The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (12 page)

A case Roy worked on as a consultant in 1997 featured an organized offender. In the crime, a masked and gloved intruder, armed with a 9mm handgun, entered a retail business at closing time, taking six employees hostage. He had them bind one another, and then shot all six, killing three of them. After robbing the establishment, he collected the spent shells and departed.

This was an experienced, mature, and highly organized offender. He planned his crime, brought what he needed with him, concealed his identity, chose an advantageous moment (closing time) to strike, eliminated half the possible witnesses against him (the others were left for dead, his single oversight), and removed potential physical evidence (the shells) before leaving.

He still has not been caught, or even as yet identified.

Hazelwood also has characterized the organized offender
as “a thinking criminal,” and the disorganized offender as “not a thinking criminal.”

Thinking criminals tend to be extroverted and articulate, use (but do not abuse) alcohol and drugs, and are highly narcissistic. They often take great care with their physical health and appearance, and can pass anything but a mirror.

Exceptions exist.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, obviously was highly organized, a thinking criminal. A Ph.D. mathematician, Kaczynski fabricated and exploded sixteen intricately built bombs over eighteen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-eight more. Yet he also was socially isolated, a hairy, ill-kempt hermit with few apparent social skills, who lived in a rustic shed in rural Montana.

Psychiatrists later diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Still another exception to the general rule is the disorganized offender who creates havoc, but in the midst of it also drops a clear hint of who he is and where he’s been.

In one gory case that Roy worked, an offender had carefully extracted five green peas from his victim’s eviscerated stomach and lined them up precisely on a plate.

Hazelwood surmised that the killer had once been institutionalized, and later was proved correct in his conjecture.

“How’d you get that idea?” a skeptical Dr. Dietz asked him.

Hazelwood explained to his friend the psychiatrist that in an institution where a person is totally controlled, a need for order in one’s life develops. A patient, for example, might neatly line up books on a window ledge, even though his mind is chaotic.

The same patient, having just chaotically slaughtered a victim, might express that same craving for orderliness in the way this offender did, by arranging the green peas just so.

Organized offenders tend to remain organized over time, although again there are exceptions, such as Ted Bundy.

Bundy abducted and killed as many as a dozen girls and young women before the police discerned a pattern to their disappearances, or any of their remains—much less a crime scene—were discovered.

He murdered perhaps fifteen more victims before he was first arrested, by accident, and was charged with a kidnapping, not homicide. Even then there were no known witnesses to any of his abduction-murders, nor any fingerprints or other physical evidence that conclusively tied Ted to any of his twenty-seven or more sexual homicides.

Then Bundy began to unravel. On Super Bowl Sunday, 1978, in a bloody and wholly uncharacteristic spasm of spontaneous violence, he clubbed to death two sleeping coeds, and left two others for dead, in the upstairs bedrooms of the Chi Omega sorority house on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee. In his even wilder ultimate assault—for which he was caught, convicted, and executed—on February 9, 1978, Ted snatched Kimberly Diane Leach from her junior high school campus in broad daylight. He slit the twelve-year-old Florida schoolgirl’s throat and deposited her partially clad body under an abandoned hog shed some miles away. Bundy was captured drunk, driving a stolen car, less than a week later.

Ted’s final crime was hardly organized—at least not in the way his early kills were—but it wasn’t entirely disorganized, either. It was “mixed,” a third classification first proposed at BSU by John Douglas, Bob Ressler, and other agents who saw that not every crime fits exactly on one side or the other of Roy’s original divide.

In fact, the Odom-Lawson case represented one important class of mixed offender cases, crimes in which two perpetrators of contrasting criminal type are involved.

The fact that Odom’s and Lawson’s victim was taken to a secluded spot argues for an organized offender. So would the serological evidence of semen found in her vagina; disorganized offenders are less likely to commit penile rape.

Yet the frenzied, postmortem mutilation and apparent indifference to how and when the body was discovered gave the crime a disorganized cast as well.

