The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (5 page)

By the following spring, Cunanan appears to have gone broke and was drinking heavily. On April 18, 1997, a friend in San Francisco saw Cunanan for what would prove to be the last time.

“Something had snapped in him,” John Semerau told Maureen Orth of
Vanity Fair.
“Now I realize the guy was
hunting—he was getting the thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the kill. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his body. He had stepped over the edge.”

Cunanan flew to Minneapolis from the West Coast in late April 1997. He made no effort to hide the visit. On Tuesday afternoon, April 29, Jeff Trail’s body was discovered, wrapped in a carpet, in David Madson’s blood-spattered apartment. Trail had been repeatedly struck about the face and head with a hammer, which was found in Madson’s apartment.

Saturday morning, May 3, Madson’s body was found by fishermen at a lake about one hour’s drive north of Minneapolis. He had been shot three times with a .40-caliber weapon; once in the head, once in the eye, and once in the back. His red Jeep Cherokee was missing.

Police later matched the .40-caliber slugs recovered from the Madson crime scene with a box of .40-caliber ammunition discovered in Jeff Trail’s apartment.

Roy Hazelwood, who followed Andrew Cunanan’s saga in the newspapers, recalls thinking at the time that Cunanan must have been very much concerned at the direction in which his lifestyle was leading him prior to the killings.

“He was physically attractive,” Roy observes, “and had traded on his appearance and youthfulness to both validate his self-worth and to enjoy a very high standard of living.

“But then he began to age. His appearance—the essence of his self-esteem—began to fade. He was finding it difficult to attract the rich and appreciative sexual partners he believed he deserved. To make matters worse, their use of him was one of the factors causing him to age, and because of that they no longer desired him as they once had.

“So Andrew Cunanan, I believe, decided to get even. He did so by killing those who represented or symbolized the men who’d ruined and then rejected him.”

On May 4, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin’s sadistically broken body was discovered in his home.
Miglin, seventy-five, was bound hand and foot. His body was partially wrapped in plastic, paper, and tape. His face was also taped, except for two airholes at his nose. He had been tortured—several of his ribs were broken—and stabbed. His throat had been cut open with a saw. He had been left under a car in his parking garage across the street from his Chicago town house.

A search of the Miglin residence showed no sign of forced entry. However, as much as ten thousand dollars in cash was missing, as was a collection of the elderly tycoon’s expensive suits. Several months later in Miami, Cunanan would pawn a gold coin he apparently stole in the course of murdering and robbing Lee Miglin.

On Tuesday, May 6, David Madson’s red Jeep was recovered by Chicago police around the corner from the Miglin house. Discovered inside the vehicle were newspaper clips of the Trail and Madson killings.

Miglin’s dark green Lexus also was missing. The car, with Andrew Cunanan behind the wheel, was already in New York City.

Friday night, May 9, the Miglin Lexus was found outside an office at Finns Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, New Jersey. Inside the office, cemetery caretaker William Reese, forty-five, lay dead on the floor in a pool of his blood, a .40-caliber bullet in his head. He had been shot with the same gun that had been used to kill David Madson, and would be used to kill Gianni Versace.

Reese’s 1995 Chevy truck was missing, too.

Andrew Cunanan knew his killing spree was a national news story. Several papers devoted long stories to the murder saga, including
The New York Times.
He was about to hit the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. And he could read and hear how the Bureau was warning certain prominent gays of his acquaintance to mind their personal security.

Cunanan suddenly was famous and powerful, an object of fear, loathing, and national fascination.

Cunanan also had exhibited enough traits of the antisocial personality—lying, substance abuse, promiscuity, disdain for social norms, cruelty, use of aliases, lack of a fixed address—to warrant a curbside opinion that he was a sociopath, and a narcissist as well.

He parked Reese’s hot pickup, carrying stolen South Carolina plates, in a Miami municipal garage on June 10. Since May 12, he’d been living under an assumed name in a moderately priced residence hotel on the beach. According to several witnesses, he joined South Beach Miami’s busy gay scene. According to the night manager at his hotel, Cunanan came and went in a variety of disguises.

