The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators
Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
BY STEPHEN G. MICHAUD
Lethal Shadow:
The Chilling True-Crime Story of a Sadistic Sex Slayer
BY STEPHEN G. MICHAUD WITH BECK WEATHERS
Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest
BY STEPHEN G. MICHAUD WITH HUGH AYENSWORTH
“If You Love Me You Will Do My Will”
The Only Living Witness:
The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy
Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer
The Vengeful Heart and Other Stories
BY ROY HAZELWOOD AND STEPHEN G. MICHAUD
Dark Dreams
BY ROY HAZELWOOD WITH PARK E. DIETZ AND ANN BURGESS
Autoerotic Fatalities
BY ROY HAZELWOOD WITH ANN BURGESS
Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation:
A Multidisciplinary Approach
EVIL
THAT
MEN DO
FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood’s Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators
STEPHEN G. MICHAUD
WITH
ROY HAZELWOOD
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
NOTE: |
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
Copyright © 1998 by Stephen G. Michaud.
Cover photograph courtesy Photonica.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-45537
ISBN: 0-312-97060-9
EAN: 9780312-97060-4
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / February 1999
St Martin’s Paperbacks edition / January 2000
10 9 8
For Louella and Earl
ONE
“His Influence Is Everywhere”
THREE
“I Don’t Like Women All That Much”
SEVEN
Organized and Disorganized
EIGHT
“I’d Like to Pray About This”
TWELVE
“My Intentions Were to Inflict Fear”
THIRTEEN
“I’m Going to Have Sex with You”
FOURTEEN
Who Hanged Andrew McIntyre?
FIFTEEN
“We Changed the Rules”
EIGHTEEN
“He Wanted to Be My Boyfriend”
TWENTY
“I Felt I Was Rehearsing for My Own Death”
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SELECTED HAZELWOOD BIBLIOGRAPHY
“His Influence Is Everywhere”
You could say that Ted Bundy introduced me to Roy Hazelwood.
We first met on a russet Iowa autumn evening in 1984 in the crowded lobby of a Des Moines motel, where next day Roy and I were to address a professional symposium on serial murder.
The FBI man’s presence lent the annual gathering considerable cachet. It also guaranteed the symposium’s delighted organizers, a local college’s criminal justice program, an SRO audience of veteran homicide detectives drawn to dozy Des Moines to hear the world’s foremost authority on sexual criminals.
My invitation had come on the strength of
The Only Living Witness,
the biography of Bundy that I’d published the preceding year with my coauthor, Hugh Aynesworth.
Ted was a figure of consuming interest to criminologists, and ours was the definitive treatment of his strange odyssey.
Once a dark legend throughout the West, a roving, phantom killer who murdered, undetected, for years, Bundy finally was convicted and condemned to death in Florida for the Super Bowl Sunday, 1978, bludgeon murders of two Chi
Omega sorority sisters. He received a second death sentence for the throat-slash murder of a twelve-year-old Lake City, Florida, child, whose brutalized remains Ted had dumped beneath a derelict hog shed.
But it wasn’t the horror of such crimes that made him stand apart in the minds of the police. Rather, it was Ted’s extraordinary success. There were no living witnesses, besides Bundy, to any of his murders. Save for a single savage bite mark Bundy left in the buttock of one Chi Omega victim, there also was not a single piece of incontrovertible physical evidence connecting Ted to any crime more serious than shoplifting. One prosecutor called him “the man with no fingerprints.”
A onetime law student and young GOP volunteer in the state of Washington, Ted was handsome, witty, and poised, nobody’s idea of a deviant killer. But behind what the late psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, coauthor of
The Three Faces of Eve,
famously termed the sociopath’s “mask of sanity,” there was a hidden Bundy—the “entity,” as Ted first described him to me: a deviant killer who collected and preserved his victims’ severed heads on cabinet shelves in his small Seattle apartment.
It was also the “entity” who sought credit for the murders, even as the public Ted indignantly disclaimed them.
In an effort to exploit this split between the public and private Bundy, Hugh and I asked Ted if he would speculate on the type of offender who might have committed the many homicides for which he was a suspect—put himself in the killer’s shoes, so to speak.
Bundy, the supreme narcissist, promptly agreed to do so. He had much to tell.
