Anyone You Want Me to Be (4 page)

I
n the past few years, Robinson had progressed from petty theft to conjuring up a false identity to stealing stamps to involving the Kansas City mayor’s office in a relentlessly self-serving scam. The Man of the Year scheme had been foiled, but Robinson was starting to tap into other groups where he might find potential victims among the weak and the ill. Like others whom he would come to resemble, Robinson was drawn to jobs that involved counseling or the ministry or medically related work. Tex Watson of the Charles Manson family, for example, became a jailhouse minister. So did David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer in New York. When Berkowitz appeared on CNN’s
Larry King Live,
he held a Bible in his hand throughout the interview, determined to show that even behind bars, he’d found a way to exert power and control over others. Robinson didn’t gravitate to the medical profession or to helping the disabled because he wanted to aid his fellow citizens. His real career, which was still taking shape, perhaps even in his own mind, was locating groups of potential victims who were vulnerable or drawn to fantasy or dependent on others.

By the late 1970s, one person who’d been dependent on Robinson for the past decade and a half had apparently had about enough of him. His wife had turned into a chain-smoker whom people described as increasingly nervous and distressed. Nancy now clearly understood that she was living with a repeat offender who showed no signs of going straight. He’d embarrassed the whole family during the Man of the Year fiasco and seemed incapable of holding a job or staying out of legal trouble. He was unfaithful and this habit would only get worse as he got older. In the decades ahead, Nancy would be reduced to conducting surveillance on her husband, following him around in her car to see whom he was meeting and where. She would gather the details, confront him head-on, threaten to end their marriage, and even throw him out of the house, but his exile never lasted. The children always wanted him to come home, so she let him back in. He was capable of things that no one had yet imagined, but he seemed incapable of one thing: giving up his wife or family.

Nancy could see that her husband’s penchant for trouble was escalating, and she was worried for her own future and her kids’ welfare. If she knew that John was unfaithful, she did not know what seedy corners of Kansas City his curiosity had led him into. Nor did she know that he was becoming interested in the subculture of sadomasochistic sex. If all that wasn’t enough, her neighbors were starting to talk about John because he made explicit comments to women at Pleasant Valley Farms. The Robinson children were chagrined at school because their father had gotten a reputation for getting arrested and creating humiliating public scenes. By 1980, after much inner debate and procrastination, Nancy was thinking of filing for divorce, but she waited a little longer, hoping things might improve.

Her body told her they wouldn’t. Her eyes were growing more strained, her posture more stooped. She bent forward when she walked, as if she were pulling a heavy weight. Her face was losing some of its early prettiness, as worry set into pockets of her skin. This small, slightly built woman, with bright blond hair that swept around one side of her face, looked weathered and worn, but she did not file for a divorce or break up the family. She endured. She smoked and suffered along, deciding to stay with Robinson and to accommodate his bad moods and occasional outbursts, directed at her and others. She was the peacekeeper inside the home, the rock for her children, a steady presence in a situation that was at best unpredictable.

In time, she would take standing by your man to an entirely new level.

In 1979, Robinson was released from federal probation with a glowing recommendation from his probation officer, Ronald L. Ferguson. In his report, Ferguson wrote that he hoped Robinson “will continue to reap the rewards of good citizenship….”

He began collecting those rewards by taking a job as the employee relations manager at Guy’s Foods in Liberty, Missouri. The firm, which manufactured potato chips and other foods, had just been sold and was transitioning to new ownership. Typically, no one there had taken the time to look into Robinson’s background; because of his apparent competence and warm personality, he’d quickly been hired. Guy’s liked the way he handled people and his intelligence. Robinson seemed a natural at the position. He was being given another opportunity to have a legitimate career and might have progressed well at this solid and successful company, but that wasn’t his goal. He merely used the facade of his personality while searching for the weak links at Guy’s.

He began an affair with a secretary and launched another round of thefts inside the business. In one, he fabricated nonexistent Guy’s employees and then paid them with money that went into his own pocket. In another, he deposited a $6,000 company check in an account that he created to look like a Guy’s corporate account. He used some of these funds to rent an apartment in the Johnson County suburb of Olathe, where he had sexual escapades with female coworkers. Within a few months, tens of thousands of dollars were missing from the company. His more pressing problem was that his secretary had fallen for him and now told him that he had a clear-cut choice: he could either leave his wife and marry her—or she was going to the police with what she knew about his stealing from Guy’s. When he wouldn’t meet her demands, she made good on her threat. Nancy Robinson now knew for certain that her husband was not only a crook but had been cheating on her at the office.

At the end of 1980, Robinson was fired from Guy’s and charged with felony theft. His former employer also hit him with a civil lawsuit asking for him to return what he’d stolen. He eventually settled the civil suit by agreeing to pay the company $50,000 in restitution (he paid Guy’s $41,000 over the next four years). On the criminal side, he pled guilty to stealing a $6,000 check, but instead of facing the maximum seven years for this felony conviction, he was given only sixty days of “shock time” in the Clay County Jail. In addition to the sixty days, he got five years probation in Missouri.

