The Evil That Men Do Part 7

"You know I was just kidding, don't you?" Kemper said on his way out the door.

"Sure," Ressler answered.

Kemper was every bit as depraved as James Lawson. At age fourteen, he murdered his grandparents, and he spent seven years at the maximum-security California state hospital at Atascadero (where Odom and Lawson later met) before being paroled to his mother's custody in 1969.

Over the succeeding nine years he killed eight more people: six young women he picked up hitchhiking, plus his mother and one of her female friends.

All were dissected or decapitated or s.e.xually a.s.saulted after death. He cut leg meat from two of his victims into a macaroni ca.s.serole he prepared and ate.

Kemper bludgeoned his mother with a hammer as she slept. He sawed off her head, had s.e.x with her corpse, and carved out her larynx and shoved it down the garbage disposal. Afterward, he propped her severed head on the mantel for dart practice.

Hence Bob Ressler's informed unease when Kemper threatened to "screw your head off."

But Ed Kemper had more than one dimension to him.

What distinguished him from a James Lawson, Hazelwood recognized, was organization. Patience and planning and attention to detail were the reasons Kemper was able to commit serial kidnap-murders for so long without being identified. Ed Kemper thought through his every move, and even rehea.r.s.ed his crimes.

He would pick up a girl, try a personality on her, and then release her unharmed and unaware of his intentions. He experimented for months with different approaches, perfecting what Hazelwood calls the killer's "service personality," the image he projects to mask his true intentions.

Highly disciplined and a perfectionist, Kemper learned to be conversational, unthreatening, to project a mild, even attractive, persona with which he would smoothly transact the critical first phase of his a.s.saults, the approach.

Afterward, despite the ghastliness of his postmortem behavior, he never left messy crime scenes or in any way called unnecessary attention to himself. Kemper wasn't caught until he called California police from Colorado, confessed what he'd done by telephone, and then waited in his car to be arrested.

This, Hazelwood recognized, was the ant.i.thesis of James Lawson's and James Odom's disorganized behavior. Ed Kemper was organized.

Pursuing the distinction further, Hazelwood realized that what he'd really captured with his dichotomy was the broad difference between crazy (psychotic) behavior, and irrational yet sane (psychopathic, or antisocial) behavior.

In time, the insight led to a practical and handy way for homicide investigators to quickly categorize their UNSUBs into three major cla.s.ses: organized, disorganized, and mixed offenders.

Hazelwood unveiled his organized and disorganized a.n.a.lytical framework in an article ent.i.tled "The l.u.s.t Murderer," published under his name and John Douglas's in the April 1980 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It was the first professional article Roy wrote as an FBI agent. Since then, "The l.u.s.t Murderer" has been the most frequently reprinted of all BSU papers.

The t.i.tle comes from an old catch-all clinical term for homicide committed during pa.s.sion. Hazelwood and Douglas appropriated l.u.s.t murder for any killing that involves mutilation and/or removal of the victim's s.e.xual parts. In either sense, the term today has fallen largely into disuse.

Hazelwood used it to describe the Odom-Lawson slaying, because "there really isn't another term that captures what those men did to that woman," he explains.

He describes the organized offender as indifferent to his fellow humans, irresponsible, and self-centered-the cla.s.sic psychopath. He is manipulative, deliberate, and full of guile, outwardly amiable for as long as it suits his objectives.

If the organized offender is a crafty wolf, then the disorganized offender is more like a wild dog.

He has few, if any, social skills. Typically, he is a loner and manifestly so. He may not wash or shave for days, or change his clothing or comb his hair. He feels rejected, and for the most part is incapable of forming normal relationships with other people of either s.e.x. He lacks the organized offender's craftiness, and commits his crimes on impulse, in a frenzy, with little planning or preparation.

His spontaneous fury may be sparked by anger or pa.s.sion, drugs or alcohol. He may also be mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded or psychotic, or may simply lack experience or maturity.

Unlike the organized offender, who preys for the most part on strangers, the disorganized offender may kill a friend, relative, acquaintance, or neighbor, indifferent at that moment to his risk of capture.

He also will score lower on standardized intelligence tests, although here Hazelwood cautions against confusing low measurable intellect with stupidity. Disorganized offenders are capable of high animal cunning.

"My favorite example of this is a serial rapist I interviewed in a midwestern prison," he says. "I remember he was chained wrist to waist, and waist to ankle, and was considered one of the most dangerous inmates in the prison.

"He had attacked and beaten the deputy warden, and then sent him a letter saying that next time he hoped the official would put up a better fight.

