Anyone You Want Me To Be
A Shocking True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet
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4.2 • 11 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Legendary FBI profiler and New York Times bestselling author John Douglas explores the shocking case of John Robinson a harmless, unassuming family man whose criminal history began with embezzlement and fraud - and ended with his arrest for the savage murders of six women and his suspected involvement in at least five disappearances. Most disturbing was the hunting ground in which Robinson seduced his prey: the world of cyberspace. Haunting chat rooms, targeting vulnerable women, and exploiting the anonymity of the Internet, his bloody spree was finally halted by a relentless parole officer who spent ten years trying to nail Robinson as a cold-blooded killer.
A cautionary tale set in a virtual world where relationships are established without the benefit of physical contact, ANYONE YOU WANT ME TO BE is a contemporary real-life drama of high-tech crime and punishment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Douglas (The Cases That Haunt Us) criminal profiler, ex-FBI agent, true crime writer and supposedly the model for a key character in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs presents the sordid and horrific case of John Robinson, "the nation's if not the world's first Internet serial killer." A chubby middle-aged father of four with a long history as a con man, Robinson explored the local s&m underground of Kansas City while skillfully using Internet chat groups to lure sexually adventurous women to Kansas, where he killed six of them, and perhaps five more, before his arrest in 2000. Douglas's methodical pace and his careful accretion of detail to describe bizarre crimes committed by seemingly ordinary people is highly reminiscent of the work of true crime writer Ann Rule, with Douglas seeing the case as being "about sex among unglamorous people and how the Internet had unleashed so many pent-up possibilities." He also spends a lot of time describing how the proliferation of porn-related sites on the Internet has made it "the fastest-growing criminal frontier in cyberspace." While much of this is fascinating, Douglas too often breaks his tone to issue simplistic warnings to the reader ("Nobody can any longer afford to be naive when it comes to cyberspace"). Johnson, writing with journalist Singular, helpfully offers an appendix featuring "tips for helping adults and kids avoid the dangers of on-line predators."
Customer Reviews
Brilliant!
I've been a fan of John Douglas for a while now, particularly because of his way of relating to people as he explains the crimes, his process of profiling and how he came to the conclusions.
This book doesn't disappoint. In it, John takes the reader deep into the mind of the perpetrator, while (in his own words in other books, 'not giving anyone a how-to on how to commit a murder'. A fascinating read, and a timely reminder that sometimes, online encounters are not what they seem.