Free Anyone You Want Me to Be by John Douglas Page B

Robinson was so dangerous that they advised the Truman Medical Center to get the two young women out of his Troost Avenue apartment at once. The center complied.
    Despite law enforcement’s fears, making a case against Robinson was proving to be challenging. Both local and federal agencies, including the Secret Service, kept looking for ways to ensnare him, and in mid-March 1985, they got their first break. Irv Blattner turned against his old partner, signing a statement for the Secret Service that connected Robinson to numerous financial crimes. The next day, at a few minutes before noon on March 21, 1985, when Robinson showed up at Haymes’s office for a probation meeting, he was arrested. As Haymes transported him to the Clay County Jail, Robinson told the officer that Tiffany and Lisa had been located and were doing just fine. After being booked, Robinson posted a $50,000 bond and was released within a few hours. He was back on the street and back in the business he was learning to master: finding novel ways of doing to others whatever his imagination could conceive of, while finding other ways of avoiding prison. Nothing quite matched the perverse joy of beating anyone out of anything he could.
    “The con game was everything to him,” Haymes says. “He just loved the game.”

    A day after Robinson’s arrest, Haymes learned to his extreme concern that Robinson had not merely been trying to lure young mothers and children away from Hope House, but had been working the same scam at another Kansas City maternity home, known as the White House. To Haymes’s knowledge, the man had not been successful in getting any kids out of the White House—so far.
    On March 26, Robinson and his attorney, Bruce Houdek, came to Haymes’s office to address the matter of Robinson’s parole violation on three separate counts. Haymes was reviewing the probationer’s recent behavior and putting together a report for Judge John Hutcherson.
    “Robinson is continuing to involve himself in criminal activity,” Haymes wrote in the report. “Robinson has been involved in criminal activity for over fifteen years and, to date, has managed to obtain probation when caught, but never required to serve a significant period of incarceration.”
    This seemed finally, after years of Robinson’s avoiding any harsh punishment, about to change. The case against him was about to get much stronger, but Robinson was a far more creative and elusive adversary than anyone had yet understood.

X
    I n 1984, twenty-one-year-old Theresa Williams had come to Kansas City from Boise, Idaho. She’d worked around town at a Kmart and a self-service laundry before meeting Robinson at a McDonald’s, where he initiated a conversation with her by telling the pretty young woman how much he could improve both her present and future life. His pitch worked and she soon became his lover, moving into the empty Troost apartment and performing sexual favors for men who paid for her services. In return, Robinson took care of her bills and supplied her with marijuana. Several things about him made Williams uncomfortable, but she was being provided for and didn’t say too much. One was the gun he carried in a shoulder holster—in violation of his probation. Another was that he seemed to have a penchant for violence, including sexual violence, but this didn’t prevent her from sleeping with or posing nude for him.
    The longer she stayed with him, the more demanding Robinson became. On the evening of April 30, 1985, he had her don a sexy dress, paid her $1,200, and instructed her to leave the Troost Avenue apartment and wait in a nearby park for a limousine. When the car arrived, she jumped in and the driver blindfolded her and took her to another part of Kansas City. The car stopped at a mansion and the blindfold was removed. She was escorted inside, where a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man in his sixties accompanied her down to his basement. The man, known to her only