True Crime Campfire - You Belong to Me: The Murder of Robin Benedict

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Love can be a pretty hard thing to define. It’s easier to say what it is not. Love is not secretly following someone and trying your best to keep her within sight every second of the day. Love is not trying to keep someone scared and uncertain so that they’ll rely on you more. And love is not thinking you own a person, and becoming furious when you find out that you do that. This is a story about someone who made all those mistakes, who mistook obsession for devotion, and whose towering sense of entitlement turned into awful violence. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: Don Stradley, Boston Tabloid https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/06/03/Missing-Beauty-killer-released/1326739080000/ https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/19/us/killer-marries-in-prison.html https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/28/us/professor-about-to-go-on-trial-admits-killing-his-young-lover.html Follow us, campers! Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/ Facebook: True Crime Campfire Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire Email: [e-mail] MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Love can be a pretty hard thing to define. It's easier to say what it is not. Love is not secretly following someone and trying your best to keep her within sight every second of the day. Love is not trying to keep someone scared and uncertain so they'll rely on you more. And love is not thinking you own a person and becoming furious when you find out that you don't.

This is a story about a man who made all those mistakes, who mistook obsession for devotion and whose towering sense of entitlement turned into awful violence. This is You Belong to Me, the Murder of Robin Benedict. So, campers, for this one we're starting out near the town. of Mansfield, Massachusetts at a rest stop off of I-95, March 6, 1983. A couple of men were going through the trash cans in the chilly early morning. A new state law had gone into effect at the start of the year, offering five cents for every can or bottle brought in to be recycled. Going through trash cans like this wasn't going to make

you rich, but you might be able to buy a pack of smokes. In one of the trash cans, they found a brown plastic garbage bag tied at the top. In it was a woman's tan corduroy blazer, and it was wrapped around something. Inside the blazer was a large blue shirt and a small sledgehammer, something you'd use to smash out plaster on an interior wall. All three items looked like they had trace amounts of blood on them. The hammer was stuck to the shirt, and stuck to the hammer was one long strand of dark hair. Initially, they just put the bag back in the trash can. They didn't want to get involved in any serious business, but before long, conscience went out, and they called the state police. The jacket would soon be identified as belonging to Robin Benedict, a beautiful young, aspiring

artist and sex worker from Boston, and the shirt as belonging to William Douglas, a brilliant professor at Tufts University Medical Center. He was a frequent client of Robbins and had been become obsessed with her, and he was quickly identified as the most likely suspect in her murder. William Douglas was born in 1941 in Saranac Lake, way up in the woods and hills of upstate New York, but grew up nearby in Lake Placid, where his parents moved when he was five. He was a klutsy, awkward kid who couldn't make friends, which wasn't helped at all by his weird parents. Bill Sr. was a plumber, and Eleanor was a maid, working in both hotels and private homes. And if you've ever wondered, will the maids judge me for making them clean up all this crap?

Yes. Yes, they will. Or at least Eleanor did. And so did one of my friends who used to work for Molly maids. Oh, my lord, she would tell me some horror stories. Let me tell you. One of her favorite things to talk about was how disgusting people were. She was a German immigrant who still had a thick accent, which must be the ideal voice to give lectures on how revolting people are. I think I've had nightmares about exactly this, like a stern German woman telling me how disgusting I am. Some people are probably into that. Oh, God, I just thought of that too. Eleanor cared a lot about how people behaved and took care to teach Little William to be polite.

They'd had him when Eleanor was in her 40s, so he was something of a miracle baby who they spoiled and sheltered. Eleanor wanted him to be clean and always in control of himself, and to keep him from picking up bad habits, she discouraged him from spending time with other children. Oh, my God. Mom, no. Lake Placid is a resort town, lots of skiing and skating and hiking and hockey, but not for young William. Why don't you just stay at home with mother and father, read a nice book, and have some oval teen? He needed permission to leave the house, and his only rebellion was occasionally sneaking out. When he was caught, his mom and dad would scold him until he burst into tears and begged for their forgiveness.

Then mom or dad would pat him on the head and call him their little man and everything would calm down. This happened again and again. He'd break some stupid little rule it would be treated as deadly serious than tears and forgiveness. We shouldn't draw too straight of a line from A-Vey. to be here, but that sounds to me like a situation where a weird, isolated kid in a kind of frosty home might start to find transgressing kind of exciting. It was pretty much the only time when real emotions were let out. At the start of middle school, the family moved again up to a trailer home in Plattsburgh. William didn't find it any easier to make friends there. He was shy and strange and whatever

other qualities German home cooking might have low fat is not one of them. William was a tall, pudgy kid who also happened to have a really high-nervious little boys. Middle school kids, as a group, do not tend to be kind to the odd and the strange. In his isolation, William dove into schoolwork, discovering a deep facility with science, especially biology, which took him on to college in Plattsburgh. His dad died in a construction accident when William was in school, leaving him and his mom alone in the trailer. So far, William has just been an awkward nerd, but he already had a cruel streak.

Even though she was only in her 60s, Eleanor was in the early stages of dementia, and she was often confused. William either ignored her or bullied her. She was a Christian scientist and did not altogether approve of his scientific education, so just to irritate her, he'd read out loud from his textbooks.

When people visited and Eleanor tried, to say something, he just told her to shut up. Nice, good. We're developing a healthy respect for women, I see. Yeah. College was good for William. He joined a frad and learned to interact with the humans. Unhealthy fasting and crash diets shed some weight, at least for a little while,

and he successfully molded himself into an average college man, like if beige were a human being. But he continued to excel academically, and beige plus smart is enough to. to get you some attention in college. In this case, from a nursing student named Nancy Bolton, William would basically fall for any woman who gave him some attention, and Nancy had a kind of stern Maggie Thatcher vibe, probably not a million miles away from Mama Eleanor. Yeah, paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud.

