The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (2 page)

Hazelwood brought to the Des Moines meeting an altogether different perspective. A member of the Bureau’s elite Behavioral Science Unit, based at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, Roy’s domain is the sexual criminal’s mental and emotional planes, the deviant mind’s hot zones where lust and rage are fused, and deadly fantasies flower.

No one knows this world better than he.

There are more than ten thousand homicides, rapes, suicides, accidental deaths, and miscellaneous acts of mayhem in Hazelwood’s casebook. Among them are famous serial murders, savage mass murders, serial rapes, mutilations, explosions, a couple auto-amputations, multiple hangings, eviscerations, bludgeonings, staged deaths and faked rapes, stabbings, shootings, strangulations, garrotings, electrocutions, and a few poisonings.

Roy acquired this vast experience in the process of transforming
the subject of sexual crime investigation—once a scorned and degraded facet of police work—into a professional discipline at the FBI.

“His influence is everywhere,” says his friend and frequent collaborator, Dr. Park Elliott Dietz, the noted forensic psychiatrist and a heavyweight authority on aberrant criminality in his own right.

“There are very few people who have influenced any area of criminal investigation as profoundly as Roy Hazelwood has sexual crimes. It is an influence that extends to the research community, to victims, to criminals he has brought to justice, to investigators who’d be lost were it not for the guide roads Roy has mapped out for them.”

In 1980, Hazelwood was the first BSU agent from the unit’s underground office complex at Quantico dispatched to Atlanta to assist authorities with what became the sensational and highly sensitive Atlanta Child Murders case.

Later joined in Atlanta by his colleague, John Douglas, Hazelwood would be the first to tell local lawmen that their serial child killer undoubtedly was an African American male, probably in his twenties. Although it was clear nearly from the outset that more than one killer was stalking Atlanta’s black children and youths from 1979 to 1981, the sexual criminal whom Hazelwood and Douglas conjured from the crime scene evidence was Wayne Williams, twenty-three, a black photographer who ultimately was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in conjunction with the Child Murders.

Like all BSU agents, Hazelwood also wrote criminal personality profiles, subjective portraits of aberrant UNSUBs (unknown subjects) drawn from the behavioral clues that those offenders inevitably leave at their crime scenes. Depending upon how rich a trove of behavioral clues is available for analysis, Hazelwood can infer an UNSUB’s age, sex, race, intelligence, education level, military history, type of work, car, clothing, marital status, sociability, hobbies,
possible arrest record, and erotic preferences in his consenting sexual relationships, among other details of his daily life.

One of the first profiles Hazelwood ever wrote was of a predatory UNSUB who in May of 1978 molested and murdered a little boy in St. Joseph, Missouri.

On the afternoon of May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen, scion of a prominent St. Joseph family, momentarily was left by his baby-sitter at a downtown St. Joseph playground as the young woman went into a store for a purchase. When she emerged a few minutes later, little blond-haired Eric was missing.

The next afternoon, Eric Christgen was found murdered in a rugged ravine near the foot of nearby river cliffs, about a twenty-minute walk from where he’d disappeared. He’d been sodomized and then asphyxiated.

The local investigation soon faltered, and a request went to the BSU for help on the case. Working with crime scene photos, police and witness reports, and what he knew about the sort of person who abducts, sexually assaults, and then murders little boys, Hazelwood constructed a word picture of the UNSUB.

Roy surmised Eric Christgen’s killer was a white male pedophile, aged around fifty. He arrived at these inferences based upon witness accounts and the BSU’s voluminous files on similar abduction murders. The offender’s race, sex, and sexual orientation were self-evident. His age was a surmise, supported by the witnesses.

Roy also knew from the BSU’s past experience with pedophiles that they do not start acting out, suddenly, in middle age. So this UNSUB, he thought, probably had a police record for past deviant acts with children.

Judging from the apparent strength required to scale the thickly overgrown hillside where he’d taken the boy to kill him, the UNSUB also probably was sturdily built.

Hazelwood wrote further that the killer would likely be a
loner who had been drinking the day of the slaying. His inhibitions lowered by alcohol, he had snatched Eric Christgen on an impulse. It was a crime of opportunity, with no prior planning.

