Anyone You Want Me to Be by John Douglas Read Free Book Online

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