Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story (Allegheny Image Factory, Marwar Junction Productions, Red Letter Media, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 7) at 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime movie that turned out to be unusually good despite a piss-ant exploitative title: Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story. Heather Tiffany Robinson (a marvelous performance by Rachel Stubington) is the 16-year-old adoptive daughter of Mike Robinson (Ross Crain, who was a bit hard to take in the role for no fault of his own: he looks like a more heavy-set version of J. D. Vance) and his wife Karen (Molly Miller). They’ve had a long and troubled relationship because Heather gets along well with Mike but is deeply suspicious and resentful of Karen. At one point she chews out Karen and says that Mike actually treats her like his daughter while Karen regards her as an “ornament.” This plot line is intercut with the story of Heather’s uncle John Robinson (Steve Guttenberg), whom she’s taken to see in an early scene. John Robinson is ostensibly a businessperson and activist for people with disabilities, including young women who’ve got pregnant out of wedlock, though in fact he’s a con artist who has a criminal record for forgery and fraud. We learn about John Robinson’s true past – or at least some of it – through an interview he has with parole officer Lisa Coy (Jana Kramer), who summons him from Kansas, where he lives and has a decaying farm, to Missouri because she’s convinced that after his most recent release from prison he’s still committing other crimes. Coy is determined to bust John for whatever he’s doing, and it turns out that he’s considerably worse than a con artist. He’s a serial killer whose modus operandi is recruiting young women who’ve left their families with phony job offers, holding them hostage, forcing them to sign their names on sheets of yellow legal-pad paper, and then killing them. The reason he has them sign their names to otherwise blank pages is so he can forge letters to their parents or families saying they’re all right and living elsewhere when in fact they’re dead and stuffed into 55-gallon oil drums on his property or a storage unit he’s rented in the name of one of his victims. At least some of the parents get suspicious of these phony letters because they don’t read like what their daughters actually said or wrote them, and one mother deduces that the letters are forged because the names of her daughter’s two dogs are misspelled.

The two plot strands meet when Mike and Karen announce that they’re taking Heather from Illinois to Kansas to attend the wedding of family member Samantha to her long-time fiancé, and Uncle John will be there. There’s a grimly funny scene in which Karen takes Heather shopping for a dress to wear to the wedding, and Heather predictably dislikes everything Karen comes up with and says of one particularly ugly dress that it makes her look like a doll. At the wedding reception John asks Heather to dance with him, though Mike cuts in in mid-dance. Uncle John is depicted as a nice if rather eccentric middle-aged guy – referencing Steve Guttenberg’s past, I joked to my husband Charles during one of the promos for this, “Old teen idols never die; they just end up on Lifetime” – and it brought back memories of my mother’s relatives who wanted me to kiss them on the cheeks even though I didn’t want any physical contact with them. (It wasn’t that I had anything against them; it was just that I was revolted by the idea of kissing and touching anybody that old.) Coy gradually convinces reluctant police officers to surveil John and gather enough evidence against him for a search warrant – the local D.A. is a Black man who at first is skeptical of the whole investigation but ultimately agrees to seek the warrant. On John’s farm the cops discover three large black oil barrels, two of which contain bodies in various stages of decomposition. Ultimately they identify at least eight of John Robinson’s victims. They and we also learn that Heather’s real name is Tiffany Stasi (it’s pronounced “Stacy” but I’m still trying to figure out why writers Shawn Linden and Pamela Gray gave her the same name as the infamous East German secret police) and her mom was Lisa Staci (Lily Talevski), whom we saw John dispatching in a prologue even though we didn’t yet know it was he. John killed Lisa and gave her baby to his brother Mike and Mike’s wife Karen. He charged them $5,000 for Tiffany, allegedly as “adoption fees,” and he faked a series of legal-looking adoption papers to give them ostensible justification for raising her as their own.

When all this comes to light, Heather finds herself in a pickle because she literally has no legal identity: she can’t work, get a driver’s license, or even attend school because legally she does not exist. The Robinsons hire a tutor to home-school her so she doesn’t fall too far behind – though the tutor is more interested in pumping Heather for details about her weird and unusual existence than in teaching her anything. Ultimately the police arrest John Robinson and he’s put on trial for multiple murders and sentenced to death. But Heather still lives in fear that either her grandmother or her father will claim her as their own and assert parental rights over her, forcing her to leave the Robinsons and move down South where grandma lives. Heather calls a man she’s been told is her biological dad, who to her disgust insists on calling her “Tiffany,” but she intuits that he’s a fake when he’s unable to describe the color of her eyes. She does drive south to meet her grandmother, who gives her Tiffany’s old baby book which, revealingly, has a blank space where her father’s name should be. The final scene takes place on Heather’s 18th birthday (ironically she’s learned that the date she’s always celebrated as her birthday was as phony as the rest of her knowledge of her existence), in which she celebrates her liberation from legal limbo but also asks the Robinsons to do an adult adoption of her so she’ll finally have an above-board and legally acknowledged family.

I’ve since looked up the real John Robinson on Wikipedia, and his actual story would have made an even more compelling film – he ostensibly trolled the Internet for his victims (the first known serial killer to do so) under the screen name “Slavemaster” – but the one we have is quite fine, thank you. Judging from the imdb.com synopsis – “A teenager’s life changes forever when she discovers her uncle is a suspected serial killer, forcing her to confront dark truths about her adoption and her biological mother’s fate” – I thought it was going to be a knockoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt (1943), also a story of a teenage girl who discovers that her beloved uncle (her biological kin in this one) is a serial killer. But though Kidnapped by a Killer hardly has the psychological resonances of Shadow of a Doubt (nor did I expect it to), it is a quite striking tale that raises questions of personal identity and whether we can ever be that sure of who we really are. It’s also quite well plotted by Linden and Grey and expertly directed by Lee Gabiana, who gets a superb performance from Rachel Stubington as a young woman whose whole sense of who she is is wrenched away from her by dramatic and traumatic surprise events that shake her life to its very core.