Anyone You Want Me to Be (16 page)

In the autumn of 1999, Izabela told her bookstore-owner friend, Robert Meyers, that she would soon be moving away from Kansas City and wouldn’t be coming in anymore. He was disappointed because he was fond of Izabela and sorry to be losing such a steady customer. She told him that her husband would be buying books for her from now on.

Not long after this, Izabela’s shocked parents received an e-mail telling them that she’d recently been married. When her parents sent her a message asking for their new son-in-law’s name, she shot back that she wasn’t going to tell them that.

“I am happy, I am wed. I want to be left alone,” she wrote.

She also informed them she would never be returning to Indiana. Her husband was rich, worked for a big company, and traveled often. She would be accompanying him to China and Switzerland. These messages did not exactly sound like Izabela, but when her father e-mailed his daughter saying, “I’m not sure you’re really Izabela,” she responded by mentioning her younger sister’s nickname. This convinced her father that he was really communicating with his daughter. Andrzei and Danuta then invited Izabela and her new husband to come home for Christmas. They received a reply saying, “Not possible, I’m busy.” Another e-mail correspondence from their daughter around this time stated that she’d just been in Switzerland.

In anticipation of Izabela’s twenty-first birthday on April 11, 2000, her parents mailed her a check. Three days later they got one of the last e-mails that had supposedly been written by their daughter: “We spent two weeks in the countryside of China. It is my birthday surprise.” She went on to say that she was enjoying learning new painting and glazing techniques in the Far East. If the words were designed to show her parents that she was doing fine on the other side of the world, the e-mails did not allay their fears.

In Kansas City, Robinson was no longer seen around town with Izabela. He’d spent enough time with her in public that her absence was noticeable. He terminated the lease early at the 901 Edgebrook fourplex, saying that he’d moved out because of his concerns about the other tenants. When people asked him what had become of the colorful young woman with the dramatic appearance, he said that she’d been caught smoking marijuana with her boyfriend and deported back to Czechoslovakia.

Nancy Robinson noticed her absence too. Because Izabela had worked at Specialty Publications, Nancy had been quite aware of her and parts of her relationship with John. Nancy sensed that her husband was attracted to Izabela, and the older woman saw the younger one as a serious threat to her marriage. There had been many other infidelities in the past, but this one seemed more troublesome. John might actually leave this time. After all, the children were now grown and there was less to keep him at home or wed to her. Was he finally ready to break the bonds of his marriage and start over with someone else?

Like the rest of the world, and especially like many people in law enforcement, Nancy did not see her husband clearly, even though she’d lived with him for more than three decades. She did not yet understand what he was capable of doing, and she did not grasp the one thing he would not do: he was never going to divorce his wife. Their bond was beyond words and beyond understanding. It raised the uncomfortable possibility that love is more complex and stranger than anyone has yet defined.

I
n summertime, the elm trees near La Cygne, Kansas, are infested with tiny bugs. They infiltrate the eastern part of the state and spin big white cocoons that hang on the branches like spools of cotton candy. They cling to the leaves and weigh them down, gradually eating away at their health and destroying the trees from within. The elms stand there, unable to shake off the disease, dead in the ground. The bugs, known as webworms, are not just lethal but ugly and off-putting in almost every way. In color, texture, and movement, they conjure up maggots and leave an indelible impression.

“They come here in hot weather and take the life right out of your trees,” says a local farmer. “If you’ve ever opened up one of those cocoons and looked inside, you’d never forget it. It’s gruesome. It makes you shiver. There are thousands of awful little things crawling around on top of each other. They stay with you afterwards and can bring on nightmares and thoughts of death. It makes you want to get a torch and put a flame to the whole bag.”

The blighted trees detract from the subtle beauty of the landscape around La Cygne. Modest hills grow stands of maple and cottonwood, while the pastures are filled with brown-eyed Susans and red clover. Wild turkey and deer roam the underbrush, quail huddle in coveys in the hedgerows. The Marais des Cygnes River flows through eastern Kansas, bringing in fishermen and their steel canoes, which on warm days glide slowly up and down the wide banks of the silent steam. This countryside evokes another time and feels more than seventy miles away from Kansas City.

