The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (16 page)

Douglas immediately agreed with Hazelwood that the killer was an African American male, and that he probably was not responsible for all the deaths on the list—which would eventually reach thirty—especially not those of the two girls. While it is wise never to say never when it comes to aberrant offenders, Hazelwood and Douglas quickly isolated and analyzed enough behavioral evidence to have a firm sense of the offenses the Atlanta Child Killer would, and would not, commit.

His victims, many of them poor and streetwise, were disappearing routinely, yet there were no reliable reports that
any of them had been forcibly abducted, or snatched in the night from their families’ houses, except for one of the girls, LaTonya Wilson, who was taken from her bed.

The Child Killer was too cool for that. Hazelwood and Douglas knew he was using some variation on the con approach, an indication of intelligence.

They believed him to be in his mid- to late twenties.

“This type of offender has to relate to children,” Hazelwood explains. “He can’t be so old that he frightens them, or so young that they don’t believe what he says. Whatever his lure, we said it had to be credible.”

The agents’ experience, and BSU research, led them next to conclude the killer probably was from a middle-class or higher background. These were not a poor man’s crimes.

Self-evidently, his hobbies and pastimes would be attractive to children.

He also was single, and probably was sexually inadequate. The first conclusion flowed from his demonstrated sexual preference for boys. The second was an inference. Autopsies indicated minimal sexual contact between the Child Killer and his victims. In fact, the murders, at least the earliest ones, may have been caused by frustration and anger precipitated by his sexual dysfunction.

Finally, Hazelwood and Douglas knew that serial killers often are police buffs, and guessed that the Child Killer probably was one, too. He might even drive an old police car, or a vehicle that resembled one, and he likely had insinuated himself into the investigation.

He enjoyed the national attention, too, and would inject himself into the investigation to enhance that experience.

“We said that he not only was gratified in the commission of his crimes,” Roy recalls, “but also in the authorities’ inability to solve them.”

In the midst of fitting these pieces together, Hazelwood and Douglas also had occasion to knock down the claims of
at least one white Georgian who wished to take credit for killing so many black children.

The impostor placed a call to the police in Conyers, Georgia, not far from Atlanta, claiming to be the murderer. An unmistakably unreconstructed redneck, the caller mentioned the name of the most recent known victim, and said he’d left another body at a specific spot on Sigmon Road in Rockdale County, southeast of Atlanta.

After listening to an audiotape of the call with Dr. Dietz and recognizing it for a crude ruse, Hazelwood and Douglas devised a plan for flushing out the self-proclaimed serial killer. It seemed certain that the caller would monitor the Conyers police response to his information. Therefore, the agents suggested that police officers deliberately search the wrong side of Sigmon Road. The hope was that he’d surface to correct their mistake, either at the search scene or in another taunting—and traceable—telephone call.

The ploy worked.

Full of derision at the police’s stupidity, the impostor ill-advisedly telephoned from his home to mock the Conyers Police Department, and stayed on the line long enough to permit a trace. He was arrested later in the day.

Hazelwood and Douglas delivered their joint profile of the Atlanta Child Killer in person to Morris Redding, Atlanta Police Department chief George Napper, Lee Brown, and a local psychiatrist who had been advising the task force investigation.

“There was a sigh of relief when we said we thought it was a black guy,” Roy recalls. “One of them said, ‘Thank God. We thought it was going to be a white guy. The last thing we needed was for these to be racial killings.’ ”

The profile proved accurate. Wayne Williams, who was arrested in June of 1981, was a single black musician and freelance photographer who lived at home with his parents, both schoolteachers. Hazelwood and Douglas seemed to get
everything right but Williams’s age. He was twenty-three at the time of his arrest.

Wayne Williams has never admitted to the Atlanta Child Killings, and those who have questioned his guilt point out that Williams never, in fact, was charged with killing a child. The deaths for which he ultimately was convicted were those of twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, both clearly older than Williams’s victims of preference, teenaged boys (his youngest suspected victim was nine).

