The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (40 page)

That morning, Hazelwood and Ron Mackay would find Homolka had blurred that distinction. Inmates at the Prison for Women are responsible for their own wardrobes, and wear what they please. For her interview with the investigators, Karla asserted her individuality in an eye-pleasing sundress.

Neither Hazelwood nor Mackay had thought to bring an umbrella. So Roy hoisted his briefcase over his head and
ran from the car to the gate, with Mackay chugging along beside him.

Inside the facility, Mackay was relieved of his side arm. He and Hazelwood then were escorted down narrow, high-walled corridors to a small, gray-painted interview room, where Karla soon materialized.

Although Steve Hucker and others had commented to Roy on Karla’s exquisite softness, when she entered the interview room in her sundress, he remembers being forcefully struck by how feminine she really was, a trait he’d encountered with other subjects in his compliant victim study.

“I mean, fifties feminine,” he says. “They project an aura of helplessness, and it’s a weapon in their arsenal. A very effective weapon. You can be thrown off stride by it. You can forget what the person did, what they participated in.”

Roy explained to Homolka his project and the seven-section, seventy-four-page, 448-question protocol that he’d brought with him. It was the same thick volume Debra Davis remembered from her long conversation with Hazelwood. Both he and Inspector Mackay would have questions, Roy said.

“I told her that we’d be asking some very, very personal questions. I conduct these interviews very clinically. There’s no emotion. No sympathy given. I maintain the same tone of voice no matter what they say to me.”

Then the dialogue began.

P
ROTOCOL
Q
UESTION
A-7:
Was she sexually abused as a child?

No.

A-28:
What was her sexual experience prior to meeting Bernardo?

One encounter.

A-35:
Had she been arrested prior to meeting him?

No.

C-17:
Did Bernardo want her to dress in a particular way?

Yes, as a schoolgirl. Sometimes in her sister Tammy’s clothes.

Homolka sat up straight in a hard-backed chair throughout the interview, Hazelwood recalls. “She was very, very proper, and very forthright.”

D-3:
Prior to sex, would he routinely ingest drugs or alcohol?

Yes.

D-5:
Did Bernardo masturbate?

Yes. Sometimes in the night he would tell Karla to go out into their yard and do a striptease for him. He stroked himself as he watched her.

D-11:
Did he have specific terms he used to describe body parts or sexual acts?

Yes, Bernardo called his penis “Snuffles.”

D-16:
Did he whip her?

Yes.

D-17:
Did he engage in sexual bondage?

Yes.

D-18:
Did he use foreign objects during sex?

Yes. A bottle.

D-28:
Did he window-peep as an adult?

Yes.

Because Karla’s answers were so complete, the interview ran overtime, lasting until 7:30 that night, and continuing the next day. Although Roy told Karla they could stop for a rest whenever she wished, their only break was for lunch.

D-43:
Did he ever ask her to have sex with an animal?

Yes, his dog. But she refused, telling Bernardo she’d rather be killed.

D-54:
Did he ever ask/force her to ingest urine or feces?

Yes. Feces.

Although Homolka, like Debra and Michelle and the other interview subjects, was free to refuse any question she
wished, she answered every one. In fact, all of the twenty women answered every question Hazelwood put to them.

E-13:
What was his attitude toward his mother?

He hated her.

E-73:
Did he ever imprison Karla?

Yes, she was made to spend a winter night in the same unheated root cellar where Bernardo had secreted the dead Leslie Mahaffy before dismembering the girl.

F-59:
Did he have an illegal occupation?

Yes. Cigarette smuggling.

F-73:
Was he frequently depressed?

Yes.

By the time the interview ground to an exhausted end the next day at noon, Hazelwood and Inspector Mackay were emotionally spent, which was usual for these encounters.

Karla presented Roy with her personal file of every psychological evaluation she’d ever been put through, plus copies of the famous raccoon-eyes photos. It was all very businesslike.

“She said she was very grateful for the opportunity to participate in the research,” Hazelwood recalls, “because it helped her so much to know that other women had been through this.

“Then we thanked her, and talked a little bit about her situation. I said that right now the prison might not be so bad a place to be.

“She agreed.”

At noon on Friday, September 5, 1986, Roy and a group of fellow agents were at lunch in the Academy cafeteria when Alan “Smoky” Burgess, chief of investigative support at the BSU, walked up to their table.

“What are you guys doing?” the boss asked.

“Being experienced FBI agents, and knowing it was a Friday, we asked him why he wanted to know,” Hazelwood recalls.

The boss did not mince words. Burgess told the group that a young typist employed in the Bureau’s San Antonio office had been raped and murdered in her apartment the previous night by an unknown intruder. FBI director William Webster wanted profilers flown to San Antonio to join in the search for Donna Lynn Vetter’s killer.

The agents balked, arguing to Burgess that proper profiling required an autopsy, crime-scene photos, and other forensic evidence for them to review. This kill was too fresh for the BSU.

“You didn’t understand me,” Burgess explained calmly. “I said the director said you
will
fly down there.”

Within hours, Roy and fellow agent Jim Wright were
aboard a helicopter bound from Quantico for Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. There they transferred to Judge Webster’s Learjet and flew directly to San Antonio. They arrived at Donna Lynn Vetter’s apartment by 5:00 p.m. Texas time.

Their instructions were to complete the UNSUB’s profile overnight for presentation at 9:00 a.m. Saturday. One hundred or so investigators assigned to hunt for the killer would be gathered to benefit from their insights.

Roy knew this meeting could turn out to be the law enforcement equivalent of a Monday night audience at the end of the pier. A profiler can say little of value about an UNSUB unless he leaves
behavioral
evidence to be read and interpreted, and so far he and Wright had no idea what they’d find inside Donna Vetter’s apartment.

