The Evil That Men Do Part 2

The writer noted that Harvey "was told it would drive him crazy and would rot his brain. He was told his pimples resulted from it, and that the pimples revealed his habit to the whole world. He was told that every time the act occurred he lost the equivalent of a pint of blood."

However terrorized the boy must have been by his father's threats, he was not deterred in his dangerous autoeroticism. When Glatman as an adult couldn't find a suitable female victim, he'd dress up in women's clothes and hang himself.

Such behavior turns out to be recurrent among s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts, the most polymorphously perverse of all aberrant criminals.

Glatman's first arrest came just after high school, in Boulder, Colorado. He accosted girls with a toy gun, tied their hands and feet, and then gingerly fondled his victims. He occasionally robbed the girls, but only for insignificant amounts of money that he never spent.

Then he moved to New York and began committing felony robberies as the so-called Phantom Bandit. After doing five years at Sing Sing, where he received intensive psychiatric care, Glatman returned to Colorado, and then moved on to Los Angeles, where his mother set him up in a small television repair business.

When Harvey left Sing Sing, an optimistic prison counselor wrote that "he is beginning to understand himself, and is making great strides in overcoming his neurosis, although a great deal of work remains to be done with him."

Indeed.

Socially isolated in Los Angeles, Glatman began seriously to connect with his paraphilias, primarily s.e.xual bondage and a rope fetish. Searching for images to serve as raw material for his paraphilic fantasies, he found one source that was plentiful even in the straitlaced fifties-detective magazines.

Glatman later told investigators that he collected detective magazines, "sometimes for the words, sometimes for the covers," which in those days invariably portrayed an ample-chested victim, often bound with ligatures and with a gag in her mouth, helpless and horror-struck, cringing under the menacing figure of a male.

Only after Hazelwood and his longtime colleague, Dr. Park Dietz, published a critical study of such periodicals in 1986 did the tone of these cover ill.u.s.trations change.

Glatman set about making his fantasies real. He posed as a freelance detective-magazine photographer under the names Johnny Glynn and George Williams, and joined a lonely hearts club in pursuit of potential victims. With sure instincts for the vulnerable, and skills at manipulation, he persuaded these women to disrobe for him, as well as to allow him to bind them for his "shoots."

Glatman tied his knots and wrapped his ligatures with painstaking, exquisite care. Judging from the photographic evidence, it must have required considerable time. Only after the intricate work was completed to Glatman's aberrant taste did he then murder his victims.

After he was caught, the Lonely Hearts Killer claimed to have raped his three known murder victims. However, Glatman also disclosed that he was impotent in the absence of bondage.

Hazelwood believes Glatman may have fabricated the rape story as a means of making his behavior more comprehensible to the policemen who interrogated him. In those days, even veteran police officers weren't likely to understand how for some s.e.xual offenders all that is required for s.e.xual gratification is a rope, a camera, and a weapon.

Bob Keppel writes in his book, Signature Killers, that Glatman, again like Ted Bundy and many other s.e.xual killers, kept a box full of trophies-photos of the victims and articles of their clothing to help him relive the killings.

Keppel also isolates Glatman's s.e.xual sadism. "Glatman first photographed each victim with a look of innocence on her face," writes Keppel, as if she were truly enjoying a modeling session. The next series represented a s.a.d.i.s.t's view of a s.e.xually terrorized victim with the impending horror of a slow and painful death etched across her face. The final frame depicted the victim's position that Glatman himself had arranged after he strangled her.

After a three-day trial, Harvey Glatman was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He discouraged his lawyers from filing appeals. "He told me that he couldn't stand the other guys on death row," Pierce Brooks, a legendary Los Angeles police detective who conducted many interviews with Glatman, recalled to me just before his death in the spring of 1998. "He said they were so stupid that he'd rather be executed than spend the rest of his life around them."

Glatman was put to death in the San Quentin gas chamber in August of 1959.