La Cygne has a thousand people and takes its name from the French word for swan. Legend has it that a beautiful Indian princess and a great chief fled her angry father and became lost in turbulent waters in this area, but were saved after turning into swans and surfacing in the river. The nineteenth-century French settlers in Kansas named the river Marais des Cygnes (“marsh of the swans”). Today images of swans are printed on the maroon-and-white banners that hang from the light poles on the two-lane blacktop leading into La Cygne, and Main Street features big planters shaped like swans. Nothing could look more innocent than this part of Kansas, but that innocence is something of an illusion. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, drug dealers specializing in marijuana were first drawn here because of its remoteness from the general population and from law enforcement. In time, their business grew and spread. By the midnineties, a handful of methamphetamine labs were operating in the state, but by the turn of the century more than seven hundred were up and running. That number would grow even more. Even out here on the Midwestern prairie, where coyotes howled at night at the clear black sky, things were never quite what they seemed.

In the late nineties, Robinson sold his property in Big Pine Key, Florida, and purchased sixteen and a half acres outside La Cygne. The land, which lay six miles northwest of the town and held some outbuildings and a pond, cost him $36,670. He eventually moved a trailer onto the property, installing a phone line inside it. The trailer sat back a couple hundred yards from the gravel road that ran in front of his acreage and was protected from view on one side by a row of trees. A pole barn stood on an edge of the land. People passing by on the road would barely notice the trailer or the outbuildings or the small body of water. The farm was an isolated escape from life in the city. Robinson enjoyed getting in his pickup and heading south toward the farm, sometimes stopping in La Cygne for gas or a meal at the town’s café. He was friendly to the local people but kept to himself. In this rural setting he donned blue jeans and work shirts, unlike the preppy shirts and slacks he wore in Olathe. Among these folks, he portrayed himself as a weekend rancher, a man who left his urban identity behind in Kansas City by driving for sixty minutes. The problem was that he never really looked or sounded like a farmer.

Now in his midfifties, Robinson was balding, pudgy, and slightly below average height. His hair, what remained of it, was going either gray or white. He wore glasses that set off his baby face and clear blue eyes. He had no distinguishing features but looked bland, harmless. He looked soft in the body and cheeks, soft in the hands, like somebody who’d never done much physical labor. When he spoke, he did not stumble over words as did so many rural people or have to work to put together full sentences. He could talk fast about many different subjects, and his voice carried a trace of the Chicago area he’d come from. Upbeat and naturally exuberant, he had the demeanor of a natural-born salesman. But around La Cygne, he was usually subdued, never wanting to call attention to himself.

He didn’t have much to do with his rural neighbors, although he’d gotten into a fracas with one of them over a property line. Folks in the countryside rarely saw him out working on his land or fishing in the small pond near the trailer, and they never saw him taking pictures of himself. He liked to set up a camera outside in the open air, where he took photos of himself dressed as a dude farmer. Back in Olathe, while his wife worked all day as the manager of Santa Barbara Estates, he surfed the chat rooms and bulletin boards, constantly looking for someone new to send these pictures to.

His urban neighbors occasionally saw Robinson puttering in his yard or leaving in his pickup. They never imagined that he had five computers behind the walls of his home or that he was exploring Web sites they couldn’t have conceived of. They viewed him as an energetic and pleasant businessman who was always busy, too busy to talk, always coming and going and sticking his hand out the window of his pickup to give them a wave. They perceived him as a community asset because he put up the best Christmas decorations, and that statue of St. Francis in his yard was reassuring. The Robinsons were churchgoing people, active at Santa Barbara Estates, and never caused anyone trouble—except for the occasional lewd comments that John directed at women in the mobile home park. But everyone had his little eccentricities, didn’t he? In America’s heartland, folks trusted one another more easily than in some other places and rarely bothered to look deeply into someone’s background, as long as that individual made a nice appearance and seemed decent and sincere. Most people wanted to think the best of others.

Down at the farm, Robinson put up fences and cleared out underbrush and worked on the trailer’s run-down deck. At Santa Barbara Estates, he’d befriended a shy young maintenance man named Carlos Ibarra, who was originally from Mexico. Nancy had hired Carlos, and John had taught him much about repair work. Carlos was grateful for the job and the assistance. Sometimes the men fixed things together and the older one boasted to the younger one about keeping women in local hotels for sexual purposes. He showed Carlos a picture of a nude woman in a sexual pose, with her legs and hands tied to a table, telling Carlos that she was his girlfriend. When the two of them rode around Kansas City in Robinson’s pickup, Robinson said that he’d like to have a pretty Mexican girl for a companion, implying that because of all the things he’d done for Carlos, the young man should now help him fulfill this desire. Carlos listened politely but didn’t say a lot. He was in an awkward position. He liked Nancy Robinson because she’d given him a job, but now her husband was telling him about his affairs and showing him disturbing photos and seeking an uncomfortable favor. Carlos only wanted to keep working at Santa Barbara Estates and drawing a paycheck.

