Anyone You Want Me to Be (21 page)

By now, Vickie was “gagging and feeling kind of sick.” Robinson asked her if his semen was sour and explained to her that if he ate celery, it would be sweeter.

Despite her fear and disgust, when Vickie later made contact with her “safe” connection back in Texas, she told her friend that she’d met Robinson and things were fine. She didn’t call again, and she didn’t stop the new affair because, as she once put it, “I wanted him to think that I was worthy of a job opportunity.”

The police, meanwhile, continued listening quietly but intently to the whole scene in the next room.

Robinson abruptly got up, dressed, and prepared to leave, giving her $50 for food and other necessities. She was surprised at this paltry sum, as she’d assumed that he was a wealthy man; after they’d become intimate, she’d at least expected him to take her out to dinner. Before going, he opened his duffel bag and showed Neufeld what struck her as very serious sexual devices: chains, ropes, leather restraints, collars, and floggers. He left the bag in the hotel room. She wondered if all this was more than she could handle. She wondered if she should head back to Texas—now—but she’d signed a contract with Robinson and he’d taken it with him when he’d left the hotel.

After their initial meeting, the psychologist sensed potential trouble with this new man, but she didn’t dwell on her feelings and intuitions. It was too late to change things now anyway, wasn’t it? She’d agreed to most of his terms—and at the moment she was without the cash to return home. She didn’t think her friends would wire her the money to get back to Texas, and she was reluctant to involve her family in her private life. She would stay a while longer and see what developed.

Robinson called the next morning to say that he was having problems with one of his overseas companies but would come by as soon as possible. When he arrived around 11
A
.
M
., she was wearing jeans and a sweater. He asked if she’d looked at any of the sex toys he’d left in her room. She said she had and he asked if anything interested her.

“I told him he had heavy-duty stuff,” she says.

He took off his clothes and asked her to take off hers and put on some spike heels.

“He was laughing as he said this,” she recalls. “I was feeling uncomfortable.”

She didn’t remove her clothes or put on the heels.

“He sat there for a while and got very angry and told me to take my clothes off. He pulled off my sweater. I was afraid. He wanted me to get on the bed on my knees and I did. He put a leather collar around my neck and I said it was a bit tight. He told me to put my hands behind my back and I did. He put cuffs on me. I was afraid.”

The cuffs were attached to the collar.

In most of Vickie’s other BDSM encounters she had had negotiations and talked about what was going to happen. Robinson dictated and forced the next moves. With a collar around her neck and her hands clamped behind her, he again sat on a chair and took pictures of her.

“I told him to stop,” she says. “He laughed and my fear became anger. I said if you don’t stop, I’ll leave and go back to Galveston. He stopped taking pictures. He came over and undid everything and put his clothes on. He said if you want to go back, that’s fine, but if you want a job offer, you’ll have to do what I tell you to do.”

Once more Robinson informed her that she was unsophisticated and didn’t know anything about the S&M lifestyle or what it meant to be a slave. She shouldn’t be bothered by his taking pictures of her. Perhaps she should reconsider their contract, because she wasn’t fulfilling her agreed-upon role. Perhaps she wasn’t ready to make a commitment. If she didn’t change her behavior, he would renege on the job interviews he’d set up for her next week. They argued for a while before he left the hotel.

Later that day, Neufeld called him and apologized for how she’d acted. She’d had time to cool off and think about things, and she’d decided that she wanted to continue the relationship. He accepted her apology and explained that the photos he’d taken of her were solely for his personal use and she didn’t need to be concerned about them going out to others on the Net. She just needed to relax and enjoy what he had to offer. He suggested they meet tomorrow at the hotel and then instructed her to be wearing a velvet ribbon around her neck to symbolize their relationship. Vickie followed his lead, driving to a local mall and purchasing the ribbon. When he arrived at her room the following day, she was wearing it and hoped he would like how it looked.

“I wanted him to perceive me,” she says, “as he wanted to perceive me.”

Once Robinson was in the room, he laid her down on the bed. Then he began doing what he always did—slipping into his master persona and talking the talk.

“He said, ‘How does my slave want it?’ I said nothing. He took his hand and slapped me as hard as I’ve ever felt. Then he slapped me on the other side of the face. You only do in the S-and-M world what you’ve agreed upon.”

In Vickie’s mind, she certainly had not agreed to be slapped this way. Robinson again wanted oral sex and she hesitated but then went ahead. After Robinson was satisfied, he said he had to prepare for a meeting in the Middle East. Things seemed better between them now so they discussed her going back to Texas to make arrangements for her belongings to be packed up and shipped to Kansas. She could take care of this while he was abroad. The plan appeared to be a good one, but then something happened that angered Vickie again. Just before Robinson left, he grabbed her bag of sex toys and took them with him.

