Anyone You Want Me to Be (18 page)

“I want you to get your TENS unit set up,” he says. “I want to see how it works.”

After fiddling with it for a while, he tells her that you’d “have to be an electrical engineer to use this thing.” Suzette giggles at him.

In some ways, she seemed more relaxed than he was, more casual about what they were doing, like a young person exploring the limits of her sexuality in an unabashed manner. She would come out of her slave character and talk to him like a friend and lover while he remained in the stern position of master. In her happy-go-lucky Suzette manner, she taught him about the TENS unit, but he remained gruff and harsh. Being in control was obviously not just important to him but an aphrodisiac. Her personality—her friendliness and openness, her playfulness and liveliness—came through until he began spanking her, and then she resumed her slave persona. To her it seemed like a game, but to him it was something more.

After putting aside the TENS device, he lay down on the bed on his back and she again gave him oral sex. When she mounted him, he talked to her almost nonstop, occasionally tugging on the nipple chain. He repeatedly used the most demeaning words a man can use with a woman, as if this would keep Suzette at an emotional distance.

“The most important thing you are in your life is my slave,” he said, calling her a “whore,” a “bitch,” and a “slut.” He moved around behind her and grabbed her hair and pulled back her head, entering her and continuing his tirade.

“Did you sign the contract?” he said.

She nodded.

“Would you give your life for your master?”

“Yes, master.”

He spanked her again and kept talking to her in a flat and cold voice. When he finally ejaculated, he moved off camera. Suzette positioned herself in front of the lens and three golf balls dropped out of her, one by one.

As the encounter was ending, something else popped up on the videotape, something totally unexpected. Robinson had evidently not brought a new cassette to the motel, but had filmed the action over the children’s movie
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The film clip was a perfect reflection of Robinson’s daily life. When he wasn’t carrying on S&M sessions in Kansas City motels, he was playing the role of doting grandfather.

A
fter Suzette had come to Kansas, she’d continued trading e-mails with Lore Remington. They talked about her new job and upcoming travel. At 2
A
.
M
. on the morning of February 29, 2000, the two women exchanged e-mails. They didn’t speak again online until eight o’clock that evening. Suzette said she was doing paperwork and they discussed her employment.

“Just don’t fuck the boss,” Lore wrote her at 8:42.

A minute later Suzette replied, “LOL. It would be screwing up a good thing if I did.”

An hour later they communicated again, this time talking about one of Lore’s former masters. Their dialogue continued off and on deep into the night. At 12:38
A
.
M
. on March 1, Suzette wrote to her friend that she was not “doing” JR, but she followed this up with another LOL. While Lore was exchanging messages with Suzette she was also speaking with Badass One, another member of their on-line group. The banter went on until 3
A
.
M
. Perhaps Lore and Suzette stayed on so long because this was the last chance they would have to speak over the Net for a while. Suzette and Robinson, according to his plans, were going to be leaving later that day for a trip to California and then a cruise to Hawaii on his yacht. Suzette had told her friends and family that she would be breaking down her computer for the trip.

In between her e-mails to Lore, Suzette called her mother in Michigan. It was 1
A
.
M
. eastern standard time and Carol Trouten was getting ready to close the Big Boy restaurant she managed. She was totaling up the figures for the day when the phone rang. Suzette sounded lonesome, the same way she’d often sounded since leaving home for Kansas, but she was trying to remain optimistic. She told her mother the same thing she told Lore, that she was leaving for the West Coast tomorrow and a trip across the Pacific.

That morning, Robinson called Suzette at the Guest House Suites to say that it was finally time for them to leave, but he wanted to do one last thing before taking her out of Kansas. He thought she should see his property down by La Cygne. As Robinson came to get her, Suzette took apart her computer, which she felt would be placed in storage for the duration of her travels. Then she left.

At 11:43 that morning, a call was made from the number of the phone in Robinson’s trailer at the farm. A little more than two hours later, he arrived at the kennel that held Suzette’s Pekingese. He checked out the dogs, complaining about the size of the bill for their boarding: $477. An hour or so after that, he was captured on videotape paying the account for Suzette’s room at the Guest House Suites. He also stopped by the unit he’d recently rented at Need Mor Storage in Olathe, where he dropped off some of the young woman’s possessions. To enter the facility, he had to log in with an electronic card. At each location he visited on March 1—the farm, the kennel, the motel, and the storage unit—he left behind a trace, creating a timeline of his appearances.