It is unclear why Payne and Cater were killed, but it is not uncommon for a serial murderer to occasionally select seemingly anomalous victims. John Wayne Gacy’s oldest victim, for example, also was twenty-seven.

The local authorities closed twenty-three of the cases upon Williams’s conviction, and left the remaining seven open, officially unsolved.

At the same time they presented their profile in 1980, Hazelwood and Douglas also explained why they suspected one of the slain girls, Angel Lenair, had not been murdered by their UNSUB.

Lenair was found in early March 1980, next to a log near a stream with her hands tied behind her, not far from where she lived. An electrical cord was pulled tight around her neck. She’d been gagged with a pair of women’s panties, not hers. The ME said the black child had died of ligature strangulation.

Sexual assault appeared unlikely. The only physical evidence of sexual contact was a very small scratch, as if made by a fingernail, detected on her vaginal labia.

“She was not beaten or otherwise abused,” Hazelwood recalls. “I believe the autopsy showed she’d been fed potato chips and food of that nature during the days she was missing.

“We believed she had been abducted and kept in the same neighborhood. It didn’t make sense to us that you would
abduct someone, take them away, and then bring them back to dispose of the body.

“We thought that she’d been taken by someone with access to a nearby place where he could keep her.

“The panties found in her mouth might have come from his panty collection, we said. And it was our opinion he had little or no contact with women. The fact that he’d taken a little girl also led us to believe he was socially inept, with no confidence in his ability to capture an adult woman.

“We didn’t think he was very intelligent, based on the way in which she apparently had been kept and fed junk food. We thought he would have spent time in a mental institution. The use of an electrical cord to strangle her was another clue. It was a weapon of opportunity.

“We suggested that the police canvass her neighborhood, asking kids if they knew anyone who acted strange, and hung around with kids a lot.”

Such an individual in fact did live near Angel Lenair, in a derelict structure. As Hazelwood and Douglas had predicted, he also had been confined to a mental institution—a VA hospital.

Investigators discovered him hiding beneath his kitchen sink. He was clad in VA pajamas. In lieu of a belt, he was wearing around his waist a length of electrical cord identical to the ligature around Angel Lenair’s neck. (There was, however, no conclusive evidence that connected this man to the killing, and the Lenair case remains officially open.)

“Do you know you have just described a paranoid schizophrenic?” the task force psychiatrist said after Hazelwood and Douglas were finished.

“That’s absolutely correct,” Roy answered.

“How do you know that?” the doctor asked skeptically.

“From the way he committed his crime,” Roy said. “We try to think the way he thinks.”

“And how do you do
that
?” the psychiatrist pressed.

“A lot of experience.”

Then came the challenge.

“If I were to give you a series of tests, do you think you could test out with a particular mental disorder?” he asked.

Hazelwood and Douglas said yes, they thought they could.

“So we went to his office at night,” Roy recalls. “He took John into one room and me to another. And he said, ‘Okay, I want you to test out as paranoid schizophrenics.’

“And both of us did. He just thought that was amazing. He couldn’t believe it.”

For a time early in the 1980s almost all the profiling responsibility in the BSU fell to either Hazelwood or John Douglas or the two of them together.

“We worked closely on so many cases,” Hazelwood says. “I remember one year I did sixty profiles and he did eighty. And we traveled together on several homicides.”

A Canadian double-murder case from the mid-1960s that Hazelwood and Douglas profiled together, two decades later, also was one of the oldest ever brought to their attention.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who requested the BSU’s assistance, reported that the victims were teenage sweethearts, Maurice* and Chloe,* who lived in a small town in eastern Canada. After failing to solve their double murder using traditional investigative methods, the Mounties hoped a fresh, behavioral approach to the twenty-year-old crime might yield results. Upon hearing of the new profiling service at Quantico, they decided to give it a try.

As RCMP agents recounted the story to Hazelwood and Douglas, one snowy Saturday night, Maurice and Chloe went bowling together with friends. Afterward, they climbed into Maurice’s car and headed for his house. Chloe was to
sleep over with Maurice’s family and then drive to church with them the next morning.