After this last debacle, the idea of divorce again surfaced for Nancy Robinson. Many of her friends and acquaintances were openly encouraging her to take this step, but before following through on their advice, she and Robinson went into marriage counseling. Once again, they stayed together, for better and for worse.

Robinson soon opened another business, called Equi-Plus, which offered his management consulting services to the public and hoped to bring new products to the marketplace. One of those products was designed to provide the consumer a better way of storing bull sperm. He rented a suite in Overland Park and hung out an Equi-Plus sign. Before long, his phone started to ring. A local outfit named Back Care Systems conducted corporate seminars on treating employees’ back pain on the job. The company approached Equi-Plus and asked Robinson to create a marketing plan for them. He undertook this mission and started sending them invoices that seemed very high—if not downright suspect. Unlike many other corporations in the past, Back Care Systems began gathering information on Robinson’s history and his current activities. The company took its findings to the Johnson County district attorney’s office, where prosecutors began yet another investigation into John Robinson. He sought legal advice and a lawyer told him that the best strategy for countering the authorities was to have sworn affidavits from customers about the soundness of his business. He came up with these documents by forging them.

The most significant aspect of Equi-Plus was not its success or failure, but something Robinson encountered while creating it. Two of his neighbors and potential Equi-Plus clients at Pleasant Valley Farms, Bob and Scott Davis, introduced him to the world of computers. In the early eighties, personal computers were quite rare, and the average person was barely aware of the technological revolution that was just a few years away. The Davises showed him what was on the high-tech horizon, and Robinson was intrigued by these new possibilities. He’d always found innovative ways to employ machines in his criminal adventures. He’d had his secretary use a typewriter to generate fake letters and he’d forged other documents by using Wite-Out and Xerox copiers. That seemed like amateur stuff compared to what he might be able to do with a word processor or more sophisticated technology. Everything could be utilized to expand his repertoire as a con man.

By mid-1984, he’d posed as so many different things to so many different people that he decided to try something new. He met a local woman named Mildred Amadi who desired to end her marriage to a Nigerian man and convinced her that he was an attorney who could represent her in divorce proceedings (he’d recently been telling other listeners that he’d raised the funds for Sylvester Stallone’s latest hit movie,
First Blood
). As part of his arrangement with Amadi, she gave him her marriage license and birth certificate, as well as the title to her automobile. In the months ahead, she would complain to the authorities that she wasn’t sure what Robinson had done with her legal documents and he never did help her get a divorce.

Until now the scams he’d run were designed to make money. They hurt people and were clearly illegal but had not yet taken a darker turn. They were just con games, but that was about to change because, like other serial criminals, Robinson was a work in progress, someone who was constantly evolving toward greater risks and new rewards. It was as though he kept pushing himself to see what he was capable of or if he had any limits at all.

H
e now created yet another company in Overland Park, this one called Equi-II, which he described as providing consulting services to medical, agricultural, and charitable ventures. He also leased a duplex at 8110 Troost Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, in a rundown neighborhood with a white population on one side of Troost and a black population on the other. Legal investigators, who were by now constantly paying attention to Robinson for one reason or another, believed that he’d hired an experienced prostitute to take charge of this Troost address and had opened a profitable bordello there. The word on some of the tougher Kansas City streets was that if you were drawn to rough sex, or to sadomasochistic practices, you could find it here. Robinson himself had reportedly been engaged in such pursuits for years before deciding to turn these interests into a source of revenue. There were also rumors of cocaine as another income stream.

In 1984, he hired an attractive nineteen-year-old woman named Paula Godfrey to work at Equi-II as a sales representative. The year before, the dark-haired Godfrey had graduated from Olathe North High School, where she’d been an honor student as a junior and a senior, as well as a talented figure skater. She was active in Senior Rowdies, an offshoot of the pep club, and contributed to a literary magazine called
Mindburst.
To improve her skating, she rose at 4
A
.
M
. and practiced at a local rink called the King Louie Ice Château. She tried out for a professional skating job with the Walt Disney World on Ice Show, but illness hurt her performance and she began searching for work with a future.

When she met Robinson, she thought she’d found a solid company run by a good businessman. He told her that he wanted to enroll her and several other women in a clerical skills’ training program in San Antonio. Robinson would pay all of her expenses and provide her the work experience she was looking for. The two of them chose a date for her trip to Texas, and Robinson came to pick her up at her parents’ home. As far as her family knew, they were headed to the Kansas City airport.

Her father, Bill Godfrey, expected a call from his daughter that evening or within the next few days, but it never came and the Godfreys got worried. Bill was so upset that he flew to San Antonio to track down Paula. He learned that she’d never checked into the hotel where she’d said she would be staying. He returned to Kansas City and went looking for Robinson, confronting him at his Equi-II office. Robinson was unflappable and told the man nothing useful. Godfrey said that if he didn’t hear from his daughter in the next three days, there would be serious trouble. Almost immediately a handwritten note, postmarked Kansas City, appeared in the Godfreys’ mailbox. It had apparently been sent from Paula and informed her parents that she was all right.

