The Evil That Men Do Part 25

She was found lying on the ground, comatose and close to death, with her throat slashed. Examination with a rape kit revealed pubic hairs of unknown origin around her v.a.g.i.n.al area, and seminal fluid in her v.a.g.i.n.al tract. Only a medical "miracle" at the hospital saved her life.

The whole scene had been staged.

She was a drug addict who supported her habit by working as a prost.i.tute. Despairing of her existence-but unwilling to have her child grow up knowing that Mom killed herself-she faked what looked like an a.s.sault and rape.

The pubic hairs, for example, were taken from one customer. From another, she obtained the s.e.m.e.n specimen found in her v.a.g.i.n.a. She chemically induced unconsciousness, and slit her own throat with a razor blade, which she managed to dispose of before slumping to the spot where she collapsed, was discovered, and then rescued.

Because he played no official role in the Brawley investigation, Roy did not testify before the grand jury. However, his colleague and research partner, Park Dietz, did.

The forensic psychiatrist testified to many of the behavioral clues that point to pseudovictimization, including offender behavior which could be inferred from the victim's report.

As the grand jury reported in its published notes, Dietz and Hazelwood and Dr. Janet Warren were then conducting research into s.e.xual offenders who degrade their victims, as Tawana Brawley alleged that she had been degraded by her attackers.

"There are two princ.i.p.al reasons that offenders degrade their victims," the grand jury notes report of Dietz's testimony. "The first reason is anger. Angry rapists often punch their victims in the face, and the face is a significant target. There were no injuries at all to Ms. Brawley's face. Even the fecal smearing avoided the face.

"An angry rapist who chooses to smear feces on a woman would smear the face, and probably attempt to put the feces in her mouth. More important, however, angry rapists are not known to smear their victims with feces.

"The other motive for degradation is s.e.xual sadism. s.e.xually s.a.d.i.s.tic offenders can hold their victims for periods of time and degrade and humiliate them. They will torture their victims with physical means that leave scars and often kill them.

"Most s.e.xually s.a.d.i.s.tic offenders operate alone, according to Dr. Dietz. A significant number operate with a partner, but not in a group of three or more.

"Dr. Dietz did not see any reason that an offender would put cotton-like material into Ms. Brawley's nose and ears [but] did see reasons why Ms. Brawley might do so.

"The cut hair, if it was cut, the wearing of burned clothing and the fecal smearing can all be seen as non-permanent degradation of oneself.

"Dr. Dietz concluded that Tawana Brawley's physical appearance when she was found is consistent with self-infliction and a false allegation. It is inconsistent with known patterns of offender behavior"

The grand jury concluded in its 170-page report that Tawana Brawley had made up the whole story, and dismissed each of her "advisers' " allegations.

Hazelwood received a letter of commendation from Robert Abrams for his a.s.sistance to the investigation. As an informal member of the Brawley task force, he also received a special T-shirt designed and printed as a commemorative souvenir of the experience.

The front of the T-shirt features a sketch of the Poughkeepsie armory, where the task force was headquartered. Lettering on the back reads: "Brawley Task Force-244 days of fact, fiction and feces."

Alton Maddox later was suspended from practicing law for five years after refusing to cooperate with a lawyers' disciplinary committee investigating his conduct during the Brawley affair.

C. Vernon Mason was disbarred for seven years by the New York State Supreme Court for price-gouging his poorer clients. He entered the New York Theological Seminary as a student.

In 1991, the Reverend Al Sharpton was stabbed and superficially injured by a white man during an outdoor rally.

He has since entered politics. He has run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from New York. In 1997, Sharpton placed a close second in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

Tawana Brawley, who never testified before the grand jury and was never charged in the case, subsequently moved to Virginia with her mother and Ralph King, and later attended Howard University. She left the university in 1992 and became a Muslim. Now Maryam Muhammad, she lives in Temple Hills, Maryland, and reportedly has worked in a Washington-area hospital.

In November 1997, Steven Pagones's $395 million defamation suit, filed nine years earlier against Brawley and her advisers, finally came to trial in Poughkeepsie.

On July 13, 1998, after eight months of protracted and acrimonious legal wrangling, a six-person jury decided that Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox indeed had defamed Pagones. Sixteen days later, they a.s.sessed Sharpton $65,000 in damages, Maddox $95,000, and Mason $185,000. Altogether, the awards roughly matched the amount of money Steven Pagones reportedly spent in waging the legal battle against his accusers.

Tawana Brawley did not testify in the trial.

20.

