Anyone You Want Me to Be (8 page)

The brochure cited his work as an Eagle Scout and as a cubmaster and a scoutmaster in the 1970s. It did not mention that in a statement put out by the Boy Scouts of America in the early eighties, the organization declared that John Robinson had been ousted as a cubmaster in December 1981 after he pled guilty to stealing from Guy’s Foods.

“Thereafter,” the statement read, “his registration in the Boy Scouts of America expired and was never renewed.”

In one last desperate attempt to help himself, he forged yet another letter, this one from a “Linda White,” which outlined how Robinson and his children had brought food and clothes to her home last Christmas Eve. White was supposedly an out-of-work pregnant mother of three kids, who’d already decided to give away the infant she’d delivered a few weeks after the holidays. Because of Robinson’s great warmth and giving spirit, she’d changed her mind and kept the baby.

The judge was not persuaded by either “Linda White” or her heartfelt letter. In late August 1985, he revoked Robinson’s probation and sentenced him to seven years in a Missouri prison. Before the sentencing could begin, Robinson was freed on a quarter million dollars’ bail and quickly set about filing an appeal. Throughout the appeal period, he was ordered to report to Officer Haymes daily and to call him on the weekends. Haymes was more dogged than ever in his tracking of Robinson, never letting him far from his sight or his telephone.

“I was the bulldog that wouldn’t let go,” he says. “After the revocation in 1985, the FBI closed their file on Robinson at that point, but I kept showing up and haunting him.”

But haunting wasn’t enough. To his shock and then to his pervasive dismay, Haymes soon learned that his efforts were not enough to put the man away. During the appeal process, Robinson argued that he’d been denied his constitutional right to confront his accuser, because Theresa Williams had never shown up in the Clay County courtroom. In May 1986, a Missouri appellate court threw out Judge Hutcherson’s ruling and sided with Robinson.

In the opinion of Judge David J. Dixon of the Missouri Court of Appeals’ Western District, “There cannot be the least doubt that the actions of the probation service and the FBI agents denied petitioner due process of law.”

Robinson was free to go, free to do what he did best. Haymes could only imagine—or perhaps he couldn’t imagine—what the man might do next.

R
obinson resumed working at Equi-II, and in August 1985, only days after Judge Hutcherson had initially revoked his probation, he appeared on the cover of
Farm Journal,
a national agricultural magazine. He was pictured standing in the middle of a cow pasture, wearing a dapper sport coat and tie, smiling out at the world. He is happy, calm, and confident, and he would use this favorable publicity to promote Equi-II as a successful consulting firm that advised ranchers on the tax benefits of limited partnerships. In print, he came across as an expert in both finance and farming.

“For every dollar the limited partner invests,” Robinson said, “he gets $2 to $4 in tax write-offs, along with a return of 25 percent to 50 percent on his investment over the life of the partnership.”

As he’d done earlier when fleecing Harry Truman’s physician and then scamming Ewing Kauffman’s corporate office, Robinson again crossed the path of another prominent local figure. The
Farm Journal
article on limited partnerships quoted Sam Brownback, a Kansas State University agricultural law professor who would go on to become a U.S. senator from Kansas. Robinson used this periodical to speak optimistically about the future of partnerships for cattle ranchers looking for solid investment strategies. One man who actually got involved with Robinson in the limited partnership business, Bob Lowrey of Norwich, Kansas, lost $10,000. So did his associate, Bill Mills. Steve Haymes’s fears were being realized: Robinson was only getting better at his ability to work con games. Yet he had made mistakes in the past that were about to ensnare him.

For months, Johnson County (Kansas) officials had been investigating Robinson’s connection to Back Care Systems, which in 1982 had hired Equi-Plus to market its seminars. Robinson had promised to deliver a number of services to the company—promises that were unfulfilled—but he’d sent them invoices for his work. Early in 1986, while he was appealing his probation revocation in Missouri, Robinson went to trial on the Kansas side of the border over these financial practices. In late January, a jury found him guilty of submitting $3,600 worth of false billing. Because the defendant had been investigated for so many crimes in recent years, Assistant District Attorney Steve Obermeier asked Johnson County district judge Herbert W. Walton to apply the Habitual Criminal Act when deciding Robinson’s sentence. Judge Walton followed this suggestion and ordered him to spend five to fourteen years in prison and to pay a fine of $5,000.

