The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (27 page)

“In this case,” they concluded, “it was suicide.”

The agents submitted their analysis on June 16, 1989.

On September 7 Admiral Milligan called a press conference to announce the navy’s determination that “a wrongful intentional act” had caused the explosion in Turret Two. Milligan added that Clayton Hartwig “most probably” had committed the act.

“We have an FBI profile by FBI psychologists with the opinion he took his own life and hoped it would look like an accident,” said the admiral.

The expected reaction was swift.

“I never believed it from the start,” Hartwig’s sister,
Kathy Kubicina, told a reporter. Of Milligan’s press conference, she added, “I didn’t really hear anything I didn’t hear before.”

The Hartwig family lawyer called for a congressional investigation.

“I think the navy is at a loss,” said Kendall Truitt. “They are looking for scapegoats.”

The allegations touched a chord both in the press and on Capitol Hill, and in retrospect it is simple to see why. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Reagan administration’s secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan contras, when significant numbers of people still doubted that Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray acted alone, it was not difficult to believe the U.S. Navy capable of conspiracy, too.

When hard scientific evidence of sabotage aboard the
Iowa
was not forthcoming, both the U.S. House and Senate announced their own investigation of the explosion, no doubt mirroring constituent sentiment.

Although there were dark variations on the theme, the thrust of the skepticism was that the technical experts couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened, so instead of accepting that there might be something intrinsically amiss aboard the
Iowa,
the navy chose to place the onus on a dead man.

Clay Hartwig looked like a convenient patsy.

This idea surfaced everywhere in the press.

The New York Times
unloaded several salvos, lambasting the navy’s “unproven, probably unprovable charge that one dead crew member was the culprit.”

Syndicated columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, a former colleague of mine at
Newsweek,
derided Hazelwood and Ault’s analysis as “quack evidence.”

The intelligent and thoughtful Lester Bernstein, a former editor for whom I worked at
Newsweek,
turned up during the
Iowa
debate as an angry voice in
Newsday,
accusing the
navy of scapegoating Hartwig as a consequence of the service’s “hidebound commitment to its four half-century-old battleships.”

In still another fusillade from West Forty-second Street, the
Times
scolded the navy for its decision to “smear a crewman’s memory on flimsy evidence” and for relying on a “libelous psychological profile of Mr. Hartwig.”

Members of the House Investigations Subcommittee were hardly more polite. While the FBI was accustomed to taking its licks in the press, deserved or otherwise, Capitol Hill usually was friendly territory, particularly for the BSU.

It hadn’t been too many years since Roy, John Douglas, Roger Depue, Ken Lanning, and others from Quantico had come before another House committee, testifying under the legislators’ beneficent nods to the encouraging progress the BSU was making toward identification and apprehension of aberrant criminals.

The agents’ presentations had been earnest and professional and highly persuasive. The Reagan White House and a Democratic Congress responded with a $4 million appropriation to fund VICAP, the BSU’s computer-based Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

But the beneficence soured to balefulness by December 1989, when Hazelwood and Ault sat down before the subcommittee, accompanied by assistant FBI director Anthony Daniels, then in charge at Quantico.

Roy read into the record a summary statement which laid out the eight main factors, plus buttressing evidence, that had led him and Ault to their conclusion.

1. “Hartwig was a loner” with only six known friends, the document explained. “Hartwig believed that four of the six individuals had rejected him, and the fifth was applying pressure on him for an intimate relationship that he was not capable of.”

2. “Hartwig was dissatisfied with life.” Here, Hazelwood and Ault reviewed the evidence, from Hartwig’s subscription to
Soldier of Fortune
to the false intimations he made about his expected reassignment to naval security work in London to the amateur “war games” he and others played while stationed at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. “He had a fantasy life that went far beyond the realities of his true life,” the agents noted.

3. “In the writers’ opinion, Hartwig believed that he had good reasons for not returning from the cruise.” If he killed himself, he wouldn’t have to face discovery of his lies, or the pending sexual demands. Finally, there’d be relief from the onboard ostracism, as well as the rejection he felt.