If employed, the UNSUB would be a laborer of some sort. He was neither stable nor skilled enough to hold down a more demanding position. Most importantly, wrote Hazelwood, if not stopped he certainly would reoffend within a few months.

In Roy’s experience, criminal pedophiles, along with sexual sadists, are the only sexual offenders who enjoy the actual commission of their crimes as much as they do fantasizing about them, before and afterward. They are not remorseful for the harm they do, nor do they experience guilt. They never recoil at their excesses. And at no level of consciousness do they ever wish to be caught.

Hazelwood’s 1978 profile of Eric Christgen’s killer had little initial impact on the investigation. At the time Roy wrote it, the BSU wasn’t nearly so well known as it became in the wake of Thomas Harris’s spooky novel,
The Silence of the Lambs,
or the ensuing movie, in which Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for his bloodcurdling portrayal of the flesh-eating Hannibal Lecter. In 1978, the quality and relicibility of the BSU’s work were largely unknown.

It was also years after Hazelwood completed the profile that Michael Insco, the prosecutor in St. Joseph, finally read it. By then, the Christgen case had taken a surprise turn as well.

Some months after the murder, Melvin Reynolds, a slightly built twenty-five-year-old resident of St. Joseph, confessed during police questioning that he’d abducted, assaulted, and killed Eric Christgen. Reynolds, an unemployed cook, was sentenced to life in prison in 1979.

“We had a person who’d confessed,” says Insco, now in private life as a computer-system consultant to law enforcement. “And profiles were something we totally were unfamiliar
with. At that time, all I saw was something come across my desk marked ‘Psychological Profile.’ ”

Three years later, a burly itinerant sex killer and convicted pedophile named Charles Ray Hatcher confessed to the crime. Hatcher intimated he was good for as many as sixteen murders over several years. He’d been fifty years old at the time Eric Christgen was killed, just as Roy earlier had conjectured the boy’s killer would be.

Faced with the dilemma of two men now having sworn their guilt for the same murder, Insco began reviewing the evidence, including, for the first time, Hazelwood’s five-year-old profile. After reading it through, “I realized that Hazelwood had written a description of Hatcher,” Insco says. “The profile matched him on something like twenty-one points. And it wasn’t just the fact that the profile fit Hatcher so closely. It also described someone far different from the man we’d convicted. It was a very impressive piece of work.”

Insco later visited the BSU, where he met personally with Roy.

“I wish that I had gone there much earlier,” he says. “If I had known the kind of work they were doing in the BSU I really think it might have saved an innocent man from going to prison. I don’t think I would have believed Reynolds.”

Charles Hatcher was sentenced to life in prison on October 13, 1983. The next day, after four years behind bars, Melvin Reynolds was released.

On December 7, 1984, Hatcher was found hanged to death from a wire in his cell at the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City. Cause of death was presumed to be suicide.

Since that first profile, Hazelwood’s research projects have taken criminology where it’s never been before, from the malignant misogyny of criminal sexual sadists to behavior that often is neither criminal nor violent nor predatory, but nonetheless poses critical challenges to law enforcement.

When I first met him, Roy, with Dr. Dietz and Ann Wolbert Burgess, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania,
recently had published the first and only textbook ever devoted to autoerotic fatalities. These accidental, often bizarre deaths frequently are mistaken by investigators for murders or suicides. Hazelwood has even identified a subset of such cases,
atypical
autoerotic deaths.

Another of his innovations is the “organized-disorganized” aberrant criminal dichotomy, as familiar to homicide investigators today as handcuffs. The dichotomy is a shorthand way for police to quickly ascertain from crime-scene evidence what sort of UNSUB they seek.

If, for example, a killer brings with him the weapons and restraints he requires to commit the crime, and then takes pains to secrete his victim’s body, he is demonstrating foresight, and is probably an experienced, mature, coherent criminal—“organized.” If, by contrast, the crime scene is chaotic, and reflects no planning nor any particular care taken to get away safely, the offender is apt to be young, inexperienced, or possibly even psychotic—“disorganized.”