Roy Hazelwood first learned of the Lonely Hearts Killer in military police training about a year later. It was an astonishing experience for the twenty-two-year-old soldier whose knowledge of the world was largely confined to tiny Spring Branch, Texas, where he grew up.

"Glatman just seemed to come out of nowhere," Roy recalls. "I didn't understand anything about him. I wanted to know why he took pictures of the victims. Why did he tie them in various positions and in various stages of undress?

"Glatman seemed so ordinary to me, yet his crimes seemed so sophisticated compared to other criminals of the time. I wondered, Where did he learn these things? Why was he aroused by them?

"Why did he tie a victim's legs entirely, instead of just her ankles? Why put a gag in her mouth when they're out in the desert? These questions were swimming in my head.

"And another important thing that struck me was how very little people seemed then to know about this behavior. All of us in the cla.s.s asked questions of the instructor.

"Basically, his answers were: 'Well, we don't know those things.'

"That made a h.e.l.l of an impression on me. I remember thinking, 'Someday I'm going to look into this.' "

Harvey Glatman ever since has served as a touchstone case for Hazelwood. He was the first s.e.xual offender Roy ever encountered, and in many ways remains one of the most complex criminals he's ever studied.

3.

"I Don't Like Women All That Much"

Harvey Glatman also was Hazelwood's introduction to multiple killers.

An itinerant subtype of these predators-for whom the term "serial killer" was coined in the 1980s by agent Bob Ressler at the BSU-seemed to explode out of nowhere in the 1960s and 1970s, and to spread like a virus. In truth, although serial killers often can seem magically immune to capture, they are no more uniquely modern than any other criminal.

Like all irrational offenders, they sort themselves along a behavioral continuum from the patient, deliberate hunters, such as Bundy, to wild, murderous outlaws, such as the killing team of Juan Chavez and Hector Fernandez, described later in this chapter.

In between, there are startling anomalies, such as Henry Wallace, a thirty-one-year-old African American who confessed in 1996 to s.e.xually a.s.saulting and killing eleven black women in several southern states between 1992 and 1994. Unlike the majority of serial killers, who princ.i.p.ally prey on strangers, Wallace raped and murdered women he knew, or worked with in various fast-food restaurants. It was a very poorly thought-out MO, which invited Wallace's eventual detection.

"If he elected to become a serial killer, he was going about it in the wrong way," said Bob Ressler, who interviewed Wallace and testified as an expert witness for the defense at Wallace's murder trial.

Another, far better known multiple, or spree, killer added his own, individual twists to the crime in 1997.

Andrew Cunanan, slayer of flamboyant Italian clothing designer Gianni Versace, lived extremely well as a domestic companion to wealthy older gay men-"a gigolo," in his mother's uncompromising description.

He also was a familiar figure in the haute gay worlds of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, well remembered by a succession of friends and lovers as vain, charming, highly intelligent, and articulate-a h.o.m.os.e.xual Ted Bundy.

Cunanan spent lavishly-he reportedly owed Nieman Marcus forty-six thousand dollars at his death-and dealt and consumed (sometimes injecting) a variety of drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine, and the male hormone testosterone, which can induce rages.

According to several sources, he favored sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic p.o.r.nography. One partner characterized Cunanan's s.e.xual habits as "extreme."

Late in 1996, his patron of the moment severed his relationship with the young man, just as two of Cunanan's romantic interests, Jeff Trail, twenty-eight, and David Madson, thirty-three, both of Minneapolis, reportedly were trying to put him in their pasts.

By the following spring, Cunanan appears to have gone broke and was drinking heavily. On April 18, 1997, a friend in San Francisco saw Cunanan for what would prove to be the last time.

"Something had snapped in him," John Semerau told Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair. "Now I realize the guy was hunting-he was getting the thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the kill. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his body. He had stepped over the edge."

