The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators Read Free

City. Cause of death was presumed to be suicide.
    Since that first profile, Hazelwood’s research projects have taken criminology where it’s never been before, from the malignant misogyny of criminal sexual sadists to behavior that often is neither criminal nor violent nor predatory, but nonetheless poses critical challenges to law enforcement.
    When I first met him, Roy, with Dr. Dietz and Ann Wolbert Burgess, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania,recently had published the first and only textbook ever devoted to autoerotic fatalities. These accidental, often bizarre deaths frequently are mistaken by investigators for murders or suicides. Hazelwood has even identified a subset of such cases,
atypical
autoerotic deaths.
    Another of his innovations is the “organized-disorganized” aberrant criminal dichotomy, as familiar to homicide investigators today as handcuffs. The dichotomy is a shorthand way for police to quickly ascertain from crime-scene evidence what sort of UNSUB they seek.
    If, for example, a killer brings with him the weapons and restraints he requires to commit the crime, and then takes pains to secrete his victim’s body, he is demonstrating foresight, and is probably an experienced, mature, coherent criminal—“organized.” If, by contrast, the crime scene is chaotic, and reflects no planning nor any particular care taken to get away safely, the offender is apt to be young, inexperienced, or possibly even psychotic—“disorganized.”
    When it is clearly evident that an UNSUB is organized or disorganized, that knowledge is vitally useful in focusing the critically important early stages of a criminal investigation.
    “The disorganized and organized classification of crimes was fantastic, a brainstorm,” says Vernon J. Geberth, a retired New York Police Department lieutenant commander and author of the standard police textbook,
Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures and Forensic Techniques.
“For a police officer to be able to define and describe behavior without using clinical terms was just fantastic.”
    Besides noting his evident style, my first impression of Roy in Des Moines that Monday night was how different he seemed from the other BSU agents Hugh and I had met. Roger Depue, unit chief during the BSU’s heyday of the 1980s, once told me that overseeing Hazelwood and his brother profilers was a little like coaching a football team with eleven quarterbacks.
    “They were all different, with very strong ideas about what they wanted to do, and how to do it,” said Depue.
    Intelligent, highly motivated, hardworking, and good company, especially when they’ve had a few drinks, profilers tend to combine the giant, fragile ego of the brain surgeon with the tireless intensity of genius-level computer programmers.
    They can be a strange bunch.
    Depue remembers camaraderie in the unit, a sense of specialness that this platoon of psychological commandos—
Psychology Today
called them “mind hunters”—shared. But the fault lines in the unit also ran deep. There are certain present and former BSU agents it is best not to invite to the same function.
    Roy, a natural diplomat, remains on cordial relations with all his old buddies. He’s centered in a way that many of them are not. He also maintains a healthy perspective on his work.
    Roger Depue recalls that Hazelwood was one of the very few BSU agents who could leave profiling’s horrors on his desk each night, and then pick up the burden of reconstructing ghastly murders afresh each morning.
    As Roy tells it, the key is not to dwell in the overwhelming evil, but to sequester it or defuse it. He employs one of the homicide investigator’s trustiest emotional allies in this battle, mocking irreverence.
    Some years ago, after listening to Hazelwood lecture at a conference, an older female psychologist approached him.
    “How do you cope with all that violence?” she asked.
    “I looked her right in the eye and said,