The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (30 page)

The card, he explained on the stand, described a Melissa P. from Paducah, Kentucky, who was nineteen years old, and rated a ten on Ward’s zero-to-ten scale.

“No” meant she was unmarried, and “Dancer” was Melissa’s occupation. “Mark” took the photo, which appeared in the “F&L” section—for Friends & Lovers—of the January 1989 issue of
Genesis.

The spiral notebook contained a complementary classification system. A representative page contained these entries:

The notebook’s code was the same as for the cards. The initials V. and R. represented the women’s surnames, Hazelwood testified.

“Those cards and that notebook were amazing,” John Bass recollects. “Ward had everything indexed, cross-referenced, and organized. He would have made a perfect file clerk.”

The next topics were ritual and MO.

“Ritual,” Roy said, “is that part of sexual crime that is committed to enhance the psychosexual enjoyment of the offender. It is the signature of a crime that a criminal investigative analyst looks for to link cases to one individual. The ritual remains relatively static over time.

“MO,” he went on, “evolves over time as the offender matures and gains experience in committing similar crimes. The primary functions of an MO are to protect the identify of the offender, ensure control of the victim, and facilitate his escape.”

Roy illustrated his points with a case from his files.

“A man breaks into a home, captures the husband and wife, and takes the wife out of the room and has her change into panty hose and high heels,” Hazelwood recounted.

“Breaking into the house was MO. Tying up the husband was MO. Having the woman change into panty hose and high heels prior to the assault would be ritual.”

Van Pelt’s next objective was to establish with Hazelwood the behavioral links between the kidnap-rape of Laura Grant, to which Ward already had confessed, and Nikia Gilbreath’s abduction-murder.

The district attorney produced an easel chart which listed on one side various features and factors of the Gilbreath
case, and on the other, corresponding features and facts of the Grant case.

Examples of parallel MO, Roy testified, included the fact that no males were present at the early-morning hours of the abductions and that women with children were targeted. The presence of the kids, he explained, made their mothers more cautious, and easier to control, at least initially.

Comparable instances of ritual, Roy said, included the obvious importance of lingerie in both cases, as well as the fact that both victims were taken from their homes and driven to a second location. In both cases, that decision heightened his risk of capture, but was absolutely essential to playing out his ritual.

On cross-examination, court-appointed defense attorney Chris Townley, by reputation an able and dogged advocate, showed Hazelwood no deference.

Mocking Roy’s list of case similarities, Townley archly suggested that since both women lived in Georgia and neither had gray hair, those similarities might have been included in his analysis, too.

Hazelwood allowed politely that yes, these were similarities, too.

Townley also established that possessing an item, such as a woman’s purse, does not make a man a fetishist.

“It depends on why he has the purse,” Hazelwood answered.

Nor does the identification of multiple paraphilias in a defendant’s character prove him guilty, Townley asserted.

Hazelwood agreed again.

Townley chipped away where he could in his cross-examination, but he could not unravel the broad and distinct picture Ralph Van Pelt and Roy Hazelwood had created of Ray Ward as a troubled, deviant killer.

“Hazelwood was an excellent witness, and that helped us a lot,” says the former prosecutor.

Ward’s jury deliberated only briefly before voting him
guilty of capital murder. In the ensuing penalty phase of the trial, members of the panel would be surprised to see Roy take the stand once again—this time as a defense witness.

Based on the detailed information provided by Laura Grant, Roy believed Ward was an essentially nonviolent power reassurance rapist. Chris Townley wanted the jury to hear Hazelwood’s description of such an offender, and then make the jump in their own minds to the Gilbreath case. As they deliberated whether Ward should be executed, Townley hoped they’d consider that Ray Ward probably had not kidnapped Nikia Gilbreath with the intent of killing her. The asphyxiation had been a ghastly, tragic mistake.

With Ralph Van Pelt’s and the FBI’s approval, Roy agreed to testify as a defense witness.

“In the Laura Grant case, what type of offender would you be looking for?” Townley asked.

“I would classify that rapist as a power reassurance rapist,” Roy replied, and then he briefly explained his typology.

“So,” said Townley, “he is not trying to inflict physical pain, or trying to subject someone to physical abuse?”

“No. In the Laura Grant case, you would have seen a beating, possible cigarette burns, that type of thing.”

What about the odd incident with the Christmas tree, the defense attorney asked.

“In my opinion,” Roy answered, “he was trying to reinforce with her the fact that he is a nice guy. You’ll recall that he dropped her off a block from her house, asked for her phone number and that sort of thing. He was trying to reinforce in her mind that he was a nice guy.”

Townley also explored with Hazelwood what is known about the root causes of fetishism.

“The most prevalent and accepted theory,” Roy said, “is that at some point very early in their lives fetishists come into contact with a particular object at the same time they are being sexually aroused.”

At that moment, he went on, the object is believed to
somehow become “imprinted” and henceforth is always associated by the fetishist with sex gratification.

In one example from the professional literature, Roy told of a large number of Englishmen who developed rubber gas mask fetishes. Research indicated that as boys during World War II, these males had been forced to wear gas masks during the German air raids, occasions when their protective mothers also held them tight to their bosoms. The experience may have sexually excited the boys, imprinting the rubber gas masks on their libidos.

Roy agreed with Townley that the fetishistic impulse can be very, very strong.

“For example,” he said, “fetishists know the consequences of an illegal act, there’s no question about that. But that consideration is overcome by the desire for that gratification of breaking into the house and stealing a pair of panties.”

“Somehow they end up doing it anyhow?” asked Townley.

“Yes,” said Roy.

