The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (22 page)

In their subsequent review, the local authorities found nothing to contradict Roy’s assessment, and much circumstantial evidence to support it. As a result, both the Hilo police and Dr. Majoska concurred with Hazelwood’s conclusions, and the Bruno case was closed, reclassified as an innocent, if horrifying, accidental death.

Roy employed what he calls “equivocal death analysis” to explain Gloria Bruno’s mystifying demise. Built on deductive principles he first worked out while parsing autoerotic fatalities, equivocal death analyses differ in the main from criminal personality profiles in that the analyst must solve
multiple variables, and must have a broad range of knowledge and experience to competently attempt one.

“They are more complex,” he says, “because you have more than just the question of who did the crime. You have to determine if a murder occurred at all.

“Secondly, there is more risk involved. If a profile is wrong, no one gets hurt. But with equivocal deaths you face the same set of potential problems you do with autoerotic fatalities: insurance questions, religious questions, and a lot of emotions. You have to pay very close attention to what you are doing. You’ve got to capture every detail.”

Never in Roy’s career was that maxim more plainly true than in another equivocal death investigation—probably the strangest case he’s ever encountered.

At about 4 a.m. on July 6, 1985, June Smith,* twenty-four, and the mother of two young boys, was found dead, lying face up next to a parked car in her neighbor’s driveway, about sixty feet from her front door. Smith was shoeless, dressed only in a pair of slacks and a blouse, which was saturated with blood. Her left arm, the source of the blood, had been nearly severed at the shoulder, and rested beneath her.

Her scalp was shaven from her forehead to the midline of her skull.

A trail of blood led circuitously back from where she lay to her neighbor’s porch and then to Smith’s front door, tracing what appeared to be June Smith’s last few faltering steps before she collapsed and died in the night from loss of blood.

Inside the Smith house, police found six plastic bags arranged together in the living room. In the center of each was a plate of uneaten food and a glass of milk.

Smith’s older son, aged four, lay asleep on the couch. He was unharmed, although a substance that appeared to be blood was discovered on the shoulder of his pajamas.

The kitchen was littered with food, milk containers, more plastic bags, dirty plates, and clothing. Two newly baked
cakes, both untouched, rested incongruously on the top of the stove.

Investigators found Smith’s younger child, her one-year-old baby boy, safe and asleep in his bed.

Next came the bathroom.

A pile of June Smith’s hair lay at the threshold. The walls were spattered with blood. The floor was slick with it, as were the sink and the shelves on both sides of it. Three more plates, each accompanied by a pair of forks, were arranged on either side of the sink. Behind the water faucets was a Bible, opened to the Book of Psalms, chapters 22 to 26. A cross attached to a chain was affixed to the wall to the right of the bathroom mirror.

Opposite the sink, the bathtub was partially filled with clean water.

The forensic pathologist who autopsied Smith concluded from the pattern of her wounds that they were self-inflicted. And from his own attempts to duplicate the near-total amputation using the same knife Mrs. Smith had used, he estimated she had spent two hours hacking at her left shoulder in the bathroom.

He also noted in his report that she had several superficial bruises of recent origin on her right arm.

The victim’s family could not conceive of such a horrible rite of self-destruction. They pressed for a fuller explanation from the local police, who called on Hazelwood and Park Dietz to consult in the case.

Roy concurred that amputation is a highly unusual form of killing somebody, or oneself; and that it is especially so for a woman, and particularly in the deliberate way Smith seemed to have gone about it. No one reported hearing a sound from the Smith residence at any time that night, meaning she would have endured epic pain without uttering any cry much above a whimper.

Yet Hazelwood was not primarily interested in the way that June Smith died but in whether she’d killed herself, or
been killed. While conceding that pills or gas are a more common way for females to kill themselves, Roy cautioned that women do occasionally inflict horrible injury on themselves. He mentioned in his later report a case in which the victim hacked herself to death with a machete.

Roy emphasizes that the first rule of equivocal death investigations is to never let the severity of the trauma determine the manner of death (i.e., homicide, suicide, or accident).

