The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (3 page)

Then there were the audiotape recordings of the torture sessions themselves. These included one tape in which DeBardeleben himself plays the victim. It certainly is among the strangest sexual sessions ever recorded.

“I want you to do it! Do it! Do it!” he screams on the cassette. “Bite it! Bite it!

“Aw! You’re bitin’ it right now! Oh, the pain’s sharp! I love the pain! Bite it harder! Suck it! Bite it! Make the nipple bleed! I hate myself! I hate myself!”

A three-man Secret Service task force—agents Dennis Foos, Greg Mertz, and Mike Stephens—investigated Mike DeBardeleben. They discovered assaults, murders, kidnappings, rapes, bank heists, drug dealing, flimflams, car thefts, and almost every other possible felony in DeBardeleben’s background.

Meantime, the agents invited Hazelwood to analyze the materials seized in the two searches, hoping to gain some insight into the criminal incubus they’d captured almost by accident.

Roy’s key finding was DeBardeleben’s criminal sexual sadism. For such offenders, sex and suffering are one and the same. This perversion, or paraphilia, is surpassingly unusual, even among sexual criminals. But those who harbor it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime, marked by their
wildly complex fantasy worlds, unequaled criminal cunning, paranoia, insatiable sexual hunger, and enormous capacity for destruction.

Ten years later, I’d retell Mike DeBardeleben’s saga in my book
Lethal Shadow.
But even as Roy first related it, somewhere in the double-digit hours of that Monday night in Des Moines, I already was considering ways of shaping a much different story, this one.

It couldn’t happen right away: The subject was vast and detailed, and required an extensive commitment of my time and attention. Moreover, with ten years left before retirement from the Bureau, much of Hazelwood’s most important work still lay ahead of him. He would publish pioneering studies of serial rapists and sexual sadists, as well as a separate survey of the former wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists.

He’d also lecture extensively in the United States and Europe, and contribute his expertise to the resolution of some of the highest-profile criminal cases of the past fifteen years.

They include the April 9, 1989, turret explosion aboard the USS
Iowa
in which forty-seven sailors were killed; the false accusations of rape and assault made by teenager Tawana Brawley in 1987; and Toronto’s so-called Ken and Barbie sexual murders of the early 1990s.

Through all this time, Roy was my frequent and invaluable mentor. And as I developed and discarded outline after outline for this book, he was a constant source of revelation.

I learned from him that sexual criminals are so varied that almost any encompassing statement about them will be inaccurate or misleading. With serial killers, for example, about the only safe generalization is that an inexplicably large percentage of them are named Wayne or Ricky Lee.

Hazelwood commenced my tutorial where all sexual crime begins, in the fantasy world of the offender.

As he explains it, “I teach police officers what I call Hazelwood’s Golden Rule of sexual crimes.

“The crimes are fantasies being acted out. The more complex the crime, the more complex the fantasy and the more intelligent the offender. Most people have no trouble connecting intelligence with a complex robbery. But rape-torture is a depraved act, which they cannot remotely relate to. They therefore resist crediting such offenders with intelligence. This is true even of police officers.

“On the other hand, consider an impulsive offender, the type who walks up, strikes a woman over the head, knocks her down, penetrates, ejaculates, and walks off. You’ll probably find this guy is of average, or less, intelligence. He’ll have little, if any, criminal sophistication.

“He’s only got one thing on his mind, as opposed to this other offender who has all this stuff mixed up with what he
calls
sex. That’s the guy who’s interesting to me.”

We spoke of the importance of ritual to many sexual offenders, particularly the more intelligent ones. Ritual, sometimes referred to as “signature,” is any behavior that heightens the offender’s psychosexual pleasure. It is not connected to the libido’s hardwired component, the procreative urge, or to physiology and hormones.

Instead, ritual is a product of the imagination, a matter solely out of the conscious mind, where an estimated 70 percent of the human sex drive is generated. It is highly individualized, offender-specific behavior.

Roy told me about a serial rapist he’d interviewed who was by far the most ritualized offender he’d ever encountered.