4. Clay Hartwig had a revenge motive. He disliked the ship and his shipmates. He had also been disciplined aboard the
Iowa,
taken before a so-called captain’s mast and reduced one grade in rank.

5. “Hartwig had a history of immature reaction to change in his life and interpersonal problems. He was also known to carry a grudge against those who he believed wronged him.”

6. “Hartwig was experiencing a number of stressors at the time of his death.” Besides all his other unsolved problems, he was broke, his car needed repair, and his telephone had been turned off.

7. “It is the opinion of the writers that Hartwig had suicide ideation.” He had talked of suicide, and seemed to be thinking seriously about it the day Brian Hoover discovered him in his room, playing with the knife.

In what proved to be his last letter to the woman in Norfolk, Hartwig closed with “Love always and forever, Clayton” instead of his usual “Clay,” and added, “I’m sorry I didn’t take you home to meet my mother!”

To another woman, who accused Hartwig of “hiding” aboard the
Iowa,
he wrote on April 9, 1989, “I don’t think the
1200 men that went down on the USS
Arizona
*
were hiding, or the 37 sailors that were killed on the USS
Stark
in the Persian Gulf in 1986! I could become one of those little white headstones in Arlington National Cemetery any day!”

8. “Finally, Hartwig possessed the knowledge, ability and opportunity to ignite the powder in the same fashion that occurred on the USS
Iowa.”

Nothing contained in the agents’ thirteen-page summary report or their testimony seemed to make much of an impression with the lawmakers.

After wondering aloud what made BSU agents any better at making psychological evaluations than, say, teachers or insurance agents, Indiana Democrat Frank McCloskey asked if it was unusual for someone working around explosives to believe he or she might die in an explosion.

“No sir,” Hazelwood agreed. “But it is unusual for them to say ‘I
want
to die in the line of duty,’ not ‘I may die,’ not ‘I’m in danger of dying,’ but ‘I want to die in the line of duty’ to two different people. That is unusual, yes sir.”

The final subcommittee report excoriated Hazelwood and Ault’s analysis for “doubtful professionalism” and declared “the false air of certainty generated by the FBI analysis was probably the single major factor inducing the Navy to single out Clayton Hartwig as the likely guilty party.”

Curiously, Roy remembers one hectoring questioner raised the reverse possibility, that Hazelwood and Ault had gone into the tank for the navy. At that Anthony Daniels rose to ask for a clarification. Was the congressman accusing the agents of lying? Daniels asked. No, came the quick reply.

As Roy told the committee, a BSU profile or analysis “can be used or discarded or discounted” by the requesting agency, in this case, the navy. That Petty Officer Clay Hartwig deliberately blew up Turret Two “is simply our opinion,” he added.

The House committee also asked the American Psychological Association to form a committee to review the evidence as well as Hazelwood’s and Ault’s findings. Of the fourteen panel members, several were dubious of the FBI analysis, although only three asserted that Clay Hartwig was probably guiltless in the matter.

The other members were generally supportive. Dr. Roger L. Greene of the psychology department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock said he detected “a number of potential problems with the logical links between the evidence and the conclusions drawn in the FBI equivocal death analysis.”

This was a not unreasonable
academic
criticism of purely practical exercise in speculation.

Dr. Elliott M. Silverstein, a forensic psychologist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wrote, “Presuming all the evidence is true, the psychological profile drafted by the FBI is very plausible.”

Dr. Alan L. Berman of the Washington Psychological Center was less equivocal. “It is most reasonable,” wrote Berman, “to conclude that Hartwig sacrificed his own life in a planned suicide-mass homicide to accomplish a variety of ends.”

Hazelwood and Ault’s next engagement was with the Senate
Armed Services Committee, where the reception was only marginally more civil.

William Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine and later to be Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, was patently skeptical of both agents.

