Anyone You Want Me to Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet by John Douglas and Stephen

[lightreads]

Nonfiction. A reconstruction of the life of John Robinson, white collar criminal turned serial killer. The title is a bit misleading, actually, as this book covers much more than Robinson’s eventual adoption of the internet as hunting ground for new sexual and financial victims. Just as a portrait of a criminal life, this book is riveting (this would be something I like, because I really like that sort of thing). Robinson conducted an extraordinary forty year campaign of lies, trickery, financial schemes, uncountable relationships, sexual domination, and murder, to say nothing of raising four children and being an active member of his community. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the book is the way it tells the story of Robinson’s women, his victims reaching from beyond the grave to catch him in mistakes, and his wife and daughters rallying to savagely defend him. The book mostly steers clear of the more idiot TV moves – he’s a killer because his mother was cold – and it maintains an impressive control of fact and speculation and psychology.

A little bit of history here; Douglas was instrumental in starting the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and ran it for many, many years. He’s brilliant and perceptive. But, well, man’s got issues. Most of which had no business in this refreshingly objective book. I was particularly unimpressed when he gave the full names of psychiatrists who had examined Robinson during a prison stay and reported him sane and safe. Arguments about the supremacy of, well, himself over mental health professionals aside, that’s just tacky. Also, I’m not going to forgive him this sentence, offered while discussing one of Robinson’s early victims, for either content or syntax: “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.”