“You don’t need these,” he told her, adding something that underscored his fear that she might go down to Texas and never return to Kansas City. “This is one way to get you back.”

The toys had been given to Vickie as gifts and held considerable sentimental value. She wanted them back but didn’t want to start trouble now.

The detectives next door waited patiently and listened to Robinson and Vickie, wondering what would develop next with the couple in Room 120. They heard slapping and barking and wondered if this was just part of the S&M sex play (the barking turned out to be Neufeld’s dog).

When Robinson drove away from the motel with the toys, he didn’t realize that he’d just made another mistake. One had occurred when Suzette Trouten had given her mother his phone numbers. Another had taken place when the employee at Extended Stay America had discovered the slave contract in the trash basket and passed it along to the police. Another had unfolded when he’d taken the dogs back to Santa Barbara Estates and they’d been handed over to the authorities and given new homes. This told everyone who knew anything about Suzette that she wasn’t merely a missing person, but was most likely dead.

But why had she needed to disappear? She didn’t have any monetary resources to steal. She couldn’t be cashed out, not unless he’d sold her to one of his underground connections. With all her doubts about what she was doing in Kansas, couldn’t he have simply packed up her things and sent her back to Michigan? Or did she know too much about Robinson’s past and his secret life? Had he told her or shown her things that were too dangerous to be revealed? Or had he simply reached a point where he believed that he was invincible and could get away with anything with women? So far, he had every reason to think that he could. But the sheer number of women he was juggling and the energy it took to manage the ever-growing complexity of lives and lies finally began to unravel his plans.

Along with everything else, some of the women he was encountering were, like Vickie Neufeld and Alecia Cox, stronger-willed and more resistant. He needed more compliance, needed women who wouldn’t talk back. You couldn’t have dissension and keep playing his game.

Hitting Vickie Neufeld in the face or hog-tying her in the hotel room may have been experiences that she wasn’t quite ready for, but they hadn’t pushed her to call on her safety net or contact the police, but stealing her $700 worth of toys was another matter. They were expensive and losing them in this manner deeply offended her, and if he didn’t bring them back, she was going to take action.

B
efore she left for Galveston, Robinson gave Vickie a little cash for the trip. While she was making plans to move north permanently and find a job in Kansas City, she e-mailed him about putting together references and referrals whom he could contact in setting up interviews for her. He provided her with several addresses of prospective employers but not their phone numbers. Vickie soon received a response from a female who was apparently a nurse; she told Neufeld that Robinson had helped many professional women and that Vickie was lucky to be associated with him.

“Fifty slaves,” she said, “would love to be in your shoes.”

A week passed and Neufeld was still in Texas, not feeling very lucky at the moment. She was waiting to hear from Robinson that a van was about to arrive at her front door and move her furniture to Kansas. Robinson was supposed to have provided this service, but he hadn’t followed through and seven days had evaporated. She concluded that he wasn’t going to help her and she wasn’t going back to Kansas to find a job. The relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Vickie called him and left a message on his business phone, saying, “I feel that you used me. Please send my stuff back.”

He replied with a message of his own, stating that he’d been in Israel, that he was really a colonel in the air force, and that Vickie “needed to think on her own and trust him.” When they got together again, he was going to punish her because she’d doubted him. Confused, she e-mailed the nurse, seeking some clarity.

“Slaves,” the nurse sent back, “don’t argue with masters.”

Robinson began avoiding Vickie’s calls but left her messages that the move was still on. Desperate, Neufeld finally got hold of him, but his timetable for her coming to Kansas remained slippery. Looking for sympathy or maybe just to stall her, he told Vickie that he’d recently been in Tulsa and that his week-old grandchild had had open-heart surgery. She doubted this; she’d checked out his earlier story about flying from Kansas City to Israel and discovered there were no direct flights between the two places.

She was ready to break off all contact with him but wanted her sex toys back. If he didn’t return them, she was going to the police. As soon as she’d made the threat, she started receiving hang-up calls that intimidated and spooked her because they came during the hours when Robinson usually tried to phone her. Each time this happened now, she was prepared for it and blew a whistle into the receiver as hard as she could. Eventually, the hang-ups stopped.

Then Robinson called and told her that if she continued to harass him about the toys, his attorney would let the professional association of licensed psychologists in Texas know that she’d come to Kansas City for an S&M relationship with him. He would expose the nude pictures of her that he’d taken in the hotel room, and these photos would destroy both her personal and professional reputations. (He’d once made a similar threat to Alecia Cox, telling her that if she wouldn’t commit to marrying him, he would show her mother the nude photos of her that he’d taken; he was, of course, already married and had shown no intention of leaving his wife, but it was a way to keep Alecia off-balance and uncertain, more vulnerable to his demands.) Robinson’s threats to Vickie were enough to make Neufeld stop trying to get the toys back—at least for a while.

