The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (36 page)

They differ from other sexual criminals in another way, too.

A criminal sexual sadist may capture his intended prey using a simple con. Typically, he will then assault and discard her, dead or alive, in a matter of hours or days.

But when he’s hunting for a companion, he is deliberate, patient, and infinitely resourceful. In the first instance, he’s focused on his goal. In the latter, the process matters. Although he never loses sight of his objective, to dominate
and emotionally destroy the woman he selects for a companion, half the fun for him is getting there.

Roy’s first interview subject in the compliant companion survey had helped her husband capture one girl, whom he killed while trying to cut her vocal cords, and then another victim, who was kept for several years as a sex slave.

For a large part of that time, the girl was kept in a box in the couple’s basement. Later, she slept at night in a coffinlike wooden container beneath their water bed.

Another young wife was enlisted by her husband to lure his selected victims from shopping malls and country fairs to his vehicle.

Roy consulted in one case where a sadistic killer kept several women in his thrall at once. James Ray Slaughter of Oklahoma City—married with three children—maintained extramarital liaisons with four other women, three nurses and a psychiatrist.

All became pregnant by Slaughter, and all but one acceded to his demand that their fetuses be aborted. Slaughter insisted that only his wife, Nikki, would bear his children.

Then one of the women, a nurse named Melody Wuertz, defied Slaughter and bore a daughter by him. When he learned of Wuertz’s decision, he coolly plotted her death, recruiting one of his other mistresses, Cecilia Johnson, into his plan.

At Slaughter’s order, Johnson supplied him with evidence to help stage Wuertz’s murder scene. She collected a set of soiled men’s undershorts from a patient on her hospital ward, as well as the patient’s head hair, and mailed them to her master. Slaughter in turn planted the hair and soiled underwear in Wuertz’s residence, and then shot to death both Melody Wuertz and his one-year-old daughter, Jessica. He then mutilated both bodies to make the crime appear to have been a satanic, ritualistic murder.

The double murder went unpunished for two years until
Cecilia Johnson broke down, admitted her role in the plot to a grand jury, and then committed suicide.

All twenty women in Hazelwood’s survey shared their remarkably similar hidden hells with him. But each woman’s story is uniquely heartbreaking.

Debra Davis, the youngest of six sisters in a working-class family, was born in November 1957, in Talahoma, Tennessee. She was raised from the age of four in Houston.

“I was very quiet and very shy, a real loner,” Debra recalls of her girlhood. “I was sick quite a bit.”

Debra was sexually molested at age six by an eighteen-year-old neighbor boy. Although the boy and his family moved away a week later, Debra’s world did not grow any sunnier. “I kind of faded into the woodwork,” she recalls.

Depression, a common consequence of sexual molestation, became her intermittent burden. She was given to mood swings—“feeling out of control,” as Debra describes it—plus bouts with low self-esteem and guilt. Whatever went wrong, Debra tended to blame herself for it.

A pretty girl, just four feet nine inches tall, Debra discovered herself pregnant at age seventeen in 1975, and left home to marry the child’s father, her high school sweetheart.

Their first son was born later that year. A little brother came along in 1978, followed in 1981 by Debra’s third and last child, a daughter.

In 1983, Debra suffered a major depression, and made a serious attempt at suicide using pills. That same year, life with her husband, Jimmy, fell apart. Too broke to divorce and set up separate households, Debra and Jimmy decided to go on sharing the same residence, if not the same bed.

Then Robert Ben “Dusty” Rhoades came into her life.

She met the thirty-eight-year-old Rhoades, a tall ex-marine, at a Houston nightclub. He was wearing an airline pilot’s uniform. They danced a few times that night.

Rhoades reappeared a week later at the same club, this
time in western wear. Debra liked his easy, reassuring manner. They danced some more and had a few drinks. She found it all very pleasant. Debra started calling him Bob in the familiar way she might refer to an uncle.

She had no thought of falling in love with him. It didn’t even occur to her that she might. To Debra, the relationship simply was a welcome change of pace from the stresses of her split household.

“We talked all the time,” she remembers. “He was my best friend. I told him everything.”