Actually, Freud also came up with the Madonna Horror Complex, so you might as well just keep him on speed dial for this story. Freud on call is the alternate episode title. William and Nancy got married right after he graduated. A National Science Foundation Fellowship paid for a year of postgraduate work at Yale, which changed William's life because he excelled and started to get an ego. He got a master's and PhD in biomedical sciences and soon landed a private research job back in Lake Placid. By this time, his mom had died, an event that didn't seem to move him much.

He and Nancy had three kids. He published an incredible amount of scientific papers, and eventually he was on the review panel of the National Institutes of Health. The awkward nerd seemed to have built a successful, normal life. How much weight is resting on that, seem to? We don't really know. The story of Robin Benedict was big news in the 80s, so inevitably there was a TV movie about it,

which has William wandering into the Red Light District, being dazzled by all the bright lights and being kind of surprised to find himself in bed with a sex worker. Like, oh, gee, shucks, how'd I end up here? In reality, that's not at all the way things happen. He was already a frequent John by the time of this story, and how far back the habit goes, we'll never know. Certainly not from William, whose science nerd vibe hit a deceptive and manipulative nature. He would absolutely lie to save himself some embarrassing. We do know that somewhere on the road between Mother's Strudel and academic stardom,

he developed an obsession with porn that soon evolved from Playboy to extreme material about gangrape, bondage, and violent sadism. And if you want some more dime store psychoanalysis, you don't have to squint too hard at Williams' repressed childhood and strict mother to see where a kink for control and domination would come from. Yeah. You might not even need to squint at all, just come to. kind of look at it.

Yeah. In 1978, William was headhunted by the Tufts University Medical School in Boston, thinking his reputation and academic output would help them haul in lots of grant money. He was made an assistant professor and given his own lab to supervise. And it just so happened that the Tufts Medical School sat right next to a neighborhood known as the Combat Zone. I'm sure anybody who plays Fallout 4 just pricked up their ears, but the combat zone was a real place, a block and a half of downtown Boston that in the 70s was officially designated as

the adult entertainment district. There were strip clubs, pornographic bookstores, and movie theaters, and sex workers of every type on the street corners and in the bars. It was predictably an easy place to buy drugs. If you wanted any kind of nasty good time, you came to the combat zone. And as was not uncommon for such places in big cities at the time, it was also one of the few places that LGBTQ people could live without fear of regular harassment. In the early days of the combat zone, the same was even true for mixed race couples. So this was a wild, accepting, dangerous criminal place. In 1976, the Wall Street Journal described the neighborhood as a sexual Disneyland,

which I doubt the Disney company appreciated. The mouse will have to send his team of lawyers to deal with it. You don't want to mess with the mouse. Oh, man, talk about breaking your thumbs. In 1975, police arrested 97 underage girls for soliciting men in the zone. The way this usually worked at the time, the girls were arrested and the Johns were not. Great. Makes perfect sense, right?

This kind of sex work was incredibly dangerous. Women working on the streets were often beaten or mugged, and no one in Boston was more at risk of being murdered. It might have been sexual. Disneyland, but this neighborhood was not the happiest place on Earth. There was no shortage of bars in the combat zone, but the one Professor William Douglas adopted as his own was Good Time Charlie's, which does not in fact sound like a good time. Depressed-looking men drank at a big circular bar while a couple of topless ladies danced on a small stage under pink lighting, one of them scrambling down every now and again to pump more

quarters into the jukebox to keep the disco hits coming. sex workers stood against the wall, sometimes coming to the bar to ask a prospective client if he wanted to party. Good Time Charlie's had a few rules to maintain their status as the more respectable combat zone bar. There was a dress code for the ladies working there to try and create the illusion that they might just be out clubbing. And unlike some of the other bars, there was no screwing around on the actual premises. They had to go elsewhere for that, but not before letting the guy buy him a drink. William had become a regular there almost as soon as he'd started at Tufts. He'd regained the weight he'd lost in college and then some.

He was a huge guy over six feet tall and over 300 pounds. But he also seemed harmless, nervous and smiling when one of the women approached him. And at least in comparison to most of the guys drinking there, he looked like he had money. They frequently hired sex workers who seemed to have enjoyed working with him, safe and has money is the ideal combination in that line of work. And one night in the cold march of 1982, a beautiful young woman came up to him at the bar and started flirting. This was Robin Benedict,

although when she was working, she used her middle name, Nadine. Robin Benedict was born in 1961, in Methuen, an old industrial town just across the border from New Hampshire. Her dad, John, was from Trinidad, but after finishing service in the U.S. Navy, he decided to change his name from Lopez to Benedict for his new American life in New England, which was not an uncommon choice in the late 50s. He'd met his wife Ellen while stationed in Virginia, and after the Navy, they headed back to her home state of Massachusetts to a small five-room house in Methuen. It's a nicer place now than it was when Robin was growing up there, a green street close by the Merrimack River, but in the 60s and early 70s, before Lerun. the Clean Water Act, the river was nasty, it's basically just a soup of industrial pollution and

raw sewage, and the factories on its banks made the air gray and smoggy. Yack. Robin and her four siblings were pressured to perform well in school, and all of them joined a local marching band, the White Eagles, Drum, and Bugle Corps. Robin was a cute kid with a bright smile who grew into a beautiful young woman. She always got great grades, but her main interests were creative, learning to play the flute and developing a real skill for drawing. She went to the Greater Lawrence Technical High School to study commercial art, where she won the Presidential Certificate of Merit and was voted best dressed in her senior year, which led her to choose as her yearbook quote,

I love this. Robin Benedict leaves behind her flashy wardrobe and goes stark naked into the world. She was smart and energetic, and she definitely had a wild streak. Methuen was boring. When Robin started dating, it was with dudes with cars who'd take her to disco clubs out of town. This was disco's time in the sun, and under the glitter balls and colored lights, Robin won a bunch of dance contests, some with cash prizes. Her boyfriends were always older and always had some kind of an edge, a little touch of danger.