"He was powerfully built, in his early thirties, about five-nine and two hundred forty pounds, all muscle. He had a full-scale IQ of seventy-nine, and spoke mostly in monosyllables."

The inmate's evident lack of intellect, says Hazelwood, masked a far more important a.s.set-street smarts.

"He'd raped a series of women in Florida, and then fled to his hometown in the upper Midwest when he learned there was a warrant out for his arrest."

Searching for shelter, the rapist hit upon a foolproof way of hiding out. "He told me that he checked into a residential drug rehab program," Roy recalls. "Total confidentiality. No one would acknowledge he was there. Although he had never used drugs, he'd been around people who did, and was able to fake all the symptoms.

"Now remember, this guy has an IQ of seventy-nine. After several weeks in the drug program, he wanted a woman. He told his roommate he wanted one. The roommate says, 'Oh, no. You can't even get out of the building until you've been here six months.'

" 'Bulls.h.i.t,' the guy says."

As he later recounted the story to Roy, he faked a stomach pain and was sent with an escort to the city hospital for diagnostic work. Once there, the first thing he needed to do was get rid of the escort.

"Well, let's see," he said, "I gotta go to the seventeenth floor for X rays. Then I gotta go to the third floor for blood tests. Up to the sixth floor for urinalysis and-"

The escort interrupted: "I'll wait for you in the lobby," he said.

At this point in his narrative, the rapist stopped and asked Hazelwood where he would search for a rape victim in a hospital.

"The gynecology department?" Roy ventured.

"Nah. They're all pregnant in there, or have a disease. What you want to do is head for the women's rest room."

The rapist stood outside the rest room until a woman walked in alone, and then he followed behind her. After scratching "Out of Order" on a paper towel, which he affixed to the facility door, he returned inside and s.e.xually a.s.saulted the victim.

As he did so, a second female, ignoring the "Out of Order" sign, walked into the rest room, discovered the rape in progress, and ran out screaming, "There's a man a.s.saulting a woman in the rest room!"

A crowd quickly gathered at the doorway. Meantime, as the rapist retold the story, he grabbed his victim by her hair and shoved her along in front of him, out the rest room door.

"And let me tell you something, b.i.t.c.h!" he screamed at her. "If I ever catch you s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around on me again, I'm not only going to kill him, I'm going to kill you, too!"

His stunned audience "parted like the Red Sea," according to Hazelwood, and he escaped the rest room, the hospital, and the United States for Canada.

Typically, the disorganized offender commits his crime with any weapon available at the point of encounter with his victim. He will also leave her at the murder site, making little or no effort to conceal the body. He'll probably leave the weapon there, too.

Such an offender initially is apt to commit his crimes within walking distance of where he lives or works. However, if he is not caught and is mentally competent and capable of learning, he may soon stop taking such risks and evolve, over time, into an organized offender.

In a representative case Hazelwood consulted on in 1997, a young female was raped and murdered at home. The offender, who was personally acquainted with his victim, had kicked her and struck her with his fists before beating her to death with a steel rod he'd picked up inside her house. He left her body where he killed her and returned to his residence, which was less than a thousand yards away.

Roy immediately categorized the criminal as disorganized because he knew his victim, chose a weapon of opportunity, made no effort to conceal what he had done, and lived a short distance away from the murder scene.

The organized offender, by contrast, is a planner. He brings his own weapons or restraints, hunts away from where he lives or works, normally has no traceable a.s.sociation with his victim, and takes steps to conceal the body, as well as to remove evidence. He'll take care not to leave fingerprints, body fluids such as blood or s.e.m.e.n, or spent cartridges and sh.e.l.ls.

He is usually older, as well as more mature, than the disorganized offender. He prefers to commit his crime in seclusion, and often transports his victim to a second location for disposal. He is not necessarily concerned if she ultimately is discovered, because the publicity surrounding her death and its impact on the community can be highly exciting to him.

A case Roy worked on as a consultant in 1997 featured an organized offender. In the crime, a masked and gloved intruder, armed with a 9mm handgun, entered a retail business at closing time, taking six employees hostage. He had them bind one another, and then shot all six, killing three of them. After robbing the establishment, he collected the spent sh.e.l.ls and departed.

This was an experienced, mature, and highly organized offender. He planned his crime, brought what he needed with him, concealed his ident.i.ty, chose an advantageous moment (closing time) to strike, eliminated half the possible witnesses against him (the others were left for dead, his single oversight), and removed potential physical evidence (the sh.e.l.ls) before leaving.