Cunanan flew to Minneapolis from the West Coast in late April 1997. He made no effort to hide the visit. On Tuesday afternoon, April 29, Jeff Trail's body was discovered, wrapped in a carpet, in David Madson's blood-spattered apartment. Trail had been repeatedly struck about the face and head with a hammer, which was found in Madson's apartment.

Sat.u.r.day morning, May 3, Madson's body was found by fishermen at a lake about one hour's drive north of Minneapolis. He had been shot three times with a .40-caliber weapon; once in the head, once in the eye, and once in the back. His red Jeep Cherokee was missing.

Police later matched the .40-caliber slugs recovered from the Madson crime scene with a box of .40-caliber ammunition discovered in Jeff Trail's apartment.

Roy Hazelwood, who followed Andrew Cunanan's saga in the newspapers, recalls thinking at the time that Cunanan must have been very much concerned at the direction in which his lifestyle was leading him prior to the killings.

"He was physically attractive," Roy observes, "and had traded on his appearance and youthfulness to both validate his self-worth and to enjoy a very high standard of living.

"But then he began to age. His appearance-the essence of his self-esteem-began to fade. He was finding it difficult to attract the rich and appreciative s.e.xual partners he believed he deserved. To make matters worse, their use of him was one of the factors causing him to age, and because of that they no longer desired him as they once had.

"So Andrew Cunanan, I believe, decided to get even. He did so by killing those who represented or symbolized the men who'd ruined and then rejected him."

On May 4, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin's s.a.d.i.s.tically broken body was discovered in his home. Miglin, seventy-five, was bound hand and foot. His body was partially wrapped in plastic, paper, and tape. His face was also taped, except for two airholes at his nose. He had been tortured-several of his ribs were broken-and stabbed. His throat had been cut open with a saw. He had been left under a car in his parking garage across the street from his Chicago town house.

A search of the Miglin residence showed no sign of forced entry. However, as much as ten thousand dollars in cash was missing, as was a collection of the elderly tyc.o.o.n's expensive suits. Several months later in Miami, Cunanan would p.a.w.n a gold coin he apparently stole in the course of murdering and robbing Lee Miglin.

On Tuesday, May 6, David Madson's red Jeep was recovered by Chicago police around the corner from the Miglin house. Discovered inside the vehicle were newspaper clips of the Trail and Madson killings.

Miglin's dark green Lexus also was missing. The car, with Andrew Cunanan behind the wheel, was already in New York City.

Friday night, May 9, the Miglin Lexus was found outside an office at Finns Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, New Jersey. Inside the office, cemetery caretaker William Reese, forty-five, lay dead on the floor in a pool of his blood, a .40-caliber bullet in his head. He had been shot with the same gun that had been used to kill David Madson, and would be used to kill Gianni Versace.

Reese's 1995 Chevy truck was missing, too.

Andrew Cunanan knew his killing spree was a national news story. Several papers devoted long stories to the murder saga, including The New York Times. He was about to hit the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. And he could read and hear how the Bureau was warning certain prominent gays of his acquaintance to mind their personal security.

Cunanan suddenly was famous and powerful, an object of fear, loathing, and national fascination.

Cunanan also had exhibited enough traits of the antisocial personality-lying, substance abuse, promiscuity, disdain for social norms, cruelty, use of aliases, lack of a fixed address-to warrant a curbside opinion that he was a sociopath, and a narcissist as well.

He parked Reese's hot pickup, carrying stolen South Carolina plates, in a Miami munic.i.p.al garage on June 10. Since May 12, he'd been living under an a.s.sumed name in a moderately priced residence hotel on the beach. According to several witnesses, he joined South Beach Miami's busy gay scene. According to the night manager at his hotel, Cunanan came and went in a variety of disguises.

It can never be known if he chose Miami as the perfect setting for his apotheosis, or, more likely, because he knew the city from a previous gig working there for a gay escort service. Cunanan certainly knew he could easily move without calling attention to himself in a district where gayness was the norm.

