The Evil That Men Do Part 4

"Additional guards also would not have deterred this crime. Cameras would not have deterred this crime. Better lighting would not have deterred this crime.

"Nothing was going to stop those two."

* Denotes a pseudonym.

4.

The Dead Speak The world of aberrant crime forcefully reclaimed Hazelwood's attention in 1968, when Roy, by then a Vietnam veteran and a major in the army, accepted a yearlong fellowship at the Armed Forces Inst.i.tute of Pathology, based at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The AFIP was the best-equipped and most advanced facility of its kind anywhere in the world.

Roy by this time was familiar with the dark side of human nature.

From Fort Rucker he'd been transferred to West Germany, where Hazelwood first served as provost marshal (police chief) of the Fourth Armored Division's home base at Goppingen. He then was sent to Stuttgart, where he commanded a stockade.

There are very few jobs less attractive than being a jailer. But for Roy Hazelwood, the yearlong responsibility of managing 150 criminals was a welcome chance to interact directly with them-to be educated on criminality by criminals.

"I learned a lot running that stockade," he says.

He also demonstrated a natural feel for dealing with felons.

One of Roy's innovations, developed with the help of a psychologist, was to color-code the facility's interior. Thus, when new arrivals first came to Captain Hazelwood's prison entrance, they found the walls and floor painted a bleak gray, underscoring the seriousness of their situation.

To emphasize that in this place their lives no longer were their own, Roy directed that black hands and feet be painted onto the walls and floor. These indicated precisely to the newcomers where they were to position their own hands and feet as they were searched, and then marched through the entrance's outer and inner gates, or sally port.

Inside the lockup, Roy added a Dantean touch. Those in maximum security found their area covered completely with a dark, dull green paint. As the men worked their way up, via good behavior, to the moderate-security wing, they discovered the vile green relieved by a white paint on the upper walls and ceiling. Those well-behaved enough for minimum security enjoyed curtains, rugs, and furniture.

Troublemakers were placed on suicide watch: locked down naked, with no mattress or blanket, under twenty-four-hour guard in a brightly lit cell with only a Bible and their wedding ring to remind them of their higher responsibilities.

After two days of this, Roy would personally visit the inmate, excuse the guard, and speak privately. "I'd tell him that if he'd tell me he was sorry for what he'd done, I'd let him out, and no one would ever know he'd apologized. It worked ninety percent of the time."

If it didn't, Hazelwood shipped the miscreant off to a far less congenial environment, the former n.a.z.i concentration camp at Dachau, then being operated as a special lockup for soldier-inmates with behavior problems throughout the European stockade system.

Although Roy couldn't know it, these one-on-one encounters with the baddest of the bad in his custody were an invaluable prelude to his later confrontations with America's most deviant offenders.

Mentally sparring with a killer is very different from sharing a lemonade on the veranda with your Aunt Kate. It is very hard work in which a simple slip of the tongue, or even a mistaken gesture, can cancel days, even weeks, of effort.

There's no cookbook, either.

In Stuttgart, for example, Roy was faced with the problem of a glib and personable inmate whom the prison psychologist had diagnosed as a psychopath.

This prisoner, a persistent reoffender with a long record of incarceration, had voluntarily a.s.sisted with overhauling the stockade's archaic office record-keeping system. But in the weeks he worked around Roy's staff, Hazelwood realized that though superficially charming, the inmate was a chronic liar who failed to complete most of the tasks he was given.

Besides enjoying the change of scenery, he also took advantage of the circ.u.mstance to ingratiate himself with several members of Roy's staff, while he became intimately familiar with the other inmates' records, gathering information he no doubt planned to use to his advantage.

Hazelwood knew he would have to make a countermove before the prisoner had consolidated his relationships and established his own power center inside the prison staff, a potentially dangerous challenge to Roy's authority.

But confrontation, a public showdown, wouldn't work. This was a model prisoner, and Hazelwood could only undercut his own credibility by treating the popular inmate peremptorily. The answer had to be a response in kind-subterfuge replying to stealth.

Consequently, contraband postage stamps were discovered in the prisoner's bunk, a rules violation from which there was no appeal. He was summarily issued a one-way ticket to Dachau.

"You know I didn't steal those stamps," the inmate said indignantly to Roy on his way out the door. "You set me up, didn't you?"

Roy nodded and smiled and wished the man a safe journey. The defeated prisoner paused briefly and smiled back, apparently appreciating the craftiness with which he had been finessed.