“Studying the victim,” he says, “is the most crucial factor in analyzing equivocal deaths.”

June Smith’s pertinent history began in her late teens, when she left her family and friends and a comfortable suburban life to marry a fisherman and live with him and his parents in a modest house in a small and isolated coastal village.

Her husband often was gone to sea for months at a time, leaving his wife to make do in an alien culture. June Smith complained in letters of her boredom and lack of privacy.

In 1980, her first son was born. The following year, Smith suffered a miscarriage, then became pregnant again, only to learn the fetus was afflicted with a gross brain abnormality for which death would be the certain consequence within days of its birth. She elected to abort.

Two years later, Smith gave birth to her second son, and immediately went into a severe postpartum depression, according to her in-laws.

Around Christmas, 1984, she began ignoring both her little boys and took up Bible study. Soon thereafter, Smith set several fires in the house, claiming she was combating an evil spirit. She also heard voices calling out to her in the dark, “I want you, I want you.”

Mrs. Smith at last was sent to a mental institution, where doctors diagnosed her condition as schizophrenia. According to her chart, the staff frequently heard her chanting “I love Jesus” and proclaiming her sinfulness. She was discharged in late January 1985.

A gap in Smith’s personal history extends from her
release date until late in June 1985. All that Hazelwood could learn of her story over that period was that she quit taking a powerful antipsychotic drug prescribed for her in the hospital, and that her in-laws had taken care of the boys.

Ten days prior to her death, she moved into a duplex. There was no available explanation why. Then her husband set out for a three-month fishing trip, leaving the psychologically fragile June Smith alone, and solely responsible for her children.

On the afternoon of Friday, July 5, 1985, the day before her death, she and the boys paid a surprise visit to the home of a local pastor. All three were neatly dressed, although the pastor noted that Mrs. Smith and her boys were barefoot.

The clergyman later described her as highly distraught. He said she told him that she’d suffered from both AIDS and cancer, but had been cured. She also insisted that God had led her to him. She was going to die soon, she explained, and wanted to be baptized in some unspecified magical way that would ensure her passage to heaven.

He explained that baptism required approval by church authorities, and that he wouldn’t be performing any that day. The minister also gave June Smith the Bible later found in her bathroom, and advised her he’d be in touch.

Dr. Dietz wrote in his report that “it is possible to conclude with a reasonable medical certainty that [Mrs. Smith] was psychotic hours before her death.”

The forensic psychiatrist additionally observed that “the disarray of her home . . . and the ritualistic and bizarre elements in her head-shaving and arm-cutting are additional evidence that she was psychotic at the time she inflicted the lethal wounds upon herself.”

Besides the victim profile he assembled, Hazelwood’s analysis included the observation that Smith had suffered no apparent defensive wounds, and there was no physical evidence that she had been incapacitated by, for example, a blow to the head. He noted the bruises on her right arm
doubtlessly were suffered as she stumbled out the door, her bloody left arm dangling at her side. She probably fell repeatedly before she collapsed and died from blood loss.

Furthermore, there was no physical evidence of a struggle in the bathroom, or of another person in the house, although June Smith’s four-year-old may have witnessed some part of the night’s horror. Months after his mother’s death, he asked his grandmother if God owned a knife.

Roy also saw something else at the scene that to him suggested Mrs. Smith committed suicide, behavior that a less knowledgeable or experienced investigator would not have known how to interpret correctly.

It was the plates of food surrounded by garbage bags in the living room, and the two fresh cakes sitting on the stove.

In and of themselves, the two discoveries are of no investigative consequence. But taken together with the rest of the evidence, they pointed away from homicide and toward suicide.

Roy refers to such indirectly corroborative evidence as the “feminine touch.”

He has seen several cases where women have cleaned house or washed and ironed the family’s clothes before killing themselves. Such behavior usually is not associated with murder or accidental death. Roy also noted that in the case of the woman who hacked herself to death with a machete, the victim first cleaned her house, washed and ironed clothes, bought a new dress, and had her hair styled.