The worst case would be a blank slate, something like a convenience-store robbery-murder, where the criminal leaves behind nothing but an empty cash drawer, a dead clerk, and perhaps a fuzzy black-and-white image on the store’s security video.

“There’s no interaction there,” Roy explains. “No sexual assault. It is simply a cold, calculated, intentional murder.”

Agencies nevertheless still submit such crimes for analysis.

A sheriff once contacted Hazelwood with a special request. “I would appreciate some priority service on a case we have here,” said the lawman. “I’d like to send you the photographs.”

A few days later, Roy received twenty-eight full-color eight-by-ten photos of the sheriff’s battered car. Roy glanced through the photos, scene after scene of dents and smashed glass.

He reached for his phone and dialed up the sheriff.

“Sheriff,” he said, “somebody’s really pissed at you.”

End of profile.

The Vetter murder scene, to Ray’s relief, told a detailed story. It remains vivid in Roy’s recollection for two reasons.

As he and Jim Wright stepped past the yellow police tape into the sealed-off apartment, the agents saw an enormous bloodstain where Donna Vetter had lain in her living-room rug. It was a detailed crimson impression of the dead woman; not just a vaguely suggestive blotch, but plain as a full-size photographic negative, done in her blood.

“It was like the Shroud of Turin,” Roy recalls. “I’ve never ever seen anything like it.”

Moments later, Hazelwood was struck with a sudden presentiment.

“Jim, a black guy did this,” Roy said to Wright.

“You can’t say that,” the other agent replied. “You just got here.”

Roy had made what is known to mental health workers as a threshold diagnosis. He could not say why he thought the UNSUB was black. He didn’t know, and that annoyed him. A strict empiricist, Hazelwood does not believe in intuition.

When he returned to Quantico he thought perhaps Judd Ray, a black agent who had been with the Atlanta police before joining the FBI, could shed some light on the matter.

He couldn’t.

Hazelwood showed Ray the Vetter crime-scene photos.

“Give me the race,” he asked.

“Black,” Ray answered without hesitation.

“How do you know that?”

Judd Ray shrugged. “You can just tell,” he said. Ray was no better able than Hazelwood to articulate his certainty.

Donna Lynn Vetter’s killer did leave a rich array of behavioral evidence behind him. In fact, as the Vetter investigation unfolded, her murder emerged as a classic instance of the applicability of behavioral analysis to criminal investigation. It also offered a broad range of features rarely seen all together in a single case, everything from clues that fell together under simple deductive reasoning to the development of an investigative strategy that dramatically narrowed and focused the hunt for Vetter’s killer.

Today, when Hazelwood lectures on profiling to police and other professional audiences, he uses Donna Vetter’s rape-murder as a case study and workshop problem for his students to analyze.

Readers who themselves are now familiar with some of profiling’s rudiments are invited to draw their own step-by-step behavioral portrait of the UNSUB, as well.

Here are the facts.

Jerome and Virginia Vetter’s daughter, Donna Lynn, twenty-four, was a 1982 high school honor graduate from New Braunfels, Texas, a small German American community and popular tourist destination a few miles northeast of San Antonio.

In February 1986, Donna moved to San Antonio, Texas’s third-largest city, to be closer to her typist’s job at the FBI office. Five nine and 165 pounds, Vetter was described by friends and family as a frugal, shy, naive, and deeply religious young woman with no sexual history, and almost no social life at all.

Her two passions were sewing and bubble gum.

She lived alone in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment fronting a heavily traveled walkway in an apartment complex located in a high-crime area of northeast San Antonio. The local population was 70 percent Hispanic, 20 percent black, and 10 percent white.

Vetter was anything but reckless in her views or habits. Yet perhaps because of her naïveté, she was not as cautious about her personal safety as prudence dictated.

Steve Harris, a security guard at the complex, later said that Donna almost always came home from work alone in the evening, and often spent her nights sewing. Despite his frequent admonitions, she would open her windows and curtains, offering any passerby a clear view of her as she worked.

Donna told Harris she disliked air-conditioning.

One other piece of victimology that would figure in the
profile was her father’s advice that Donna would resist wildly if any man attempted to hurt her. He advised that Donna would “fight to the death to defend her virginity.”

Steve Harris last saw Donna Vetter alive as he walked past her apartment at 9:20 the previous evening. Her curtains were open.

The security officer returned to Vetter’s apartment at 11:20, responding to a report that a screen was missing from her front window.

It was. Donna’s curtains were drawn, as well, and her front door was ajar.

Harris pushed the door open, and immediately saw the lifeless woman, supine on the living-room rug. Her clothing had been ripped from her body.

“Her eyes were swollen shut,” Harris later testified in court. “There were bruise marks on her face. She seemed covered in blood.”

Besides the facial battering, Vetter was subjected to a furious knife assault. She had sustained defensive knife wounds to both hands, four superficial stab wounds in her chest, defense wounds to her left thigh, and two deep stab wounds to her chest.

She had been mortally wounded, her lungs filling with blood, when her attacker finally stopped stabbing her and violently raped the dying woman.

A schematic drawing of the crime scene is shown on the following page.

The killer climbed through the window by the chair shown at bottom, leaving telltale fingerprints as he did so. He also knocked over a potted plant, and then set it straight.

The telephone, shown at right, was unplugged from the wall.

Vetter’s body was discovered as shown. Her assailant had dragged her by her knees onto the living-room rug—where she had been raped—from the kitchen, where the floor was slick with her blood. It was evident the shoeless UNSUB had slipped and lost his footing in the blood as he tried to move her. He left footprints in the kitchen.