Murder in Massachusetts

Back It Up with Evidence

It was a relief for police that Christopher Robinson had admitted killing his stepfather. They had their man. Even better was that he had given up the crime's true perpetrator, Patricia. None of it, however, meant she was guilty. Detectives had to begin building a case against the accused Black Widow and try to, most importantly, back up what Christopher was now telling them. After all, without corroboration, Christopher's statement was nothing more than a mesh of words.

When detectives caught up with Amanda Robinson it was clear the young woman had fallen on hard times over the past few years, but that she had also been trying to rebuild her life lately. It wasn't only alcohol, cigarettes and pot that had dragged Amanda down. According to a statement Amanda would give later and her court testimony, she'd had a serious problem with cocaine, which Neil and Patricia had discovered a year or more before Neil was murdered.

Born on Valentine's Day 1986, Amanda was Patricia's youngest child. Quite stunning, with long blonde hair and, as one family member later admired, "puppy dog eyes," lately Amanda appeared weathered and drawn down. She was only 19 years old, but looked much older. When detectives found her, she was living in New York with her boyfriend at his father's house.

Amanda Robinson

Amanda admitted that after she'd tried cocaine for the second time, in the bathroom of her mother's restaurant, she soon "developed more of a coke habit ..." Her favorite places to snort the drug, she added, were at home in her room, inside the restaurant and outside in "the horse's stall."

As she explained it to Trooper Jean Thibodeau and Sergeant David Bell, her drug dealer would come by the Olsen house and swap cocaine for money she had left in the mailbox. She would wait anxiously in her room by the window, which faced the mailbox, and then run out and grab her drugs as soon as he dropped them off. This went on for quite some time.

"My mom usually slept upstairs," Amanda explained to police, "and Neil would be passed out on the couch." So they never really knew what she was doing.

Working at Mrs. O's for her mother, Amanda said, had become more of a chore than a job. "I was working ... like every night. I wasn't getting paid. I would go in my mom's wallet. She didn't call me on the money. I stopped getting coke ... after my [last] birthday. I got caught by my mom."

Patricia walked into the restaurant one morning, Amanda explained, and threw a "rolled up dollar bill on the counter" in front of her, snapping, "What's that?" She didn't appear angry, though, Amanda remembered. Just "disappointed."

"Why didn't you come to me about this?" Patricia wondered when Amanda didn't respond. Neil had found the coke, along with empty bottles of liquor Amanda said she used to come down off the coke and fall asleep. Neil knew it was coke, Patricia told her that morning, because he had "tasted" the residue left in her room and it had made his lips "go numb."

"You need to get out of the house now," Patricia told her, "or you'll be grounded until you leave."