In June Smith’s case, Hazelwood theorized that the garbage bags placed around the plates of food in the living room were a matter of maternal tidiness. Mrs. Smith had set them out in the middle of the night, he believed, so as to catch crumbs and other debris from messy eaters, her two little boys, whom she meant to consume the milk and food when they awoke.

The two recently baked and untouched cakes were his second example.

In Roy’s opinion, Mrs. Smith may have been deeply disturbed, intent on taking her own life, but she was still a mom.

That left her grisly wounds, her shaved head, and the scene in the bathroom to interpret. Hazelwood believed explanations were to be found in the Bible.

June Smith clearly was preoccupied with religion, a well-documented obsession underscored by the cross and Bible she’d brought to the bathroom scene of her autoamputation.

From the bloodied facing pages of Psalms 22 to 26 propped in front of her that night, the psychotic Mrs. Smith might have symbolically reenacted verse 20 of Psalm 22: “Deliver my soul from the sword.”

If suicide was her intent, then she was delivering her soul
via
the sword, her knife.

In the familiar Twenty-third Psalm, the phrase “He leads me beside still waters” was reflected in the partially drawn bathtub, where she might also have intended the baptism denied her by the neighborhood minister.

Later, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” could have inspired her to arrange the plates and forks on either side of the bathroom sink. June Smith certainly perceived enemies in her disordered world, the unseen evil spirits that threatened her in her in-laws’ house.

“Thou anointest my head” may have precipitated the decision to shave hers. Head-shaving traditionally is associated with penitence.

Finally, June Smith could have read “and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” to mean the promise of immortality for the amputation, in her tortured mind an ultimate act of expiation.

Her death officially was ruled a suicide.

Homicide or suicide also was the issue in another of Hazelwood’s equivocal death inquiries where victimology once again proved a decisive factor in Roy’s analysis.

In this case, Hazelwood questioned the official view that eighty-two-year-old Andrew McIntyre* took his own life.
Roy and the victim’s family believed a killer might be on the loose.

Andrew McIntyre lived alone in a small town for nineteen years, ever since his wife died of cancer.

He was deeply religious and very active in his church. McIntyre was also a model of probity and restraint, deliberate in everything he did, from dating grocery cans and boxes as he purchased them to making sure that his dog never left the house unleashed.

He was a kindly old man, according to his friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances.

They described McIntyre to Hazelwood as “a very calm, loving, and gentle man,” “very quiet, but friendly,” “like family,” “one of the most dependable men I’ve ever met,” “considerate,” and “a very godly man who lived what he believed.”

McIntyre was security conscious, too. Five weeks before his death, he installed a motion detector on his front porch. A similar device already had been installed in his garage.

On June 4,1995, his youngest daughter, Joyce,* drove her father to a doctor’s appointment. McIntyre recently had been very ill, which kept him in bed and unable to eat for days. The old man was depressed by his lingering incapacity. “I just wish I could die, but I can’t,” he told Joyce.

Yet by June 4 McIntyre had regained his vigor and good humor. He asked his doctor if he might resume his daily one-mile constitutionals.

“Sure, just take it easy,” said the physician.

Andrew McIntyre had no other medical problems that his doctor knew of.

On the morning of June 5, he spoke by telephone with his friend and neighbor, Mabel Lowe,* who fixed Andrew his late-afternoon supper most days. Lowe would remember McIntyre saying he felt stronger, better.

Later in the day, he went into town to buy a get-well card for his ailing pastor, and also mailed an RSVP for his grand-daughter’s
wedding in three weeks. Also on his forward calendar was another granddaughter’s dance recital on June 18, and the father-son dinner scheduled for the eighth at his church.

At about 5:30 that afternoon, McIntyre spoke by telephone with his daughter Carla,* who lived nearby with her husband. Dad seemed in good spirits to Carla.

His next reported contact was a brief conversation with Mabel Lowe. The two spoke for maybe half an hour in the alley between their houses. Andrew inquired about Mabel’s eye, which had been bothering her. She assured him it was better.