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

ways of making money.

One Man’s Struggle

VII
    I n late 1984, Stephen Haymes was a district supervisor with the Missouri Board of Parole and Probation. Haymes had dealt with many criminals and knew well the difficulties of predicting their behavior. Some people changed in prison and straightened out their life. Others never did and always remained incorrigible. Until now, no one within the legal system had paid much attention to Robinson. He was regarded as just another crook with a penchant for small-time financial schemes (although a few of them had gone far beyond the penny-ante stuff of pinching stamps). Through his law enforcement sources in both Missouri and Kansas, Haymes had become aware of Robinson’s involvement with Paula Godfrey and his potential role in her disappearance. But at that time the parolee was being supervised by a probation officer in Olathe, on the Kansas side of the border, and the Godfrey investigation had never really led anywhere. Still, Haymes had not forgotten about the man. When his phone rang on December 18, 1984, he got an alarming reminder about Robinson.
    The call was from Ann Smith, who worked at Birthright, a local nonprofit group that counseled young, single mothers-to-be who didn’t want abortions but desired to keep and support their children. Smith told Haymes that Robinson had called Birthright a few days before and told her that he and fifteen other suburban business leaders had started a philanthropic organization called Kansas City Outreach. It was offering a six-month program designed to provide job training, housing, and other assistance to unwed mothers. Each mother would live in an Olathe duplex and receive $800 a month plus expenses. Robinson said that he was on the board of a local bank and a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Stanley. He claimed that such prominent corporations as Xerox and IBM would be funding his group. He also said that he was working closely with Catholic Charities and provided names and agencies to back up this claim. It seemed to Ann Smith that he was knowledgeable in this area and had answers for everything. He wanted both Birthright and the Truman Medical Center to refer possible candidates to him, because he and his fellow businessmen wanted to give something back to the community.
    During the Christmas holidays, the center informed Robinson that it had some African-American women with infants who were in need of assistance, but he wasn’t interested in them. Whenever the center contacted him about available babies, he asked if the mother was black or white. This question set off a tremor or two inside the center because it was well known in social service circles that healthy white infants brought a higher price in the black-market adoption trade than African-American children. Since most of the mothers at Truman were black, Robinson didn’t offer to help any of them.
    When Haymes got the call from Ann Smith, he contacted a local judge, John Hutcherson, to inform him about Robinson’s recent activities. Like Haymes, the judge was alarmed and told the officer to look into Robinson’s background and learn whatever he could about his current work with unwed mothers. Haymes began digging into Robinson’s past and doing legwork on the case, but this took time and the holidays stretched everything out and days were falling off the calendar—while Haymes tried to figure out what to do next. He kept busy looking into Robinson’s extensive criminal record and attempting to digest the last twenty years of the man’s life. Robinson stayed busy too, searching for a white mother and child. Haymes was beginning to pursue the man more aggressively than anyone before him ever had, and to penetrate Robinson’s facade, but the probation officer was just one beat behind Robinson’s latest con game.
    The Truman Medical Center had led Robinson to nineteen-yearold Lisa Stasi, a pretty, dark-haired young woman with a hard-luck story that had