Neither of these are particularly unusual for teenage girls. You know, the bad boy cliche didn't become a cliche out of nowhere. It's most definitely a thing. Oh, yeah. In her senior year, Robin and her then boyfriend went to a fundraiser event at school that featured the faculty against some players from the New England Patriots NFL team. And at the dinner afterward, Robin got to know Ray Kostick. Ray was 24 years old and a linebacker for the Patriots, although he wasn't a superstar by any means. In his three-year career, he'd only started six games.

And thanks to a knee injury, that would be all the time he got in the NFL. Robin and Ray hit it off at dinner and soon became friends. Ray had a long-term girlfriend and a kid back in Mississippi, and he was lonely up in New England. So Robin invited him to her dad's weekend barbecues. He almost became one of the family. Then, one day, Robin happened to go see her boyfriend and walked in on him in bed with another woman. She drove to Ray's apartment in tears and cried on his shoulder,

and it probably won't surprise anybody to hear that they started dating soon. after that. And Robin moved into his apartment in Quincy. He still kind of had that girlfriend in Mississippi, but, you know, Mississippi was a long way away, and this is before the internet. Yeah.

Robin got a graphic design job, and on the surface, she was her usual upbeat self, but things weren't going great with Ray. She was in some ways a tough cookie, but there was kind of a heartbreakingly yearning quality to Robin. She wanted to be

loved. And if that meant shaping herself into something new, she'd do it. Ray Kostick was an unusual dude in some ways. He'd formerly had a drug problem and still hung out with a pretty sketchy crowd, but he's also a semi-devout Jehovah's Witness, and he'd go through periods where he'd be racked with guilt about all the partying. Robin had been raised Catholic, but gave it up and took Bible study classes to start the lengthy process of converting to the Jehovah Witnesses for Ray. When Ray heard his name and couldn't play, Robin took care of him and ran errands. But she didn't get the same kind of consideration back. When Ray's Mississippi girlfriend came to visit, he kicked Robin out of the apartment for the

weekend. Oh, yeah. I do not like him. Mm-mm. No. Robin thought they should have a child together, but Ray had no interest in that. He had a four-year-old in Mississippi that he barely knew. and he intended to get back there soon.

There's a clear difference in how they saw the relationship. Robin thought she'd found a mate for life, but to Ray, she was just his New England girlfriend. After they'd went together for a year or so, Ray told her he was going to spend the off-season down in Mississippi, getting to know his son. The NFL off-season is like seven months long, and Robin could hear the alarm bells ringing.

She tried to talk him in the staying, but Ray headed south. And before long, Ray told her he was staying, Mississippi and getting married. Robin was justifiably hurt and angry, and she could throw a punch. She called up Ray's church elders and told them that not only had

Ray been doing a whole lot of fornicating, the two of them had frequently shared lines of Coke. Petty? Sure. Satisfying? Oh, yeah, you betcha. Wowie. When they'd been together, Ray and Robin had gone to a lot of parties, and at

one of them, an acquaintance of race came up to congratulate him on his pretty girlfriend. It's so weird. This was JR, a small-time pimp who had a knack for appearing at parties in clubs where athletes and other local high rollers were and asking if they needed female entertainment. To one later interviewer, Kostick would say that J.R. said about Robin, that's the kind of girl you marry. But he told an earlier interviewer that what J.R. said was, that's the kind of child you put out on the street, which sounds more like some of. something J.R. would say. Anyway, by the end of the year, Robin had given up on the Jehovah's witnesses and was being driven to work in J.R.'s Mercedes. The war is over and both sides lost.

Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, an army scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always will. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon.

with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. From the parents behind Law and Order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Picklebottom, a precocious 11-year-old with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life

as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. After a short apprenticeship offering massages with extras in a couple of health clubs, J.R. sent her to the combat zone to make some real money. This all happened incredibly fast, and it's kind of difficult to piece together why. Robin had a job. Her drug use was entirely casual and didn't burn a hole in her finances.

She'd always had a healthy sexual appetite, but wasn't promiscuous. She was certainly vulnerable after everything fell apart with Ray Kostic, and that made her open to a romantic relationship with J.R., which is what happened. The pimp relationship is definitively exploitative. One person's doing the work and taking all the risks, and it's not the person controlling the money. But people are complicated. If for a moment you set aside the huge box of snakes that was their respective jobs, Robin and J.R. started dating, moved in together and fell for each other. And obviously, we're not holding J.R. up as any kind of paragon here.

he was fundamentally kind of a sleaze bag. It's just that people are weird, and there seems to have been genuine affection between them. Robin almost certainly knew how J.R. made a living before she got involved with them. She had a history of trying to please her romantic partners. Would that go as far as embracing sex work? A wrinkle there is that after all this shook down,

Robin's parents hired an investigation agency to look into what had happened to their daughter, which revealed that she'd already done a little sex work by herself when she was a senior in high school. So JR was absolutely skilled at talking women into sex work, but I think you have to say that Robin had her eyes open about what she was doing. And just for the record, this is what sex trafficking looks like nine out of ten times, a boyfriend or a friend that talks someone into sex work and works as their pimp. It's nothing like Liam Neeson would have you believe.

