The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (20 page)

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Simonis granted the author permission to use his name.

A worry preoccupied Hazelwood as he came away from his meeting with Barry Simonis. He could not erase thoughts of the terrible pain the police detective’s wife had endured for simply saying that Simonis was a gentleman. The incident alerted Roy to a potential problem he hadn’t fully considered before.

All over the United States, he knew, women receive advice on how to react when confronted by a rapist. Allegedly authoritative voices on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines counsel all sorts of responses, from the use of weapons to pleading pregnancy to claiming you are infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Thinking about the detective’s wife, Hazelwood realized that hundreds, if not thousands, of women around the country might say exactly the same thing in the same situation, because they had been told that was the best strategy to pursue with a sex offender.

Roy’s rapist typology, however, indicates there should be no blanket strategy for rape victims. Avoiding, or minimizing, harm depends on several variables.

In the subsequent paper he published with fellow BSU
agent Joseph A. Harpold, Hazelwood identified three “critical variables” that he believes women should be trained to assess before deciding what their most reasonable course of action is.

First of the critical variables is location. A woman confronted at midafternoon in a grocery store parking lot obviously has different options than she would at 4:00 a.m. along a deserted roadway.

Hazelwood points out that screams or noisemakers—whistles and the like—might help the former victim, but be useless to the latter.

The wisdom of carrying a weapon or a disabling chemical such as Mace also varies according to the situation. A cocked gun stuck in his ear would easily dissuade many would-be rapists. However, the armed woman might place too much faith in her weapon and forget her native caution. She might neglect to lock a door, or forget to peer into the backseat of her vehicle before getting into it, thus raising her risk of a potentially deadly confrontation.

A false sense of security might lead her unthinkingly into places that common sense tells her to avoid.

The second variable is the victim’s personality.

Anyone advocating vigorous verbal or physical resistance to the threat of rape, for example, should recognize that not every victim can be combative on cue. It may not be in someone’s nature to behave that way. Conversely, Hazelwood says, “an independent and assertive individual will be hard-pressed to submit to a violation of her body without a struggle, even if she has been advised that passivity is her best course.”

The third and most important variable is the offender himself.

Knowing how best to respond entails understanding the type of rapist confronting you.

Acquiescence might only encourage a power reassurance rapist by feeding his fantasy of consenting sex. In a similar
vein, pleading for mercy from an offender such as Barry Simonis might be, as Simonis told Hazelwood, “the most stimulating part” of the assault.

In a case from his serial rapist survey that Hazelwood sometimes uses in his lectures, a power reassurance rapist approaches a teenage girl in a parking lot.

“Do you want a ride?” he asks.

“No.”

She walks on.

The stranger drives up again, this time blocking her way with his car. He pulls a gun from his T-shirt.

“I think you better get in the car,” he says.

This particular girl has attended rape classes where she has been taught not to let a would-be attacker depersonalize her. She has learned not to antagonize him, but to encourage him to see her as a real person, to talk to him.

As Roy explains, “Now, you have a rapist whose fantasy is a consenting sexual relationship, and you have a victim who’s been told to try to get the offender to relate to her as a human being, rather than as an object. She begins telling him about her family, and how she skipped school that day. And she asks him what he’s going to do.

“ ‘Well, I’m going to have sex with you,’ he says.

“ ‘When you’re finished, will you take me back home?’ she asks.”

This technique, designed to help her survive a rape, actually feeds her rapist’s fantasy.

In the end, Roy and his coauthor called for multidisciplinary programs to train women to quickly and competently assess their peril and then to finesse or overcome it.

“We know of no such comprehensive training program,” they wrote, “but we know that one is possible.”

The more encompassing consequence of his encounter with Simonis was Roy’s decision to undertake his serial rapist survey. It was a natural next research step for the BSU after John Douglas’s and Bob Ressler’s serial killer survey
and Roy’s book on autoerotic fatalities. Serial rapists are a clear and serious problem for law enforcement. Until Hazelwood’s prison study, they also were largely a mystery.

“There’d been hundreds of rape studies done,” says Hazelwood, “but no one had ever looked at serial rapists.”

He had three major research objectives that grew out of the Simonis interview.

“One, I wanted to find out what made serial rapists so successful,” he explains. “What traits did they have in common? Two, I wanted to see if they varied their MO or rituals over time. Three, I wanted to test whether rapists escalate the violence of their crimes. Simonis did. But I wasn’t sure about other serial rapists.”

In order to gain valid trend information and to ensure there were no fluke inclusions in his study, Hazelwood set the bar high.

Generally, a rapist is considered a serial offender if he commits three or more sexual assaults. To qualify for inclusion in Hazelwood’s study, the offenders must have committed at least ten documented sexual assaults.

“You can’t look at just three or four rapes and gauge why someone was so successful, or if they changed over time or if they escalated their violence,” says Hazelwood. “I set the figure arbitrarily at ten in order to capture this behavior.”

To recruit his subjects, he combed the records from prisons in twelve states, and found forty-three men who met his criteria. All were guaranteed confidentiality. All were also advised not to mention any past crimes for which they had not been charged, or of which the police were unaware.

It was Roy’s version of don’t ask, don’t tell.

Out of that group, only two men declined to participate. Both explained to Hazelwood they had nothing against him or his research, but they did bear grudges against the authorities in general, and that included FBI agents.

The forty-one rapists who sat down for the open-ended interviews, which lasted between four and a half and twelve
and a half hours, were a predictably strange, and highly various, group. In all, they had committed 837 known rapes, plus an additional 400 attempted rapes.

One of Roy’s biggest surprises in a survey that would be full of unanticipated results was that only one of the offenders said that he himself had been sexually abused as a child.