On the audiotapes we later played for the detectives in Des Moines, Ted carefully explained what it was like to be a serial killer.
He said that a killer comes to hunting humans gradually. The appetite builds from a young boy’s undifferentiated
anger and morbidity of mind to a search for ever more violent pornography, the visual and written material that Ted believed had shaped and focused his fantasy world.
Then comes the window peeping, followed eventually by crudely conceived and unsuccessful assaults. In Ted’s case, these gave way, over time, to a sophisticated taste for the chase and its aftermath: the selection of what he called “worthy” victims, pretty and intelligent young daughters and sisters of the middle class, nice girls whom Ted desired to possess, he said, “as one would possess a potted plant, or a Porsche.”
No multiple murderer before or since has so vividly communicated the essence of his urge as Ted did on those Death Row tapes, or taught law enforcement more about the ways of a serial killer.
In the end, Hugh and I would learn, the apparent mystery of Ted Bundy was really only a matter of failed perception. The skulls and necrophilia—Bundy revisited some victims in their woodland graves for days—so difficult to reconcile with his attractive public persona were ghoulish but hardly unique examples of how the sexual criminal attempts to create a fantasy that complements his underlying motivations—in Ted’s case, a monstrous hatred for women and a consuming, frantic quest for power—and then tries to realize that fantasy.
To the sexual offender, possession is power, and total possession is absolute power.
Roy Hazelwood taught me that.
When I located Hazelwood that night in Des Moines, he was seated alone at a low table, savoring a nonfilter Lucky Strike and a sparkling glass of iced gin, habits he has since reluctantly abandoned. Roy’s gaze was obscured by the amber lenses in his aviator frames—a look he’d acquired in Vietnam—and he was bathed in a haze of blue cigarette smoke.
Clustered in knots throughout the lobby were dozens of
heavy-limbed middle-aged men, each with a practiced grip on his own cocktail-hour libation. A glance at their weary eyes and wary posture immediately confirmed that here was a room full of cops.
“Roy Hazelwood?” I asked, approaching the celebrated FBI agent.
“Yes.” He stubbed out his Lucky. “You must be Michaud.”
Hazelwood rose to extend his right hand. We shook.
“Have a seat,” he directed. “Care for a drink?”
Roy wore a spiffy dark blue blazer, open-necked white shirt, gray slacks, and carefully polished black loafers, an arresting sartorial contrast to this writer in old chinos and the assembled homicide investigators in their cop mufti, double knits and short sleeves.
The scene is indelible in my mind, and years later the details still play exactly the same way in my memory. It’s humid, and the icy cocktail glasses sweat rings through paper napkins onto the damp Formica tabletop. Ecru tufts of stuffing poke up through a hole in the red Naugahyde seat of my chair.
But what turned an otherwise ordinary night into an ineradicable memory was the conversation with Hazelwood. By evening’s end I’d already begun an extraordinary journey, a frequently harrowing fourteen-year exploration across the shadowy nether edge of human behavior, the psychic precincts of the sexual criminal.
This book is the record of that trip.
Police departments from around the United States and Canada had paid $145 apiece for their detectives to attend the Des Moines meeting, a bargain ticket given some of the big-dog crime authorities scheduled to lecture.
Besides the meeting’s top draw, Hazelwood, speakers included Cook County, Illinois, state’s attorney William J. Kunkle, Jr. Four years earlier, Kunkle had won a death sentence
for John Wayne Gacy, the portly bisexual serial killer and Democratic Party operative who strangled or stabbed to death an estimated thirty-three of his sexual partners, young men and boys, throughout the 1970s. Gacy buried more than two dozen of his victims in the crawl space beneath his house in Norwood Park Township, a northwest suburb of Chicago.
Also in Des Moines was Sergeant Dudley Varney of the Los Angeles Police Department. Varney was a key investigator during LAPD’s Hillside Strangler case of 1977 and 1978, the string of ten (and possibly more) brutal torture-murders for which serial-killing cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono ultimately were caught and imprisoned.
Another of the presenters was Bob Keppel, chief investigator for the Washington State attorney general’s office, and probably the world’s most experienced serial killer hunter. At the time of the symposium, Keppel was advising various law enforcement agencies in western Washington on the Green River Killer cases, the serial murders of dozens of prostitutes that remain unsolved today.