Yeah, and a lot of times that's not what happened here, but a lot of times it will also involve getting them addicted to drugs or some other way of kind of keeping them there if they decide they don't want to be there anymore. JR was Clarence Rogers Jr. A short, kind of fancy guy in his 30s who was sharp, but no kind of tough guy. He had a short and very petty, nonviolent criminal record

and was well known to Boston Vice as a pimp. His girlfriend, Savi, was a Trinidadian immigrant who had been a sex worker for sex worker for, years, and they had a little boy together, Taj. Savi was tall and friendly, but with a tough edge, as you'd expect from someone who'd been working on the streets for years. She and Robin got along really well, even after Robin replaced her in J.R.'s apartment. Savi took Robin under her wing in the combat zone, and Robin tried to mimic her friend's take-no-shit attitude, but the fact was she was 20 years old

and new to all of this. It was all affront. Her plan was to do this for five years and make as much money as she could and then go back to her art career. But by the time she was one year in, she would already be sick of it. There's every reason to think she'd have gotten out and put her life back on the track she wanted it, but she never got the chance. When William Douglas took his new job at Tufts, his family settled in the small suburban town of Sharon in one of the wealthiest counties in the whole country. But the trappings of success weren't helping his marriage with Nancy.

He would claim later that Nancy refused to have sex with him, and that's why he started his forays to the combat zone. But the thing about that is, William's a liar. And I suspect if that's true at all, he put it backwards. Nancy stopped going to bed with him because she figured out he was paying other women for sex. Anyway, their marriage became chilly and almost silent. His work at Tufts was excellent. He was popular with students that he taught, but not with the people he worked with. He had kind of a shy demeanor, but couldn't take criticism at all and got angry really fast. He got paranoid about people taking stuff from his office, so he labeled everything with his initials. Just like Amy Bishop, you remember her?

The university shooter, like she would label everything in her lab and get mad if somebody accidentally could kick a key home or something. When academic books kept going missing, he had to be talked out of a plan to plant highly radioactive material in the bindings and then go hunting for the thief with a Geiger counter, which is possibly one of the most psycho things I've ever heard in my life. Holy shit. So his reputation was of a brilliant weirdo and also kind of a prudish one. There were young single guys in the lab who were always talking about the combat zone, just one block away from the med center, but William never joined in and gave them disapproving

looks. He just didn't want to reveal how much he actually knew about the combat zone. More often than not, he'd go there right after work and spend hours in the porn shops and bars, sometimes going with a sex worker to her trick pad before heading home to Nancy and the kids. His behavior got even weirder in 1982, after he met Robin Benedict and almost immediately became obsessed with her. Their first few conversations did not lead to the trickpad on Beacon Street that Robin shared with Savvy. William wanted oral sex, which was not a service she provided, and she really didn't like men as sweaty and large as him. Robin was one of the hottest women working in the combat zone, and she could afford to be a little picky. So the first few times they'd talked

had ended with Robin introducing him to another lady who could give him what he wanted, and those other ladies gave Robin encouraging reports. Despite his extreme interest in violent porn, William was surprisingly vanilla in his request to sex workers. I'm guessing it's because he was too embarrassed to ask for anything else. He was polite, docile, and paid up without hesitation. That's not always easy to find. So in April, he became a regular client of Robbins, meeting once or twice a week. Sex can sometimes lead to talking, and they'd chat in bed. Robin was funny and curious with everyone she spoke with. She was a gregarious, friendly person. But to a sad sack like William, it felt like something special was happening with them. Oh, Lord. No, no, she really likes me. We have a

connection. I can feel it. Honey, honey. No. Things started to get out of hand fast. Once or twice a week became every weeknight, with William paying two or $300 a night for hours of her time. He made decent money, but academic rock stars don't get paid like actual rock stars. This was financially untenable, and he knew it, but he didn't stop. Soon, Robin stopped going to the combat zone at all. She made enough from a few deep-pocketed clients that she didn't have to go out on the streets anymore. And William was the best client she had.

More and more often now, he didn't even want to have sex, just wanted to sit and talk or walk through boss in common. If he did want some action that Robin wasn't in the mood for, he was content if she called up savvy and let her do the work instead. Compared to how most women in her profession worked, this looked like a pretty sweet situation. But if she'd been more experienced, Robin might have been wary. Stocking didn't really exist as a legal concept in 1982, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Most women would know what you were talking about if you described it.

And it's a thing that strippers and sex workers are at high risk of. A client who started imagining a real emotional connection was something that probably wasn't going to lead any more good. To be clear, Robin never encouraged William in that way. She never treated him or referred to him as anything other than a friend. And all their meetings were clearly transactional. He wanted to sit and talk. He paid for her time.

He wanted to go to the park. He paid for her time. He wanted her to make dinner. He paid for her time and the groceries too. This was the job. Money in exchange for human interaction. And she never disguised that. Yeah, the delulu that this man achieved here, he achieved all on his own. She was not trying to mislead him.

In May, after knowing her for just a couple of months, William sent Robin a note outlining a plan to get her on the Tuft's payroll as an illustrator. This, he wrote, would help avoid a gap in her resume when she finished her five years of sex work and would also help next April when William did her tax returns. Now, on the one hand, this looks like standard issue simpage, promising to do end. anything for the girl he had a crush on, but you have to consider that all of William's secret porn kinks revolved around controlling other people. It was probably a major reason why he enjoyed sex workers so much. Whatever happened, it was because he and his money made it happen. And now he was trying to fully insert himself into her life and make himself indispensable, make her reliance on him. It wasn't cute at all. He just wanted to tighten his grip on her.