A “power reassurance rapist” in Hazelwood’s typology, this man was a highly presentable middle-aged westerner with a master’s degree in metallurgy and a comfortable income. Successful as he seemed, he was so totally incapable of interacting appropriately with women that rape was the
only
form of sexual intercourse he’d ever experienced.

He told Hazelwood that he would drive 250 miles from his home to a neighborhood where on previous reconnaissance trips he’d already preselected up to six potential vietims.
Reason: “If for any reason he failed in an attack,” says Hazelwood, “while the police were responding to the first victim he could be raping another one safely in her home.”

On nights he chose to commit assaults, he’d arrive in the neighborhood, park his van, and pull on what he called his “going-in clothes”: coveralls, a ski mask, leather gloves, and oversize sneakers.

He’d enter his intended victim’s house via a preselected window using a glass cutter and suction cup to remove the excised glass pane. Next, he would disconnect every possible light-emitting appliance in the residence, and reconnoiter an escape route. Then he would exit, leaving a window or door ajar as he did, and return to his van, where he changed into his “rape clothes”: black coveralls, black ski mask, surgical gloves, and undersize sneakers.

As the rapist reapproached the house, he was alert to any hint that he’d awakened his intended victim. If, for example, the window or door he left open was now shut, it was on to the second preselected victim.

Then came the weirdest part of all. The rapist would head for his victim’s bedroom and stand over her silently, counting in his mind in one-half increments—“one-half, one, one and a half, two . . .”—until he reached ten.

“At that point,” says Hazelwood, “he would leap on the victim, squeeze her breasts once or twice, penetrate, ejaculate, and leave. He said the longest he was ever with any victim was a minute and a half.”

He explained to Roy that the rape itself was the least enjoyable part of the experience for him. The reason for counting, he went on, was to put the act off as long as possible.

“Why didn’t you just turn and walk away?” Hazelwood asked.

“Mr. Hazelwood,” he replied, “pardon me, but after all I’d gone through, it would have been a crime
not
to have raped her.”

In Hazelwood’s experience, white males of European
descent predominate among aberrant offenders to an extent unrivaled in any other crime category, save perhaps white-collar crimes.

“Every single sexual deviation is overwhelmingly dominated by white males,” he says. “And most sexually related ritualistic crimes are committed by white males.”

As a black male juror in Georgia put it after hearing Roy testify about James Ray Ward, a white murder defendant in whose possession was found approximately three thousand dollars’ worth of women’s lingerie, all neatly packaged in clear plastic, labeled, and indexed:

“What’s wrong with you white guys? Can’t you just have sex?”

The more complex and sensational the case, the more likely the perpetrator is a male of European descent.

Roy’s research has elaborated upon some long-standing assumptions about the antecedents of criminality. The so-called classic triad, for example—bed-wetting, fire starting, and animal abuse—was posited decades ago as predictive of later violent behavior.

In Hazelwood’s work among incarcerated serial rapists, he found boyhood bed-wetting among 40 percent of them, cruelty to animals among 19 percent, and fire setting in 24 percent. Significantly more common in their backgrounds were youthful alcohol abuse, 63 percent; stealing and shoplifting, 71 percent; and assaultiveness toward adults, 55 percent.

The same study showed that sexual criminals most apt to become more violent over time—and thus pose the greater challenge to law enforcement—are those given to sexual bondage and anal sex and, curiously, those who transport their victims in a vehicle.

Addressing sexual assaults from the victim’s perspective, he’s found no statistically significant relationship between the amount of resistance a victim puts up and how much harm is done to her. Fighting back may scare off a rapist, or it might cause him to escalate the violence.

Nor is there any relationship between the presence of a weapon and injury to the victim. Just because a rapist is not carrying a gun or a knife does not make him unwilling to hurt his prey. Just because he is armed does not mean he will use the weapon.

There
was
one statistically significant relationship. Hazelwood found that when a victim resisted, the rapist remained with her twice as long as when there was no resistance.