A Mexican girl wasn’t the only thing Robinson asked him for. In time, when Carlos’s mother, Lidia Ponce, came to visit him from Veracruz, Robinson told Carlos to ask her to take four or five light blue, light yellow, and light green envelopes and letters back home to Mexico. From there, she was to mail the letters to people in the States. Robinson gave Carlos $10 for stamps and explained that a friend of Robinson’s owed money to a bank and was on the run from the authorities and wanted people to think he was in Mexico. Lidia did exactly what her son requested and mailed out the letters from the Fiesta Inn Hotel.

On three occasions, Robinson invited Carlos to go with him down to the farm. Once the young man fished in the pond, another time he helped Robinson move the trailer onto the land, and during the final visit he helped the boss’s wife add a deck to the mobile home. Then Robinson asked him for another favor. He said that he wanted to make a fishing dock for the pond and needed several large barrels for the project. He asked Carlos specifically to find four eighty-five-gallon barrels built to hold fuel or other liquids, and to find lids for the barrels with holes in the top. The barrels would be used to keep the dock afloat. Carlos did not purchase the barrels himself but told Robinson about someone who could sell him just what he was looking for. The man, according to Carlos, was asking $15 per barrel.

I
n 1998, Robinson had reconnected with a Canadian woman he’d known since 1963, when he was nineteen and she was fifteen. Barbara Sandre was now in her fifties, with short blond hair, a heavy build, and a face that evoked Tammy Faye Bakker. In their youth, Robinson and Sandre had become friends and then written to each other for several years before losing touch. In 1969 or 1970, he reestablished contact by visiting her in Canada. She eventually moved to England, where she started a translation business, and they lost touch again. In 1993, Robinson rekindled the friendship by sending her parents a letter, which they forwarded to Barbara in Great Britain.

“He was in the States and I was in England,” she once recalled, adding that she did not think it was odd to hear from him after a lapse of more than a decade.

The letter launched a new round of exchanges by mail and phone. She’d become separated from her third husband and he wanted her to visit him in Kansas City. He liked to regale her with stories about his life’s adventures over the past several decades, telling her that he was connected to all kinds of secret organizations. He also told her that he had adopted grown children. He asked her if she would mind mailing some letters back to the States for his daughter Kim, after he’d sent them to her. He explained that Kim was collecting postmarks from Europe. Barbara mailed two letters for Robinson, both of which were sent to her already addressed. She did not look closely at the return addresses she mailed them from—one in France and one in Switzerland. Sandre willingly did other mailings for him, whenever he asked.

Barbara was a good listener and a good talker. She could speak almost as quickly as Robinson and had a sharp mind. She ran her own business, Berlin Associates, Ltd., which translated German into English and vice versa. Compared to some of the women he had become intimate with, she was practical, down-to-earth, and had her own financial resources. She had, in fact, given Robinson part of the money to buy the farm near La Cygne. She was not, however, perhaps so astute when assessing men or potential partners.

They began exchanging e-mails every day and she made a trip to Kansas to see him (her sexual encounters with Robinson did not involve S&M). Nancy Robinson figured out that her husband had taken up with a new woman and had apparently found something containing Sandre’s address in Britain. Nancy was upset enough to compose a letter to Barbara and fired it off to England, telling her that she was Robinson’s wife. Then Sandre fired off an e-mail to Robinson.

“I just got a letter from your wife,” Barbara wrote him.

“What wife?” he replied.

Who is this woman, Nancy Robinson? Barbara demanded to know. He explained that she was not his wife but someone he had hired when his kids were small. This woman was now baby-sitting his daughter’s children. Robinson implied that Nancy had been a problem in the past and said a court order was even in place so that she couldn’t harass his family anymore. If this message seemed confusing and bizarre, it did not stop this businesswoman from making plans to uproot herself from England and move to Kansas City. She believed that Robinson was not married in spite of Nancy’s letter, and she had another reason for going.