Our main source for this story was Don Stradley's book Boston Tabloid, and he theorizes that what made William obsess about Robin so quickly was that he was fundamentally jealous of her. He was a gray man with a gray life, and the only excitement in it came from his secret porn stash. He'd never turned heads, never broke the rules, and here was this beautiful 20-year-old, who for all her dramas and mistakes was living a colorful, exciting life where she was widely, desired, and despite the tawdreness of her profession, she had a spark of light and energy in her that William had never had. He started mirroring her. If she was going to do cocaine, he would do cocaine. He bought her a little silver Toyota Starlet, and then bought himself one, too. It's like single white female, so weird. It was a cute car for a 20-year-old, but a ridiculous one for a well-to-do 40-year-old with three kids. When he wasn't actually,

with her, William was usually composing one of endless letters to her. These weren't sexual at all, and were barely romantic, just sappy praising of Robin and whining about how he wasn't good enough for her. Oh, my God,

I know the exact type, and you do too. Like, have you ever had a guy go on and on about how unworthy he is of you? And it's like, exhausting, because he's just fishing. It's like, I saw one yesterday on Reddit, where the guy said, if you ask 10 women about me, 10 of them would say I look weird. It's like, maybe.

Now that you say it, yeah. Yeah, here's a little advice for the dudes out there, just from, you know, from a lady who's had experience with dudes. If you do this enough, eventually the woman's going to start to think, you know what, maybe you're right. You're not good enough for me. You know, I mean, it really, you got to be careful about that shit. They read like they'd been written by a middle schooler with his first girlfriend. He started ending them with, I love you, but Robin told him not to, so he passive-aggressively switched to, I love seeing you. You know, I'm going to do what you tell me, technically, but I'm still going to do what I want, too.

Robin's own letters in reply were brief and light and talked only about their friendship. When she'd first met him, Robin had been interested in William and his work. She was naturally curious, and he was certainly a really intelligent man, but it didn't take many of his saccharine letters to turn that off. Sappy and self-pitying had never appealed to her. William was just work. At his own job, William was often late and even more dishevelled than usual. He had a couch brought to his office and often slept there. He was short-tempered and distracted and often vanished in the middle of the day. Like so many of the truly brilliant people we've covered, his brain just switched off when he tried to be underhanded,

most likely because he assumed every other human being was a drooling idiot. He went ahead and got Robin on the school's payroll as an assistant, saying she was an MIT grad student and paying her $1,000 a month, which that's a lot, you know, purportedly to draw sketches for his various projects. And for 1982 money, basically multiply that, by three and a half for today's equivalent, so, you know, not peanuts by any means. And for sketches that nobody'd ever seen? People in the lab made the fairly accurate assumption that this mysterious Miss Benedict was a mistress. This, obviously, was not William's money to spend. It was also just the tip of the iceberg of how much cash she was ripping off from Tufts.

In November, William and Robin were leaving her trick pad early one morning, when a couple of vice cops stopped and harassed them, laughing at William when he insisted Robin was his employee at Tufts. They showed him a picture of JR and told him that this was Robin's pimp and that William's money all went to him. Williams still refused to admit to them that Robin was a sex worker. Robin had been having a hard time with the cops. They always seemed to turn up at her trickpads not long after she'd set herself up,

forcing her to find a new place. About half the time when she was with the club, client, vice would show up and give her grief. It was like the police always knew where she was and what she was up to. They did, almost, because William Douglas was telling them. Oh my God. It's so creepy. As soon as he'd started seeing Robin, he'd also started secretly following her whenever he could. When he saw her pick up a client, he called the vice squad in a fake voice and told them where to come for her. There's even some suggestion that he was paying one of the vice detectives to make sure they leapt into action. Unbelievable.

He'd called them on this November morning when they got in his own face. It gave him a chance to show a little backbone in front of Robin and probably gave him a little thrill. Oh, I'm in trouble with the fuzz. Aren't I a naughty boy? There are probably a few things going on here. And the most obvious is simple jealousy. He didn't want Robin and D. bed with other guys, so he called the cops to interrupt them when he could.

But the constant with William Douglas was that he wasn't just a sad sack. There was always something steely and cruel buried inside him. He wanted Robin scared and uncertain, so she'd rely more and more on her safe, friendly professor. But he wasn't safe or friendly. He bought her an answering machine and then later smashed a window to break into her trick pad to steal it so he could listened to her messages and learn more about her personal life. Jesus. He bought her replacement machine when she moved into a new pad, and before long, he broke in there too.

He staged a robbery, throwing things around, and stole $300, the new answering machine, and Robin's address book where she kept the contact information for her regular clients. Oh, my God. He'd soon go through it and try to figure out which guys were married. Then he'd call their wives and rat them out for seeing a sex worker. When Robin told him how terrifying it was to be robbed twice in quick succession, he consoled her. Jesus. He's Dennis Reynolds. For the Always Sunny and Philadelphia fans, it's the first end in the Dennis system.

Nurture dependence. What a freaking creep. Good gravy. Eventually, Robin noticed Williams' car following her when she was with other clients. She confronted him, and he denied everything. But she was getting a bad feeling. And she decided to cool things off. By the end of the year, she was changing the way she worked, cruising yuppie bars instead of the combat zone, and doing mostly pretend lesbian sex shows with other ladies. All very theatrical, lots of riving and moaning with very little in the way of actual action going on. Yeah, like most lesbian porn.

When they all have very long fingernails and you're like, yeah. Okay. All right. soon she stepped down her activities significantly, going back to massage work outside of Boston, where she and J.R. got a little house and started decorating it. This looks like a step towards stopping sex work, although not leaving the biz entirely. She'd be J.R.'s kind of normal girlfriend while he made money from other women. As to whether she'd stay with J.R., who knows?

She was 21 years old and absolutely still had the real possibility of a bright future. she still wanted to do her art. I think she'd have ditched him before long. Meanwhile, at Tufts, a routine audit of Williams' lab turned up some eye-opening expenses. There were claims for business trips he'd taken all over the country, even one for Sweden, that no one could remember William ever going on. There were expense vouchers for housing and entertaining visiting professors that no one had ever seen or heard of. And most of all, there was a huge stack of expense vouchers,

for the mysterious Robin Benedict, the MIT grad student that no one had ever met. And just to illustrate what a cheapskate William was when it came to his own money, he'd also used the lab to buy condoms from a medical supply company. And he'd listed them on the invoice as biological fluid collection units, which might be the worst phrase I've ever heard like ever in my life. Oh, Lord. In the course of one year, he'd racked up. $67,000 in fraudulent expenses.