Roy’s conversations with the imprisoned rapists, particularly one long session he spent at Louisiana’s Angola Prison with Jon Barry Simonis, the Ski Mask Rapist, convinced him that women were receiving potentially dangerous advice from so-called rape experts. The upshot was one of his more influential papers: “Rape: The Dangers of Providing Confrontational Advice,” published in 1986 in the Bureau’s
Law Enforcement Bulletin.

The search for a narrative thread through such diverse material led me at last to settle on a thematic organization for the book, a chapter-by-chapter exploration of sexual criminals and their victims, divided according to offender types, their motives, and their modus operandi.

Which left a final decision: Where to begin?

Roy Hazelwood’s personal experience with the world of strange and outrageous human behavior antedates even his toilet training.

When he was just six months old his father, Myrle P. “M.P.” Reddick, a hustler and itinerant musician, kidnapped Roy from his mother’s home in Idaho and took off for California with him.

“For half a year no one knew where I was,” says Hazelwood. “My grandmother later told me that M.P. took me into joints where he was playing, and would sit me up on the bar to attract women. Finally, after six months on the road he took me to his mother, who then returned me to my mother. He was a psychopath. There’s no doubt about it.”

Another possible starting point was 1958, the year a
casual girlfriend, vacationing in Nebraska, was found murdered in a barn. There were indications she’d been slain by Charlie Starkweather, the multistate thrill killer who, with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, terrorized the Midwest that summer.

Although Roy’s friend isn’t included in the list of Starkweather and Fugate’s twelve known victims, “I’m almost sure they did it,” he says.

The list of such strange events and peculiar interludes in Hazelwood’s life is long. However, there was one organizing event, a single experience that became the touchstone for his career.

In the autumn of 1960, Roy arrived at Fort Gordon, Georgia, for his army officer’s orientation course. He had been accepted into the Military Police Corps.

There, on a steamy Georgia afternoon in criminal investigation class, Hazelwood experienced his epiphany, a stunning, full-bore psychic collision with this century’s prototypical sexual criminal, the first modern aberrant offender and giant mystery to criminology: Harvey Murray Glatman, the Lonely Hearts Killer.

Says Hazelwood: “I could not
believe
Harvey Glatman.”

Harvey Glatman hit the front page like a comet.

Before the Lonely Hearts Killer slammed to earth along a Los Angeles freeway in 1958—he was caught after an intended victim, bleeding from a gunshot wound to her leg, grabbed his revolver and held him at bay until police rescued her—sexual crimes of the sort Glatman committed were largely unknown.

Such deviant criminality, plus much less sinister behavior, was both curbed and concealed in America at midcentury by a moral climate hostile to sexual extremes or erotic experimentation of almost any sort.

The conservative cultural consensus extended even to what passed for pornography.

“In those days, people appearing in what was called hardcore pornography still wore masks,” Hazelwood recalls. “
Playboy
was new. Mickey Spillane’s books were considered explicit.

“In the last three or four pages of
I, the Jury,
for example, Spillane describes a man holding a gun on a woman as she slowly unbuttons her blouse. Beads of perspiration run between her breasts. That was the book that high school guys
gathered around to read during lunchtime, and those were the particular pages most frequently read.”

Such fare may serve to stoke a healthy male libido. But to an offender such as Glatman, a sexual sadist, it lacks the specific connection between sex and violence necessary for his arousal.

Whether he is a low-order, impulsive criminal who uses violent pornography, in Roy’s term,
reflectively,
to construct fantasies around what he observes, or is a generally more intelligent, ritualistic offender who absorbs violent pornography
inflectively,
by incorporating it into an existing fantasy, the softer, or less violent the material, the less arousing the sadist will find it.

Ritualistic offenders such as Glatman or Bundy shop assiduously for their pornography, which they regard as among their most prized possessions. The photos or videotapes or narrative passages they select and keep are those that most closely complement their fantasies and deviant sexual practices.

For that reason, a careful study of it can provide investigators with important clues to a suspected deviant offender’s ritual, the psychosexually driven “signature” behavior that is consistent no matter how much he may vary his MO.