Free Anyone You Want Me to Be by John Douglas

sense of incredulity and discomfort. He’d never seen anyone labor harder at building an image with elaborate stories and paperwork. Haymes kept looking for a scintilla of shame or a hint of guilt, but there was none. The officer had never encountered anybody like John Robinson. It was as if the man weren’t merely playing a role, but believed everything he was saying—as if he became another person when he was talking.
    While Robinson’s crimes and the way he perpetrated them were groundbreaking in the study of serial killers, his overall personality was not unique. Robinson possesses the characteristics of a classic “antisocial personality.” This disorder has nothing to do with having or not having the ability to socialize. Many antisocials are good at presenting themselves to others. They have superficial charm, above average intelligence, and the ability to masquerade. They are also emotionally stunted, unreliable, and insincere. Robinson fit all of these characteristics and then some. One thing he did not have was mental illness. He knew right from wrong and knew the consequences of his heinous acts on others.
    In retrospect, Robinson reminded me of other killers whom I’d interviewed or studied. When you speak with these individuals, they have an answer for everything. Unless you thoroughly study their case, they can fool you. They’ll tell you what they think you want to hear and project the blame on others. During one such interview, a convicted rapist told me that he hadn’t raped anyone. He said, “The victim wasn’t wearing any panties and was looking to have sex, so I obliged.” Because Robinson had such superficial charm, he was able to easily manipulate his victims, his family, and early on the law enforcement community. We make the mistake of treating people like Robinson the way we expect to be treated. This doesn’t work because what separates us from him is a conscience. Robinson had no conscience or remorse. He and others like him know and understand they are lying, but they don’t get flushed in the face, shift their body, wet their dry lips, or look away when they lie. They’ll look you right in the eye and tell you what good people they are and that they must be believed.
    “The common criminals we deal with may lie,” says Haymes, “but they’re not very good at it. They’ll tell you, ‘I wasn’t at the bar last night and I haven’t been drinking,’ when they reek of alcohol. It’s pretty easy to break that lie down, and usually, when most people are cornered with a lie, they will come around and confess. He would never do that. No matter how tight you had him boxed in, he would just spin off and start a whole new set of lies. We would spend hours or days proving those were all lies and then we would have another set of lies to deal with. His inability to tell the truth, even when the truth might have done him better, was what struck me.
    “Plus his demeanor was quite different from the average person we deal with. He was older and more refined as far as his education and skills. He always wore a coat and tie, soft-spoken, with a round, kind of boyish face. Nothing set him off easily as a criminal to the average person who had contact with him. He didn’t meet the stereotype of the guy with tattoos.”
    Haymes soon paid another visit to Equi-II, this time with a second probation officer named Bill Neely. Both men questioned Robinson at length about Lisa and Tiffany, and he explained to them how a man named Bill had been waiting for the mother and daughter when he’d transported them to the Rodeway Inn during a snowstorm about a month earlier. The pair had left with Bill and that was the last he’d seen of them. When Haymes and Neely went to the Rodeway Inn to check out this story, the motel clerk recollected that Lisa and Tiffany had left the premises the final time with Robinson.
    Haymes contacted the local FBI office and spoke to veteran Special Agent Thomas Lavin and his