But Miami also had collateral appeal for a fugitive such as Andrew Cunanan. It is a busy international city from which there are a thousand ways to quietly disappear for destinations as handy as the Caribbean, and as remote as Rio.

All you need is money and connections, which could partially explain his choice of Gianni Versace as his final victim.

Cunanan may well have been sending a very specific message to a very specific person, the way kidnappers make their point by sending a victim's family photos or a tape recording or even a body part to emphasize the seriousness of their demands.

Versace was by far the most famous of Cunanan's five known murder victims, but he was the only one with whom Cunanan did not have an intimate relationship, or from whom he did not steal something he needed.

In a theory first advanced by Joe Swickard, a veteran crime reporter at the Detroit Free Press, Cunanan's intent behind the brazen Versace murder may have been to intimidate one of Cunanan's wealthy acquaintances into fronting the capital, transportation, and/or doc.u.ments necessary for him to slip away south from Miami in quiet comfort.

Any individual, no matter how rich or well protected, would likely take to heart such a demonstration of daring and lethality.

But the ploy, if that's what it was, failed.

Cunanan did make what has been described as a frantic, unsuccessful telephone appeal to a West Coast acquaintance for help in securing a pa.s.sport. Whether that call was part of an overall strategy that included Versace's murder likely will never be known.

On July 23, still trapped in Miami and suffering from a stomach wound, Andrew Cunanan was discovered by a caretaker aboard a houseboat, and fired a final, fatal .40-caliber round into his mouth.

It was of course no coincidence that three, perhaps four, of Cunanan's victims were gay or bis.e.xual. Many multiple murders are s.e.xually motivated. Those who commit them also tend to share a pleasure in the physical act of murder. The more they do it, the more they enjoy it.

Lone wolves like Cunanan or Bundy or Wayne Williams foremost are opportunists. They search and wait for the moment they feel is propitious, and then strike. Their horrific depredations may shock and seem uniquely modern, but the main reason for their rise is that opportunity today is abundant.

In the cohesive culture of an older, simpler, slower world, people noticed strangers, watched them and remembered them. A would-be multiple murderer was forced to act with utmost circ.u.mspection. The urge to act out certainly existed, as Harvey Glatman's story attests. But the chances to commit anonymous serial murder, and therefore the crime's overall incidence, were limited.

In contemporary society, with its fractured sense of community and hurried pace, a single killer can move quickly from place to place and across police jurisdictions, which habitually do not interact well with one another. In this environment, where strangers are a commonplace, the artful multiple killer-who is not necessarily intelligent, but usually is quick-witted and crafty-becomes a cipher, turns essentially invisible, and thrives.

Ted Bundy taught me that.

Killers at the other end of the spectrum, outright savages such as Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles Night Stalker, trust more to luck and audacity than cunning. They murder heedlessly and recklessly, and frequently are caught soon after they start.

Ramirez, who indiscriminately stabbed, beat, shot, and mutilated both male and female victims aged six to eighty-four, was at large for little more than a year, during which time he killed at least thirteen victims and a.s.saulted many others.

Chavez and Fernandez killed twelve people in the four months they were loose around Dallas, Texas, in 1995. Bundy, by contrast, murdered thirty women or more in an intermittent killing career that lasted throughout the 1970s.

He was part of the sudden epidemic of serial killers that would provide the Behavioral Science Unit with a mission: The BSU quickly became the world's leading inst.i.tution devoted to the study of these rare, but highly lethal, pathogens.

Hardly a significant known instance of serial homicide anywhere in the world escaped the BSU's attention. Ramirez. Wayne Williams in Atlanta. Peter Sutcliffe, Great Britain's "Yorkshire Ripper." David ("Son of Sam") Berkowitz in New York City. The Trailside and Zodiac Killers in California. Even the great dissembler, Henry Lee Lucas, the one-eyed, snaggletoothed drifter who claimed to have murdered hundreds of victims from Guyana to j.a.pan (but probably killed no more than three people, including his mother). All were scrutinized in the BSU laboratory.