It can never be known if he chose Miami as the perfect setting for his apotheosis, or, more likely, because he knew the city from a previous gig working there for a gay escort service. Cunanan certainly knew he could easily move without calling attention to himself in a district where gayness was the norm.

But Miami also had collateral appeal for a fugitive such as Andrew Cunanan. It is a busy international city from which there are a thousand ways to quietly disappear for destinations as handy as the Caribbean, and as remote as Rio.

All you need is money and connections, which could partially explain his choice of Gianni Versace as his final victim.

Cunanan may well have been sending a very specific message to a very specific person, the way kidnappers make their point by sending a victim’s family photos or a tape recording or even a body part to emphasize the seriousness of their demands.

Versace was by far the most famous of Cunanan’s five known murder victims, but he was the only one with whom Cunanan did not have an intimate relationship, or from whom he did not steal something he needed.

In a theory first advanced by Joe Swickard, a veteran crime reporter at the
Detroit Free Press,
Cunanan’s intent behind the brazen Versace murder may have been to intimidate
one of Cunanan’s wealthy acquaintances into fronting the capital, transportation, and/or documents necessary for him to slip away south from Miami in quiet comfort.

Any individual, no matter how rich or well protected, would likely take to heart such a demonstration of daring and lethality.

But the ploy, if that’s what it was, failed.

Cunanan did make what has been described as a frantic, unsuccessful telephone appeal to a West Coast acquaintance for help in securing a passport. Whether that call was part of an overall strategy that included Versace’s murder likely will never be known.

On July 23, still trapped in Miami and suffering from a stomach wound, Andrew Cunanan was discovered by a caretaker aboard a houseboat, and fired a final, fatal .40-caliber round into his mouth.

It was of course no coincidence that three, perhaps four, of Cunanan’s victims were gay or bisexual. Many multiple murders are sexually motivated. Those who commit them also tend to share a pleasure in the physical act of murder. The more they do it, the more they enjoy it.

Lone wolves like Cunanan or Bundy or Wayne Williams foremost are opportunists. They search and wait for the moment they feel is propitious, and then strike. Their horrific depredations may shock and seem uniquely modern, but the main reason for their rise is that opportunity today is abundant.

In the cohesive culture of an older, simpler, slower world, people noticed strangers, watched them and remembered them. A would-be multiple murderer was forced to act with utmost circumspection. The urge to act out certainly existed, as Harvey Glatman’s story attests. But the chances to commit anonymous serial murder, and therefore the crime’s overall incidence, were limited.

In contemporary society, with its fractured sense of community and hurried pace, a single killer can move quickly from place to place and across police jurisdictions, which
habitually do not interact well with one another. In this environment, where strangers are a commonplace, the artful multiple killer—who is not necessarily intelligent, but usually is quick-witted and crafty—becomes a cipher, turns essentially invisible, and thrives.

Ted Bundy taught me that.

Killers at the other end of the spectrum, outright savages such as Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles Night Stalker, trust more to luck and audacity than cunning. They murder heedlessly and recklessly, and frequently are caught soon after they start.

Ramirez, who indiscriminately stabbed, beat, shot, and mutilated both male and female victims aged six to eighty-four, was at large for little more than a year, during which time he killed at least thirteen victims and assaulted many others.

Chavez and Fernandez killed twelve people in the four months they were loose around Dallas, Texas, in 1995. Bundy, by contrast, murdered thirty women or more in an intermittent killing career that lasted throughout the 1970s.

He was part of the sudden epidemic of serial killers that would provide the Behavioral Science Unit with a mission: The BSU quickly became the world’s leading institution devoted to the study of these rare, but highly lethal, pathogens.

Hardly a significant known instance of serial homicide anywhere in the world escaped the BSU’s attention. Ramirez. Wayne Williams in Atlanta. Peter Sutcliffe, Great Britain’s “Yorkshire Ripper.” David (”Son of Sam”) Berkowitz in New York City. The Trailside and Zodiac Killers in California. Even the great dissembler, Henry Lee Lucas, the one-eyed, snaggletoothed drifter who claimed to have murdered hundreds of victims from Guyana to Japan (but probably killed no more than three people, including his mother). All were scrutinized in the BSU laboratory.

