The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (11 page)

Earl was satisfied.

Then in 1962, Roy was sent to Oxford, Mississippi, to help protect James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

“My dad almost disowned me over that,” he recalls. “He was a racist. When I told him I had orders to go to Ole Miss, he said, ‘Resign your commission.’ I told him I couldn’t. I’d taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.”

Time and Earl’s advancing ill health eventually resolved all conflicts between them. In 1975, as his dad lay dying a painful death from emphysema in a Houston hospital, Roy spent two weeks with him. To the end, Earl remained in charge of their relationship.

“Go on back home,” he announced to Roy from his hospital bed one day. “You were here when it counted. You don’t need to come back for my funeral.”

Not long thereafter, Earl expired in Louella’s arms.

Roy’s best-known contribution to criminology—the organized-disorganized criminal behavior dichotomy—first occurred to him one day while he was taking a shower.

He had been contemplating James Odom and James Lawson, Jr., a pair of convicted rapists who’d met as inmates at a state mental institution in California. While locked up together, the pair had shared their fantasies; Odom described to Lawson his dreams of rape, and Lawson confided to Odom his violent imaginings of female evisceration and mutilation.

“We’d fantasized so much that at times I didn’t know what was real,” Odom later said.

Upon their release, the two hooked up in South Carolina and went hunting victims together. They abducted at gunpoint a twenty-five-year-old convenience store clerk and drove the woman to an isolated location. Odom raped the victim in the backseat of a Ford belonging to Lawson’s father. Then Lawson cut her throat with a knife the clerk had sold him earlier, and savagely mutilated her dead body with it.

“I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person, and destroy her so she would not exist,” Lawson said
in his subsequent confession. “I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her breasts off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body.”

Odom and Lawson put scant effort into concealing what they’d done. Their victim was soon discovered, the car was easy to trace, and within days they were arrested for the clerk’s murder.

As Hazelwood pondered this crime, he couldn’t get over how haphazard and sloppy the killers had been. “I said to myself, ‘Gosh, this was really not well planned, not well thought out. These guys were really kinda disorganized.’

“And I compared them to Ed Kemper. He was
really
organized. Kemper put a lot of time and effort into his crimes.”

Edmund Emil Kemper III occupies an extralarge niche in the BSU’s early history with aberrant criminals. Not only was the six-foot nine-inch, three-hundred-pound necrophile a highly intelligent and well-spoken serial killer, an ideal subject for interview, but Kemper also had a sadistic wit.

He was serving seven life sentences in California’s Vacaville State Prison when Bob Ressler, pursuing his serial-killer study, paid Ed Kemper a call. It was their third meeting.

After spending several hours together with Kemper, talking murder and dismemberment in a locked cell adjacent to death row, Ressler buzzed for a guard. None came. He buzzed again, and a third time. After fifteen minutes of waiting, still no guard.

The agent tried not to betray his nervousness, but Kemper saw his chance.

“If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you?” he toyed with Ressler. “I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

As Ressler disconsolately imagined how easily such a scene might play out, he gamely warned Kemper of the trouble he’d be in for committing such a crime.

“What would they do, cut off my TV privileges?” the killer replied with a smirk.

Inwardly berating himself for the stupidity of allowing such a situation in the first place, Ressler continued to keep Kemper talking, trying out every interrogation and hostage-negotiation trick he’d ever been taught—plus some he made up as he went along—hoping someone, soon, would happen by to rescue him.

Finally, a guard appeared to escort the homicidal giant back to his cell.

“You know I was just kidding, don’t you?” Kemper said on his way out the door.

“Sure,” Ressler answered.

Kemper was every bit as depraved as James Lawson. At age fourteen, he murdered his grandparents, and he spent seven years at the maximum-security California state hospital at Atascadero (where Odom and Lawson later met) before being paroled to his mother’s custody in 1969.

Over the succeeding nine years he killed eight more people: six young women he picked up hitchhiking, plus his mother and one of her female friends.