Yet by their responses to his next question—“With whom and at what age did you have your first sexual experience?”—it was evident that thirty-one of the men, 76 percent of the sample, were in fact sexually victimized as youngsters.

One rapist said that his first sexual contact occurred at age fifteen with his girlfriend’s mother, who began a yearlong affair with him. Although she was a willing bed partner, she forced him to withdraw from her before he spent himself. She then would masturbate the boy to ejaculation.

Later, when he started raping, he also would have his victims masturbate him—in handcuffs.

“I was seven years of age when my mother hired a knockout baby-sitter, who was twenty-one,” said another. “She taught me how to go down on her.”

A third inmate said that his initiation to sex came at age nine with a child molester. Each week at the movies, he told Roy, he had allowed the older man to fondle him in return for a ticket, refreshments, and two dollars.

Overall, sexual abuse committed against these men by family members was fairly evenly divided between male and female relatives. Sexual abuse by outsiders, however, almost invariably was committed by males.

One offender, Tim,* described how he had been repeatedly raped by his father until Tim was eleven. That’s when Dad, a serial rapist, found other uses for his boy.

He took his son with him into bars (shades of M. P. Reddick) where Tim drank Cokes and watched as his father chose his prey for the night. At closing time, Dad would suggest to a woman that she join him and his son for breakfast.
Tim’s presence usually put the intended victim at ease, and she’d agree.

But instead of heading for an IHOP, his father would drive to a graveyard, where he raped and tortured the woman in the backseat as Tim looked on in front. Once finished, Dad would direct Tim to carry out an assault of his own.

At first, the boy was frightened.

“I was terrified,” he said. “But I remember one woman telling me to do what my father said, ‘or he’s going to hurt me worse.’ ”

“Was there any significance to the choice of graveyards?” Roy asked.

“Police don’t usually patrol them,” he answered.

By about age thirteen, Tim said, he had changed. He started looking forward to the attacks, hoping his father would finish quickly, “so I could have her.”

It wasn’t until he was fourteen and began to discuss sex with his peers in school that Tim learned sexual intercourse ever occurred with warmth and affection between willing partners. This was a profound revelation for him.

Two years later, his father raped Tim’s girlfriend, and the young man finally broke away from home. But his pattern had been set. Tim was by now a habitual rapist himself, different from his father only in that he always stopped short of physically brutalizing his victims.

To him, that was an important distinction, he told Roy.

He continued to rape even after enlisting in the army and becoming a military policeman in Korea. After returning to the United States, Tim joined a major East Coast police force. While a cadet officer in the training academy, he committed so many sexual assaults that a special task force of his fellow officers was created in the unsuccessful hope of hunting down the phantom UNSUB.

They never did.

Tim finally quit the police department, he told Hazelwood,
because of the huge physical cost of working during the day and raping at night. “I was so exhausted, I couldn’t stay awake,” he said.

Finally he was captured, convicted, and sentenced to prison, where he served seven years. Upon his release, Tim found a job managing a bowling alley, and married.

All apparently went smoothly for him for two years and Tim began to believe he had conquered his deviant urges. Then one night, he called his wife to say he was picking up a couple steaks and a bottle of wine. She was to “get ready,” he said.

As he was driving home, Tim stopped at a light where he happened to glance at a woman in another car. Suddenly, the old violence was reawakened in him and Tim chose not to resist it.

Instead of continuing on home to his waiting spouse, Tim followed the woman, stopped her, and raped her.

“My boyfriend’s going to kill you for this,” she said after he finished.

Again, the old behavior boiled up. Tim mercilessly beat the victim with his fists, and raped her again, this time anally.

However, even as he was committing the assault, Tim was hit with a horrifying realization.

“My God, this is exactly what my father did,” he thought. “I’m turning into my father!”

With that he stopped, walked to his car, and drove away, allowing the victim ample opportunity to write down his license number, which she did. He subsequently was caught, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.

“Why did you allow yourself to get caught?” Roy wanted to know.

“I didn’t care anymore,” Tim answered.

Another serial rapist taught Roy that even deviants can have a code of conduct.

This inmate recalled the night his mother had bailed him
out of jail. She later helped him celebrate his release with some marijuana and a bottle of Jim Beam.

Mother was dressed only in her bra and panties.

In time, she passed out, or at least she seemed to. Her son thought to exploit the situation, and began to undo her bra.

She stirred at his touch.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“I’m gonna fuck you,” he answered.

She slapped him hard several times. “No son of mine is going to do that!” she shouted.

“So I stabbed her three times and killed her,” he told Roy.

Hazelwood nodded, then asked, “Well, did you rape her?”

The inmate stared at Hazelwood, a confused, hostile look in his eye.

“Did you hear what I said?” the rapist finally said.

“You said you stabbed her three times, but did you then rape her the way you originally intended?”

“Jesus, no!” the prisoner finally snapped, shocked that this FBI agent would think him capable of both incest and necrophilia.

“I didn’t rape her! I just killed my own mother!”

There were thirty-five white males, five African Americans, and a single Hispanic in Roy’s sample. They had committed between ten and seventy-eight sexual assaults each, and ranged in age at the time of their interviews from twenty-three to fifty-five years.

The youngest victim was five years of age; the oldest was sixty-five.

The first apparent clue to their success was intellect. Of the thirty-three for whom intelligence testing was available, all but four scored average or better. Nine were “bright normal” and eight more were “superior or very superior.”

Part of that intelligence was expressed in their eagerness to learn.

“Some of them told me that they went to rape prevention
seminars to find out what women were being told,” says Hazelwood. “They wanted to figure out ways of circumventing what experts were suggesting to women.”

The rapists’ second important shared characteristic was patience. They were, for the most part, organized offenders like Barry Simonis. Fewer than one in four described his assaults as impulsive or opportunistic.