Bob spoke little of himself.

“He only told me what he wanted me to know, and that was very limited, no details,” Debra says.

Rhoades admitted he was a truck driver, not a pilot, which hardly mattered to her. He also told Debra of growing up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his father, Ben Rhoades, was arrested twice for molesting Bob’s cousins, one boy and one girl. Ben Rhoades later committed suicide.

Bob intimated that he, too, might have been molested as a youngster.

“He had a real rough time of it,” says Debra.

Gradually, Rhoades began to win Debra’s trust. He contributed paychecks to the beleaguered family exchequer, counseled with Debra, sent her flowers, and took her out to dinner.

Still, they remained just friends in Debra’s mind until one night when Bob called from the road.

“I gotta tell you something,” he said. “I really love you.”

Rhoades’s timing was exquisite. The sudden, dramatic profession of love jolted Debra, disconcerted her. But it was not wholly unwelcome.

Debra was vulnerable.

When he returned to Houston, Bob took her out to a romantic candlelit dinner, and then later that night made passionate love to Debra. The moment was spectacular for her,
and the comfortable friendship soon deepened into something much more serious.

She was hooked.

“I felt I was the only thing that mattered to him,” Debra says. “He did anything and everything I wanted. I felt like I was a queen.”

Rhoades even welcomed Debra and her three kids to come live with him. She recalls that they all got along fine.

Nor did Bob’s attentions flag.

“When we went out I was like his paper doll,” she says. “He dressed me just the way he wanted. I’m a jeans and T-shirt girl. He wanted the garters, the panties, all the nice stuff, things I would not normally wear.”

Bob also contributed ideas about the type of makeup Debra wore, and how to apply it.

The first hint of a hidden objective came on a date one night in his car outside a dance joint when he clapped a handcuff on Debra’s wrist. The gesture was not overtly hostile, but it unsettled her. Debra told him she was not amused, and he removed it.

Far less ambiguous was the Saturday night that Rhoades took Debra to a swingers’ club in Houston. She had assumed when he said swingers he meant swingers in the country music sense of the word. She learned otherwise when a woman at the club slipped her hand up Debra’s leg.

“I got mad at him and slapped him and said, ‘Let’s leave!’ Afterward he told me how closed-minded and naive I was.”

Rhoades eventually coaxed Debra back to the club and the spouse-swapping scene in Houston, with which he seemed very familiar.

“I remember he got me totally wasted one night and we went to this couple’s house. This guy was dragging me into the bedroom and Bob’s got the woman in the living room.

“I said, ‘I’m leaving. I am not comfortable with this.’

“Well, Bob takes me into the living room where this girl is
totally passed out and he’s trying to make love to her. I got really upset, and we left.”

Eventually, Debra did acquiesce to Rhoades’s insistence that they try group sex. “He was my Prince Charming,” she explains. “He rescued me. He was going to fix everything, and make it okay. My whole life had been a disaster. I was willing to do this for him.”

There were limits, however.

She agreed one Halloween to attend a costume party as a dominatrix, leading Bob, her collared sex slave, on a chain.

“We won first place,” she says.

But she vehemently refused any more radical sexual experimentation. Bob wanted to introduce bondage into their sex life, and sadomasochistic devices, such as nipple clamps.

“He’d bring those things home and I’d tell him to get them out of my damn house.”

One day, an odd-looking stranger appeared at the front door and announced that he was the love slave Bob had ordered for her. Debra hardly knew how to respond, except to shove her visitor back out the door, telling him there’d been some sort of mistake.

Bob read a lot of books and magazines, much of it violent pornography, which Debra found hidden around the house, along with the enormous phone-sex bills that Rhoades ran up.

She also began to sense that Rhoades connected sex to violence and pain in ways she could not previously have guessed. When she developed sick headaches, he sometimes would lie down with her, just to watch Debra suffer. When she was diagnosed with lupus and hospitalized, her evident pain and discomfort sexually aroused him. Once, Rhoades climbed into Debra’s hospital bed to have sex with her.

Her first halfhearted attempt to break free came in late 1986, when Bob was on the road in his rig for three straight months. “I found out that I could make it on my own,” she says. “I didn’t need any help.”

