Testimony and tears leave only a riddle

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 20, 2000

If the story of Valessa Robinson, as much as we know, were a novel, it would be a flop. Anybody reading it would finish the book in the dark about what motivated the main character.

This is not entirely the defense's fault. Juries don't like hearing psychiatrists make what ordinary people regard as excuses for hideous behavior. Florida law doesn't give a defense lawyer much wiggle room. You have to all but argue your client is plain cuckoo.

It doesn't matter whether you think she is guilty or not. This trial was remarkable for its inability to answer the question on everybody's mind: What makes the girl tick?

There was no testimony about Valessa's mental state, but clearly she is not cuckoo. Her brains may be fried from all that dope smoking and acid dropping. Still, she cried at all the expected moments in court.

If a teenager is going to commit this almost unimaginable crime, it's not likely to be a daughter. When it comes to violence, gender still matters. Boys hurt others. Girls hurt themselves. Most of the time.

From a kid's point of view, even thinking about killing your mother -- and try naming a kid who hasn't thought about it -- is like contemplating killing God. Your mother gave you life. If she is the only parent around, she is your ultimate authority. She can provoke in you love and hate and both at once, as well as awe.

For a daughter, the awe is very particular. It's about femininity. About being different from your mother. Not just different but better.

In her powerful and elegant final argument, prosecutor Shirley Williams said there was a power struggle going on between Valessa and her mother. Every mother and daughter go through this, but it must have been epic in the Robinson household.

It's my own hunch that Valessa believed she was losing the struggle, that she was not better than her mother but worse. Not as pretty -- physically, Valessa takes after her father -- and not as lucky. Her mother was perhaps about to remarry, to fulfill the old-fashioned fantasy that Valessa, wild and rebellious though she was, had about Adam Davis.

Valessa said she just wouldn't be the prep, as she called it, that her mother wanted her to be I can't help thinking that was defense posing as offense, the phony talk of a troubled girl playing tough.

Just how troubled the jury did not fully hear.

They never heard the story that prosecutor Williams got from Vicki Robinson's relatives, about how Valessa allegedly tortured the family dog, a sheltie named Lady, when Valessa was all of 6 years old She had a habit of calling the puppy to a doorway and then slamming the door on it. When she was 11, Williams said, Valessa was seen trying to run the dog down with a lawn mower.

You don't have to be a psychiatrist to know that torturing an animal doesn't bode well for the way a child will turn out.

Nor do you need to consult Freudian theory to know this behavior all but shouts that the kid is in a rage.

And you don't have to be a family therapist to know that Vicki Robinson herself behaved in contradictory ways.

There she was, a born-again Christian, who sent her daughter to a Christian school and to Christian therapists, who may put more faith in Jesus than in traditional counseling. There she was, a believer in a highly judgmental faith, and she let a 19-year-old who was having sex with her daughter sleep in their house.

This is not a way of blaming Vicki Robinson, but of saying that her daughter must have lived in a world of extremes, with lots of rules one day, too few the next. It couldn't have helped.

But what could have? That's the mystery, and one answer is, perhaps nothing.

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