Anyone You Want Me to Be (10 page)

“Before personal computers and word processing arrived,” says Haymes, “the more common means of doing business was a typewriter. Robinson was the master at cut-and-paste in the typewriter era. In the eighties, he realized that he could take advantage of a word processor to produce a document that looked like it was printed without running the risk of looking like it was cut-and-pasted. When he was involved in his alleged charitable activities, he was producing these forms for different people and trying to con them. They gave legitimacy to what he was saying because of how they looked.

“Years later, when other things came to light about Robinson in 2000, it really struck me what a terror this guy is for something like the Internet because he takes to these technologies and uses them very well. There was a lot of indication in the eighties that he was involved in some networks with other people, but it was much more difficult to do those sorts of things back then because you had to do a lot of things mechanically or by telephone or in person. With a computer, you don’t have to do things face-to-face. I’d never really put together what a threat he could be over something like the Internet.”

If Robinson was good with the new technology, he also had a gift for sensing the deepest needs and desires of women. He understood that for some of them the greatest need was to feel useful. If they felt they were genuinely helping others, they would do things they might not otherwise consider doing. This applied not only to impoverished and desperate women, like Lisa Stasi, but to solvent and competent women who were emotionally unfulfilled, like Beverly Bonner. By the early nineties, she’d been married twice and had two sons from her first union, but she still hadn’t satisfied some of her longings for experience and adventure. Robinson picked up on those longings when he met Bonner in prison—and decided to exploit them. To restart his businesses, he needed an energetic and legitimate partner, and he’d found one in the library at the Western Missouri Correctional Center. After his release, he went back home to his wife and children, but Beverly made plans to split with her husband and join Robinson in Kansas City. In February 1994, she was divorced from Dr. Bonner and the plan went forward.

Robinson had told Beverly about his old company called Hydro-Gro, which had once sold indoor gardening kits, and with her assistance he began reinventing it. The papers of incorporation listed her as the Hydro-Gro president, yet they conspicuously failed to include the name John Robinson (in part because he was a convicted felon). In place of his name was that of “James Turner” as company secretary. This was Robinson’s first known usage of that alias, but it would resurface when he became active on the Internet. After hooking up with Robinson, Bonner began calling her mother and talking with enthusiasm about her new business connections and the exciting opportunities that lay ahead. She mentioned Hydro-Gro but also spoke about going overseas and working in the perfume industry. At first, Bonner told her mother the real name of the man who’d become her partner, John Robinson, but later she called back to say that she’d mistakenly referred to him. His real name, she said, was Jim Redmond.

Bonner obviously knew that Robinson was a career criminal and had just spent six years in prison. She was aware that he was asking a former correctional facility employee to help conceal his identity to her own mother. She saw that he was still married and had not begun divorce proceedings—yet none of that seemed to matter. The forty-nine-year-old woman had left her husband for him and did not question the direction of their relationship. She’d begun signing blank pieces of paper at his request—letters that she would one day write, he explained to her, and send to her relatives once she’d gone overseas for her new job. And in fact, before too long these people did begin receiving letters telling them about her travels abroad for her company and how much fun she was having doing this work. The letters appeared to come from Europe and one of them accurately described a street in Amsterdam, which Robinson had visited with his family in the eighties. The letters kept coming and coming, the final one reaching her mother in early 1997 and carrying a Russian postmark. It claimed that Beverly was gradually making her way to China.

Bonner’s friends received similar mail with foreign postmarks and detailed accounts of what was happening in distant countries. The forwarding address on the envelopes was a mailbox in a commercial mail center, called the Mail Room, in the Olathe, Kansas, Crossroads Shopping Center. Robinson had rented this space in Beverly’s name, and since her divorce her ex-husband had diligently been mailing his thousand-dollar monthly settlement checks to this box. If Dr. Bonner thought it odd that he should be sending checks to a Kansas mailbox when his ex-wife was supposedly working abroad, he didn’t ask many questions and kept sending them anyway, $1,000 a month for eighteen months. After all, the letters people had received from Beverly certainly looked authentic, because Robinson had located a service that not only concealed a letter’s point of origination but for a modest fee would postmark an overseas address on the envelope.