The letter said that she was grateful to Robinson for his help and she didn’t want to see her family. It contained profanities, which was unusual for the young woman, was typed badly, and was signed, “Love Ya, Paula.” Her father didn’t recognize the signature and the grammar was unfamiliar. There was no reasonable explanation for her wanting to stop seeing her family. The Godfreys contacted the authorities to report that their daughter had vanished, but when the police went to Robinson and asked about the young woman, he said he couldn’t help them out. He knew nothing about Paula Godfrey. He was just a businessman.

Her parents turned over the note to the Overland Park police, who examined it and concluded that it was real and their daughter was fine. They prepared to close the investigation. Only one probation officer was leery of Robinson’s connection to Godfrey, but with the appearance of the letter, there wasn’t much he could do.

“As the girl was of age and there was no evidence of wrongdoing,” he wrote in a file, “Overland Park terminated their [missing-person] investigation.”

The Godfreys themselves were maddened by this decision, but without the help of the local police they could do little on their own. So the investigation died.

Years later, another letter seemingly written by Paula would turn up. This one was found by Irv Blattner, a business connection of Robinson’s who was also an ex-con. In the second letter, “Paula” was depicted as an angry acquaintance of Robinson’s who’d stolen his money and his car before leaving the area. If the first letter had appeared out of character for her, the second one was even more so; it sounded nothing like the former ice-skater.

In the early 1990s, Blattner died of cancer. Before passing, he told a relative three things: John Robinson was extremely dangerous, the relative should contact federal agents if something happened to him, and Robinson was directly involved in the disappearance of Paula Godfrey. The cancer victim had saved the old letters as evidence in case he met an untimely or violent death.

No one ever discovered what happened to Paula Godfrey. Years later, however, reports surfaced about how in the mideighties Robinson had become connected to the cult of the International Council of Masters (ICM), a secretive sadomasochistic group with members all over the world. His taste for the exotic had apparently driven him toward those who shared his desires. The ICM cult had been born in London in 1921, when half a dozen professional men initiated a club to satisfy their deepest sexual longings, which ran in the direction of the Marquis de Sade’s. The men had a common bond: they all wanted to be the dominant partner, or “master,” of submissive women, known as slaves. One got into the club only after the founding members had determined that the initiate shared their tastes and could keep quiet about the cult. The ICM developed a communal dungeon, and each member contributed his own ideas and equipment for the purposes of sexual torture or rape. The masters wore purple, hooded robes and the slaves white robes with metal handcuffs joined to chains. The masters untied the slaves’ robes in front of a group and made the women stand naked before everyone. The slaves were “trained” to do whatever was demanded of them, and the women were traded back and forth among the men. The men joined the cult of their own volition, but that wasn’t necessarily true of all the women.

The ICM’s first-ever meeting was held in a London basement warehouse on Friday, May 13, 1921. The cult eventually spread across Europe and opened dungeons in America. It was constantly looking for new recruits, and when Robinson learned of the group, he apparently decided to become a member. His superiors graded him on his ability to bring in new slaves, and over time he was so successful at this that he reputedly rose to the top of the local branch. His name inside the organization was Slavemaster. The young women he introduced to the other members wore leashes around their necks and other paraphernalia, and they did exactly as they were told—or faced the consequences. Anyone trying to escape the ICM was subject to violence. No one knows how many of the young women Robinson met in the eighties may have ended up as slaves in this group.

While exploring new sexual territory, he was building income from his various businesses. He constantly needed cash to keep up with all the expenses of his Pleasant Valley Farms home and his family of six. It took a lot of money to maintain appearances in the suburban community and to stay active in the town, the school, and the local church. It took a lot of money—and energy—to live one life in the town of Stanley and another down on Troost Avenue in Kansas City or as a member of the ICM. It took a lot of juggling of identities and multitasking and what, in psychological terms, was sometimes known as compartmentalization.

Robinson had an extraordinary ability to break up his personality and behavior into different pieces and to place them into radically different boxes; then he would pull out from one box or another whatever was needed for a particular occasion. He could be anyone he or someone else wanted him to be. If the role was refereeing a soccer game, he was convincing at that. If it was finding new slaves for the cult, he seemed to be successful at that too. According to some people, he was, despite all this philandering and criminal activities, a good father, just as he would one day be perceived as a good grandfather. He was able to separate the various aspects of his life and never let them touch each other—or let one undermine the other. It was as if he were not just one man, but half a dozen or more. He wasn’t living just one life, but six or seven. And everything he did gave him new experiences and ideas for things he wanted to try in the future.

In the mideighties, he took his wife and children on an extended vacation to Europe. They visited several countries, and when he returned home, Robinson spoke enthusiastically about how much he’d enjoyed his trip abroad and all the sights they’d seen. While overseas, he was generating novel plans for using travel in a new financial scam, but it would take him another decade or so to perfect it. In the meantime, he’d found other unimaginable ways of making money.