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he took from people who were too ashamed to come forward to the police and report it,” says one officer. “The problem is that when this happens to someone, they tend not to want to pursue the charges in court or to confess their own role. When you’ve been taken by a con man, you don’t want to look foolish to the whole world.”

IV
    U ntil now, the Robinsons had been living on the Missouri side of the border, but in July 1977 they relocated to an upscale neighborhood across the state line in Kansas, in the town of Stanley. Using money he’d put away and a breezy, confident manner with the local financiers, Robinson was able to buy a $125,000 nine-room home that sat on three handsome acres in an area known as Pleasant Valley Farms. Stanley was in Johnson County, which was on its way, as people moved out from Kansas City to this rural landscape, to becoming one of the wealthiest suburban areas in the United States. In earlier centuries, Native Americans had lived here and left behind their Shawnee names. The wife of an Indian chief had been called Lenexa—today a large town in Johnson County. The county seat is Olathe, which is Shawnee for “beautiful.” Johnson County was steadily growing, but Pleasant Valley Farms was removed from most of the population. The Robinson property, with its ranch-style design and its fashionable wooden shingles, was surrounded by elm and maple groves. It had a horse stable, a corral, a riding path, and a pond filled with fish. Robinson worked hard to fit in with the country gentry around him. He was often seen out in the yard tending his lawn or building a fence or making something for his children to play on.
    At Pleasant Valley Farms, people knew Robinson as a devoted father and scoutmaster. Like his dad, John Jr. was well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. Robinson was very visible in the community, teaching Sunday school as an elder in the local Presbyterian church (although he’d been raised a Catholic); at Christmas, he dressed up like Santa Claus and gave treats to all the kids. As president of a group of volleyball officials, he assigned referees to games at area schools and was regarded as a good official himself. The license plate on his new Fiat read REFEREE . He’d also stepped forward and served as the “unofficial caretaker” at Pleasant Valley Farms, cleaning up the neighborhood pond and horse trails. He took over the Pleasant Valley Homeowners Association and even went so far as to haul a neighbor into court for failing to use wood shake shingles to reroof her house after it was hit by lightning. In Stanley, he was scaling the ladder of social responsibility and respectability. He bought a couple of horses so he could join the local equine groups. People at Pleasant Valley Farms knew nothing about his criminal past or brief periods in jail.
    The move from Missouri to Kansas perfectly symbolized Robinson’s rising fortunes. The Kansas side of the border, if you were living in Johnson County, was a more prestigious address, although some Missourians might argue the point. The 1,200-mile Santa Fe Trail had gone through the heart of Johnson County and helped make Kansas City a prosperous town. The patch of land connecting Kansas and Missouri had seen a lot of rivalry and a lot of American history—much of it bloody. Back in 1838, the federal government had forced a tribe of Potawatomi to leave their home in Indiana, and their route west became known as the Trail of Death. After sixty-one days of hardship and thirty-nine fatalities, their journey ended just to the south of Johnson County. Prior to the Civil War, the antislavery leader John Brown had roamed this part of Kansas spreading his message of freeing blacks from white ownership. In 1859, he was seized at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia and executed.
    Kansas was a free state and Missouri was not. Raiders from both sides crossed the border, burned property, and killed their fellow citizens. In Linn