Multiple factors can be at play to create a mixed crime scene.

Sometimes what the investigator finds is behavioral evidence of a youthful disorganized offender in transition toward becoming organized. Sometimes, as with Odom and Lawson, mixed evidence actually points to two or more offenders.

The offender may also be mixed in that while he exhibits a disorganized criminal’s typically short emotional fuse, he is also organized to the extent that he can assess his situation and adjust his behavior to avoid taking undue risks. Serial killer Jack Harrison Trawick typified this type of mixed offender.

The disorganized, organized, and mixed categories apply across the range of deviant criminality, including rape. However, Hazelwood’s second major contribution to the classification of aberrant criminals was to divide rapists themselves into six groups. He adapted the system from a typology first suggested by clinical psychologist Nicholas Groth, author of
Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender.

Nick Groth was among the first researchers to observe that the underlying motivations for rape are principally power and anger, sometimes in combination. There are very few rapists for whom the primary motive is sexual.

The first of Hazelwood’s offender types is the “power reassurance rapist,” who is the most common example of a ritualistic, stranger-to-stranger rapist.

Familiar to newspaper readers as “the Gentleman Rapist” or “the Friendly Rapist” or any similar name that suggests what Hazelwood calls this type’s “pseudo-unselfish” behavior, the power reassurance rapist is trying to do just that: reassure himself of his masculinity (which he deeply doubts) by exercising physical control over women.

The fantasy which fuels his behavior is of a willing, even eager, victim, the sort of sexual encounter he feels totally incapable of consummating in his day-to-day world. With a victim, however, he may play the part of ardent lover, fondling and complimenting her on her appearance, frequently inquiring solicitously if he’s pleasing her.

The power reassurance rapist often produces a weapon, or claims to be carrying one. However, his fantasy is to express power through sex, not physical injury. He is the rapist least likely to apply more force than absolutely necessary to compel his victim’s compliance.

His hallmarks are victims selected from within his own age range, whom he forces to remove their own clothing as a way of feeding his fantasy that they are his willing partners.

This offender generally spends an extended period of time with the victim, especially if he encounters a particularly passive female upon whom he can act out all of his sexual fantasies.

Afterward—and consistent with “pseudo-unselfish” behavior—he may apologize and even ask her forgiveness.

An example of the power reassurance rapist from Roy’s casebook, one that he uses in his lectures, was an offender in Tennessee. After selecting a victim who lived alone, the rapist broke into her house through a bathroom window, pointed a knife at her, and said, “Do what I say and I won’t hurt you.”

The woman complied, as she later explained to Roy.

He kissed and fondled her, and within five minutes had committed a vaginal rape. Then he remained in bed with her for another forty-five minutes, head propped on an arm, speaking about himself.

The rapist explained that he was a college graduate and had been married until the day he caught his wife cheating with another man. Since then, he’d become a serial rapist, he said.

“That’s the reason I’m committing these crimes,” he told
her, as if his unhappy personal history somehow explained, or mitigated, the degradation and trauma he was causing her.

As the conversation continued, his victim said she was engaged to be married.

He told her that he had parked his car six blocks away and left the keys in it. He said he hoped the vehicle wouldn’t be stolen. He said he had a drunk friend who’d come with him, but that he wouldn’t allow the fellow inside because he was drunk and he could not be responsible for his behavior. He advised her to repair the broken latch on her bathroom window.

After he finally left and she was calling the police, the victim discovered that four hundred dollars in cash had been stolen from her purse. Next morning, she opened her mailbox to find an envelope containing the money and a printed note from the rapist, executed in crayon in block letters.

In it, he first advised her again to fix the bathroom window lock.

He then wrote that he was “terribly sorry” his inebriated friend had sneaked into the house and stolen the cash, “and that he assures me that is all he took.” He felt very fortunate to report his car had not been stolen, and wished her and her fiancé the best of luck.