After picking up the dogs, Robinson took Hari and Peka back to Santa Barbara Estates and left them outside Nancy Robinson’s manager’s office in a traveling cage. Then he called animal control in Olathe to report the two dogs running loose at this address. That afternoon Rodney McClain, an animal control officer, came to the trailer park and saw the pair of handsome purebred dogs without collars freely roaming the property. He was struck by how well groomed and friendly the dogs were; they were clearly not strays. McClain picked up the Pekingese and transported them back to an animal shelter. According to Olathe law, if the dogs weren’t adopted soon, they would have to be destroyed.

Hari and Peka were supposed to be put to sleep eight days later, on March 9, unless someone came forward to claim or adopt them. On March 6, Vicki and Dan Wagner, a local couple, took the female dog and named her Tara. That same day, Ginny Holbert, a volunteer at the Second Chance Pet Adoption, gave the male to Patty Lusher, a member of an animal care group.

On March 2, Robinson reassembled Suzette’s computer and spent several hours going through her e-mail, searching for her passwords and other data. He wanted to know everything he could about how she communicated in cyberspace, whom she spoke to on-line, what their addresses were, and what sort of language Suzette had used when talking with her friends. Using this information, he would soon begin sending out e-mails to some of Suzette’s acquaintances, the messages indicating that she and her dogs had finally left Kansas City behind and were off on a wonderful trip.

On March 6, Carol Trouten received what looked like a computer generated letter on pastel-colored paper. It was signed by her daughter, but a number of things about it seemed wrong. Carol believed that it contained too much information, was written like a travelogue, and left out the kind of personal details that she would have expected from Suzette. More troubling, the letter had a Kansas City postmark. The letter had been written on February 28 and, according to what Suzette had told her mother, should have been mailed from the West Coast. The postmark implied that Suzette had sent it a few days later from Kansas City, which didn’t make sense.

“She shouldn’t have been in Kansas to mail that letter,” her mother once said.

Carol soon received another computer-generated letter, this one postmarked from San Jose, California. It was typed and signed by Suzette and said, “Well, I’m off on the adventure of a lifetime.”

“I knew this was not from my daughter,” Carol said later. “There was no personality to it at all.” These letters had no spelling errors and her daughter was notorious for getting words wrong.

In a strange way, Suzette’s gregarious personality, captured on the videotape Robinson had made with her in the motel room, was leading her mother, who loved her the most, in the right direction. She knew what Suzette sounded like, she could intuit her absence behind the letters, and she sensed something had gone wrong. Robinson could do many things with many people, but he could not re-create the lively Suzette for those who knew her best. Little nuances in language were sending warnings to her mother; more were to come.

In 1996, a middle-aged woman named Jean Glines had worked with Nancy Robinson at a mobile home park. Back then she was married and got to know the Robinsons through her employment. A few years later, she divorced and moved to San Jose. In 2000, she called the Robinson home seeking a reference. She got John, who told her that he was divorced from Nancy and would give her a good recommendation for a new job. He immediately began flirting with her, calling her gorgeous and suggesting they become intimate.

“He wanted to have phone sex,” Glines has said. “I told him that wasn’t my bag.”

Robinson began calling her often, asking her to move to Kansas City and be with him. Her own family was located in California and she had no intention of leaving them. Robinson was disappointed but stayed in contact. In March 2000, he asked her for a favor. He told her that he would send her some letters via FedEx and he wanted her to mail them out immediately from a post office in San Jose. The letters, he explained to her, were an effort on Robinson’s part to protect a woman who was in a bad domestic situation. Glines agreed to help, and the letters were supposed to arrive at her home on March 24, but they didn’t. When Robinson learned this, he “went totally ballistic,” Glines recalls. When they finally did arrive she opened the package and saw three pastel envelopes, yellow, blue, and green. She would later remember that they were going to somewhere in the Midwest, perhaps Michigan, and the return address was either “ST” or “Suze.” Her phone relationship with Robinson ended soon after she mailed them. One letter she sent was received by Carol Trouten, and Carol would get another letter that had been mailed by Lidia Ponce from Veracruz, Mexico.