When it is clearly evident that an UNSUB is organized or disorganized, that knowledge is vitally useful in focusing the critically important early stages of a criminal investigation.

“The disorganized and organized classification of crimes was fantastic, a brainstorm,” says Vernon J. Geberth, a retired New York Police Department lieutenant commander and author of the standard police textbook,
Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures and Forensic Techniques.
“For a police officer to be able to define and describe behavior without using clinical terms was just fantastic.”

Besides noting his evident style, my first impression of Roy in Des Moines that Monday night was how different he seemed from the other BSU agents Hugh and I had met. Roger Depue, unit chief during the BSU’s heyday of the 1980s, once told me that overseeing Hazelwood and his brother profilers was a little like coaching a football team with eleven quarterbacks.

“They were all different, with very strong ideas about what they wanted to do, and how to do it,” said Depue.

Intelligent, highly motivated, hardworking, and good company, especially when they’ve had a few drinks, profilers tend to combine the giant, fragile ego of the brain surgeon with the tireless intensity of genius-level computer programmers.

They can be a strange bunch.

Depue remembers camaraderie in the unit, a sense of specialness that this platoon of psychological commandos—
Psychology Today
called them “mind hunters”—shared. But the fault lines in the unit also ran deep. There are certain present and former BSU agents it is best not to invite to the same function.

Roy, a natural diplomat, remains on cordial relations with all his old buddies. He’s centered in a way that many of them are not. He also maintains a healthy perspective on his work.

Roger Depue recalls that Hazelwood was one of the very few BSU agents who could leave profiling’s horrors on his desk each night, and then pick up the burden of reconstructing ghastly murders afresh each morning.

As Roy tells it, the key is not to dwell in the overwhelming evil, but to sequester it or defuse it. He employs one of the homicide investigator’s trustiest emotional allies in this battle, mocking irreverence.

Some years ago, after listening to Hazelwood lecture at a conference, an older female psychologist approached him.

“How do you cope with all that violence?” she asked.

“I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Masturbation!’ ” Hazelwood recollects.

She literally staggered.

“I said, ‘I’m joking! I’m joking! I’m joking!’ I do the same thing you do. I compartmentalize. This is my job, not my life. I have a home and family and a faith in God.”

Another common inquiry: Why the fascination with such extreme criminal behavior?

Hazelwood often senses this questioner’s implicit assumption that cops and criminals are two sides of a very thin coin, a connection he emphatically rejects.

“I always answer that one with a question of my own,” he says.

“ ‘When you go to the zoo, what is your favorite animal to look at?’

“Some people say, ‘I like the snakes.’ Others say, ‘I like the lions.’

“ ‘Why?’ I ask.

“ ‘Because they’re dangerous.’

“ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘that’s why I study sexual offenders, because they’re dangerous.’ ”

As the cocktail-hour conversation matured into a genial exchange of stories and opinions, my attention wandered repeatedly to a typescript lying on the table between us. It was entitled “An Analysis of Materials Seized from James Mitchell DeBardeleben,” and it rested beneath Roy’s gleaming Zippo, emblazoned with the insignia of the Fourth Infantry Division, Hazelwood’s old unit in Vietnam. Whenever he lit a smoke, Roy returned the lighter to the transcript, like he was checking a poker bet.

I was intrigued.

“DeBardeleben is a fascinating case,” Hazelwood finally said, gesturing toward the report. “It ought to be your next book.”

The year before, Mike DeBardeleben, then forty-three, was arrested in Knoxville by Secret Service agents who for years had known him only as “the Mall Passer,” a rare solo forger who printed his own bills and passed them himself, principally in malls.

Hazelwood told us that although DeBardeleben was as wily a counterfeiter as the Treasury Department ever
encountered, his true dimension as a sort of omni-criminal only became clear after Secret Service agents tossed the two miniwarehouses where he’d stashed his printing gear.

Along with DeBardeleben’s Multilith press and plates and inks and unfinished examples of his handiwork, the federal agents also found guns and knives, drug paraphernalia, dildos, chains, handcuffs, K-Y jelly, jewelry, women’s bloody underwear, and hundreds of photos of women and girls in various states of undress and consciousness, many of them clearly torture victims.