Before Beverly went away, Robinson had driven out to a southeastern Kansas City suburb and rented a storage locker at Stor-Mor for Less in Raymore, Missouri. Nancy Robinson had previously rented a space here, but Robinson now said that he needed a larger one for the belongings of his sister, who was named Beverly. Once, when he was visiting Stor-Mor, an employee asked him about Beverly and he replied that he was keeping her furniture in the locker while she was abroad working for Hydro-Gro. He went on to say that his sister was having such a good time in Australia, she might not ever return.

On another occasion at Stor-Mor, he unloaded a large sealed metal barrel from the vehicle he was driving, which belonged to Beverly Bonner, and placed it in the storage unit. Then he locked the unit and drove away.

S
tarting in 1994, Beverly’s friends and family never saw or heard from her again. The following year one of her sons died and she was glaringly absent from his funeral. People at the service asked a lot of questions about her, but nobody had any answers. Some assumed that she must still be traveling or working in Europe. Some thought she might have run off with a man to another part of the United States. Others wondered if she was dead, but if that was the case, where was the body? How could she have vanished so completely from so many lives? And she hadn’t disappeared completely because several of those close to her were still receiving letters from her, weren’t they? She must have been all right.

A few people surmised that her absence might have something to do with John Robinson and her new job, but no evidence directly linked him to Bonner. No one had gone to the police with their suspicions, so the authorities didn’t know Beverly was missing—not even Steve Haymes.

He had other things to worry about.

“When Robinson was released on parole,” says Haymes, “he was living in Missouri but in southern Jackson County, which wasn’t an area that I supervised. My only involvement at that point was that I asked to be notified when he got out because he had allegedly made some threats against me and I wanted to know when he was released.

“I had been told by someone that they thought he blamed me for all the bad things that had happened to him and they thought he could potentially harm me. When he was released, I made contact with the parole people who were going to supervise him and tried to put a bug in their ear, and I sent them some information about him because on the surface he seemed like such a compliant person. He’d do what you wanted him to do and say what you wanted him to say, but I wanted them to have an idea of what he was about. After that, I checked periodically on him.”

Over his two decades of being a probation officer, Haymes had had only a handful of direct threats from those he’d supervised or sent back to prison and another handful of indirect threats. Nobody had ever attacked him.

“The ones you worry about the most,” he says, “are the ones who don’t threaten you. People are often pretty unhappy with you, but for most of the people we deal with, probation is a kind of game and they understand that. They made conscious decisions to break the rules so they usually don’t hold you personally responsible when they get caught. That’s part of the risk. The fact that I report them or put them in prison isn’t held against me.”

He instinctively felt that Robinson would not feel this way. When Haymes heard that the man had possibly been threatening him, he did not hesitate to take this seriously—and to change his behavior.

“I knew that we had people who were missing and had disappeared in the 1980s,” Haymes says, “so I became more cautious after he got out in the midnineties. I varied my driving routes to and from work. I made sure I wasn’t being followed. I had small children and I made certain that my wife was aware of what Robinson looked like and what kind of vehicles he drove and to be aware of any suspicious vehicles in the neighborhood. I made sure the kids were watched a little more closely and that they played in the back but not the front yard. I knew he was capable of things and blamed me for things and that he didn’t accept a lot of responsibility for putting himself in that situation. So my level of caution went up.”

Most people’s level of caution about Robinson was nowhere near Haymes’s—nor had it even been awakened.

As a child, Debbie Faith was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and from an early age she’d needed a motorized wheelchair to get around. Her mother, Sheila, took good care of her, and so did her father, John, until 1991, when he died of cancer. The mother and daughter had been living in southern California, but now they began moving from place to place in their search for better conditions. They survived on Social Security payments, which amounted to $1,016 a month, plus food stamps, but Sheila constantly needed more money for Debbie’s medical care. She wore arm braces and was dependent on the wheelchair and a catheter. As she grew out of childhood, she would be diagnosed not as having cerebral palsy but the equally crippling illness known as spina bifida. Approaching her teenage years, she weighed more than two hundred pounds and her mother could only put her to bed by using a hoist and a lot of physical exertion.

