The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (13 page)

“Second on my list of goals is to buy a house; preferably, buy some land and build my own house according to my own
custom
specifications and needs. Number one would be a garage, one- or two-car garage, to completely enclose a car with no windows so that no one could tell if a car was there or not there. Also a basement area—or
work
area—which is hidden and unable to be detected by ordinary means.

“Naturally, of course, I would need as a requirement secret hidden compartments built into the house for stash areas, for various things . . . along with the secret work area for a press and darkroom facilities, a
fun
area—secret
fun
area—which would include a
cage
so that I could have an SMB [DeBardeleben’s code for
sadomasochistic bitch
] locked
up!

“Also of
prime
importance—top priority—would be an
incinerator
capable of incinerating at extremely high temperature—
total
incineration. This could be connected as the lower part of the fireplace in the living room above.”

He also recorded torture sessions with his fourth wife, Caryn.*

“What are you going to do to me?!” the terrified woman is heard to say in a small voice on the tape.

“Huh?” DeBardeleben grunts.

“No!” Caryn screams. “What are you going to do to me?! Please! Please tell me! Please tell me! What are you doing?!
Tell me
!”

“C’mon,” he drawls lazily.

“Oh, please don’t do it again!”

“You gonna be a crybaby? Huh?”

Caryn whimpers. “No, I won’t.”

“All right.”

A pause.

“Please!” she screams again. “Untie my hands! Please, Mike! Don’t fuck me in the ass! I wouldn’t do something like that to you!
Don’t fuck me in the ass!”

The tape, a half hour long and edited in places, quite clearly depicts Mike DeBardeleben torturing and sodomizing Caryn. He forces her to beg for pain and humiliation, and giggles as she does so.

“Please let me die,” Caryn pleads. “Let me die. Let me die. Let me die.”

“Calm down. You gonna calm down?” her husband asks.

“Why can’t I die? Why can’t I die?” Caryn continues in a high-pitched singsong. “Why can’t I die? Why can’t I die? Why can’t I die?”

“My mother died,” DeBardeleben interjects.

“I wish I were her!” Caryn sobs. “I wish I were her and not me! I wish I were her, oh God! I want to die! Why don’t you do it?”

DeBardeleben hated women and used sex to punish them.

He also exactly captured what could be called the sexual sadist’s creed in written notes discovered by the Secret Service, and later published in court documents.

DeBardeleben wrote:

The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism. The central impulse to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god, to do with her as one pleases, to humiliate her, to enslave her are means to this end. And the most radical aim is to make her suffer. Since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her. To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the complete domination of another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.

“Investigators,” explains Hazelwood, “find no other sexual crime as well planned and methodically executed as that committed by the anger excitation rapist. Every detail is carefully thought out and rehearsed, either literally or in the offender’s fantasies. Weapons and instruments, transportation, travel routes, recording devices, bindings—virtually every phase has been pre-planned, with one notable exception.

“A sexual sadist will practice his brutality on his wife or girlfriend, but most of his victims are strangers. While they meet certain criteria established by the rapist to fulfill his desires and fantasies, they generally will not be associated with him in any way known to others. This is also part of his plan. He wants no ties that will connect him to the victim.”

Of all Hazelwood’s categories, the only type who may assault primarily out of sexual desire is the so-called opportunistic rapist, who usually commits his offense in the course of committing some other crime altogether, such as robbery or kidnapping. As his designation implies, he sees an opportunity and impulsively seizes it.

He generally uses minimal force and spends just a short time with the victim. It is common for the opportunistic rapist to bind his victim before leaving.

He often is drunk or high on drugs when he rapes.

About the last category, gang rape, Hazelwood has the least to say. “It is pathological group behavior in which the victim is almost always seriously injured,” he says. “These rapists play to one another. There are multiple offenders, obviously. But there is always a leader, and always a reluctant participant, who often makes himself known to the victim. This is the offender whom law enforcement should focus on and attempt to profile.”

Following his AFIP fellowship, Roy returned once again to Fort Gordon, Georgia, to serve as a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) instructor. In a short time, he was placed in charge of all new agents training for the CID.

He had so far enjoyed his army career and had done well. However, Roy also knew the next step in his career path likely would be a desk job at the Pentagon, a prospect about which he was only mildly enthusiastic, even though it also meant another promotion, to lieutenant colonel.

He was ten years away from retirement, and had no expectations of staying in the army beyond that time. That meant at age forty-two he’d have to start looking around for a second career. “What am I going to do, sell real estate?” he asked himself. “Do prison work? Become a special investigator for a sheriff’s department?”

Roy had reached another of those periodic junctures in his life when all he knew for certain was what he disdained. It was time once more for chance to intervene.

It finally did one day in 1970, when he drove a friend to an interview appointment at the FBI office in downtown Augusta, Georgia. Dressed in his uniform, Roy was seated in
the lobby, waiting for his fellow officer to finish, when he was approached by an FBI agent.

“While your friend’s in there, would you like to look at an application?”

“No, I’m happy,” Roy said, gesturing at his uniform. “Career army.”

“Well, just take an application,” said the agent.

Hazelwood did, and went home and filled out the form “on a lark,” he says. “I just wanted to see if the Bureau would accept me.”

To his delighted surprise, the FBI did. An agent contacted Roy, advising him to resign his commission so he could depart immediately when the imminent appointment letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover arrived.

Major Hazelwood was too cautious for that.

“Wait a minute,” he told the agent. “I have a wife and three kids. When I get that appointment letter, then I’ll make a decision.”

The appointment letter didn’t come; although Roy was his recruiter’s top choice, the Bureau was not hiring agents at the time.