Robinson was, as she once described him to the police, “a caring individual.” She felt certain that if she relocated to be near him, they would work well as a couple. In July 1999, she uprooted herself and came to Kansas City. Because of her alien status, she needed a cosigner to rent her first apartment and he performed this role. They opened a joint checking account and she worked at his publishing business, helping produce a mobile home magazine.

“He told me he had a government job,” she once said. “He told me he worked for the CIA. He was an assistant director.”

She soon moved again, this time to an unfurnished duplex in Overland Park. Robinson filled the new place with things he’d been keeping in storage: books, furniture, dishes, and other housewares. He told Sandre that some of the items had come from estate sales. He stocked the apartment with three hundred to four hundred occult type volumes, the authors ranging from Anne Rice to Madame Blavatsky. Barbara found this choice of literature odd and was not interested in reading it, but she kept the books anyway. Robinson never told her where they had come from and she never probed. One household item he gave her was a Hungarian coffeemaker. Another was a Polish mortar and pestle, which she placed on the mantel of her duplex. Another was a large orange impressionistic painting, which she hung on her living room wall. She was especially pleased with the canvas because it had been signed by Robinson himself, and she believed that he was the artist. He also gave her some attractive green-and-maroon cotton sheets, which did not come with pillowcases.

To Barbara’s disappointment, once she’d made a great effort to live near him, she didn’t see nearly as much of Robinson as she’d hoped to. He only visited her during the day, and when he dropped by, they almost never left the apartment. They usually had sex and then he departed, but even that didn’t happen often. She assumed that he was busy with his work and didn’t push him to spend more time with her.

She filled her days by shopping for gifts for Robinson and making new acquaintances. When he asked for her help, she willingly gave it. Once she went with him to a run-down section of Kansas City, where he picked up a stun gun for a purpose that he didn’t make clear to her. He’d ordered it over the phone but purchased it in her name, telling Barbara that “a colleague from another country needed it.” Maybe this was part of his work for the CIA. She never saw the gun again.

On another occasion, in October 1999, she went with a friend to a Sam’s Club. Coming down the aisle right in front of them were Robinson and Nancy, walking side by side, and he was pushing a cart. Barbara was startled to see him—and even more startled to see him with another woman.

“I’m going down a row thinking that looks like JR coming toward me,” she has said. “I about ran over his toe.”

The couple passed by Barbara so closely they almost ran over her foot.

“He looked right through me,” she said, “like he’d never seen me before in my life.”

Barbara assessed the other woman, taking in the color of her graying hair, her glasses, her age, her clothing, and her demeanor. She thought Nancy looked older than JR, as she always referred to him. Barbara immediately went home and angrily e-mailed Robinson, telling him that she’d just seen him at Sam’s Club with another woman.

He denied even being in Kansas City and said that wasn’t possible.

“I couldn’t have been [at Sam’s Club],” he wrote back. “I was in Russia.”

This incident did not cause Sandre to stop seeing Robinson, but it did help motivate her to surveil him, just as Nancy had done in the past. Barbara had kept the letter that Nancy had mailed her in England, which had the return address of 36 Monterey Lane in Olathe. Barbara printed up a detailed map of Olathe off the Internet and enlisted a friend to drive with her to this address. She spotted JR’s white Dodge pickup parked out front of the mobile home. She did not know where JR lived, but it looked to her as though he lived right here. When she confronted him this time with what she’d seen, he gave her a quick but complex answer, showing just how fast he could work. He told her that his daughter often used his truck and stored it for him at this residence when he was out of town. He said that relatives of his daughter’s husband owned 36 Monterey Lane and that his daughter worked at a fire station nearby. Nothing in this explanation caused Barbara to end the relationship.

Robinson had been expanding his more legitimate Internet work by introducing himself to a local Web site designer named Steve Gwartney. He wanted Gwartney to help him develop an on-line version of Robinson’s modular-homes magazine, and the designer produced a site that fit all his specifications. It linked browsers to both industry retailers and trade associations and had a feature called “J.R.’s Comments,” which offered a picture of a smiling Robinson accompanying his advice. He wrote about the best modular home styles and tips for how they could hold their value. His presentation was convincing enough to make him appear like an expert in the field. Yet Steve Gwartney, who had a lot of Internet experience, felt that Robinson was an on-line novice who didn’t know his way around cyberspace. Steve had no concept of the technical knowledge the man had gained in prison and no idea that he was currently running five computers out of his home and trolling various Web sites and chat rooms, under several names, including Slavemaster, Jim Turner, and JT.