Apparently, this added objective information about Ray Ward did nothing to sway the jury in his favor. On July 12, 1991, the panel voted the death penalty for him.

They did so without ever hearing Roy’s most interesting contribution to the case, his speculative reconstruction of how the Gilbreath murder in fact took place.

Hazelwood believed Mrs. Gilbreath was a carefully selected victim, probably chosen when Ward helped drill the water well for the Gilbreaths.

He knew also from long experience with such offenders that Ward no doubt had fantasized a great deal about Nikia Gilbreath before committing the actual crime.

Ward’s intent probably was for Nikia Gilbreath to bring to life his lingerie fetish fantasy, just as Laura Grant had been forced to do at knifepoint. Murder, however, was not on Ward’s mind. Women’s underwear was.

Roy surmised that Ward surveilled the Gilbreath household,
and knew its rhythms. The tire tracks suggested he parked his vehicle that Thursday morning, where Nikia’s mother later found the Gilbreath Cutlass partially hidden on the old logging road. He then walked the half mile to the Gilbreaths’.

Ward would have watched the house from cover, knowing from his previous reconnaissance that Joe left via the back door each day at 6:30. Once Nikia’s husband had rumbled away in his pickup, Ray Ward walked into the house through the back door.

Had Ward knocked on the front door, Hazelwood pointed out, Mrs. Gilbreath would have automatically pulled on a robe before opening the door.

He encountered Mrs. Gilbreath not in her bed, but on the couch in the living room, where she’d gone back to sleep after fixing Joe lunch that morning. The telephone cord was probably the first thing handy with which to bind her, and it was taken directly from the wall near the sofa.

Ward may have gained her compliance by threatening to harm the sleeping Amber. That would explain the lack of defensive wounds. The bruises discovered on her back, plus the broken ribs she also suffered from behind, most likely were caused by the 245-pound offender digging his knees into her as he hog-tied Nikia, wrist and ankle, with the blue cord, on the sofa.

Roy guessed Ward then covered Mrs. Gilbreath with the nylon bedspread and carried her out the front door to the family car, where he likely put her in the trunk. He then returned to the front porch and pulled the balky outer door closed over the new carpet, hoping to create the appearance that Mrs. Gilbreath had driven somewhere with Amber in the car.

Nikia Gilbreath, whose first concern would have been to protect Amber, probably remained silent while still in the house. Once safely away where Amber was no longer threatened, however, Nikia very likely started screaming and resisting as best she could. Everyone said Nikia was a fighter.

Roy inferred from the evidence that as Ward moved his bound and struggling victim from her car to his vehicle, he tried to muffle her screams with wads of paper towel he grabbed from her trunk and shoved down her throat. He did not realize he was asphyxiating her.

Ward must have believed Gilbreath was alive as he drove away with her; otherwise he surely would have fled immediately, leaving her dead body at the scene.

He probably did not learn what he had done until he arrived at his preappointed site for assaulting her, likely an empty or abandoned structure not too far away. The discovery would have panicked Ward.

At that moment, his motive would shift from sexual gratification to self-preservation. Roy believed the frightened killer continued driving in the direction he was headed, north, until he reached the dump, eight miles away, where Nikia Gilbreath’s body was found three days later.

The dump site, Roy also believed, was selected on the spur of the moment, and was chosen only because Ward needed to quickly dispose of Mrs. Gilbreath’s body lest he be discovered with it.

From the position in which she was later found, it appeared that he hastily placed her body into the dump, risking being seen and identified as he did so. The only precaution Ward took was to remove and carry home the bedspread and blue telephone cord ligatures. In his haste, he somehow grabbed the loose swimming suit bottom, too.

Either that, or as his attorney suggested, Ray Ward really could not resist a fetish object.

During his murder trial nearly two years later, a security search of Ward’s cell revealed he’d secreted away a range of contraband documents and photocopies. Among the materials Ward somehow managed to procure under heavy guard was a nude autopsy photograph of Nikia Gilbreath.

An aberrant offender’s behavior is as unique as his fingerprints, as his DNA—as a snowflake.

The challenge for the investigator is to exploit that singularity, to find the behavioral equivalent of the latent fingerprint or the electrophoretic “bar codes” of a DNA analysis that can establish an offender’s identity beyond any reasonable quibble. You need to isolate the snowflake.

With serial offenders, one means of doing so is linkage analysis, a compare-and-contrast behavioral assay developed by Hazelwood and others at BSU.

This procedure looks at MO and ritual as Hazelwood did in the Gilbreath case.

“You can say that cases are linked when the number of MO characteristics and ritualistic characteristics reach a point that you have never seen in combination before,” Roy explains.

“For example, an attorney may ask me in court, ‘How many victims have you seen who were twenty-one years old?’

“ ‘Well, a lot of people.’

“ ‘How many of them have been white females?’

“ ‘A lot of them.’

“ ‘How many have been bitten on the breast?’

“ ‘Quite a few.’

“ ‘I see, and how many of them were struck in the face four times?’

“ ‘A lot of them were.’

“ ‘Now, Mr. Hazelwood, how many cases have you seen in which the victims were all twenty-one-year-old white females who’d been bitten on the breast
and
struck in the face four times?’

“I’d have to say I’d never seen that exact combination before. Then if I saw that exact combination in another case, I could say the two cases were linked.”

The offender’s MO is behavior meant to ensure his success, facilitate his escape, and protect his identity. Ritual is behavior that heightens his psychosexual gratification. Sometimes, the two are not easy to tell apart.

For example, Roy has never seen an offender’s method of entering a structure be anything but MO. However, the way he approaches a victim on the street, or in her bed, can be either MO or ritual.