The vice president and comptroller of Tufts called him in. He hemmed and hawed and said there might be a problem with his record keeping, but all the expenses were certainly genuine. When they asked for Robin's phone number, he told them it was confidential. Yeah, those MIT grad students, you know, top secret. Not suspicious at all, Bill. Well played. He offered him.

to reimburse the school for all the expenses. They let him know that their investigation would continue. On New Year's Eve, Robin and J.R. were in the process of moving into their new house up in Malden, but still stayed in their old apartment. Outside, cold in his car, William spied on them, waiting for them to come out so he could finally get a good look at J.R. They didn't come out. He went to a phone booth and called Robin, pleading for a date. She said, no, it was New Year's Eve. she wasn't working. And instead of going home to his family, William just sat in his car and watched. I'm guessing either Robin or JR spotted him, because the next day, Robin called William and said he'd become a pest and she wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Ten days later, he was suspended

from Tufts. Look, there are a lot of celebrity interview podcasts out there, but there's only one happy, sad, confused. I'm Josh Horowitz, and yeah, I'm the host of the show, so I'm a little biased, but truly, happy, sad, confused is the place for nerdy and intimate conversations with all your favorite actors and filmmakers. From Andrew Garfield and Scarlett Johansson to Christopher Nolan, casting what ifs, backstage stories, and much more. Listen to Happy Say It Confused on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are names that echo in the world of true crime, names that carry unanswered questions.

Oakley Carlson. A five-year-old girl who deserved safety, protection, and love. Yet the system built to protect her failed and Oakley disappeared. Her community still calls her name. Or Ellen Greenberg found in her locked apartment with 20 stab wounds. A case declared a suicide. But how does a locked apartment tell two different stories at once? These are not just cases we have covered.

They are people. They were loved and they mattered. Their stories deserve to be told. with care, with depth, with truth. I'm Ashley. And I'm Ricky. We are the husband and white duo behind crime salad. Every week we uncover stories of the missing, the silence, the misunderstood.

We ask the questions that were left behind. We refuse to let these stories be forgotten. Because behind every case is a family holding on a community seeking answers and a story that deserves to be heard. We invite you to listen to Crime Salad. Your healthy portion of true crime. wherever you get your podcast. Robin was working at a place called the Danish Health Club and Sagas,

which was notorious for offering a lot more than just massages. Patrons didn't get much more than that from Robin, though, who no longer bothered to act like she enjoyed sex work and didn't provide any services beyond a scowling handjob. Scowling handjob is my new indie band name. That's the best kind of hand job, a scowling one. William visited her a few times, but she didn't give him any more than she gave anyone else and wouldn't meet with him outside of the club. When he sent a long, pathetic letter about his suspension from Tufts, she told him she'd quit working at the health club, hoping he'd just leave her the hell alone.

So he started calling the health club in a ridiculous falsetto voice to complain about Robin. He practiced the calls and recorded them on tape. The police later found one with him saying, Is your whore from the combat zone working tonight? Robin Benedict, you know we're going to close that fucking place of yours for bringing whores from the combat zone back here. He also called the local police, in one call complaining that Robin had propositioned me for sex and money

and tried to sell me dope. The good citizens of Saugas are going to rid ourselves of the stench of this place. After Robin had been working there for just three weeks, a city health inspector showed up to investigate the claims. The big charges wouldn't stick, but Robin wasn't licensed to give massages. The health club didn't want a loser. She was the prettiest woman working there, and that brought clients in, even if they got nothing more than a grim handy. But the club couldn't risk being shut down, so they fired her. William was sitting by the window in a restaurant across the street, watching the whole thing play out as he ate.

He'd been following her almost constantly since his suspension, spying on her with high-powered binoculars. William was asked to do a week-long seminar to his old college in Plattsburgh, where no one had heard about his trouble at Tufts. He wanted Robin to come with him for the whole week, but she didn't want to do that. She really didn't want anything to do with him at all anymore, but he was offering to give her $1,000 for every day she spent with him,

and after losing her massage job, she needed the money. She agreed to spend the last two days of the conference with him. He introduced her as a grad student named Chris Costello and paraded her around his old school like a trophy. A couple of weeks later, Robin and William met and argued so much about the two grand he owed her that he had chest pains. They rushed to the hospital, where the doctors found nothing wrong with him at all.

I think he faked the whole thing to get out of the argument and elicit sympathy from Robin. He probably didn't expect her to be worried enough to call his wife Nancy, and she soon arrived at the ER. Robin introduced herself as Chris and immediately got to hell out of there. That's the girl, isn't it? Nancy said. She'd long ago figured out that William was having some kind of affair. He was out all night, burning holes through their bank account, wasn't exactly complicated. In fact, she'd say later that he'd been acting this way for years. He hadn't known Robin for even one year at this point.

He'd started trawling the combat zone almost as soon as they moved to Boston in 1978. A few months earlier, he'd admitted to Nancy that he had a girlfriend. He'd asked if she wanted a divorce, but she'd been determined to try and fix their marriage. By now, she was mostly just depressed. On March 2nd, Robin called Nancy at home and said, Bill wants to see me but I no longer want to see him. Please keep him away. On March 4th, William called Robin. He'd say later that he was trying to reason with her. March 5th was a Saturday.

