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

even as Roy first related it, somewhere in the double-digit hours of that Monday night in Des Moines, I already was considering ways of shaping a much different story, this one.
    It couldn’t happen right away: The subject was vast and detailed, and required an extensive commitment of my time and attention. Moreover, with ten years left before retirement from the Bureau, much of Hazelwood’s most important work still lay ahead of him. He would publish pioneering studies of serial rapists and sexual sadists, as well as a separate survey of the former wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists.
    He’d also lecture extensively in the United States and Europe, and contribute his expertise to the resolution of some of the highest-profile criminal cases of the past fifteen years.
    They include the April 9, 1989, turret explosion aboard the USS
Iowa
in which forty-seven sailors were killed; the false accusations of rape and assault made by teenager Tawana Brawley in 1987; and Toronto’s so-called Ken and Barbie sexual murders of the early 1990s.
    Through all this time, Roy was my frequent and invaluable mentor. And as I developed and discarded outline after outline for this book, he was a constant source of revelation.
    I learned from him that sexual criminals are so varied that almost any encompassing statement about them will be inaccurate or misleading. With serial killers, for example, about the only safe generalization is that an inexplicably large percentage of them are named Wayne or Ricky Lee.
    Hazelwood commenced my tutorial where all sexual crime begins, in the fantasy world of the offender.
    As he explains it, “I teach police officers what I call Hazelwood’s Golden Rule of sexual crimes.
    “The crimes are fantasies being acted out. The more complex the crime, the more complex the fantasy and the more intelligent the offender. Most people have no trouble connecting intelligence with a complex robbery. But rape-torture is a depraved act, which they cannot remotely relate to. They therefore resist crediting such offenders with intelligence. This is true even of police officers.
    “On the other hand, consider an impulsive offender, the type who walks up, strikes a woman over the head, knocks her down, penetrates, ejaculates, and walks off. You’ll probably find this guy is of average, or less, intelligence. He’ll have little, if any, criminal sophistication.
    “He’s only got one thing on his mind, as opposed to this other offender who has all this stuff mixed up with what he
calls
sex. That’s the guy who’s interesting to me.”
    We spoke of the importance of ritual to many sexual offenders, particularly the more intelligent ones. Ritual, sometimes referred to as “signature,” is any behavior that heightens the offender’s psychosexual pleasure. It is not connected to the libido’s hardwired component, the procreative urge, or to physiology and hormones.
    Instead, ritual is a product of the imagination, a matter solely out of the conscious mind, where an estimated 70 percent of the human sex drive is generated. It is highly individualized, offender-specific behavior.
    Roy told me about a serial rapist he’d interviewed who was by far the most ritualized offender he’d ever encountered.
    A “power reassurance rapist” in Hazelwood’s typology, this man was a highly presentable middle-aged westerner with a master’s degree in metallurgy and a comfortable income. Successful as he seemed, he was so totally incapable of interacting appropriately with women that rape was the
only
form of sexual intercourse he’d ever experienced.
    He told Hazelwood that he would drive 250 miles from his home to a neighborhood where on previous reconnaissance trips he’d already preselected up to six potential vietims.Reason: “If for any reason he failed in an attack,” says Hazelwood, “while the police were responding to the first victim he could be raping another one safely in her home.”
    On nights he chose to