Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (24 page)

When it comes to safety precautions for a planned
first meeting,
regardless of the type of meeting
, it is important to
remember that sometimes, when it comes to our own affairs, we are absolutely
the
worst judges
of what may or may not be a potentially dangerous
encounter.  Our good judgment quickly becomes clouded by emotion and hope
and we start to make critical mistakes, one of which is to
seriously
underestimate the magnitude and possible consequences of those mistakes. 

When I caution friends to be wary and to take
precautions prior to a first meeting, I’m sometimes told, “Don’t worry,
that
won’t be necessary.
  I’ve been chatting with this guy for
months;
I
think I know him pretty well.”  One very pretty but incredibly naïve
nineteen-year-old friend cockily assured me, “Nothing
bad
is going to
happen!”  When I asked her
how
she knew, she replied, “I know how
to tell a guy
no,
if I need to.”  And, I believe her;
she
probably does.
 Unfortunately, there may be times and circumstances
when
that simply isn’t going to be enough.

Take, for example, the case of Sheila, who was a
hard-working, intelligent forty-five-year-old widow who lived in Pueblo,
Colorado with her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Debbie.  Her husband had
passed away eight years previously from cancer, and she missed his
companionship.  Her daughter Debbie was confined to a wheelchair due to a
spinal condition called
spina bifida,
and Debbie’s care requirements
kept Sheila at home most nights with only her internet chat room friends for
company.  She had just moved to Pueblo a few months earlier from
Fullerton, California and hadn’t yet made many friends in Colorado. 

Eventually, through a personal ad and subsequent
online chats, she became acquainted with John, a successful fifty-year-old
businessman in Kansas City, Missouri.  John was a lifestyle Dominant who
was also a scoutmaster, tee-ball coach, Sunday school teacher, and had even
been a member of the board of directors of a charitable organization that
helped the handicapped.  As far as Sheila was concerned, the fact that he
was knowledgeable and experienced in the BDSM lifestyle and
financially
secure
were just icing on the cake. 

It didn’t take very long for Sheila to fall
head-over-heels in love with John.  He seemed to be everything she had
ever wanted in a mate; incredibly smart, funny, successful
and
kinky. 
He told Sheila he had a job lined up for her in Kansas City.  He even
promised to support Sheila and Debbie financially, take care of their mounting
medical bills, and pay for Debbie’s therapy if they would be willing to move in
with him.  Sheila didn’t have to be asked twice.  She jumped at his
offer.  The last eight years had been exceedingly difficult, struggling to
survive on the $1,016 per month she received from Social Security.  Sheila
and Debbie immediately began making preparations to move to Kansas City.

Sheila told her friend Nancy about her plans, and
got lectured about the dangers of running off to meet someone that she only
knew through internet chats and phone calls.  Sheila told her friend that
her ship had finally come in; John was her
dream come true
and no one
was going to dissuade her from following her dream of a happy and secure life
with him.  Nancy truly
wanted
to be happy for her friend, but she
was still very much concerned, and begged her to take precautions.  A few
days later, in the middle of the night, John arrived in Pueblo to take Sheila
and Debbie back with him to Kansas City.  Nancy never saw nor heard from
her friend Sheila Faith, ever again.

No one knows for certain exactly
where
or
when
it happened, but at some point after he picked them up in Colorado and took
them to Kansas, John raped and tortured both Sheila and her daughter Debbie and
then killed them both with hammer blows to the head.  John Edward
Robinson,
who lived with his wife and four children
and was known in internet
chat rooms as
SlaveMaster,
then loaded the bodies into two
fifty-five-gallon drums and deposited the drums in a storage facility in
Raymore, Missouri.  He performed this task quickly and routinely, a
natural consequence of the fact that he’d done this several times
previously. 
For the next six years
John Edward Robinson collected
and cashed Sheila Faith’s monthly Social Security checks, while he continued
committing similar rape-torture-murders until his arrest on June 2, 2000. 

John Edward Robinson is
known
to have
murdered
at least
eleven women,
and some investigators believe
the actual number may be significantly higher.  Sheila’s story really
wasn’t much different from the stories of any of the other women who became his
victims, the one glaringly tragic difference being that Sheila’s misjudgments
led to her daughter’s death, as well as her own.  Robinson found many of
his victims in internet BDSM chat rooms and used highly sophisticated
deceptions to gain their trust, stoke their emotions, and compromise their
judgment by promising them the world.  Even when his victims were
warned
to take precautions by friends and family, those warnings were invariably
ignored.
  John Edward Robinson has never offered a confession,
explanation, or even expressed an ounce of contrition for the murders and the
many other heinous crimes that he committed.  He is currently awaiting
execution on death row at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas

Bottom line:  Knowing how to tell a guy
“no”
is not considered to be a particularly effective method of preventing hammer
blows to the skull.

Realistically, the odds of your date turning out to
be a serial killer are
quite low
and for
that,
we should
all
be eternally thankful.  It is a sobering thing to note, however, that
many
of us have gone out and bought
lottery tickets
with a
one-in-a-million
chance
of being a winner, thinking that
those were pretty good odds.
 