Few escaped Roy Hazelwood's attention, either.

In 1994, following his retirement, Roy began to consult on serial murder cases as a member of the Academy Group, a Mana.s.sas, Virginia, consultancy made up of his old BSU colleagues, plus other former federal agents. Roger Depue, Roy's former boss, founded the Academy Group and served as its first president before leaving to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Other agent-members include d.i.c.k Ault and Pete Smerick from the BSU, and retired Secret Service agent Ken Baker. The Academy Group's client list ranges from prosecutors and defense attorneys to companies with security problems in need of employee threat a.s.sessments, and even television programs, including the popular Fox series Millennium.

One of Hazelwood's first a.s.signments after joining the Academy Group was to consider a pivotal, if deceptively simple-sounding, question about a particularly heartbreaking homicide.

The victim was twenty-one-year-old Monica Smith,* last reported alive early on a Friday evening in October 1992. A neighbor in the suburban Birmingham, Alabama, apartment complex where Monica lived with her mother saw the young woman heading for her car in the parking lot at about 7:45 p.m.

Mrs. Smith had gone to church that night. Monica's destination was a shopping center approximately one mile away, where she would purchase chocolate yogurt at a Baskin-Robbins outlet.

Hours later, Mrs. Smith returned from church to find her daughter's car, gla.s.ses, and yogurt in the apartment complex parking lot.

She ran to her apartment and dialed 911.

Monica's partially clothed body was discovered around noon the next day, Sat.u.r.day, lying in a roadside ravine about eight miles from her home, plainly visible to pa.s.sing motorists amid the miscellaneous trash strewn around an illegal dumping site.

About three weeks later, a killer named Jack Harrison Trawick was arrested on a parole violation and subsequently confessed to Monica Smith's murder, which Trawick also described to investigators in some detail.

The question posed to Hazelwood by the Smith family lawyer, who was pursuing a premises liability action against the apartment complex owners, was this: In Roy's expert opinion, would the presence of a guard on duty that night in the complex's deserted security shack have deterred Trawick from murdering Smith, and thus saved her life?

Hazelwood pa.r.s.ed the problem step by step, beginning with a close look at the victim.

Monica Smith, he learned in conversations with her mother and others, was a timid, likable young woman afflicted with a learning disability. She was sweet-tempered, naive, and socially pa.s.sive, highly unlikely to offer much resistance if confronted by an attacker. Her mother believed her to be a virgin.

Trawick was a white male, forty-five years old, whose criminal history included at least three previous murders he acknowledged at the same time he pleaded guilty to killing Monica Smith. He'd been arrested, as well, for burglaries, impersonating a police officer, kidnapping, placing threatening calls to women, and breaking into one victim's house, where he destroyed her undergarments.

Trawick was highly intelligent, and a diagnosed psychopath. Doctors and counselors described him as a s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t, preoccupied with s.e.x and violence, and a fetishist. In 1982, at his request, Trawick received a so-called chemical castration in the form of the female hormone progestin. The following year he required a mastectomy as a consequence of the drug's side effects.

Trawick spent from 1983 to 1990 in prison.

During his confession, he provided police with sketchy reconstructions of his three earlier homicides, the first of which Trawick said he committed in the early 1970s.

This victim was a prost.i.tute whom he picked up late one afternoon in his Toyota van. Trawick said he choked the woman and stabbed her in the throat. Outside the van, he used a knife to mutilate one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as well as her hips "and maybe, even, her stomach." He wasn't certain. He may also have pushed the weapon up his victim's v.a.g.i.n.a, he said.

Trawick added that he had expended so much energy in throttling the prost.i.tute that he was unable to unb.u.t.ton her clothing, and had to cut it away from her body with his knife.

However, he did not rape her.