Stealing four hundred dollars from a rape victim just to return the money in order to convince her you’re really a good person illustrates the sort of complex and convoluted reasoning of which the power reassurance rapist is capable.

An offender in Hazelwood’s next category, the “power assertive rapist,” would find such a gambit wimpish, incomprehensible. Less common than the power reassurance rapist, and more violent, the power assertive offender, as Roy explains, “assaults to assert his masculinity, about which he has no doubts. The key to understanding him is his macho self-perception. The most important thing in the world for him is for others to see him as a man’s man.”

This offender, who like the power reassurance rapist generally
selects victims of roughly his own age, attacks in no particular pattern and at any convenient time and place. Unlike the power reassurance rapist, he will rip his victim’s clothes from her body himself, and attack her repeatedly with no concern for her suffering.

Typically, he uses a moderate level of force whether or not his victim resists him. Experts in domestic violence have told Hazelwood that the power assertive rapist is most similar to the offender profile for date and spousal rapists.

One power assertive rapist whom Roy interviewed described to Hazelwood the time he came upon a female motorist stranded in her disabled car. She had her child with her, and was fearful. However, he was a well-dressed and well-spoken white male, and she soon relaxed a bit, grateful someone had stopped to offer his assistance.

He raised the hood and looked at the engine with an air of authority.

“You need a mechanic,” he informed her, and offered the woman a ride to the closest garage. Because of his politeness and appearance, she risked accepting his offer.

They drove on, exchanging small talk as they went until she noticed he’d passed two exits without stopping. When she asked where he was going, the man produced a gun and told her to shut up. She screamed, and he struck her hard on the head with the gun. She momentarily lost consciousness.

When she regained her senses, her clothes had been ripped away, and he was raping her. She pleaded for him not to hurt her. At that he swore at her, struck her once more, and again told her to shut up.

Over the next two hours, he raped her three more times, and forced her to fellate him twice.

When he was finished, he threw her out of the car, nude.

“Show your ass and you may get some help,” he said, and then drove away, leaving her nude by the roadside with her youngster.

Type number three, the “anger retaliatory rapist,” ratchets
up the violence even higher. He is angry at women for real or imagined wrongs, and lashes out against them, episodically. Typically, his assault is sparked by something involving a woman.

“But the problem is, that episode could be anything from a woman being elected to Congress to a female police officer issuing him a ticket to a fight with his wife,” says Hazelwood.

This rapist uses excessive force; his victims often require hospitalization. He usually spends a very short time with them, often experiences sexual dysfunction (because of his extreme hostility), and is highly impulsive.

A classic example of the anger retaliatory rapist is the short and muscular rest room rapist mentioned earlier. A typical sexual assault he described to Hazelwood occurred in a supermarket parking lot at midafternoon. Seeing a woman loading groceries in her car, he walked up to her, pushed the cart out of the way, pummeled her, threw her in the backseat of her car and raped her, then got up and walked away.

The most dangerous of all to his victims is the “anger excitation rapist,” the sexual sadist who is sexually stimulated by his victim’s suffering.

None of these rare and enormously destructive offenders has left a fuller record of himself than Mike DeBardeleben, the so-called “Mall Passer” counterfeiter and subject of my book,
Lethal Shadow.
The Secret Service brought the case to Roy’s attention after DeBardeleben was captured in 1983.

He left behind sheaves of handwritten notes, underlined passages in text, drawings, and tape recordings in which he created a detailed record of his desires and deeds.

“This is a tape, regarding my goals,” DeBardeleben begins on one undated tape recording.

“Number one on my list of goals is to establish a new identity, complete with background, school records, employment records, driver’s license, Social Security card, passport, checking accounts, savings accounts. Rent an apartment. Buy a car. Have a job—or a job front. All under a new identity.
This new identity would not be able to be traced to me under
any
circumstances. It may have to be set up in a different location, a different city.