All were dissected or decapitated or sexually assaulted after death. He cut leg meat from two of his victims into a macaroni casserole he prepared and ate.

Kemper bludgeoned his mother with a hammer as she slept. He sawed off her head, had sex with her corpse, and carved out her larynx and shoved it down the garbage disposal. Afterward, he propped her severed head on the mantel for dart practice.

Hence Bob Ressler’s informed unease when Kemper threatened to “screw your head off.”

But Ed Kemper had more than one dimension to him.

What distinguished him from a James Lawson, Hazelwood recognized, was organization. Patience and planning and attention to detail were the reasons Kemper was able to
commit serial kidnap-murders for so long without being identified. Ed Kemper thought through his every move, and even rehearsed his crimes.

He would pick up a girl, try a personality on her, and then release her unharmed and unaware of his intentions. He experimented for months with different approaches, perfecting what Hazelwood calls the killer’s “service personality,” the image he projects to mask his true intentions.

Highly disciplined and a perfectionist, Kemper learned to be conversational, unthreatening, to project a mild, even attractive, persona with which he would smoothly transact the critical first phase of his assaults, the approach.

Afterward, despite the ghastliness of his postmortem behavior, he never left messy crime scenes or in any way called unnecessary attention to himself. Kemper wasn’t caught until he called California police from Colorado, confessed what he’d done by telephone, and then waited in his car to be arrested.

This, Hazelwood recognized, was the antithesis of James Lawson’s and James Odom’s
disorganized
behavior. Ed Kemper was
organized.

Pursuing the distinction further, Hazelwood realized that what he’d really captured with his dichotomy was the broad difference between crazy (psychotic) behavior, and irrational yet sane (psychopathic, or antisocial) behavior.

In time, the insight led to a practical and handy way for homicide investigators to quickly categorize their UNSUBs into three major classes: organized, disorganized, and mixed offenders.

Hazelwood unveiled his organized and disorganized analytical framework in an article entitled “The Lust Murderer,” published under his name and John Douglas’s in the April 1980
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.
It was the first professional article Roy wrote as an FBI agent. Since then, “The Lust Murderer” has been the most frequently reprinted of all BSU papers.

The title comes from an old catch-all clinical term for homicide committed during passion. Hazelwood and Douglas appropriated
lust murder
for any killing that involves mutilation and/or removal of the victim’s sexual parts. In either sense, the term today has fallen largely into disuse.

Hazelwood used it to describe the Odom-Lawson slaying, because “there really isn’t another term that captures what those men did to that woman,” he explains.

He describes the organized offender as indifferent to his fellow humans, irresponsible, and self-centered—the classic psychopath. He is manipulative, deliberate, and full of guile, outwardly amiable for as long as it suits his objectives.

If the organized offender is a crafty wolf, then the disorganized offender is more like a wild dog.

He has few, if any, social skills. Typically, he is a loner and manifestly so. He may not wash or shave for days, or change his clothing or comb his hair. He feels rejected, and for the most part is incapable of forming normal relationships with other people of either sex. He lacks the organized offender’s craftiness, and commits his crimes on impulse, in a frenzy, with little planning or preparation.

His spontaneous fury may be sparked by anger or passion, drugs or alcohol. He may also be mentally retarded or psychotic, or may simply lack experience or maturity.

Unlike the organized offender, who preys for the most part on strangers, the disorganized offender may kill a friend, relative, acquaintance, or neighbor, indifferent at that moment to his risk of capture.

He also will score lower on standardized intelligence tests, although here Hazelwood cautions against confusing low measurable intellect with stupidity. Disorganized offenders are capable of high animal cunning.

“My favorite example of this is a serial rapist I interviewed in a midwestern prison,” he says. “I remember he was chained wrist to waist, and waist to ankle, and was considered one of the most dangerous inmates in the prison.