In early 1971, he was selected to attend the FBI’s National Academy program, a three-month course for veteran law enforcement officers from around the United States. Of the fifty members in each class, only two were military officers. It was a singular honor for Roy to be chosen.

Since an FBI interview was part of the preregistration process, Roy soon found himself back at the Bureau’s Augusta office. He remembers how the special agent in charge (SAC) noticed on his documents that Hazelwood had been selected both to the National Academy and, pending appointment, for FBI agent training.

“Which would you prefer?” the SAC asked.

“FBI,” Roy answered.

“Well, then, let’s hold up this National Academy application,” said the SAC.

The very next day, Roy received a special delivery letter of appointment to the FBI, signed by Hoover, informing Hazelwood he was scheduled to begin training November 29, 1971, nine months away. “That was their first opening,” he says. “And I accepted it.”

Roy remained an army major until Friday, November 26. Then he left Georgia for Washington, D.C., looking forward to what he believed would be sixteen weeks of top-level training in the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Hazelwood knew there would be some personal adjustments to make. For one thing, he was barely able to maintain the FBI’s minimum weight, and for the next four months he made sure he was carrying a couple boxes of .38 ammunition whenever he was weighed.

The more serious potential difficulties were his age and experience. Not only would he be older than all but one of the twenty-five agents in his class; Roy also brought to his new work an impressive record of prior achievement.

He was a former military officer with extensive training and command experience. Plus Roy was a decorated Vietnam veteran, holder of the Bronze Star and the army’s Meritorious Service Medal, plus an Air Medal with three oak-leaf clusters, awarded him for all the dangerous helicopter sorties he’d flown at An Khe. He’d also been decorated by the Vietnamese government.

But if he thought starting over as a mere recruit was going to be a challenge, by far the greater surprise was the indifferent quality of the classroom training he received.

“I’d just come from what I considered the finest training for investigators available anywhere in the world, U.S. Army CID,” he says.

“At the FBI I can remember my counselor, Cliff Browning, asking me, ‘Well, Major, what do you think of our training?’

“I said, ‘Cliff, this is the worst I’ve ever received.’ ”

Hazelwood’s disappointment did not extend to firearm training or to physical training in defensive tactics, which he
thought were very good, or to the hard work he was put through learning constitutional law.

But classroom instruction—conducted in Washington, D.C.’s old post office building—was for the most part an unending bore. “We learned everything by rote, and were tested by rote, too,” he remembers. “They had very few permanent faculty members, so we’d get supervisors pulled in from headquarters to teach this subject or that.”

Roy finished his last class at 6:00 p.m. on a spring Friday in 1972. An hour later, he was issued his credentials, a leather satchel, a pair of handcuffs, and a .38 with a four-inch barrel, plus ammunition. He already knew his first assignment, the Bureau office in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was expected the following Monday morning.

There was no graduation exercise, nor was any diploma awarded.

“They just said, ‘Good luck, gentlemen,’ and that was it,” he recalls. “You walked out the classroom door, got in the car, and headed for your assignment.”

Norfolk, a relatively small Bureau office that worked a large number of routine assignments inside the several nearby U.S. Navy installations, was not Roy’s first choice. He had hoped instead for a big-city assignment with more compelling challenges, such as terrorism and kidnapping and bank robbery cases.

But it was precisely because of his extensive army background that the FBI first sent him to Norfolk. The Bureau figured that a man with Roy’s military experience was a natural for working crimes on a military reservation.

While in time he would work bank robberies and kidnappings at Norfolk, it was his very first assignment that nearly tore it for the newly minted agent.

“Here I was a former army major, thirty-four years old,” says Roy. “I’d been in charge of all new agent training for army CID, and I’m told to investigate a stolen vacuum cleaner?”

The appliance had vanished five years before from the community assistance equipment shed at the Norfolk Naval Station.

“Young navy couples were allowed to sign out equipment like chairs and couches and lamps,” he explains. “Someone didn’t bring this vacuum back.

“The people in the office weren’t very concerned, so the matter just lapsed. Finally, during an inspection someone asked, ‘Where’s the vacuum cleaner?’ And someone answered, ‘We don’t know. It must be stolen.’ So they called the FBI. It was stolen government property on a government reservation and, technically, we had to investigate the case.”

Hazelwood turned the matter into a personal challenge; he was determined to solve the so-far unsolvable mystery, and worked on it whenever time allowed.

He discovered that when the people who’d checked out the vacuum were transferred from Norfolk to a new base, they simply gave away the machine, piece by piece.

“So I tracked down everyone who’d ever come in contact with that vacuum cleaner,” he says. “I got the nozzle from here, and the canister from there. It scared the hell out of some people when I knocked on their door. ‘I’m with the FBI. Do you have a piece of this vacuum cleaner?’

“I spent a year at Norfolk, and in the last month before I left I walked into my supervisor’s office, put the complete vacuum cleaner on his desk, and advised him what he could do with it.”

Roy also coped in good spirits with the FBI’s punctilious codes of behavior, a lingering legacy of the recently deceased J. Edgar Hoover. Instead of bucking the rules, Hazelwood bent them.

“People have asked me how I possibly could have worked in that environment,” he says. “Well, I really enjoyed it. You just had to know how to beat the system.”

Some rules, such as the requirement that all agents wear hats, could be safely ignored.

Others, equally silly if you took them seriously, had to be finessed.

Agents were forbidden to be at their desks for any reason for more than twenty minutes each day. They were supposed to be out in the field, working cases. Yet the paperwork somehow still had to be completed.

“Suddenly it dawned on me that libraries have air-conditioned reading rooms. So I drove to the local library with my paperwork and went inside and asked the librarian, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where your reading room is?’

“She said, ‘You’re with the FBI, aren’t you? You must be new.’