After thinking about it, she wasn’t willing to back off and decided to call the police, unaware that they already knew that she’d been in Kansas City with a suspect who was under heavy surveillance. He was being surveilled because of the actions of a group of women, of mothers and daughters and friends and lovers, from almost all points on the compass. From the north, Lore Remington and Tammy Taylor were attempting to get Robinson to say something incriminating over the phone or the Internet. From the east, Carol Trouten was also trying to get information out of Robinson. And from Texas, Vickie Neufeld was thinking about filing criminal charges against a man she believed had stolen from her. In some cases, the women did not know of one another or what each was doing, but all of them would use their resources to help law enforcement close in.

While Robinson was seeing Neufeld, he was building yet another online relationship with Jeanna Milliron, a divorced accountant from Texas in her thirties. She was currently unemployed and, like Neufeld, had placed a personal ad on a Web site seeking a relationship in which she would be a submissive. During the past ten years Milliron, a full-figured woman with a soft voice and brown hair framing her baby face, had explored the S&M lifestyle, but she was not interested in experiencing significant degrees of pain. She soon received a response to her ad from “James Turner.” They exchanged basic information and he told her that he ran a couple of businesses—involving publications and growing hydroponic vegetables—and they discussed her going to work for him as well as having a sexual relationship. Because she felt they had similar tastes, she became more comfortable communicating with the man. They began talking on the phone and decided to get acquainted in person to see if the attraction was real.

In early May 2000, Robinson made arrangements for her to come to Extended Stay America and check into Room 120. Once more, the police were told and made preparations to surveil the couple. Milliron arrived in Kansas City by bus and Robinson was there to meet her. She immediately recognized him from the cowboy photo he’d sent her over the Net. He bought her some groceries and took her to the hotel, explaining that he was divorced with grown children. They talked about her being a bookkeeper for his businesses and taking care of his house. She wouldn’t get a salary but he would handle her expenses and pay her bills. When he said good-bye to her after this first meeting at the hotel, he left behind his bag of floggers and cuffs.

The next day they had a sexual encounter at the Extended Stay America, but only after he’d beaten and punished her because she hadn’t assumed “the position” when he’d shown up—she was supposed to have been naked and kneeling in the corner. He was infuriated because when he’d gotten to the room, she’d disobeyed him by having locked the door. In his mind that violated their agreement, so he hit her on the back and breasts. He hit harder than she was anticipating. When the sex was over, he quickly left.

Milliron spent that weekend alone at the motel without hearing from Robinson, which seemed to be part of his pattern with a variety of women whom he’d brought to Kansas City. He would pay extremely close attention to them for a short while, then abandon them in a strange place for several days. By the time he came back, they were eager to see him. When he showed up on Monday, he asked Milliron for her Social Security number for insurance purposes, but this request alarmed her. Jeanna’s instincts told her to give him a false set of numbers, so she did. He then handed her $100 and told her to return to Texas, close out her bank accounts, and be prepared to move back to Kansas City around Mother’s Day. Milliron did as she was told but kept in touch with the man through e-mail. He informed her that he was busy selling one of his companies and affectionately signed his messages, “Hugs, kisses and lashes.”

After storing most of her belongings in Texas, she drove back to Kansas in mid-May. Robinson met her at the Guest House Suites in Overland Park and they continued their sexual relationship (the police were not conducting surveillance at this location as they had been at Extended Stay America). Whenever he arrived at her room, he expected her to be kneeling in the corner naked and wearing makeup, with her hair pulled back behind her head. Even when she complied with his demands, he hit her hard across the breasts and then took pictures of the marks he’d left on her chest. She didn’t want photos snapped of the bruises but he took them anyway. After the sex and violence were over, he would disappear again.

When she complained that she was getting bored being left by herself, he told her to go to the local mall to pass the time. She didn’t want to do this, and during their next encounter he exploded because she wasn’t following his advice. He told her to go back to Texas and that he’d stashed another $100 in the cabinet of the hotel room that she could travel on. By now Milliron had begun to realize that neither the job nor the relationship was going to develop, and this left her feeling angry and humiliated. He’d simply used her. Her hopes for establishing a bond were gone. Jeanna had to do something to strike back at him, even if it was dangerous.