Robin went out to buy a gift for Taj, Savi and J.R.'s young son, whose fourth birthday was the next day. At around 7.45, Robin went by Good Time Charlies and told Savvy she'd pick her and Taj up the next day for a birthday party. After that, she went out for a getting-to-know-you dinner with a prospective client, a wealthy real estate developer. She left at about 9.45 saying she had to meet someone else, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her. This case does feature a confession of sorts from William, which we'll get to later, but it's obviously ridiculous and no one should believe it. What we know is that Robin went to his house where he beat her to death with a short sledgehammer. He then transported her body in her Toyota Starlet and disposed of it somewhere. Robin's body would never be found.

He wrapped the bloody hammer in her tan jacket in one of his own workshirts and ditched them in a rest-up garbage cam. Liam then drove her bloody car down to New York and abandoned it in a parking garage. If there was any plan at all in covering up Robin's murder, it was a terrible one. The state police were called in to the restop the next morning after the bloody hammer was found. And William doesn't seem to have considered that people take actions of their own. Robin had told Savvy she was going to William's house to collect some money he owed her, and when Robin hadn't shown up for the birthday party, Savvy got worried. It wasn't the kind of thing Robin would miss.

She called a cop she knew advice. It's the doctor, she said. It's got to be. Robin's dad soon reported her missing. When police asked him if she owned a tan corduroy jacket, he said yes. his heart falling. The jacket had been found around the bloody hammer. The police started to think Robin was probably dead. When investigators first spoke to William on Tuesday, he had a big bandage on his forehead.

He said he'd hit his head against the cabinet door. Later on, he said he didn't mugged at the Amtrak station and been hit on the head. He admitted he knew Robin was a sex worker, but insisted she was also a Tufts employee, and he had never been a client of hers. She'd come over on Saturday to drop off sketches and pick up paperwork and had left around midnight. The police grilled JR, but he had an alibi and seemed genuinely distraught about Robin's disappearance. William was much calmer in his police interview, but strange, and kept telling obvious lies with complete confidence. He added a third explanation for his injured forehead.

A couple of muggers tried to grab his briefcase in Chinatown, and in the struggle they'd smacked him on the head with it. He also said that shortly before Robin's disappearance, he'd gone to see Tootsie, and when he'd come out, his car had been stolen. The next day, he'd spent the afternoon with Robin, but when he'd left the building, three black men had grabbed him and thrown him into the back of a van. They punched him and yelled at him for an hour while the van drove around, telling him to stay away from Robin, then ditched him in an alley right next to where his stolen car was parked. Utter, insane nonsense, of course. To this day, it's pretty common for white people inventing crimes to inject racial minorities as the perpetrators, and I suspect it was even more common in 1983. But in addition to just the basic racism, J.R. was black, and William was trying to steer the investigation toward him, telling detectives that J.R. and Robin had been fighting a lot. Police executed a search warrant for William's house at 12.40 a.m., two weeks after Robin had disappeared. The house was filthy, trash and dirty laundry everywhere.

A stick of butter sat unwrapped on the living room floor. There was an empty bucket of popcorn in the bathtub, and you had to step over a TV to get to the toilet. The place looked like, and probably was, somewhere where too deeply depressed people were living. Detectives showed the hammer to both William and Nancy, who both said they'd never seen it. It didn't take the investigators long to find the box

in the bedroom closet that held William's porn stash. It contained titles like Illustrated Gang War Torture and Little Sarah's Slave Training. They found an envelope containing a pair of pink women's panties, two of Robin's address books and several of her credit cards.

Elsewhere, officers found a yellow plastic bag that held Robin's purse and her flute. There was also a clipping of the first Boston Herald story about Robin, distraught dad, Hunt's daughter. When they showed all this to William, he just acted confused. Like, gosh, yes, all this certainly was Robbins, but he had no idea how it had ended up in his house.

Maybe her boyfriend had broken in and planted it. Investigators found some of William's shirts that were just like the one found at the restop, and trash bags just like the one it had been stuffed into. William was weirdly calm throughout this. At one point, he just went upstairs to bed and tried to go to sleep. Investigators would later suspect that the bed was where he'd killed Robin, and he was just trying to keep them from taking too close of a look.

Crime scene texts used luminal to try and find blood evidence, but the house was so filthy that the whole place lit up. They did find some blood evidence on the right pocket of a blue windbreaker. They asked William if the coat was his. It looks like mine, but I'm not going to say it's mine. said. They would later assume he put the hammer in the pocket while he was moving Robin's body. Deep in the pocket was an inch-long piece of flattened gray material. One of the cops thought it looked like a piece of snot. It would actually turn out to be part of a human brain.

At this point, everyone knew that William had killed Robin, but the DA was wary about jumping the gun on a murder case with no body. Weeks later, Robin's Toyota was discovered in New York. The FBI lab matched the blood inside to Robin's type. They also found more fragments of brain matter from deep inside the head where only gunshots or the most catastrophic blows would dislodge them. Nancy's brother told investigators that she'd borrowed a small sledgehammer from their dad a few months ago. The hammer used to kill Robin had a small ring on the end, like he'd used to hang it from something. When they went to visit Nancy's dad, in his garage, they saw a neat line of hammers of different sizes hanging from the wall, with a gap where the murder weapon should be.

He said the murder weapon was indeed his hammer. William was arrested. He was an absolute nightmare for his defense team, refusing to take any of their advice. They wanted to try an insanity defense, but William kept insisting on bizarre stories. First, that the state police were framing him, then that a sex worker had once abducted him, drugged him with apple juice and taken compromising pictures to blackmail him with. It wasn't clear if he meant this was Robin, but a lot of what he said was not making a lot of sense. He wouldn't go on trial. Shortly before it was set to begin, he accepted a plea deal on a

lesser charge of manslaughter. This was a tough pill to swallow, but the prosecution was worried. Nancy's dad had backtracked on identifying the hammer, and their case would rely on testimony by a lot of combat zone veterans, that it would be pretty easy for the defense to paint as unreliable. The same was true of Robin herself. In 1984, even more than today, her career in life would have them dragging her through the mud. The prosecutors worried that even if they got a conviction, William might be released on appeal. At least with a confession, he'd go away. William's story was that Robin had borrowed the hammer from him to work on her new home in Malden. He still owed her $2,000 from the Plattsburgh trip, but now she was insisting on $5,000.

