"Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster"

When Molly's abandonment finally sunk in, Rob turned his formidable anger against his stepmother, Candace, the only maternal figure left in his life, transferring onto her all the rage he must have felt toward his biological mother. It probably didn't help matters that while Rob was always getting in trouble for smoking and fighting, Candace's own son, Zachary, four years Rob's junior, seemed to skate smoothly along. Nor did her response to his tantrums help. Rob's father preferred to handle his outbursts by pinning him on the floor, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he would calm down. But when it was her turn to control him, Candace, an Air Force vet, used the back of her hand.

Growing up on a steady diet of psychiatric medication and corporal punishment, Rob became more violent and withdrawn. When he was 13, his ongoing battle with Candace went nuclear. She searched his backpack for cigarettes, and Rob flipped out on her. In response, she slapped him across the face so hard that her ring cut his forehead. He balled up his fist and said quietly, "I'm going to kill you."

Candace believed he was capable of making good on the threat: For his 14th birthday, Rob got another hospital admission and another fistful of pills. This time he sat in the doctor's office and stared blankly, refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The doctor insisted he apologize to Candace. But Rob was in no mood to make amends with his family. "I hope they get into a car accident," he told the doctor. By now, he no longer regretted his outbursts. The four-year-old kid who thought of himself as stupid and bad for hitting people was now a teenager deep in the throes of mental illness. If the doctors returned him to his stepmother, he said, he "knew where the knives were located, and she would leave the house in a body bag." On Mother's Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones, Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.

Not long after, his father drove to juvenile court and asked the judge to take over: His health insurance had run out, he told the court, and he couldn't afford to pay Rob's medical bills. Molly, Rob's biological mother, wasn't at the hearing — she wasn't even informed of the court date, although she lived 12 miles away — but in any case she was out of the picture by then, off raising her new family. After a hearing that lasted just eight minutes by the stenographer's clock, Judge Robert O'Neal rapped his gavel and the state department of Health and Human Services became Rob's legal guardian.

Two years later, the angry young man waiting in his therapist's office for his father and stepmother to show up for a counseling session looked more like a refugee from a Dickens tale than a kid from Omaha. At 16, Rob was now a veteran of institutions, having spent the last 24 months of his childhood in group homes because he resisted the reconciliation with Candace that would have allowed him to rejoin his family. He looked the part of a miserable ward of the state: painfully thin from years of undereating, nails chewed to gnarled stubs. He wore his hair long, in a thick curtain that hid much of his face and obscured his eyes. He had been molested by another resident, and was prone to suicidal despair. None of it matters, he would tell his therapists: "We're basically just numbers."

In some ways, he was even more traumatized than when he'd entered the system. He had done nine months at the Piney Ridge Center, a residential treatment center in Missouri (where he got into physical fights with other residents), before being transferred at the judge's behest to Cooper Village, a home for boys in Nebraska (where he lived under strict isolation, rarely allowed to leave the campus or make phone calls). Over the years he kept trying to buck the rules and talk to his biological mother, with whom he held out hope of a reunion, but he was never allowed to call her.

By now, his psychological profile included the darker, more exotic ailment that would lie behind his future crimes: anti-social personality disorder, a condition that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for sufferers to feel empathy for strangers. It is the underlying pathology of most serial killers. Rob drew swastikas and professed to believe in Satan. When the staff threatened to send him to another institution if he didn't reconcile with his family, this brooding young man who had spent his teen years being raised by orderlies gave them a dark warning. "If you send me there," he said, "I'll burn that motherfucking place down and all of the people in it."

But now, sitting in the therapist's office, Rob was about to surprise the doctors and social workers who had seen little evidence of change in him. After two years of round-the-clock therapy — at least two sessions a day, plus novel approaches like equine therapy, where he worked with horses — Rob was finally ready to apologize to Candace for threatening her. His therapists considered this the breakthrough they'd been working toward, and his caseworker noted in his file that he was mentally well enough to return home. But when Rob asked her forgiveness for "saying all those hurtful things to you when I was mad," Candace refused to accept his apology. Rob, she told a caseworker, had clearly been "coached" by his therapist. What's more, she added, she would "never feel safe with Robert in the house." She threatened to divorce Ronald if he ever brought his son home.

Rob was furious. The state had spent two years coaxing and pressuring and drugging him to get him to apologize — and when he finally did, it got him nowhere. "My stepmother is evil — she has no heart," Rob told his roommate at Cooper Village, another skinny, lost kid named Dallas. As the days passed in quiet isolation, the two boys clung to each other — from the back, their long hair made them look identical — and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed by wearing purple rubber bracelets. They called themselves the Purple Skulls. Noticing that the boys got into more trouble when they were separated, the staff made it a point to keep them together. "We were closer than brothers," Dallas recalls. "Never apart."

One day, when Dallas turned 17, Rob was given permission to go to a dollar store, where he got heaps of candy and all the soda bottles he could carry. That night, he invited the other patients on his hall over and threw Dallas a surprise birthday party. It touched his friend deeply. "Rob could be great when he loved you," Dallas says.

As the months passed and other kids came and went at Cooper Village, Rob and Dallas remained, dutifully obeying the regimen of classes and therapy, scheduled in orderly blocks from wake-up at 6:30 a.m. to lights out at 10:30 p.m. The two worked the system to the point that the staff allowed them to have guitars and video games in their room, just like regular kids, and to stay up late playing chess and drawing and talking. It was during these late-night bull sessions that Rob admitted to Dallas that he missed his mother terribly. "He talked about her a lot," Dallas recalls. "He wanted to be with her."