After their last encounter, Jeanna, shaking and in tears, went to the motel lobby and approached a clerk. He showed her a copy of the driver’s license of the man who’d paid for her room, and his real name was not Jim Turner but John Robinson. Milliron went to a phone and tried to call the police, but she was too upset to dial. The clerk took the receiver and helped the nearly hysterical woman make contact with the authorities. A few minutes later, Detective David Brown pulled up in front of the Guest House Suites. He spoke to Jeanna and heard the now familiar details that had come from other women who’d been involved with Robinson. As he listened, Detective Brown was encouraged. He knew that he was closer than ever before to having what the police needed—a live witness who could describe how Robinson operated and tortured his lovers, perhaps before killing them. Unsure if Robinson would return to the Guest House Suites, Brown thought it best to relocate Milliron to a safe house, where she stayed for several days.

On the morning of May 20, Brown spoke to Jeanna at length, and other members of the task force interviewed her as well. They were gathering more information and passing it along to the district attorney’s office, hoping that Paul Morrison was ready to give the signal to arrest Robinson. The DA could not afford to be rushed but the task force was ready to act.

“We always get antsy,” says Jack Boyer, “and we always get a little bit anxious to get things rolling, but there’s a procedure. I don’t care how long you’ve been doing police work, you learn a great deal about impatience and you learn to adapt, but you still get anxious. You want to see things roll along, especially if you’ve been working hard. Paul Morrison is a damn good district attorney and he’s very sharp and he makes sure all the
t
’s are crossed and all the
i
’s are dotted. I have no complaints about his work at all. Paul was right there with us all the way. We didn’t do much without him knowing about it and making sure everything was okeydokey.”

The task force, which had grown beyond thirty members, kept pushing forward. Boyer went down to Arkansas, where Vickie Neufeld was staying, to speak with the woman, while Lore Remington kept communicating with Robinson and reporting back to the Kansas City police. The detectives continued their surveillance of Robinson and were beginning to suspect he knew he was being watched. In recent weeks, he’d put security cameras around his home at Santa Barbara Estates and had installed an alarm system on his Dodge pickup. He had also given Barbara Sandre the go-ahead to pack up the apartment she’d being occupying in Kansas City and start the move to Canada. She was under the impression that he was finally ready to commit to her and would join her up north at the end of June.

Unbeknownst to Lore Remington, who had maintained an on-line dialogue with JR or JRT, she was about to be recorded having a phone conversation with Robinson. They had tapped his ground line, and on May 25 he called Lore in Nova Scotia and identified himself as James. His tone was bright, friendly, and breezy. He talked fast and dirty. He told Lore that he’d been trying to reach her all day and then went into some instructions that a master would give his slave. He talked about her putting electrodes on her rectum and vagina and said, “It can be a lot of fun.” He told her that she’d been “a bad girl” and that a master doesn’t want a slave “fucking anyone else.” Lore went along for a while with the sex talk, and even though she didn’t know the call was being recorded, she then turned it toward Suzette. Robinson never missed a beat. In the same glib manner, he told her that he hadn’t “heard squat from anyone as far as Suzette is concerned.” He said he had a private investigator looking for her. From the PI he’d learned that Suzette and her lover had taken a boat and had gone sailing around Mexico. The investigator was trying to trace Suzette through credit cards and gas receipts, and Robinson claimed that Suzette had stolen $10,000 from him. Robinson told Lore what a liar Suzette was and how she’d led some people to believe that she had cancer.

“I didn’t know her,” Lore responded, “she played me.”

Then Robinson launched into how promiscuous Suzette was with various men who were paying her bills.

“The private investigator told me,” Robinson said, “that she gave blow jobs to cover the rent, that was the interest her landlord charged.”

As Lore listened to this disparagement of her missing friend, she had to control herself to keep the act up.

Robinson continued, “I’m getting a profile of a fucking psychotic bitch who was fucking people for money and being a prostitute.”

Then Robinson explained how a friend of his in Kansas City had received a call from Suzette’s mother—“The weirdest call he ever got.” In recounting this, Robinson sounded put upon that any of the missing woman’s relatives would be disturbed enough to make phone calls about her.

“I wish Suzette would do the right thing,” he said to Lore, “and tell people what’s going on.” Their conversation ended with Robinson telling Lore what she needed to do for her slave training during the weekend, which included putting golf balls inside herself.

Glib or not, Robinson’s hostility at the persistence of people asking him about Suzette could not be suppressed. For years he had managed to keep his real identity concealed. The unspoken code of silence surrounding the master/slave contracts and his insistence that Beverly Bonner, for example, tell no one his real name had kept him operating in secret. But Suzette had violated the code. Despite her raunchy proclivities, she had taken the practical step of giving her mother Robinson’s phone numbers before she left for Kansas. The pattern had at last been broken.