When she came over on the night of her death, he said Robin had the hammer hidden under the jacket draped over her arm. William took her to his bedroom where he kept his secret stash of cash. But when he said he only had $2,000, Robin whacked him on the head with a hammer, knocking him down onto the bed. William said they struggled, Robin hitting him again and again. He managed to get the hammer from her. she still fought, scratching and biting. So we hit her with the hammer to get her to stop. There's no excuse for what I did. I just hit her two or three times, and I must have hit her awfully hard. The skull was cracked, and I could see the internal part of the brain.

If you believe that bullshit, I'm guessing you regularly forget to put your pants on when you leave the house. She attacked you with your own hammer that she borrowed? Come on. This was a streetwise woman with connections. If she wanted you dead, she could have probably got her hands on a gun inside of an hour. And William only had one injury on his forehead, which investigators thought he'd given himself because he was such a klutz. The first time a detective had spoken to him three days after Robin's death, he'd been wearing a t-shirt, but there'd been no scratches or bites on his arms, no defensive wounds at all. God, he's dumb. Well, he said it said it, so it must be true. People don't lie.

And Robin had been five foot four and weighed about as much as a wet towel. The idea that this big Hulk William could only defend himself from her by killing her was just ridiculous. The only thing that probably wasn't a lie was that Robin had gone there to get the money he owed her, the $2,000 for Plattsburgh. He'd lured her to the bedroom by saying that was where the money was and then just started hammering furiously at her head until her skull was crushed. He said he put the bloody jacket, hammer and shirt in the garbage bag, then wrapped Robin's body in a comforter and dragged her out to the trunk of her Toyota. He jumped the hammer and clothes at the rest of, then drove to prominence and shoved Robin's body into a dumpster.

There's no way to know if that was true. An owner of one of the local landfills said he didn't see how it could be. He said he felt sure a body would be found. Then William continued down to New York to ditch the Toyota in the parking garage and took a bus home. He kept a few things, Robin's purse and her flute. And then he called Nancy to pick him up and told her what he'd just done. He said Nancy was just livid.

I could do something like that. Well, what a bitch. How dare you not stand by your man, Nancy? There were, in fact, a lot of questions about Nancy. When he described leaving the house with Robin's body, William said, I drove, and as we got to the top of the street, I drove as opposed to who, Robin? We got to the top of the street?

Was he alone in the car or was Nancy right there beside him? And she'd borrowed the hammer from her dad not long before the murder. It makes you wonder whether William had planned all of this by himself or had some help. Nancy, anyway, was never charged. The judge gave William the maximum sentence, 18 to 20 years. And he did well in prison. The only time he got in trouble was in nine. 1987 when a female visitor got a little too friendly with them in the visitor's room, and when a

guard made them stop, she still had the evidence of the encounter all over her fingers. This was not Nancy, who had stoically stood by her murderer husband and possible co-conspirator. This was Bonnie Jean Smith, a church-loving Connecticut divorcee who had started sending letters to William soon after he went to prison, saying she felt sorry for him. I'm not sure how explicitly the Catholic Church excuses hand jobs to convicted killers, but within seven months of that visit, William was divorced from Nancy and married to Bonnie Jean. To the disgust of many people and the horror of Robin's family, William Douglas was released early in 1993 after serving less than nine years. He slipped into obscurity, his obsessive nature grabbing a hold of Bonnie Jean's religion.

as if he wasn't already insufferable enough, he became one of those people who won't shut up about church. Bonnie Jean died of cancer in 2002. William's own health declined, and he died in a New England nursing home in 2015. A spokesperson for the home said, sometimes you'd hear nurses talking about him, saying there was a murderer on the floor. Of course, he wasn't the only murderer we had. Which, what? You're just going to drop that and not elaborate? Girl, come on.

I was like, no, what, to who? Tell me more. I guess those places aren't as boring as you might think, those, you know, senior homes or whatever. So there you go. Another case of obsession turned fatal. Obsession and I think a large dollop of entitlement. I want you. I've chosen you. You don't get a say in the matter.

For all Williams' claims of eternal devotion, he couldn't even care enough about Robin to respect her right to tell him to screw off. He didn't love her. He wanted to own her. And I've never seen that end in anything but tears. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two live shows coming up. First, we've got summer camp, September 10th through the 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast astonishing legends, in addition to a roster of awesome stand-up comedians, and local bands. Go to badmagicproductions.com for more info and to buy tickets. And then we've got our true crime crews, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12th, 2027. If you want to come on vacation with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, true crime garage, no sleep, last podcast on the left

and scared to death, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now and they're going fast. So if you want to So make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meeting greet with us. And the great thing is you can pay all at once or you can set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week.

But for now, lock your doors, light your lights and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Cassandra, Ian, Jen, Colleen, Christina, and Katie. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And when you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff.

A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. For eight years, we've been asking the same question over and over again. How did this happen? My name's Mandy. And I'm Melissa, and we're the host of Moms and Mysteries, the True Crime Podcast with over 55 million downloads. We're two Florida moms who are obsessed with mysteries. Each week we do deep dives into fascinating true crime stories.

We cover everything from infamous cases like Casey Anthony to the bizarre and complex crimes right here in our home state, like the shocking murder of FSU professor Dan Markell. We bring you the facts, but with warmth and width, you'd only get from two friends who have been hooked on mysteries since childhood. Join us for new episodes of Moms and Mysteries every Tuesday and Thursday. Listen to Moms and Mysteries on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Reality TV is mess.

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