You may not be able to do much to improve your odds of winning the
lottery
,
but there
are
some things that you can do to improve your chances of not
only
surviving
your first meeting, but of
enjoying
it. 

How can taking
safety precautions
help you to
enjoy
your first meeting?  You just might be surprised at all the
ways!  First, it can help to silence those nagging little voices of doubt
in the back of your head that make you wonder if you’re doing the right thing,
or exercising proper judgment.  Second, it will help to reassure your
friends and family (assuming anyone has any idea what you’re about to do) that
you are
not
a complete
idiot. 
While you may not
particularly
care
what they think, overly concerned friends and family
have sometimes been known to do
crazy things
to protect you from your
own worst instincts.  The
last
thing you probably need is some sort
of whacky family
intervention
right in the middle of what might
otherwise have been a perfect first meeting!  Finally, the fact that
you
took safety precautions can make your
partner
feel better about
you.
 
After all, there are essentially two kinds of people who
don’t
take
safety precautions:
stupid people
, and
predators
.  Whenever
I
meet someone for the first time, and she tells me that she
hasn’t
taken
any safety precautions, I think,
“Seriously?
 Maybe she
isn’t as
smart as I thought she was.”

Here are some simple safety precautions that you can
take prior to your first meeting.  For the most part, there isn’t anything
terribly complicated or difficult to accomplish about any of them.  You
may not be able or willing to do
everything
on this list but
any one
of them
could save your life or, at the very least, ensure that there will
be a trail to follow in the event you simply
vanish.

Know Who You’re Meeting

The first of our safety precautions probably seems
as if it should be absurdly obvious to anyone with a lick of sense; 
however, there really is a big difference between
thinking you know someone,
and
really
knowing someone.  A harsh reality that we don’t like to
think about is, we rarely ever truly know
anyone
, even when
we
interact with them every day
in real life.  John Edward Robinson, aka
Slavemaster,
lived with his wife and four children, arranged to be named “Man of the Year”
by a charitable service organization, and had even been featured on the cover
of a national trade magazine all while methodically raping and murdering at
least eleven women.
 
Over the course of almost twenty years,
Robinson skillfully avoided becoming a suspect in the murders, but he
wasn’t
as successful in avoiding being convicted of
dozens of other crimes
,
to include theft, embezzlement, fraud, and forgery. 

Robinson’s long and well-documented history of
criminal activity
was a matter of public record
and he was even sent to
prison a few times.  In fact, it is widely believed that Robinson met and
seduced his
fourth
murder victim
while incarcerated
and serving
time for fraud at the Western Missouri Correctional Facility.  Her name
was Beverly Bonner, and she was the prison librarian.  Upon Robinson’s
release from prison in 1993, Beverly Bonner divorced her husband and moved to
Kansas to be with Robinson, who promptly murdered her and then cashed her
alimony checks for the next seven years.  In June of 2000, her body was
found in a drum at the same storage facility as Sheila and Debbie Faith’s.

Could any of Robinson’s many victims have avoided
their fate by doing a little bit of research on the man they loved and
literally
trusted with their lives?  We’ll never know for sure.  But one
thing
is
certain; it is
far easier today
to check someone out
online than it was just ten or twenty years ago.  Whatever information you
do
have about the person you’re meeting,
Google it.
 Even
phony information can reveal a lot of
real information
.  Google his
name, email address, mailing address, and phone number.  Google his job,
business, friends and family members. 
Reverse Google
any
photographs.  With the proper use of quotation marks in your searches, you
could even Google his
poetry,
or other writings. 
Google it
all. 
You may not be able to immediately differentiate between true
information and phony information, but
you can usually spot inconsistencies
pretty easily.
 

Another way to know who you’re meeting is to
tactfully
ask for personal references
from others who purportedly know
the individual in real life. 
Everyone
knows
someone. 
If
someone tries to tell you that he has
no
friends, acquaintances, family
members, associates, clients or coworkers who would be willing to vouch for the
fact that he is a real person with real community ties and
not
an axe
murderer, then that should serve as a warning flag.  He
doesn’t
have to reveal his kinky lifestyle to those people.  All he has to tell
them is, “I’m meeting someone for the first time, and I thought that maybe some
personal references might reassure her that I’m not an axe murderer. 
Would you mind if I gave her your phone number?” 

Finally, if
all else
fails, you could always
resort to the tried-and-true strategy of
blaming somebody else:
“This is
stupid, but my best friend is really worried and won’t let me come meet you
until she sees a photo of your driver’s license first.  I tried to tell
her that I trust you
implicitly
, but she just isn’t budging.  I
really don’t want to lose her as a friend over this.  Can we do this just
to shut her up?”  He may or may not agree to it, but
either way
,
his response will tell you a
lot.

