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

‘Masturbation!’ ” Hazelwood recollects.
    She literally staggered.
    “I said, ‘I’m joking! I’m joking! I’m joking!’ I do the same thing you do. I compartmentalize. This is my job, not my life. I have a home and family and a faith in God.”
    Another common inquiry: Why the fascination with such extreme criminal behavior?
    Hazelwood often senses this questioner’s implicit assumption that cops and criminals are two sides of a very thin coin, a connection he emphatically rejects.
    “I always answer that one with a question of my own,” he says.
    “ ‘When you go to the zoo, what is your favorite animal to look at?’
    “Some people say, ‘I like the snakes.’ Others say, ‘I like the lions.’
    “ ‘Why?’ I ask.
    “ ‘Because they’re dangerous.’
    “ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘that’s why I study sexual offenders, because they’re dangerous.’ ”
    As the cocktail-hour conversation matured into a genial exchange of stories and opinions, my attention wandered repeatedly to a typescript lying on the table between us. It was entitled “An Analysis of Materials Seized from James Mitchell DeBardeleben,” and it rested beneath Roy’s gleaming Zippo, emblazoned with the insignia of the Fourth Infantry Division, Hazelwood’s old unit in Vietnam. Whenever he lit a smoke, Roy returned the lighter to the transcript, like he was checking a poker bet.
    I was intrigued.
    “DeBardeleben is a fascinating case,” Hazelwood finally said, gesturing toward the report. “It ought to be your next book.”
    The year before, Mike DeBardeleben, then forty-three, was arrested in Knoxville by Secret Service agents who for years had known him only as “the Mall Passer,” a rare solo forger who printed his own bills and passed them himself, principally in malls.
    Hazelwood told us that although DeBardeleben was as wily a counterfeiter as the Treasury Department everencountered, his true dimension as a sort of omni-criminal only became clear after Secret Service agents tossed the two miniwarehouses where he’d stashed his printing gear.
    Along with DeBardeleben’s Multilith press and plates and inks and unfinished examples of his handiwork, the federal agents also found guns and knives, drug paraphernalia, dildos, chains, handcuffs, K-Y jelly, jewelry, women’s bloody underwear, and hundreds of photos of women and girls in various states of undress and consciousness, many of them clearly torture victims.
    Then there were the audiotape recordings of the torture sessions themselves. These included one tape in which DeBardeleben himself plays the victim. It certainly is among the strangest sexual sessions ever recorded.
    “I want you to do it! Do it! Do it!” he screams on the cassette. “Bite it! Bite it!
    “Aw! You’re bitin’ it right now! Oh, the pain’s sharp! I love the pain! Bite it harder! Suck it! Bite it! Make the nipple bleed! I hate myself! I hate myself!”
    A three-man Secret Service task force—agents Dennis Foos, Greg Mertz, and Mike Stephens—investigated Mike DeBardeleben. They discovered assaults, murders, kidnappings, rapes, bank heists, drug dealing, flimflams, car thefts, and almost every other possible felony in DeBardeleben’s background.
    Meantime, the agents invited Hazelwood to analyze the materials seized in the two searches, hoping to gain some insight into the criminal incubus they’d captured almost by accident.
    Roy’s key finding was DeBardeleben’s criminal sexual sadism. For such offenders, sex and suffering are one and the same. This perversion, or paraphilia, is surpassingly unusual, even among sexual criminals. But those who harbor it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime, marked by theirwildly complex fantasy worlds, unequaled criminal cunning, paranoia, insatiable sexual hunger, and enormous capacity for destruction.
    Ten years later, I’d retell Mike DeBardeleben’s saga in my book
Lethal Shadow.
But