Anyone You Want Me to Be (5 page)

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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 lately gotten harder. Her father had died during her childhood in Alabama and one of her brothers had killed himself. Lisa had grown up wanting stability and a family of her own. Her friends described her as lonely, vulnerable, and gullible but also determined to improve her circumstances. In 1983, she moved to Kansas City, and after meeting a young sailor named Carl Stasi, she appeared to have found what she was looking for. Lisa was soon pregnant, and in August 1984 the couple were married in Huntsville, Alabama. The following month she gave birth, but the arrival of the baby, a girl named Tiffany, did not bring peace to the household. The infant set off conflict that ended with Carl reenlisting in the navy and leaving the area, while Lisa entered Hope House, a battered women’s shelter in Independence, Missouri. She was living at Hope House when a social worker named Cathy Stackpole told her that a generous Kansas City businessman wanted to help her and her daughter. Lisa was deeply relieved and delighted.

In early January 1985, when Robinson first met with her, he promised to give Lisa an $800-a-month silk-screening job in Texas. If that didn’t work out, he could assist her in getting her high school diploma in Kansas City or enroll her in another training program outside of Chicago. One way or another, he would get her out of the situation she was in. He did not present himself to her as John Robinson but as “John Osbourne,” an Overland Park entrepreneur who ran a company called Equi-II. He’d been quite successful, he told her, and now he had a strong desire to do good works; there was no better way than assisting young mothers in need. It was also important to him that the mothers and their children not be separated, as they might be in other social service programs. That was why he’d started Kansas City Outreach and come to her aid.

After taking Lisa and the baby away from Truman Medical Center, Robinson did not move them into an Olathe duplex that he’d talked about, but installed them, along with two other young women, at a Rodeway Inn in Overland Park, near his Equi-II office. While Lisa stayed there, he promised her that he was finalizing travel plans for her and the baby. He had the young mother sign four blank pieces of stationery and provide him with the names and addresses of several of her relatives. He said that he needed these in order to keep them informed of where she was once she’d left Kansas City for Chicago.

On January 9, Lisa and Tiffany visited her sister-in-law, Kathy Klinginsmith, who was Carl Stasi’s oldest sister. When the pair arrived at the Klinginsmiths’, a blizzard was raging outside, so Lisa parked her old Toyota in front of their house and ran inside clutching the baby. She told Kathy that she’d met a benevolent Overland Park businessman who was going to help her finish high school and find a job in the Chicago area. Kathy was taken aback, but didn’t know whether to intervene. Maybe this was a good development, a big step up from Hope House. When Lisa went to the phone and dialed the Rodeway Inn to check her messages, she learned that John Osbourne had been frantically looking for her at the motel. He’d panicked and begun calling around town trying to locate her. He now phoned her at the Klinginsmiths’ and said he was coming to get her and the baby right now—despite the snowstorm that was covering the metropolitan area.

After hanging up, Lisa told Kathy that she wasn’t sure if she should go with him. Kathy’s concerns were quickly turning into fear. When Robinson reached the Klinginsmiths’ address, he didn’t park in front of it, but left his car down the block and out of sight, then walked through the blizzard to their home. Stepping inside, he didn’t say a word to Kathy or acknowledge her in any way. He seemed absolutely focused on removing Lisa and the baby from the home. His behavior struck Kathy as abnormal and she sensed danger—it wasn’t just Robinson’s expression that was menacing. He stood five feet nine inches, weighed two hundred pounds, and was physically imposing to someone smaller than himself. He may have been fleshy and soft around the middle, but the glare in his eyes was anything but soft. It was disturbing and frightening. One day Klinginsmith would identify this expression as evil.

She tried to talk Lisa out of going, but Robinson insisted. Kathy was no match for the man’s forcefulness. Against her sister-in-law’s advice, the young mother walked out of the house with Tiffany held next to her, all three of them disappearing into the snowstorm. As Klinginsmith watched them go, she had a terrible feeling that she would never see Lisa or the baby again. The feeling was so powerful that she called her husband and said that something was badly wrong, that they had to take action now.

Robinson drove the mother and child back to the Rodeway Inn and checked them into Room 131. Lisa tried to phone her sister-in-law and then her mother-in-law, Betty Stasi, but could only contact Betty. During their conversation, Lisa cried and attempted to explain to the woman that she’d been forced to sign four pieces of paper or she would lose Tiffany. It was Betty herself, she’d been led to believe, who’d wanted her to do this and it was Betty who was trying to separate her from her daughter. Her mother-in-law told her this was totally false and cautioned her not to sign anything else.

“I’ve got to go,” Lisa said into the phone. “Here they are.”

