The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (8 page)

Another lingering recollection is of black humor and practical jokes in the Baltimore morgue.

Early in his fellowship, one of the assistant MEs called the working day to a close and gestured to Roy that he could find a cold beer in cooler number 6 along the wall. Hazelwood opened the locker. Out rolled a corpse on its shelf, a cold six-pack tucked into the crook of its arm.

Another time, working intently on a dissection, Roy discovered a little slip of paper in the cadaver’s mouth.

“Eat at Dino’s,” it said.

He learned from the experts at the AFIP that if you know how to listen, the dead can tell you a great deal about how they got that way.

Roy met world-class authorities in toxicology, pathology, radiology, odontology, entomology, anthropology, and even
geology, all of whom contributed at various times to AFIP evaluations.

A toxicologist, for example, might establish if the victim was drunk or sober or had been poisoned. A pathologist might determine that a bruise or a scrape was a defensive wound, or estimate from how far, and in what direction, a fatal bullet was discharged.

An odontologist might identify the victim via dental records, or identify the killer via bite marks left on the victim’s skin. The entomologist could tell from insect larvae associated with the corpse if it was dumped where it was found, and how long ago. If there’s soil, clay, or rock associated with the body, a geologist can offer useful knowledge of where it came from, or the settings in which the material is used.

Hazelwood was fascinated by it all, not: least because so much of this knowledge was based upon experience and observation. For example, radiologists familiar with injuries characteristic of child abuse know to be alert to so-called spiral fractures of the forearm and lower leg bones if the possible victim is very young or immobile. Reason: Abusers tend to twist a child’s arms or legs as they grab them by their wrists or ankles, torquing their bones, which then fracture in a familiar spiral pattern.

Hazelwood personally researched stabbing and cutting wounds at the AFIP, and put together a text-and-photo syllabus for teaching the subject that is still in use in pathology classes around the country. Among the very strange cases covered in the syllabus is that of a man who committed suicide by repeatedly jamming ballpoint pens into the side of his head.

But a more intriguing area of investigation for Roy was personality: Who would do such a thing, and why? Could such a person be described?

Hazelwood wasn’t thinking like a clinician. He was thinking like a cop, wondering if a combination of experience
and research could yield reliable
behavioral
data to assist investigations, the way the hard sciences produced physical evidence.

One day in conversation with his AFIP mentor, Dr. Charles Stahl, a navy commander and forensic pathologist, Roy mentioned Harvey Glatman, and his own interest in one day conducting a study of autoerotic fatalities.

“Oh, we did one of those,” the pathologist replied, and he directed Hazelwood’s attention to Stahl’s published survey of forty-three autoerotic asphyxial deaths, all white male members of the military, culled from the 1.4 million cases in the AFIP’s voluminous files. At the time, Stahl’s study was the largest ever published.

Roy’s idea was to build on Stahl’s beginning by conducting a much broader survey aimed at assisting police departments in the investigation of these strange, often bewildering deaths. He got his chance in 1978, the year he joined the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit.

FBI assistant director Ken Joseph, then in charge of the FBI Academy, issued instructions that all Academy instructors, including the BSU’s mind hunters, were to undertake original research projects. Larry Monroe, then BSU unit chief, called his profilers together to announce the directive.

Agents Bob Ressler and John Douglas were delighted, and relieved, at the news. Since early in the year Ressler and Douglas had been paying informal visits to maximum-security prisons around the country, where they sought out America’s most infamous and prolific incarcerated killers. The profilers’ objective: to conduct deep interviews with the likes of Edmund Kemper and Sirhan Sirhan, Richard Speck and David Berkowitz.

Suddenly, with Ken Joseph’s blessing, Ressler and Douglas could elevate an informal, sub rosa project into an official FBI study. Working with Hazelwood and Ann Burgess at the University of Pennsylvania, the two agents developed a protocol, or questionnaire, and then set out on what would
become their widely studied survey of thirty-six serial killers.