Before the sentence could begin, Johnson County filed still more charges against Robinson, this time for stealing $50,000 when acting as a middleman in a condominium sale in Page, Arizona. Robinson had allegedly collected $150,000 from a Kansas buyer but passed along only $100,000 to the seller. This was a sizable score compared to some of his earlier ones, but he needed more income than ever before. In addition to his ever-mounting legal bills, his family had continued living on their four-acre estate at Pleasant Valley Farms and two of his children were in college, while the twins were still in high school. With the conviction in the Back Care Systems case, Robinson’s wife now realized that her husband’s days of avoiding prison were coming to a close. He was about to be convicted on the middleman theft charges in Arizona as well, and he now faced a total of six to nineteen years behind bars. His crime spree appeared to be over and his income could obviously not be maintained while he was in prison. Without his ongoing money scams, his family would not be able to stay at Pleasant Valley Farms. Nancy was about to put the house up for sale and start looking for work. Her children could not escape the reality of their father’s criminal past. His activities had not only harmed countless people outside of his family but profoundly affected those inside it as well, both economically and emotionally.

While these events were unfolding, the Kansas City–based
Business Journal
wrote a scathing exposé of Robinson that outlined his almost twenty-year-long criminal record. Through interviews and other research, the publication uncovered Robinson’s trail as a phenomenally good chameleon.

“Apparently,” wrote the
Journal
’s Delbert Schafer, “Robinson has developed a convincing manner of gaining the confidence of business people over the years. He has the ability to ferret out information and then use it to tell the listener exactly what he wants to hear.”

After a couple of years of investigating the con man, Steve Haymes had noticed that whenever Robinson received some really bad publicity like this, the probation officer’s phone started to ring with calls from strangers. These people had also encountered Robinson and some of his “investment strategies” in years past. Until now, they hadn’t been able to bring themselves to tell the authorities what had happened.

“When someone kicks in your front door and burglarizes you,” says Haymes, “you’re always going to call the police. But when someone tricks you out of money, the police sometimes don’t get called. There are certainly indications that there were some neighbors [of Robinson’s] whom he was able to convince to give him money that was soon gone and to my knowledge this was never reported to the police. There was some embarrassment on the part of the victims. Probably in some of Robinson’s business dealings, he just wore people down. He was good at wearing people down. He would come up with receipts and excuses and eventually people would just say, ‘I give up.’

“Looking at most criminals I’ve dealt with over the years, you say, ‘How did they get there?’ and it’s a fairly easy path to follow back. They didn’t have a lot of guidance or bad guidance or perhaps they fell in with the wrong people or got involved in drugs or alcohol, and at least you have some idea of how they got where they are. With Robinson, it’s not very clear-cut. He had many opportunities as a young person. His siblings did well. His parents, as far as I know, were good people and worked hard. So I don’t know what made him make that turn.

“It was fairly late, well into his twenties, before the crimes started showing up. I think there were some dysfunctions in him that just continued to grow. The sex thing grew over the years, and other things, but what turned him to go the easy route?”

Pondering his own question, Haymes shakes his head. Then he shakes it again, still haunted by his inability to answer it.

B
efore finally entering prison for an extended stay, Robinson was linked to one more event that went far beyond a financial scam or wearing down his creditors. In January 1987, Catherine Clampitt had left Wichita Falls, Texas, to start a new life up north. Because of substance abuse problems, she’d had difficulty raising her young son, Ryan, so he’d stayed behind with her parents in the Lone Star State. She moved in with her brother, Robert Bales, who lived in a Kansas City suburb, and soon began looking for work. The Korean born Clampitt had been adopted by the Bales family and had grown up with a reputation that split off in two different directions. One depicted her as being quite intelligent and the other as possessing a wild streak. Everyone who knew and cared about her saw this split and wanted to help her manage it. Her brother, anxious to see her settled in a job, began scheduling interviews for her with businesses in the area, but she was willful and took steps of her own after spotting an ad that Robinson had placed in a community paper. A company called Equi-II was offering a well-paying position that involved travel and other benefits: her employer would even provide her with new clothes tailored to the image of his business. She called the number and got an appointment with Robinson, who quickly hired her. As soon as she started the job, she began spending much less time at her brother’s home, but it was unclear where she was staying. She was either traveling out of state or spending time at local hotels or someplace else…. For days and nights in a row, her brother was notcertain what had become of her.

When she didn’t show up for a week, he called the police. He also phoned Robinson’s office, but Catherine’s employer was unresponsive to his questions. Bales decided to stake out the Equi-II address and asked law enforcement to help him investigate. Once again, the police took the limited steps they’d taken before when someone who’d been working for Robinson had vanished without a trace; they interviewed him about the missing woman but concluded that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to connect the man to the disappearance. This perception on the part of the authorities was as maddening for Bales as it had been earlier for Paula Godfrey’s family and for Lisa Stasi’s relatives, but the cops lacked the evidence to pursue Robinson as a suspect.

Catherine Clampitt would never be heard from or seen again.