"I Felt I Was Rehearsing for My Own Death"

Gray daylight spread slowly over Kingston, Ontario, as Roy Hazelwood awoke Tuesday morning, August 13, 1996.

Summer had deserted eastern Canada. A drizzle was falling. It was going to be a dreary day.

But as he glanced out his window, Hazelwood hardly noticed the rain and ragged, lowering clouds.

His thoughts instead were of the radiantly winsome inmate awaiting him in the nearby Prison for Women. Bracing himself against the emotional ordeal he knew lay ahead that day, and the next, Roy exhaled abruptly, punched up CNN on the bedside remote, and headed for the shower.

For this excursion to Kingston, just across the headwaters of the St. Lawrence Seaway from upstate New York, lodgings had been arranged by Inspector Ron Mackay, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Violent Crimes a.n.a.lysis Branch.

Mackay is Roy's former pupil. In 1989 and 1990 the RCMP inspector was a police fellow at the BSU, where he learned profiling from Hazelwood.

"He's the best teacher, bar none," says Mackay. "A lot of people read a few books and think they grasp it, but don't. Roy just has this special way of making the subject understandable."

Familiar as he was with Hazelwood, Mackay was unaware of Roy's rigid rules of the road, and unwittingly booked his famous mentor into a Victorian bed-and-break-fast at Kingston.

Hazelwood was deeply skeptical. However, once established in his tastefully appointed room with its four-poster bed-and after a steak dinner in a local restaurant with Mackay-he slept well and awakened keen for his morning interview with Karla h.o.m.olka.

She would be the eighteenth of twenty subjects in Hazelwood's survey of what he calls the "compliant victims" of s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts. Rare and anomalous even in the realms of the aberrant, these women frequently are complicit in their husbands' and/or boyfriends' criminal acts, including s.e.xual a.s.saults, torture, and murder. That's why many of them were in prison at the time Roy interviewed them.

Yet they are victims, too, compliant also in their own horrific abuse.

"Interviewing these women has been emotionally draining," he says. "They bother me. They are so vulnerable, so childlike in many respects. They've been so easily manipulated."

The compliant victim's traits and characteristics that, in combination, make her so vulnerable to a s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t include pa.s.sivity, low self-esteem, and a pervasive fear of abandonment.

Some exhibit features of dependent personality disorder, characterized by an inability to think or act for themselves. They are willing to be controlled in order to please.

Hazelwood expected his interview subjects would be homely, ill-kempt, slow-normal slovens, probably dependent on one or more controlled substances.

"In other words," he says, "all the biases you can imagine."

Just the opposite was true. They tended to be intelligent (if naive), attractive, and respectable-exactly what should be expected in light of their victimizers' needs.

A s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t differs from the far more common wife batterer in that his s.e.xual partner's pain and degradation are necessary components of the s.e.x act for him. He feels no remorse for something he enjoys. Also unlike most batterers, the s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t is untreatable.

"Unless he is h.o.m.os.e.xual, the s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t hates women," explains Hazelwood. "To him, all women are b.i.t.c.hes, wh.o.r.es, and s.l.u.ts. This means all women; his mother, his sister, his wife, his Sunday school teacher, Mother Teresa.

"He believes that if he pushes the right b.u.t.tons, he'll find this to be true of all women. And to prove this belief, he takes a nice middle-cla.s.s woman and tears her down. He tries to create a s.l.u.t, thus proving his theory. Then he punishes her for being like that."

s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts are amazingly alike in their s.e.xual requirements and the demands they make upon their victims. "It's like they all studied in the same schoolroom," says Hazelwood. "They have the same motivation, the same fantasies. And they act out in very similar ways."

They easily are the most destructive of predatory criminals, as well. The twenty-six felons in John Douglas and Bob Ressler's serial killer survey committed 127 known murders. Of the thirty s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts Roy has surveyed, the twenty-two who also were killers committed at least 187 murders.

They differ from other s.e.xual criminals in another way, too.

A criminal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t may capture his intended prey using a simple con. Typically, he will then a.s.sault 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 s.e.x slave.

For a large part of that time, the girl was kept in a box in the couple's bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 h.e.l.ls with him. But each woman's story is uniquely heartbreaking.

Debra Davis, the youngest of six sisters in a working-cla.s.s 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 s.e.xually 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 s.e.xual 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, rea.s.suring 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Sat.u.r.day night that Rhoades took Debra to a swingers' club in Houston. She had a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed out and he's trying to make love to her. I got really upset, and we left."