Few escaped Roy Hazelwood’s attention, either.

In 1994, following his retirement, Roy began to consult on
serial murder cases as a member of the Academy Group, a Manassas, Virginia, consultancy made up of his old BSU colleagues, plus other former federal agents. Roger Depue, Roy’s former boss, founded the Academy Group and served as its first president before leaving to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Other agent-members include Dick Ault and Pete Smerick from the BSU, and retired Secret Service agent Ken Baker. The Academy Group’s client list ranges from prosecutors and defense attorneys to companies with security problems in need of employee threat assessments, and even television programs, including the popular Fox series
Millennium.

One of Hazelwood’s first assignments after joining the Academy Group was to consider a pivotal, if deceptively simple-sounding, question about a particularly heartbreaking homicide.

The victim was twenty-one-year-old Monica Smith,
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last reported alive early on a Friday evening in October 1992. A neighbor in the suburban Birmingham, Alabama, apartment complex where Monica lived with her mother saw the young woman heading for her car in the parking lot at about 7:45 p.m.

Mrs. Smith had gone to church that night. Monica’s destination was a shopping center approximately one mile away, where she would purchase chocolate yogurt at a Baskin-Robbins outlet.

Hours later, Mrs. Smith returned from church to find her daughter’s car, glasses, and yogurt in the apartment complex parking lot.

She ran to her apartment and dialed 911.

Monica’s partially clothed body was discovered around noon the next day, Saturday, lying in a roadside ravine about eight miles from her home, plainly visible to passing motorists amid the miscellaneous trash strewn around an illegal dumping site.

About three weeks later, a killer named Jack Harrison Trawick was arrested on a parole violation and subsequently confessed to Monica Smith’s murder, which Trawick also described to investigators in some detail.

The question posed to Hazelwood by the Smith family lawyer, who was pursuing a premises liability action against the apartment complex owners, was this: In Roy’s expert opinion, would the presence of a guard on duty that night in the complex’s deserted security shack have deterred Trawick from murdering Smith, and thus saved her life?

Hazelwood parsed the problem step by step, beginning with a close look at the victim.

Monica Smith, he learned in conversations with her mother and others, was a timid, likable young woman afflicted with a learning disability. She was sweet-tempered, naive, and socially passive, highly unlikely to offer much resistance if confronted by an attacker. Her mother believed her to be a virgin.

Trawick was a white male, forty-five years old, whose criminal history included at least three previous murders he acknowledged at the same time he pleaded guilty to killing Monica Smith. He’d been arrested, as well, for burglaries, impersonating a police officer, kidnapping, placing threatening calls to women, and breaking into one victim’s house, where he destroyed her undergarments.

Trawick was highly intelligent, and a diagnosed psychopath. Doctors and counselors described him as a sexual sadist, preoccupied with sex and violence, and a fetishist. In 1982, at his request, Trawick received a so-called chemical castration in the form of the female hormone progestin. The following year he required a mastectomy as a consequence of the drug’s side effects.

Trawick spent from 1983 to 1990 in prison.

During his confession, he provided police with sketchy reconstructions of his three earlier homicides, the first of which Trawick said he committed in the early 1970s.

This victim was a prostitute whom he picked up late one afternoon in his Toyota van. Trawick said he choked the woman and stabbed her in the throat. Outside the van, he used a knife to mutilate one of her breasts, as well as her hips “and maybe, even, her stomach.” He wasn’t certain. He may also have pushed the weapon up his victim’s vagina, he said.

Trawick added that he had expended so much energy in throttling the prostitute that he was unable to unbutton her clothing, and had to cut it away from her body with his knife.

However, he did not rape her.

He then drove home and cleaned up the van, noting to his surprise how little blood he found in the vehicle.

In his second murder, for which Trawick did not provide a date, he recalled standing in an isolated aisle of a large department store and observing an employee, a “young lady,” walking toward a service area in the back of the store. After checking for surveillance measures and seeing no mirrors, one-way windows, or cameras, he went after her. Trawick cornered the clerk in the otherwise empty service area, strangled her until she passed out, and then cut the woman’s throat with his pocketknife.