They never made it home.

Maurice’s car was found with its lights on along a little-used access road leading up a hill to his family’s house. The wheels were pulled sharply to the right. Skid marks in the snow indicated the vehicle had stopped suddenly. The driver’s door was open, as was the left rear door.

Two sets of footprints led from the car doors to the rear of the sedan. From there, the footprints and a trail of blood led to a ditch about fifteen feet away, where Maurice lay dead. He had been shot once in the back, and again in one ear at extremely close range, with a 30.06 rifle.

Chloe’s footprints led from the car’s closed front passenger door up the hill toward Maurice’s house. The killer’s prints led in the same direction from where he’d shot Maurice in the ditch, and intercepted Chloe’s trail about 150 feet from the car.

There investigators found the girl, also murdered, curled in the fetal position. Chloe was surrounded by a series of wildly distorted snow angels, artifacts of her desperate fight with the killer, who had savagely clubbed her to death. He had not sexually assaulted her.

The keys to the car were in her right front pocket. The bolt from his 30.06 lay beneath her.

The killer’s footprints then led away from the murder scene, back to the car, past the ditch, and past the dead Maurice and on toward the highway below, where his trail was lost.

Approximately thirty-six hours after the killings, the rifle was found, wrapped in an oilcloth. The killer had carefully placed the murder weapon in a garbage can within a block of Chloe’s residence. The rifle’s stock was split and broken. He had attempted to tape it back together.

Since the motive for the murders clearly was neither theft nor rape, Hazelwood and Douglas inferred that a deep personal
rage lay behind the crimes. Although Maurice might have been the killer’s primary target, the impersonal way he was dispatched suggested Maurice’s death was incidental to his primary objective, killing Chloe.

Nor were these spontaneous murders. Chloe’s killer did not hitchhike through the snow that night with his 30.06, hoping the two would pick him up. Nor was he waiting on the hillside in ambush: All footprints led away from the car.

The likeliest scenario was that the killer was hidden in the back of the vehicle when Maurice and Chloe emerged together from the bowling alley that night.

It was the agents’ opinion that he waited until they turned up the hill, and then sat up and announced his presence. The reason Hazelwood and Douglas believed he waited until that moment was the sharp angle at which the car’s wheels were turned.

“If I am holding a gun on Maurice the entire ride, and say, ‘Now pull over,’ he’d pull over,” Hazelwood explains. “But if I rise up and say suddenly, ‘Stop the car!’ it will startle him, which explains the wheels being jerked.”

The physical evidence told Hazelwood and Douglas that Maurice was marched to the rear of the car, where the assailant shot him in the back.

Hazelwood and Douglas surmised that as Maurice was killed Chloe grabbed the car keys and jumped out of her side, slamming her door behind her as the teen scrambled up the hill toward Maurice’s distant house.

The mortally wounded Maurice, meantime, staggered a few feet to the ditch, trailing blood as he went. The killer followed him, and discharged a second round into the teen’s ear. This murder was unemotional, detached.

Chloe’s was not. It was clear from his tracks and the second crime scene that he ran after the girl and attacked her furiously. The later discovery of the rifle bolt under her body also suggested the power of his frenzy.

The weapon was extremely important to him, Hazelwood
and Douglas believed. Although he’d smashed the stock in his assault on Chloe, he obviously carried the damaged weapon all the way back into town, and there discovered that he’d left the bolt behind.

“My bolt! Where’s my bolt?!” the profilers imagined him wondering in distress, knowing he’d never find it in the snow.

The importance of the weapon to him was demonstrated by the fact that although he knew he had to get rid of it, he still carefully wrapped it in oilcloth.

He had been patient enough to hide himself in the back of Maurice’s car and to bring his own weapon, but the crime scene was on balance disorganized. There was no attempt to hide or disguise what he had done—Maurice and Chloe would be found very soon—and he plainly was out of control when he killed the girl. Moreover, he had neglected to provide for his own escape, or even to improvise one. He simply walked away.