She hung up, but her last three words stayed with Betty. She couldn’t stop thinking about them because of the fear in Lisa’s voice and because the words implied that more than one person had come into the room to take Lisa and Tiffany away. How many people were working with this strange man who had assumed control of Lisa’s life? Where was he taking Lisa and Tiffany? Why had the young mother been asked to sign four pieces of paper? Betty was now as worried about Lisa and Tiffany as Kathy Klinginsmith was.

The next day the Klinginsmiths contacted the Overland Park Police Department, as well as the FBI. The police went to the Rodeway Inn, but Lisa and Tiffany had checked out. Their bill had been paid not by John Osbourne, who’d checked them into the room, but by John Robinson with an Equi-II corporate credit card. After Kathy Klinginsmith learned this, her husband, David, drove to the Equi-II address at Ninety-eighth Street and Metcalf Avenue. Robinson was there alone and David confronted him with questions about Lisa and Tiffany. Robinson acted put upon at first, indignant that anyone would think he had done anything wrong. Then he suddenly transformed himself—his eyes focusing and growing hard, his muscles stiffening, and anger taking over his entire body. He no longer looked soft. He flew into a rage and pushed the man out of his office.

David Klinginsmith was shaken up. He would soon tell the police about receiving a strange phone message from someone named “Father Martin.” This was apparently a priest from the local City Union Mission, who indicated to David that Lisa and Tiffany were all right. When David tried to follow up on the message and talk with Father Martin, there was no one by that name to be found. And no one seemed to know what had become of Lisa and Tiffany Stasi.

Robinson had taken the baby girl to his home in Stanley and handed the child over to his wife, who was surprised that her husband was in custody of an infant. Nancy Robinson, who’d raised four kids of her own, was also surprised by Tiffany’s condition. The baby smelled bad, had dirt under her fingernails, and needed diapers and food. She had arrived at the house with nothing. Nancy bathed her and then went out into a snowstorm and got supplies for the child. As she was taking care of the infant, John explained to her that the baby had come from a private adoption agency and that he’d had to pay $4,000 for her. He’d apparently somehow gotten the adoption papers from the office of an Olathe attorney named Doug Wood, who would one day become a Johnson County commissioner. Robinson told his wife that Don and Helen Robinson, his younger brother and sister-in-law from Chicago, would be flying in the next day to adopt the baby.

The Chicago couple had been married about a decade and had no children of their own. Helen had taken fertility drugs to become pregnant, but this hadn’t worked. For some time, the couple had been looking for a way to adopt. At a 1983 family reunion, Don had told his brother that he’d been pursuing this goal by working with Catholic Charities and a Lutheran agency, but he’d had no luck. Adoption fees were high and the wait was several years. He’d asked John if he knew any attorneys who handled adoptions or if he knew any single women who might want to give up their child to a good family. John said that he was willing to help and was aware of a lawyer who specialized in this area. Although the older brother had been in and out of jail on numerous charges, Don didn’t seem to have many qualms about enlisting his aid in finding a baby. The younger Robinson sibling was soon on the phone with an attorney who used the name Doug Wood, and Wood was eager to offer his services for an adoption.

In the spring of 1984, John told Don to send him a check made out to Equi-II in the amount of $2,500. The money was to be disbursed to several people and a baby would be available in October of that year. Don and Helen were overjoyed by this news and began preparing for the infant’s arrival. They created a nursery in their home and made plans to furnish it with a crib, baby toys, and clothes. When October came, John explained that some things had changed and the baby wasn’t yet available. The Robinsons were disappointed but willing to be patient and see what developed. Three months later John called them and said that he’d found a baby but the infant was Italian and had medical problems and big feet. He advised that they pass, so they did. A few days later he phoned again and asked the couple to fly to Kansas at once. On the morning of January 10, they landed in Kansas City and were met by John at the airport. He told them how he’d dealt with lawyers and judges to arrange the adoption, and he provided them with notarized court documents and a birth certificate. After driving them to his office in Overland Park, John had them sign a “Petition for Adoption,” and Don gave him a second check for $3,000.

John told them a tragic story about how the child had come to him: the baby’s mother had committed suicide and left behind in a shelter this beautiful infant named Tiffany, who needed parents and a good home. Don and Helen were ecstatic as they rode with John back to his home and were thrilled to see the child outfitted in a tiny new dress. They renamed her Heather Tiffany and took pictures of the baby with her new relatives, including the Robinson children. In one photograph Heather is sitting near a rocking horse and on the lap of a proud-looking John Robinson. He wears a festive yellow sweater and a patriarchal smile, looking pleased to be the head of this clan. The following day Helen and Don and their new daughter returned home to Chicago.