In spite of her illness, Debbie had an upbeat spirit and a good sense of humor. Sometimes she acted as if she were hardly disabled at all—racing other people in wheelchairs at the mall and enjoying the thrill of beating them and exploding into laughter at her victory. She loved country-and-western music and, like many girls her age, had teenage fantasies about her teachers in Fullerton, California, and about the stars she watched on TV. She was known to call television psychics and ask them to predict her future. One told her that she might walk someday, an opinion that doctors had shared with her as well. Her pain had never defeated her or left her hopeless or bitter. She was determined to win her fight against the disease and had ambitions to become a physical education teacher. Debbie wanted to help others who needed it the most, including those in wheelchairs and the deaf.

After John Faith passed away, Sheila tried to overcome her loneliness by running personal ads or going into on-line chat rooms. She was looking for romance and for someone to share the huge financial and emotional responsibility of raising her daughter. In 1993, Sheila relocated the two of them from Orange County to Watsonville, just south of San Francisco, but the move was short-lived: Sheila had a way of hooking up with married men who weren’t about to leave their wife. The Faiths were soon making plans to go to Pueblo, Colorado, where they had friends and some better prospects. When they’d gone east, Debbie maintained contact with several girls in California through the Internet, while her mother commenced a long-distance relationship with someone special she’d just met. They had perhaps run across one another on the Net, although the details of their meeting were vague. The man lived out in Kansas or Missouri, and according to the few tidbits that Sheila shared with her friends, he was a successful farmer named John.

John liked to brag about his land and the horses he owned, and he said that if the Faiths came out to his part of the country, he was pretty sure that he could get Debbie, now fifteen, to ride one of his gentler mounts. That would be a great accomplishment for someone in her position, but John was willing to do whatever was necessary to make it happen. He also promised to get her into an expensive school for the disabled. Sheila was impressed. It took a generous and thoughtful and sensitive man to make an offer like this; there weren’t a lot of single men out there who wanted to be a part of a family and would help a child who needed this much assistance. John and Sheila began talking regularly on the phone, and he asked her a lot of questions about herself, about her own desires and where she wanted to live and how she was able to support herself and Debbie. Their relationship was quickly heating up. John wanted them to move out to the Midwest and take up his offer to help Debbie; if they did this, he’d pay for an extended ocean cruise. Before long, the forty-five-year-old Sheila was describing John to her friends as her “dream man,” the one she’d been looking for since her husband had died.

In the spring of 1994, the Faiths decided to leave Colorado and loaded their old car with some of their belongings. They drove off east to meet Sheila’s new companion, ready for a bold adventure. Debbie took her wheelchair and other possessions, but Sheila left nearly everything behind, including her clothes, furniture, and kitchen utensils. Their neighbors in Pueblo were astonished to awaken one morning and find their friends gone. They never saw or heard from the Faiths again.

Before disappearing, Sheila had told her neighbors to keep track of her mail, which included Debbie’s $1,016-a-month disability check, but no more mail arrived at the Faiths’ Pueblo residence. After Sheila and Debbie vanished, their ex-neighbors learned that their letters were being forwarded to a Kansas address. They were going to the Mail Room in Olathe, the very same address that was receiving Beverly Bonner’s mail and her monthly divorce-settlement checks from her ex-husband. The mailbox was rented in the name of James Turner, and the owner of this business would later say that a man matching the description of John Robinson had been picking up the Faith checks at that location ever since 1994. He picked up 152 of them, worth a total of more than $80,000.

Not long after the Faiths vanished from Pueblo, Sheila’s brother, William Howell, started getting letters that purportedly came from his sister. They were typed and carried her signature at the bottom, telling him that she and Debbie were doing just fine.