Robinson was about to be incarcerated for several years, but that would only open up new opportunities for when he was once again free. Behind bars he would go much further into the technological realm of computers that he’d been introduced to in the early eighties, and this would ultimately show him new doorways into crime. He would use the training he received in prison not to rehabilitate himself but to widen his repertoire for contacting, charming, exploiting, and seducing those who met him. He was discovering a technology worthy of his imagination and skills.

He was middle-aged but his energy and stamina showed no signs of flagging. He was, in fact, just finding himself and his career. If he represented the harmful side of creativity, he was almost endlessly productive in uncovering new ways to fool and exploit. He had an astounding capacity for juggling, and in recent years he’d handled numerous relationships while running several business fronts and staying deeply involved in both family and local affairs. When he wasn’t working for the neighborhood association, he was an activist in the local S&M underground, a part of the International Council of Masters, an entrepreneur, a forger, a fraud, a baby seller, and a pimp who kept two or three prostitutes busy working for him around the clock. He may have looked pudgy and out of shape, but he had incredible drive and determination when pursuing women of all ages and backgrounds, or when chasing new business schemes back and forth across the state lines of Missouri and Kansas. There were barely enough hours in a day to do all that he wanted to do, but in prison he would have plenty of time to think and to plan—to decide what he wanted to do after being released from his cell. He had time to explore his own ever-expanding identity. It seemed to have no borders or boundaries at all.

If some men were capable of deep sexual aggression and violence, the vast majority of them, especially when they were husbands and fathers, held these things in check. They denied the darker impulses, got them out in other ways, kept them buried inside. They learned how to manage their demons, held back their propensity for evil. They were committed to decency, even when it was a daily struggle. Society demanded that they not act out every urge, and they went along with these civilizing influences. They did it to be less of a threat to women and to try to have a beneficial effect on children. They did it to avoid trouble or unnecessary conflict. They did it to live their own version of the “common good.” They fought these inner battles with themselves and usually won.

For Robinson the battle did not exist. At some point in adulthood, he had decided to express every part of himself—including the savage—just because he could. His world was not either/or. It was both /and. His ability to be different people in different situations was exceptional. Serial killers are often known for their massive deceptions, but he’d taken this game to new depths. He was unusual in his ability to play both the domestic and the predator’s role to this degree. He could be both a doting father and someone who kept hiring young women who disappeared. He could be both a soccer referee and someone who ran a bordello or hired women out for S&M encounters in basement dungeons. He could be both a churchgoing husband and someone who sold an infant to his brother. He could stretch every boundary until someone made him stop—and that someone was not his wife or children. Their normality seemed to feed his need for the abnormal. Their support seemed crucial to his aberrant behavior. The flip side of his violence was his deep domesticity. This was an interactive dance that nothing could alter and that no prison psychiatrist would ever penetrate. Perhaps his rage was fed by his many emotional and financial responsibilities, his profound need for his family.

Robinson always had a loving home to return to, no matter where he’d been or what he’d done. In April 1986, Nancy was interviewed by the police and given the chance to describe the man she’d married more than two decades earlier. She said that she and John had grown closer since his recent legal troubles, and she described him as a good provider, a good husband, and a loving father. They had a good relationship, she said, but one could only imagine the kind of pressure she was under to help him shorten his time behind bars.

Also in 1986, Dirk Taiff, a presentence investigator, studied Robinson and wrote, “The defendant displays much anger and frustration regarding his legal problems, accepts minimal responsibility for his actions and attempts to portray himself as a hard-working, dedicated family man.”

The investigator had talked to Steve Haymes about Robinson. By now Haymes had been examining the man’s background since early 1985 and drawing his own conclusions. He wrote to Taiff, “In almost eleven years of work as a probation and parole officer, this officer has never seen an individual as criminally-oriented as John E. Robinson…It’s this officer’s belief that Robinson is a dangerous individual who has put forth no effort to rehabilitate himself through three prior probations in the state of Missouri.”

A week after the inmate entered the Kansas State Penitentiary in Hutchinson, the
Kansas City Star
printed a two-page story headlined, “Kansas Prison Awaiting a Convincing Talker.” Robinson was described as “a thief, a charmer, a skilled conversationalist and a crafty con artist who should have been locked away years ago. Only now, eighteen years after his first conviction, is the Johnson County businessman seeing the scales of justice crash down, ending a compulsion for white-collar crime that some authorities say they think may have had a darker side.”

Not long after Robinson went to prison, his wife found a nursing job and early in 1988 she cashed out the four-acre estate and took a much cheaper apartment in Stanley. The family was facing hard times and widespread shame, as John would not only be locked up for years to come, but had generated terrible press for all of them. His criminal career had grown large enough that it could no longer be hidden from public view. His wife and children carried on, putting their lives together as best they could, not turning against their husband or father, always willing to grant him another opportunity and to take him back. Nancy was holding them all together.