Clarify Expectations

Clarifying expectations may not seem like much of a
safety precaution at first glance, but it can make a
huge
difference in
how your first meeting turns out.  Even if you honestly believe that you
both fully understand the purpose and limits of the planned meeting, it
certainly doesn’t hurt to
confirm
what you think you both know
. 
You
may
feel a little foolish doing so
(see the section below on
being willing to do just that)
but no one ever really dies of
embarrassment.  People
do,
however, sometimes die of
stupidity.

The most common reason for misunderstandings which
could potentially lead to trouble involves one person’s naive anticipation of
sex,
when it is neither warranted nor planned.  Even though you may have been
asked
to lunch
, made the date for
lunch
, meticulously planned every detail
of the
lunch
, and even
enjoyed the lunch
with your date, it’s
entirely possible that your date is thinking,
“Great lunch, but can we just
get to the sex part now?”
  Some people simply have to have it spelled
out for them in no uncertain terms.  Here’s one example of how you can
phrase it:  “I’m really looking forward to meeting you!  I just want
to be
absolutely clear,
though.  No matter how much I
like you
or how much I may
want to
, there is simply
no way
we’re going to
be having
sex
on this first date.  If that is going to be a
problem, you need to tell me so
now
.”  

On the other hand, if sex
is
mutually
understood to be part of the plan for your first meeting, you may
still
need
to clarify the fact that
consent can be withdrawn at any time by either
party.
  Just because you’ve
discussed
having sex,
planned
on it,
anticipated
it and have every intention of following through with
your plan doesn’t mean that you can’t
change your mind
,
even at
the very last second
. 
You need to not only
trust your gut
when it comes to such things, but you also need to be able to trust your
partner to understand that
no means no,
even if you’re naked and tied to
a chair.

Meet In a Public Place

Meeting in a public place isn’t always going to be
appropriate or possible, but whenever you
can
make it part of your plan,
you should do it.
 Do it
even
if the plan is to go
immediately to a hotel room and get naked.  That way, in the event of
trouble, at least
someone
will have seen the two of you together at some
point.  It’s even possible that the meeting will be captured on a business
establishment’s security camera, which could be very helpful to the police, if
they need to conduct any kind of an investigation.  Award yourself big
bonus points for actually knowing
ahead of time
where security cameras
may be located, making that part of your plan, and letting a trusted friend
know what to tell the police, if necessary.

Make Sure Someone Knows

Not everyone has friends who can be trusted with all
of the sordid details of their kinky sex lives.  That shouldn’t stop you
from letting
someone
know
where
you plan to be,
who
you plan
to meet, and most important of all,
when you plan on returning.
 
Serial killer John Edward Robinson actually sent
forged letters,
purportedly
from the murdered women to their friends and families, which essentially said,
“Don’t worry about me; I have a new job overseas and may be out of touch for a
while.” 

Again, there’s
rarely
any need to reveal
everything
about what you’re planning to do.  It should be relatively simple to limit
what you say to, “I’m meeting someone new this weekend, and expect to be back
on Sunday.  Please call the police if I am not.”  The person you tell
may
indeed be curious about your plans and
may
even pepper you
with questions, but you are really under no obligation to answer any of their
questions.  The important thing is to ensure that
someone
knows
when you should be back. 

Just knowing that you’re late returning from your
encounter or missing altogether may not be enough to assist the police in
finding you or in figuring out what might have happened to you.  If you
prefer not to entrust a friend or family member with the details of your plan
or with any information about your new friend, you can
still
leave a
bonanza of information in a sealed envelope somewhere in your home or office
where it will be found, in the event that you disappear.  Another novel
approach might be to
mail the envelope to yourself. 
While it might
be tempting to simply leave something like that
locked in your vehicle
,
you should be mindful of the fact that anyone who might be holding
you
captive will also have the keys to your home and car,
and
all of the
information contained in your wallet or purse. 

Leave a Paper-trail

When police investigators begin reconstructing the events
surrounding a possible disappearance, one of the first things they look for is
any evidence of a
paper trail.
  By that, we mean such things as
bank deposits or withdrawals, credit card receipts, and even records of phone
calls or texts.  One way to leave a trail of bread crumbs that will be
easy to follow is to use a debit or credit card, if at all possible, to make
some sort of a purchase
during your meeting. 
Even the simple act
of placing a call from your cell phone can help police investigators to
pinpoint your last known
location.        

Have a Backup Plan

It isn’t enough to simply know that your well-laid
plans may not come to fruition; you need to have a back-up plan that can be
implemented when things go seriously awry.  Not all of the John Edward
Robinson’s victims ended up being murdered.  At least two women travelled
separately to Kansas to meet Robinson in a hotel room, where they were bound,
brutally raped, severely battered, photographed against their will, robbed of
their money and belongings, and then abandoned for several days with no cash
and no way home. 

In each instance, Robinson returned to the hotel
room several days later and gave the women a small amount of cash so they could
return home, and gave them instructions to put all their belongings in storage
and return to Kansas.
  Incredibly, one of the women actually did so,
only to have him repeat his earlier performance, which caused her to contact
the police.  How either of them avoided being brutally murdered by this
man is a mystery, but it may have been due to the fact that each had left a
trail of breadcrumbs that led right to him,
and he knew it.