Other BSU agents at the meeting with Monroe that day proposed to study subjects ranging from pyromania to suicide to stress. Then came Roy’s turn.

“I want to study autoerotic fatalities,” the new profiler said.

Silence.

“Huh?” Monroe asked finally.

Undaunted, Hazelwood rose and explained autoerotic fatalities to the group. When he finished, fellow profiler Dick Ault asked whether such a rare phenomenon—approximately fifteen hundred to two thousand such deaths occur in the United States each year—merited the time and resources necessary to study it as thoroughly as Roy proposed.

Clearly not on the basis of mortality alone, Hazelwood conceded.

But there were two good reasons for undertaking the project, he said.

One, more than almost any other type of death, the autoerotic fatality creates a painful emotional resonance among the victim’s family and acquaintances. Because most victims keep their solo-sex habit well hidden, such deaths almost always come as a sudden, ugly, and shameful surprise to survivors. When the deceased’s private, deviant sexual practices are suddenly made plain in death, there is bewilderment, disgust, denial, guilt, and often considerable anger among those closest to them.

Hazelwood told the group of one instance where a victim’s parents litigated his death for two years, insisting their boy had been murdered. In another, a father pressured the local coroner to change his son’s death report from “accidental during autoerotic acts” to “accidental due to physical exertion.”

Hazelwood’s second, more persuasive argument to the group was that his research would provide police departments
with the basic information and tools necessary to differentiate autoerotic deaths from homicides or suicides.

As he explained, some police agencies weren’t sure what an autoerotic fatality was. For example, Roy once received a telephone call from a local police official inquiring whether he was available to lecture.

Roy said yes, he was, and listed his areas of expertise, including autoerotic fatalities.

The chief considered for a moment.

“Well, I don’t think that last one would be very useful for us,” he finally said. “We don’t have too many traffic deaths down here.”

Misreading an accidental autoerotic death can have serious consequences. Among Catholics, for example, an autoerotic death mistaken for a suicide may mean the deceased is denied burial in consecrated ground.

To misidentify an autoerotic death for a suicide can also be expensive: Some life insurance policies refuse to pay in the event of suicide.

Mistaking one for homicide raises a separate set of potential problems. Time, money, and energy are wasted. The victim’s family, as well as the community, is subjected to needless stress.

Conversely, if a homicide is successfully staged as an autoerotic death, justice is evaded.

To illustrate his point, Hazelwood told the group of a case that the police at first filed away as an unsolved sexual homicide, but which turned out to be an accidental death due to a dangerous autoeroticism.

The victim was a respectable midwestern businessman and community leader who one day disappeared.

He was not known to have been depressed in any way, and had no apparent motive for vanishing. The police considered kidnapping the likeliest possibility. However, no ransom demand was made.

A few days later, searchers discovered the businessman dead in a secluded woods not far from town. He was partially clothed and elaborately bound, suspended from a tree limb, with his head and shoulders touching the ground. He’d died from exposure.

Nearby was a briefcase containing several well-thumbed erotic magazines. Photos of some members of the deceased’s family were superimposed over some of the erotic pictures.

Investigators surmised that something must have gone wrong with the kidnap plot, something that panicked the abductors, who then fled, leaving their captive to die in the forest.

The theory seemed to fit the facts, and the local pathologist agreed.

Cause of death: exposure.

Manner of death: homicide.

Then a member of the police department who’d attended Roy’s class at Quantico asked Hazelwood to review the case.

After examining the photos of the death scene and reading the police investigative report, Roy noted that both were consistent in every detail with the characteristic features of an accidental autoerotic fatality.

He explained to the police and the local pathologist how it was possible for the victim to bind
himself,
and then pull on the ropes to induce hypoxia.

Unfortunately, it appeared that the businessman’s weight prevented him from also releasing himself. A session of self-arousing sex had cost him his life.

Cause of death: exposure.

