Authors can't breathe life into serial killer tale

Gil Asakawa, Special To The News

Published June 27, 2003 at midnight

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The one requirement for a good read in the "true crime" genre is a juicy crime - the kind that makes readers want to sink into their easy chairs for a marathon session of devouring gory details and following clues to their conclusion.

In Anyone You Want Me To Be, co-authors John Douglas and Stephen Singular have a doozy of a true crime: the serial murders of six women (and suspected murders of more) by an apparently mild-mannered career-scam-artist-turned-violent-offender, with lots of sleazy sex, S&M and the Internet thrown in for good measure.

Unfortunately, the book that chronicles the criminal career of John Robinson, who lured his victims to Kansas through online overtures, never lives up to either the lurid murders or the Big Hook - the Internet connection touted in the book's subtitle.

The facts are laid out, but the narrative is presented so matter-of-factly that it's a chore to muddle through them, as if the reader is sorting through the thousands of pages of court documents alongside the authors.

You'd be better-served by logging onto the Internet and finding the contemporaneous accounts of news sources such as CNN, Court TV and the Kansas City Star as they followed the case. The facts are there, and so is a sense of urgency in the storytelling that's missing from this book.

John Robinson's life should have been a rich source for any writer.

An Eagle Scout who once sang for the Queen of England, Robinson grew up in Chicago but moved to the Kansas City area to start fresh after being caught stealing from his employers.

His business scams continued in both the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City, and during the 1980s he apparently began escalating his criminal behavior to more violent pursuit, thanks to his interest in sado-masochism. Two women he gets involved with are never heard from again.

After a stint in prison, Robinson emerges in the 1990s with his smooth-talking personality intact and a familiarity with the Internet that gives him easy access to victims for his sexual fantasies.

But throughout the narrative, the inner drive for his actions remains unexplored and the predatory aspects of his crimes generalized. Instead of probing Robinson's psyche, the writers tell us distracting and irrelevant information about child pornography on the Internet, evoke the memories of other serial murderers such as John Wayne Gacy, and interview people who had nothing to do with the case.

One notably irritating passage gives an unnecessary biography of an FBI agent who is interviewed and quoted at length as an expert, instead of the agent who was actually involved in the investigation, who had been placed under a gag order.

"Schroeder was not involved in the John Robinson case," the authors breezily inform readers in their typically bland prose, "but was familiar with the work done by Mike Jacobson, who would receive an award from the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police for playing a critical role in this investigation."

After a while, the reader has to wonder if much of the text is mere filler, inserted to pump up what turned out to be a slim volume.

The listlessness of the text is somewhat puzzling, since both authors have a bookshelf's worth of past projects tied to the true crime genre. Douglas is a former FBI agent and author of a number of books about personality profiling and investigative analysis (most are co-written). Singular is a Denver-based journalist with a string of books to his credit, including one covering the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

Despite their credentials and the celebrated nature of the crime, Anyone is a disappointment. Having a great true crime wasn't enough to make for a good book.

Gil Asakawa is a free-lance writer living in Arvada.

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