He still has not been caught, or even as yet identified.

Hazelwood also has characterized the organized offender as "a thinking criminal," and the disorganized offender as "not a thinking criminal."

Thinking criminals tend to be extroverted and articulate, use (but do not abuse) alcohol and drugs, and are highly narcissistic. They often take great care with their physical health and appearance, and can pa.s.s anything but a mirror.

Exceptions exist.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, obviously was highly organized, a thinking criminal. A Ph.D. mathematician, Kaczynski fabricated and exploded sixteen intricately built bombs over eighteen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-eight more. Yet he also was socially isolated, a hairy, ill-kempt hermit with few apparent social skills, who lived in a rustic shed in rural Montana.

Psychiatrists later diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Still another exception to the general rule is the disorganized offender who creates havoc, but in the midst of it also drops a clear hint of who he is and where he's been.

In one gory case that Roy worked, an offender had carefully extracted five green peas from his victim's eviscerated stomach and lined them up precisely on a plate.

Hazelwood surmised that the killer had once been inst.i.tutionalized, and later was proved correct in his conjecture.

"How'd you get that idea?" a skeptical Dr. Dietz asked him.

Hazelwood explained to his friend the psychiatrist that in an inst.i.tution where a person is totally controlled, a need for order in one's life develops. A patient, for example, might neatly line up books on a window ledge, even though his mind is chaotic.

The same patient, having just chaotically slaughtered a victim, might express that same craving for orderliness in the way this offender did, by arranging the green peas just so.

Organized offenders tend to remain organized over time, although again there are exceptions, such as Ted Bundy.

Bundy abducted and killed as many as a dozen girls and young women before the police discerned a pattern to their disappearances, or any of their remains-much less a crime scene-were discovered.

He murdered perhaps fifteen more victims before he was first arrested, by accident, and was charged with a kidnapping, not homicide. Even then there were no known witnesses to any of his abduction-murders, nor any fingerprints or other physical evidence that conclusively tied Ted to any of his twenty-seven or more s.e.xual homicides.

Then Bundy began to unravel. On Super Bowl Sunday, 1978, in a b.l.o.o.d.y and wholly uncharacteristic spasm of spontaneous violence, he clubbed to death two sleeping coeds, and left two others for dead, in the upstairs bedrooms of the Chi Omega sorority house on the campus of Florida State University in Tallaha.s.see. In his even wilder ultimate a.s.sault-for which he was caught, convicted, and executed-on February 9, 1978, Ted s.n.a.t.c.hed Kimberly Diane Leach from her junior high school campus in broad daylight. He slit the twelve-year-old Florida schoolgirl's throat and deposited her partially clad body under an abandoned hog shed some miles away. Bundy was captured drunk, driving a stolen car, less than a week later.

Ted's final crime was hardly organized-at least not in the way his early kills were-but it wasn't entirely disorganized, either. It was "mixed," a third cla.s.sification first proposed at BSU by John Douglas, Bob Ressler, and other agents who saw that not every crime fits exactly on one side or the other of Roy's original divide.

In fact, the Odom-Lawson case represented one important cla.s.s of mixed offender cases, crimes in which two perpetrators of contrasting criminal type are involved.

The fact that Odom's and Lawson's victim was taken to a secluded spot argues for an organized offender. So would the serological evidence of s.e.m.e.n found in her v.a.g.i.n.a; disorganized offenders are less likely to commit penile rape.

Yet the frenzied, postmortem mutilation and apparent indifference to how and when the body was discovered gave the crime a disorganized cast as well.

Multiple factors can be at play to create a mixed crime scene.

Sometimes what the investigator finds is behavioral evidence of a youthful disorganized offender in transition toward becoming organized. Sometimes, as with Odom and Lawson, mixed evidence actually points to two or more offenders.

The offender may also be mixed in that while he exhibits a disorganized criminal's typically short emotional fuse, he is also organized to the extent that he can a.s.sess his situation and adjust his behavior to avoid taking undue risks. Serial killer Jack Harrison Trawick typified this type of mixed offender.

The disorganized, organized, and mixed categories apply across the range of deviant criminality, including rape. However, Hazelwood's second major contribution to the cla.s.sification of aberrant criminals was to divide rapists themselves into six groups. He adapted the system from a typology first suggested by clinical psychologist Nicholas Groth, author of Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender.

Nick Groth was among the first researchers to observe that the underlying motivations for rape are princ.i.p.ally power and anger, sometimes in combination. There are very few rapists for whom the primary motive is s.e.xual.

