave contract. But once her money had been withdrawn from the IRA, the Internal Revenue Service asked her to account for all of it (tax penalties for early IRA withdrawals can be quite stiff ). She was stuck with trying to explain to federal agents what had become of her retirement account. She hired a lawyer to recover her losses but the money was gone.

While she was seeking legal recourse, Robinson was having on-line contact with a woman in Canada, who also signed a slave contract and agreed to follow his orders via the Net. One of his commands was to brand herself with his initials, which she said she would do but only if they met in person (they never did). On-line, he met a woman from Kentucky, a grandmother who owned a business. He’d started this affair by responding to her ad stating that she was looking for someone over forty-five and financially stable. Under the name Jim Turner, he e-mailed her back the standard photo of himself in cowboy attire smiling in a Kansas pasture, presenting himself as a wealthy, hardworking businessman and devoted father.

For about three months, the woman and Robinson e-mailed one another about their mutual interest in sadomasochistic role-playing. She claimed to be very independent in all parts of her life except the sexual arena. She and Robinson had found one another through a personal ad on a BDSM (Bondage-Discipline-SadoMasochism) Web site and her screen name was Lauralei. She took up with Robinson not just because of their shared sexual tastes, but because he struck her as a sensitive man who was willing to talk, both on-line and by phone, about personal, emotional matters. He wasn’t afraid of feelings or intimacy that went beyond just the physical. He cared and was willing to express it. After hearing about her brother’s death from cancer, he consoled her at length, much as he’d done earlier with Sheila Faith when she’d spoken of her trials with Debbie’s medical problems, telling Lauralei that she should lean on him because he was compassionate and strong.

He wanted her to come to Kansas and make their on-line relationship more than virtual. She found the offer alluring but needed to think about it.

During his conversations with Lauralei, Robinson mentioned another woman whom he’d met on-line, a young college student from Indiana. Robinson recounted to Lauralei how the student had left Purdue University and come to Kansas City to be with him. He described how her “gothic” appearance had startled and embarrassed him. She wore black lipstick and black clothes and had pierced various parts of her body. She was far more dramatic-looking, he confessed over the Net, than he’d imagined or hoped for. He was a businessman, after all, the head of a company, and he had to keep certain aspects of his life completely private. When they went out together in public, he tried to distance himself from her by claiming that she was a friend’s daughter. Because of all these things, Robinson told Lauralei, he’d decided to send the young woman back to Indiana. Although he gave a vivid description of the college student, he never mentioned her name.

In time, Robinson failed to respond to Lauralei’s e-mails and she asked him why. He said that he was away from his computer a lot because he was spending time at his recently purchased farm, about an hour’s drive south of Olathe. He invited her out to see the farm, but she turned him down, in part because he never wanted to reveal much about himself or his background. Eventually, she lost interest in Robinson and stopped sending him electronic messages. She’d almost forgotten about this relationship until sometime later, when the police contacted her and wondered why her name appeared on his phone bill. She told them about their discussions regarding her brother and how thoughtful and sympathetic the man from Kansas had been after her sibling had died. Only gradually did she realize that Robinson had been sending the same cowboy photo of himself not just to her, but to women all across the country. When she tried to retrieve his old e-mail, it was too late.