She began to signal her independence during phone calls
with Bob, sounding less meek and more self-assured. Not coincidentally, Debra believes, an avalanche of love letters started arriving from Rhoades.

Bob was highly sensitive to her moods when he chose to be.

“It’s true there are other things in my life,” read one letter he sent from the road, “but for the life of me I can no longer find any value in them without your warmth; the nights are dark without your fire.”

“I guess he felt like he was losing me,” says Debra. “He came home and we got married in two days, on Valentine’s.”

She stayed with him for two and a half more years.

“His thing was control. It drove me nuts. Even when we had sex he never lost control. He could drink all night and never get drunk. He
never
lost control.”

Rhoades spent a year off the road, recovering from bone graft surgery to repair an arm he’d broken in an industrial accident.

Debra remembers him coming out of surgery, groggy from anesthesia, but collected enough to yank the IV tube from his arm.

“I had to sit with him in the hospital to make sure he didn’t do it again,” she recalls.

“He refused even to take pain medicine, because he was afraid of losing control.”

It was a night in October 1989 when Rhoades finally stepped over the line. Bob demanded anal sex. Debra refused him. So he raped her.

“He really lost it,” Debra says. “He beat the hell out of me.

“I got up and looked him in the eye and said, ‘Are you through?’

“He said, ‘Yeah,’ and went in the living room.

“I’d been sleeping with a baseball bat underneath my bed for a while. I went and got it and walked out and hit him in the arm.

“Then I said, ‘Now I’m through,’ and I packed my bags
and left. After I slammed the door, I could hear him breaking things in the house.”

Debra believed she’d cut the cord, hardly realizing that in some ways her trials hadn’t yet begun.

About a year later there came a telephone call from Arizona. It was Bob. As Debra would learn, her ex-husband had been parked in his rig on the shoulder of Interstate 10 in Casa Grande, south of Phoenix, when a patrol officer happened along. Concerned that the big truck was stopped too close to traffic, the policeman pulled out his flashlight and climbed up to the cab, expecting to find the trucker asleep.

Instead, he discovered Bob Rhoades in the rig’s sleeping compartment with a young girl, who was nude and crying uncontrollably. There was a horse bridle strapped to her neck, with a long chain attached to the bit. The hysterical teenager was handcuffed, too, and there were red whip marks on her back. When she saw the policemen, she burst into screams.

This incident was going to cost Rhoades six years or more in an Arizona prison. But much more serious jeopardy prompted his call to Debra. He asked her to rush to his Houston apartment and clean the place up, throw everything out.

The authorities, however, beat her to it. They already had tossed Bob’s place, where they discovered evidence suggesting that the incident in Arizona was not isolated.

Far from it.

They found women’s underwear, articles of clothing and shoes and jewelry, violent pornography, and a giant dildo. The police recovered a single handcuff, too, an ominous mystery. How had it been snapped from its mate?

Rhoades obviously had been busy. There was a bondage rack in the apartment, too, and nearby a white towel drenched in blood.

Also recovered in Rhoades’s apartment were several sets of photographs of a young girl, who turned out to be Regina
Kay Walters of Houston. Walters had vanished in February 1990, several months after Debra walked out on Rhoades.

The teenager’s desiccated remains were found in late September 1990, hundreds of miles away in an old barn near Greenfield, Illinois. She’d been strangled with a piece of wire twisted around her neck fourteen times, one twist for every year of her life.

Rhoades’s photos sorted into several groups. The first pictures were nudes of Regina. She was chained inside his truck cab. Her hair had been cut, and she was handcuffed. There was a choke chain around her neck. He had shaved Regina’s pubic hair, too, and pierced her clitoris with a ring, also attached to a chain.

The second group of photos, taken out of doors, depicted the girl, both dressed and undressed, in a variety of poses. Her fingernails and toenails were painted bright red, and she was wearing bright red lipstick, too.

In the final set of pictures, evidently taken in the old barn just before he murdered her, Regina’s eyes express exactly the same silent, frozen terror that Harvey Glatman’s victims had in his photos more than thirty years before.