“Let me ask you,” said Cohen, “is it abnormal for members of the navy to have subscriptions to
Soldier of Fortune
magazine?”

“I recall very few of my fellow marines who subscribed to
Soldier of Fortune
magazine,” Dick Ault replied.

“Very few of your fellow marines were driven to violence? Don’t they teach you a lot of violence at marine boot camp?”

“They teach us to hate the enemy.”

Cohen pressed on. “You indicated that [Hartwig] only had three close women friends . . .”

Ault completed the senator’s sentence: “. . . with whom he never had any sexual contact, as far as anyone could tell. He proposed to one woman on their second date. She turned him down.”

“Well,” asked Cohen, “what’s so unusual about that?”

“She was a dancer in a strip joint,” interjected Hazelwood.

Cohen was undeterred.

“Another factor I think that you drew some significance from was that he said he could hide his hurt inside and never reveal it.”

“That’s what he said, yes sir,” Roy answered.

“Is that unusual?”

“When you combine that with the fact that people never reported seeing him angry, never seeing him violent, that to us is a danger sign.

“We’ve seen it on too many occasions where they’ve just stored it up and then went out and murdered fourteen people at a college, or blew up a ship Yes, sir.”

Cohen, like McCloskey, also fixed on Hartwig’s expressed desire to die on duty.

“Is that unusual?” he asked.

“I was in the army for eleven years, and never once did I or any of my friends make the statement, ‘I’d like to die in the line of duty,’ ” Hazelwood replied. “No sir. I didn’t want to die in the line of duty.”

The closest any of the questioners came to sympathy for the FBI men was John Warner, Republican of Virginia.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Warner at the close of the session, and then he appended a small marvel of understatement: “Tough job that you’ve had to perform.”

The FBI stood by its own.

After the hearings, Hazelwood and Ault both received personal telephone calls of support and congratulations for a good job well done from Director William Sessions and Associate Director John Otto.

Roy stands by the analysis.

“I’m as convinced today as I was then that we were correct,” he says.

“As I told one of the senators, it would take new forensic evidence to convince me otherwise.”

Several subsequent reanalyses of the technical data, plus a wide array of other experiments, were undertaken by both the navy’s Naval Sea System Command (NAVSEA) and the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.

None of the tests could scientifically establish whether the explosion in Turret Two was an act of suicide or an accident. However, there was unexplained foreign matter recovered from the gun’s barrel. This material was consistent with a chemical detonator being used to ignite the powder. But it didn’t prove it.

Despite the lack of hard new evidence, on October 18, 1991, Admiral Frank B. Kelso, chief of naval operations, announced at a Washington news conference that the navy had changed its mind.

After spending $25 million in an unsuccessful search for
conclusive evidence, Kelso announced, “There is no certain answer to what caused the tragedy. Accordingly, the opinion that the explosion resulted from a wrongful intentional act is disapproved.”

Asked about Admiral Milligan’s previous announcements on several public occasions that the blast was deliberately set, Kelso explained, “I had a different set of evidence than he had, and we changed the rules.”

The navy’s final conclusion, said Kelso, would be “exact cause cannot be determined.”

The admiral also issued an apology. “I extend my sincere regrets to the family of Hartwig,” he said. “We’re sorry Clayton Hartwig was accused of this.”

Admiral Kelso’s choice of October 1991 for reversing course would later strike both Hazelwood and Ault as ironically apt. Within days of Kelso’s pronouncements, NAVSEA issued its own final report, reasserting that the navy had been right all along.

“The review of the original investigation,” read the report’s executive summary, “has not produced any information, data, or analysis that supports any material change to the conclusions of the original technical report.”

The summary continued: “In the absence of a plausible accidental cause and having found material consistent with a chemical device, the NAVSEA team concludes that an intentional act must be considered as a cause of the incident.”

A month earlier there had been what would prove to be another watershed event in Admiral Kelso’s career.

September 1991 was the month of the infamous Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, where drunken navy fighter pilots allegedly groped, molested, harassed, and verbally abused scores of women.