By mid-March, Carol had not heard from her daughter by phone or e-mail for two weeks. On March 21, the anxious mother received an e-mail telling her that Suzette was about to take off sailing from California. This message, like the others, sounded all wrong—Suzette used different language and had a different tone. Carol was becoming frantic and decided that she had to contact the police—but whom should she phone? She asked another of her daughters, Dawn, to help her. Within a day, Carol had reached the Lenexa Police Department in Johnson County, Kansas (Lenexa is just north of Olathe).

A detective told Carol and her daughter to hold on to any e-mails they’d gotten from Suzette in recent weeks. When Carol was speaking to the police, the subject of the Pekingese surfaced and Suzette’s mother told the detectives that her daughter took the dogs with her everywhere—even when she went shopping, carrying them in a large bag looped over her shoulder. Their small heads always stuck out and amused the other customers. If the dogs were not with her, that likely meant trouble for the young woman. Carol also said that Suzette had sometimes braided the female dog’s fur with beads.

This last detail caught the attention of the police, and an officer began tracing any local dogs that had recently been adopted. This led him to Dan and Vicki Wagner. He called them and said he wanted to stop by their home and examine their new female Pekingese, which they called Tara. The Wagners were startled by the question, but invited him to come on out. The officer took hair samples from Tara and noticed that the fur around her ears was crimped and looked as if it had recently been braided. When he addressed the dog as “Peka,” she immediately responded by cocking her head in his direction. The police were fairly certain they’d found one of Trouten’s dogs, but where was Suzette?

Something besides the young woman was missing. She’d brought several pieces of furniture with her to Kansas City, but they’d disappeared as well. The police eventually traced her name to a storage locker business in Raymore, Missouri, just southeast of Kansas City and across the border from La Cygne, called Stor-Mor for Less. Because Robinson also rented from this outfit, they wondered if he might have some connection to Suzette Trouten. In March, they set up a surveillance camera at Stor-Mor in case he showed up and moved anything into or out of his locker. They also asked the Stor-Mor manager, Loretta Mattingly, to tell them about John Robinson. What sort of an individual was he? Had she noticed anything unusual about his behavior lately? How often did he come down to his storage units? Did he say much to her or to others? Had he aroused any suspicions in Loretta?

She did her best to convince them that they were pursuing the wrong man.

“When the police came out here in March 2000,” she says, “I told them that they had to be after another John Robinson. It couldn’t be mine. He was so personable and friendly. He was very energetic and knowledgeable. A happy person. He would always talk to me and he was always smiling.”

Stor-Mor had four hundred ten-by-fifteen-foot units laid out on a flat lot behind the main office. While Mattingly enjoyed chatting with Robinson and had found nothing suspicious about him, she had noticed that in recent months he’d stopped coming to Stor-Mor even to pay his bill and had begun mailing in his checks.

“I just didn’t think the police could be looking for the same man that I knew,” she says, “but then they showed me a picture of him. It really was him.”

The police didn’t learn anything about Robinson during their surveillance of the business because he never showed up at Stor-Mor. They didn’t learn anything of Suzette’s whereabouts, either. Neither did her mother.

Carol Trouten was used to speaking to her daughter at least once a day, if not more often. The calls had stopped. Suzette’s grandmother, Jenny Trouten, received a pastel-colored letter, posted from Mexico, signed, “Love, Suzette.”

Before leaving for Kansas, Suzette had given her mother Robinson’s home phone, cell phone, and pager numbers. This was out of character for what he’d done in the past, when he’d laid down strict rules for not giving out his personal information or even his real name. The appearance of these letters, combined with not hearing from her daughter, eventually caused Carol to pick up the phone and call Robinson. He was taken aback by this. It took him a while even to understand whom he was talking to, but he quickly recovered and told Carol that Suzette had not accepted his job offer but had taken off with a Jim Turner to sail around the world. Carol tried to be satisfied with this answer, but a short while later she paged him. Robinson tried to appease her by telling her that he’d received an e-mail from Suzette saying she was having a great time in her travels. Carol didn’t believe him. Her instincts told her that Robinson knew much more than he was saying. She countered by saying that she was going to the police with her grave fears. He said there was no need for that. His own college-age daughter, he explained, had once gone to Europe and had acted much the same way toward her parents that Suzette was acting now. That’s just the way kids were. As a mother, she had to understand that and accept it. But she didn’t accept it.