Barbara Sandre didn’t know Robinson was surfing these parts of the Net, either. She wasn’t aware of his cyber-life or how many women he was interacting with daily in other parts of Kansas City. She’d wanted intimacy and love with Robinson but was settling for much less. What struck her most was how busy he always was, always running across town and taking care of a hundred details that he never talked much about. After a while, Barbara decided to move back to Canada, and she and Robinson had discussed that he might join her north of the border during the spring of 2000. They’d talked about living together in Canada because she had business contacts there and they’d be better off financially in that country. Most of her clients paid her in German or English currency, and the rates of exchange were not as good for her in the United States as they were in Canada. She and Robinson were thinking of pooling their resources, but she’d agreed, as she once put it, to be the main wage earner in their “family.” She’d clearly taken the next step emotionally with him and had been led to believe that he had too.

He may have sensed that his time in the States was running out and that he was going to have to prepare for a future elsewhere. He needed an escape strategy because his life in Kansas City was getting more and more complicated, both on-line and off. And he was about to start making mistakes. The master juggler of identities, women, and relationships was finally overextending himself. There were too many needs to fill, too many people wanting his time and energy, too many stories to keep straight. His wife knew about Barbara Sandre too, and Nancy did not like what she’d learned about this latest affair. She and John were beginning to argue about Barbara and the arguments would only intensify. It was astounding that Robinson had been able to keep so many parts of his life separate and functioning for so long, but the web he’d woven around so many others was beginning to ensnare him.

Down on the farm, Robinson’s neighbor to the west was Wayne Burchett. The men got to know each other and Robinson let Burchett run cattle on his property in exchange for Burchett’s clearing out weeds on Robinson’s sixteen and a half acres. Robinson’s only stipulation was that the man not let his livestock in Robinson’s barn. Robinson had plans for this barn that included more than agriculture. He once told Alecia Cox that he wanted to take her down to his “ranch,” as he called it, for “lots of sex.” He wanted to tie her up naked in the barn, have intercourse, and “come back and fuck” some more, as Alecia once put it. But she declined his offer. She never made it to the farm even though Robinson had once made plans to take her there. The morning that she’d awakened before him in the motel room—the same morning that she later believed he was going to kill her—he had told her that they needed to go to the farm to drop off her car before they left for Europe.

Robinson and Burchett agreed to their trade and rarely saw one another again. Things did not go so smoothly with Robinson’s neighbor to the east.

Retia Grant and her husband lived on the other side of Robinson’s property, and by the fall of 1999, these neighbors had yet to meet him. Entering middle age, Retia was a small woman with long, thinning brown hair. She was deeply religious and took the words of the Bible to heart. She was polite and unassuming and would go out of her way to avoid causing trouble with someone living next to her. One day after Bible study, she and a friend were out gathering bittersweet, a bunch of orange berries prominent in Kansas in autumn. After her friend left, Retia noticed that one of her sixteen cats, named Explorer, had wandered onto a far corner of Robinson’s property, near his pole barn.

Retia and one of her eight dogs (named Montana) followed after. As they approached the barn, Retia heard a strange sound, a banging and clanging, as if metal were striking something hard. An orange car was backed up to the barn. Retia and the dog came closer and heard the sound again. Walking into the barn, she realized that she was not alone.

The barn had a skylight and the sun’s afternoon rays were streaming down from it and illuminating a man holding a shovel. Robinson wore a dark shirt and dark jeans, with a ball cap on his head. He was standing in a knee-high trench. He’d been digging two large holes in the barn’s dirt floor but was unable to go any deeper because the blade of his shovel had hit bedrock. As Retia and Montana came into the barn, suddenly the digging, the banging and clanging, ceased. It grew extremely quiet as Robinson looked at the woman and her dog.

As she tried to introduce herself, Robinson unleashed a string of profanities, telling her to get out of his barn and off his property—or he would “take care” of her animals. She tried to apologize but he was so enraged it did no good. He just kept yelling. The dog, sensing danger, moved in between Retia and the livid man. The shocked woman retrieved both of her pets and left as quickly as she could. After telling her husband what had happened, he was concerned enough to move their clothesline farther away from Robinson’s property. The Grants went out of their way to avoid any more contact with their neighbor.