Hazelwood's next overseas posting was South Vietnam, where in 1967 he was a.s.signed command of the Fourth MP Company, known at the time as the "f.u.c.ked-Up Fourth" for its lack of discipline, low morale, and dismal performance record. At the time Roy took over, seven soldiers in the company were in the stockade for attempting to kill a noncommissioned officer with a hand grenade.

Roy again intuitively recognized that creativity would get him much further than confrontation, an insight also of great value for interviewing violent deviant offenders.

On his first day in charge of his new command, Hazelwood inspected the MPs' living quarters and equipment. "They were pretty awful," he says. "I picked up one soldier's rifle and discovered that it was rusted shut.

"The first sergeant said, 'Sir, here's your chance to establish your authority. Court-martial the soldier.'

"I said, 'No, I think I'll put him on the lead Jeep on tomorrow's four a.m. convoy escort-with this weapon.'

"That PFC spent the entire night cleaning his weapon."

By the time Hazelwood moved on, the Fourth was not only squared away, but had become one of the most decorated MP companies in Vietnam.

His next stop was An Khe, home of the First Cavalry Division, where for four months Roy coordinated convoy security for more than 250 miles of the most dangerous roadway in Vietnam.

His last a.s.signment was as "number one papa san" in charge of cleaning up "Sin City," the one-square-mile red-light district in An Khe.

Sin City was notorious throughout that part of Vietnam for its overpriced and diluted booze (known as Saigon tea), diseased hookers, and the frequency of street brawls that broke out among the U.S. Army personnel who were Sin City's most frequent visitors.

Not unlike some western sheriff determined to tame his town's outlaw element, Roy inst.i.tuted reforms that eliminated most of Sin City's violence, improved the girls' health and hygiene, and regulated liquor prices.

The fighters tailed off dramatically when he forbade officers and enlisted men to mingle in the same establishments.

"In fact," Roy recalls, "we had the brothel owners construct, at their own cost, three separate facilities: one for officers, one for noncommissioned officers, and one for the enlisted men."

He saw to it that price-gouging ricksha operators, who charged exorbitant sums to transport soldiers to and from Sin City, suddenly had an affordable compet.i.tor, a regularly scheduled, round-trip minibus service.

Hazelwood also ordered that all prost.i.tutes were to receive weekly physical examinations and be tested for s.e.xually transmitted diseases. Those who were sick were ordered out of their brothels. One violation, and the wh.o.r.ehouse itself was shut down.

Roy further directed that all employers and employees from Sin City's papa-sans to their bartenders and the bar girls were to rise at 6:00 a.m. each day and thoroughly police the entire district for trash.

"Everyone took part; it was a true democracy," he says.

In the summer of 1968, his tour complete, Major Hazelwood returned home to confront a major decision. The army offered him a choice: attend Michigan State University to pursue an advanced degree in criminal law enforcement studies, or accept a year's fellowship in forensic medicine at the AFIP.

Hazelwood decided in characteristic fashion.

"I went to the dictionary and looked up 'forensic medicine.' It said, 'medicine as it applies to courts of law.' That sounded fascinating, so I accepted the fellowship."

Roy had seen a tremendous amount of violence in Vietnam, but the AFIP introduced him to a different variety of mayhem-random, pernicious violence and its victims. a.s.sisting in autopsies at the Baltimore medical examiner's office, retrieving floaters (dead bodies) with the harbor patrol, observing the psychiatric intake ward at Walter Reed, and learning forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, Hazelwood for the first time began to sketch his own mental frame around the borders of extreme and dangerous behavior.

"My professional interest in death and violence really came together at AFIP," he explains. "There was so much violence, and I was confronted daily with its victims. Some of the victims would be expected to encounter violence in their lives. Prost.i.tutes and drug addicts, for example. But many of the other victims I saw were selected randomly to be killed. That point has stayed with me for my entire career."

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

Early in his fellowship, one of the a.s.sistant 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-cla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 a.s.sociated with the corpse if it was dumped where it was found, and how long ago. If there's soil, clay, or rock a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.sisting 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 a.s.sistant 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 d.i.c.k 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-s.e.x habit well hidden, such deaths almost always come as a sudden, ugly, and shameful surprise to survivors. When the deceased's private, deviant s.e.xual 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 ill.u.s.trate his point, Hazelwood told the group of a case that the police at first filed away as an unsolved s.e.xual 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 cla.s.s 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.