Manner of death: accident.

Case closed.

After receiving official Bureau sanction to proceed with his project, Roy began collecting cases for consideration. Altogether, there would be 157 histories included, most of them submitted by U.S. and Canadian police officers who attended classes at Quantico.

From a law enforcement point of view, this approach ensured he’d gather the best possible selection of histories. Students only submitted cases for consultation and discussion at Quantico if they otherwise defied solution, or were so strange that the officer sought enlightenment from experts.

Among the mysteries Roy helped to explain was a college professor discovered dead in full western gear, including chaps, twin .45s in his hip holsters, and a ten-gallon hat on his head. Another victim was found dead in scuba gear. A third was fully attired as a surgeon.

One female victim was dressed as a harem girl.

He was able to show the officers how in each case the individual died of accidental asphyxiation while engaged in dangerous autoerotic acts.

In another consultation, Roy reviewed the death of a black woman, twenty-three, who was found nude in her bathroom, resting on her knees, with her head submerged in the bathtub. Her hands were bound in front of her, and a nine-and-one-half-inch metal bolt, which she had previously inserted within her, lay on the floor beneath her buttocks. A rope was looped around her neck, with the two free ends draped over her right shoulder.

“She is thought to have been engaging in a masochistic fantasy (hence, the bound wrists),” Hazelwood wrote in his analysis, “inducing hypoxia with the neck ligature, when she lost consciousness, falling across the tub and into the water.”

The most violent death was also the most horrible. A young man with a roller-skate-strap fetish trussed his wrists and ankles with twenty-eight of them. Then he lowered himself into a garbage can, buttocks first, with his knees drawn up to his chest, intending to sink to the point where the garbage can constricted his chest and induced hypoxia.

His escape mechanism was a roll of wire standing next to the garbage can. As Roy reconstructed the death, the young man failed to appreciate how low his center of gravity would
go, making it impossible to tip over the garbage by grasping the roll of wire.

He died, slowly and painfully, from progressive asphyxiation.

“Neighbors,” says Roy, “reported that they thought they heard a dog howling all night. It was this young man.”

In October 1979, Dr. Park Dietz, then director of forensic psychiatry at the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, invited Hazelwood to appear with him on a panel to discuss autoerotic fatalities at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law.

“I remember Roy as a short guy with peculiar interests,” Dr. Dietz says. “I shared those interests, and that’s why I liked him.”

Dietz, the son of a Camp Hill, Pennsylvania physician, is today as central a figure among forensic psychiatrists as Hazelwood is in law enforcement.

Among the infamous defendants Dietz has evaluated for both prosecution and defense attorneys have been Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee’s flesh-eating serial killer; Arthur Shawcross, the upstate New York serial killer; Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who murdered her two sons; John du Pont; and Betty Broderick of San Diego, whose murder of both her ex-husband and his wife prompted not one, but two made-for-TV movies.

Dietz has also done pioneer studies of stalkers, and
worked as a security consultant to celebrities including Michael Jackson and Cher.

He operates the Threat Assessment Group in Newport Beach, California, a consultancy to government and business which focuses on the potential threats posed by disgruntled employees and solutions for dealing with them.

Dr. Dietz’s fascination with aberrant minds started even earlier in his life than did Hazelwood’s.

“I can trace that interest in odd behavior back at least as far as my boyhood, when I tagged along with my mother when she did volunteer work at the state hospital in Harrisburg, near where we lived,” he recalls.

“She’d organize Christmas parties. I’d help with refreshments and decorations and would sometimes dance with the patients.”

Dietz says he never seriously doubted that he’d follow his father into medicine, or that his specialty would be psychiatry. However, as his interest in odd behavior deepened, he began to question what sort of light, if any, psychiatry could shed on these subjects.

A premed student at Cornell in the late 1960s, where he studied biology and psychology, Dietz seriously considered bolting for the University of California at Berkeley to take up criminology.