“He had attacked and beaten the deputy warden, and then sent him a letter saying that next time he hoped the official would put up a better fight.

“He was powerfully built, in his early thirties, about five-nine and two hundred forty pounds, all muscle. He had a full-scale IQ of seventy-nine, and spoke mostly in monosyllables.”

The inmate’s evident lack of intellect, says Hazelwood, masked a far more important asset—street smarts.

“He’d raped a series of women in Florida, and then fled to his hometown in the upper Midwest when he learned there was a warrant out for his arrest.”

Searching for shelter, the rapist hit upon a foolproof way of hiding out. “He told me that he checked into a residential drug rehab program,” Roy recalls. “Total confidentiality. No one would acknowledge he was there. Although he had never used drugs, he’d been around people who did, and was able to fake all the symptoms.

“Now remember, this guy has an IQ of seventy-nine. After several weeks in the drug program, he wanted a woman. He told his roommate he wanted one. The roommate says, ‘Oh, no. You can’t even get out of the building until you’ve been here six months.’

“ ‘Bullshit,’ the guy says.”

As he later recounted the story to Roy, he faked a stomach pain and was sent with an escort to the city hospital for diagnostic work. Once there, the first thing he needed to do was get rid of the escort.

“Well, let’s see,” he said, “I gotta go to the seventeenth floor for X rays. Then I gotta go to the third floor for blood tests. Up to the sixth floor for urinalysis and—”

The escort interrupted: “I’ll wait for you in the lobby,” he said.

At this point in his narrative, the rapist stopped and asked Hazelwood where he would search for a rape victim in a hospital.

“The gynecology department?” Roy ventured.

“Nah. They’re all pregnant in there, or have a disease. What you want to do is head for the women’s rest room.”

The rapist stood outside the rest room until a woman walked in alone, and then he followed behind her. After scratching “Out of Order” on a paper towel, which he affixed to the facility door, he returned inside and sexually assaulted the victim.

As he did so, a second female, ignoring the “Out of Order” sign, walked into the rest room, discovered the rape in progress, and ran out screaming, “There’s a man assaulting a woman in the rest room!”

A crowd quickly gathered at the doorway. Meantime, as the rapist retold the story, he grabbed his victim by her hair and shoved her along in front of him, out the rest room door.

“And let me tell you something, bitch!” he screamed at her. “If I ever catch you screwing around on me again, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill you, too!”

His stunned audience “parted like the Red Sea,” according to Hazelwood, and he escaped the rest room, the hospital, and the United States for Canada.

Typically, the disorganized offender commits his crime with any weapon available at the point of encounter with his victim. He will also leave her at the murder site, making little or no effort to conceal the body. He’ll probably leave the weapon there, too.

Such an offender initially is apt to commit his crimes within walking distance of where he lives or works. However, if he is not caught and is mentally competent and capable of learning, he may soon stop taking such risks and evolve, over time, into an organized offender.

In a representative case Hazelwood consulted on in 1997, a young female was raped and murdered at home. The offender, who was personally acquainted with his victim, had kicked her and struck her with his fists before beating her to death with a steel rod he’d picked up inside her
house. He left her body where he killed her and returned to his residence, which was less than a thousand yards away.

Roy immediately categorized the criminal as disorganized because he knew his victim, chose a weapon of opportunity, made no effort to conceal what he had done, and lived a short distance away from the murder scene.

The organized offender, by contrast, is a planner. He brings his own weapons or restraints, hunts away from where he lives or works, normally has no traceable association with his victim, and takes steps to conceal the body, as well as to remove evidence. He’ll take care not to leave fingerprints, body fluids such as blood or semen, or spent cartridges and shells.

He is usually older, as well as more mature, than the disorganized offender. He prefers to commit his crime in seclusion, and often transports his victim to a second location for disposal. He is not necessarily concerned if she ultimately is discovered, because the publicity surrounding her death and its impact on the community can be highly exciting to him.