The first of Hazelwood's offender types is the "power rea.s.surance rapist," who is the most common example of a ritualistic, stranger-to-stranger rapist.

Familiar to newspaper readers as "the Gentleman Rapist" or "the Friendly Rapist" or any similar name that suggests what Hazelwood calls this type's "pseudo-unselfish" behavior, the power rea.s.surance rapist is trying to do just that: rea.s.sure himself of his masculinity (which he deeply doubts) by exercising physical control over women.

The fantasy which fuels his behavior is of a willing, even eager, victim, the sort of s.e.xual encounter he feels totally incapable of consummating in his day-to-day world. With a victim, however, he may play the part of ardent lover, fondling and complimenting her on her appearance, frequently inquiring solicitously if he's pleasing her.

The power rea.s.surance rapist often produces a weapon, or claims to be carrying one. However, his fantasy is to express power through s.e.x, not physical injury. He is the rapist least likely to apply more force than absolutely necessary to compel his victim's compliance.

His hallmarks are victims selected from within his own age range, whom he forces to remove their own clothing as a way of feeding his fantasy that they are his willing partners.

This offender generally spends an extended period of time with the victim, especially if he encounters a particularly pa.s.sive female upon whom he can act out all of his s.e.xual fantasies.

Afterward-and consistent with "pseudo-unselfish" behavior-he may apologize and even ask her forgiveness.

An example of the power rea.s.surance rapist from Roy's casebook, one that he uses in his lectures, was an offender in Tennessee. After selecting a victim who lived alone, the rapist broke into her house through a bathroom window, pointed a knife at her, and said, "Do what I say and I won't hurt you."

The woman complied, as she later explained to Roy.

He kissed and fondled her, and within five minutes had committed a v.a.g.i.n.al rape. Then he remained in bed with her for another forty-five minutes, head propped on an arm, speaking about himself.

The rapist explained that he was a college graduate and had been married until the day he caught his wife cheating with another man. Since then, he'd become a serial rapist, he said.

"That's the reason I'm committing these crimes," he told her, as if his unhappy personal history somehow explained, or mitigated, the degradation and trauma he was causing her.

As the conversation continued, his victim said she was engaged to be married.

He told her that he had parked his car six blocks away and left the keys in it. He said he hoped the vehicle wouldn't be stolen. He said he had a drunk friend who'd come with him, but that he wouldn't allow the fellow inside because he was drunk and he could not be responsible for his behavior. He advised her to repair the broken latch on her bathroom window.

After he finally left and she was calling the police, the victim discovered that four hundred dollars in cash had been stolen from her purse. Next morning, she opened her mailbox to find an envelope containing the money and a printed note from the rapist, executed in crayon in block letters.

In it, he first advised her again to fix the bathroom window lock.

He then wrote that he was "terribly sorry" his inebriated friend had sneaked into the house and stolen the cash, "and that he a.s.sures me that is all he took." He felt very fortunate to report his car had not been stolen, and wished her and her fiance the best of luck.

Stealing four hundred dollars from a rape victim just to return the money in order to convince her you're really a good person ill.u.s.trates the sort of complex and convoluted reasoning of which the power rea.s.surance rapist is capable.

An offender in Hazelwood's next category, the "power a.s.sertive rapist," would find such a gambit wimpish, incomprehensible. Less common than the power rea.s.surance rapist, and more violent, the power a.s.sertive offender, as Roy explains, "a.s.saults to a.s.sert his masculinity, about which he has no doubts. The key to understanding him is his macho self-perception. The most important thing in the world for him is for others to see him as a man's man."

This offender, who like the power rea.s.surance rapist generally selects victims of roughly his own age, attacks in no particular pattern and at any convenient time and place. Unlike the power rea.s.surance rapist, he will rip his victim's clothes from her body himself, and attack her repeatedly with no concern for her suffering.

Typically, he uses a moderate level of force whether or not his victim resists him. Experts in domestic violence have told Hazelwood that the power a.s.sertive rapist is most similar to the offender profile for date and spousal rapists.

One power a.s.sertive rapist whom Roy interviewed described to Hazelwood the time he came upon a female motorist stranded in her disabled car. She had her child with her, and was fearful. However, he was a well-dressed and well-spoken white male, and she soon relaxed a bit, grateful someone had stopped to offer his a.s.sistance.

He raised the hood and looked at the engine with an air of authority.

"You need a mechanic," he informed her, and offered the woman a ride to the closest garage. Because of his politeness and appearance, she risked accepting his offer.