Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (12 page)

Dr. Gene Abel, an Atlanta-based mental health expert who is internationally recognized for his work with sexual offenders, has found that aberrant offenders rarely exhibit just a single deviation. If you know an individual is a voyeur, for example, you can expect to find that he is engaging in at least one additional paraphilia, such as fetishism.

Documenting such behavior, of course, is another question. Peeping, obscene calls, and indecent exposure typically are treated as nuisance offenses, troublesome but not serious. Yet before disregarding such offenses, investigators should try to ascertain just what the caller said over the phone or what an exhibitionist said as he exposed himself. “You are lovely, and I would like to make love to you” is very different from, “I want to stab you till my arm falls off.”

The caller in all likelihood is masturbating to this fantasy as he speaks. The idea is what arouses him. A person with such violent fantasies should be identified and evaluated for treatment, if possible, because he poses a potentially grave danger to society.

Preferences and Passions

We found considerable uniformity in our sample group when it came to their preferred sexual acts with victims. Seventy-three percent of the sadists preferred anal rape; 70 percent preferred fellatio; 58 percent vaginal intercourse; and 40 percent foreign object penetration.

Why such a strong preference for anal sex? It is tempting to surmise a connection to their adult homosexual experiences. But I don’t think the answer is that simple. Remember, anger and the will to power are the sexual sadist’s primary motivations; in addition, he is aroused by suffering. That’s why I believe his preference for anal rape is tied to the pain and degradation such an act exacts upon the victim.

This would also explain the common preference for fellatio. While not nearly as physically injurious, fellatio can be highly traumatic emotionally. It requires not only that a victim participate against her will, but that she perform an undeniably intimate act in a demeaning way with a total stranger.

Similarly, penetration by a foreign object is degrading. In my opinion, it is the ultimate objectification of a woman. It was a favorite of DeBardeleben, Anderson, and Malone, all of whom tortured victims by inserting oversized dildos into their rectums.

Dead on the Outside

A major surprise for me in the survey was how unemotional and detached most of the men seemed with their victims. Prior to reviewing the tapes and videos they kept of their crimes, I expected they would be hyperventilating from the excitement, the way Billy Lee Chadd described his own ecstatic moments. My assumption was wrong. Chadd was the exception.

One of Mike DeBardeleben’s victims told police, “He was like a boring schoolteacher,” repeatedly instructing her on what she was to say and how she was to act. On the several torture tapes he recorded, the only emotion DeBardeleben shows is occasional anger when a victim fails to accurately repeat the words of a script he’s given her, or she doesn’t perform sexually in the manner he demands. The more frenzied his victims become, the more detached DeBardeleben becomes. The same was true of Leonard Lake.

The great white sharks are into power and control. To them emotions, especially fear, indicate a weakness that they associate only with victims. In fact, for sexual sadists, the victim must by definition show fear. He, on the other hand, must exhibit power and control over others
and
over himself.

“You have two choices,” Leonard Lake says on one videotape in a flat voice, “you can either cook, clean, and fuck for us; or we will take you in the back, tie you to the bed, rape you, take you out in the woods, shoot you in the head, and bury you. What is your decision?”

Not only was Lake reinforcing his narcissistic self-image of godlike power; but he was also conveying to his victim, who fully realized her helplessness, that he was her opposite, the omnipotent controller of her destiny.

Terrified on the Inside

Such posturing masks a very different inner reality for most sexual sadists. Fear, in the form of paranoia, is one of their constant companions. Indeed, after narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders, I noted a wide prevalence of paranoid personality disorder (PPD) among our thirty subjects.

Persons with PPD are suspicious, mistrustful, hypervigilant, and constantly concerned with being betrayed. The paranoiac harbors illogical doubts about the loyalty of others and reads hidden meanings into innocent remarks or events.

Mike DeBardeleben’s reading ran to titles such as
You’re Under Surveillance
and
How to Tell If Your Phone’s Been Tapped
. At his various trials for counterfeiting, kidnap, and rape, he repeatedly alleged a federal conspiracy against him, spearheaded by Mike Stephens, Greg Mertz, and Dennis Foos, the three Secret Service agents who investigated DeBardeleben after his capture. More than once he accused Foos of Nazism, a bizarre allegation that he never explained.

“I was framed,” he railed at one of his trials, “framed in a sinister, evil, and insidious machination, a conspiracy, if you will!”

He even denounced one of his ex-wives for her imagined role in the plot against him, even though this emotionally broken woman never testified and still sobs at the mere mention of his name.

Strange Bedfellows

I’m sure many readers will be surprised to learn that in my experience the two types of sexual offenders with the most characteristics in common are sexual sadists and pedophiles.

This seems counterintuitive, I know. Most pedophiles are not physically violent, while the sexual sadist is very likely to be so. However, when you look at these two more closely, certain striking similarities emerge.

First, a clarification of terms. Pedophile and child molester often are used interchangeably, but they are quite different.
Pedophile
, in psychiatric usage, describes an individual who is preferentially attracted sexually to a prepubescent child (generally thirteen years of age or less). However, a pedophile does not become a criminal until he molests a child. It is entirely possible for a pedophile to act out his sexual preferences only in his mind or with a consenting adult or paid partner who plays the role of a child. That is not criminal behavior.

Child molester
is a legal term used to describe any person who sexually molests a child, which most definitely is criminal behavior. All child molesters are criminals, and a pedophile who acts out against a child consequently is a child molester. The adult male criminal pedodile deliberately preys on children.

Here is how he and the sexual sadist are alike:

• Both are ritualistic sexual criminals. They have highly developed fantasy lives and carry out their crimes according to a script.
  
• Both are highly motivated (their crimes give them deep satisfaction) and they invest great amounts of time, money, and energy to their criminal behavior.
  
• Neither experiences remorse or guilt. The sexual sadist believes that his victims deserve to suffer. The pedophile doesn’t believe he’s caused harm to the child.
  
• Both are highly practiced at rationalizing their behavior and consequently are poorly motivated to change.
  
• Both recognize that society abominates them, and they take steps to study their deviant desires and behaviors to better understand them and to evade arrest.
  
• Both collect theme-oriented pornography and/or erotica that serves to complement their preexisting fantasies.
  
• They possess average or better intelligence and social skills. They mesh well in society. Friends and associates are surprised and supportive of them when they are identified.
  
• Both are likely to commit incest with their natural children and will molest stepchildren or other minor relatives.
  
• They record their criminal sexual acts. This provides them with a means of reliving and improving on their criminal acts.
  
• Their rate of recidivism is much greater than for other sexual offenders. They tend to be model prisoners and consequently are released more quickly and, having learned nothing from their punishment, quickly begin practicing sexual deviance again.
  
• Both are highly narcissistic.
  
• Both have a low threshold for sexual boredom and involve their victims in progressively offensive and demeaning behaviors.
  
• Most sexual criminals slow down with age. There is no known burn-out age for these two offenders. Unless stopped, such men will offend well into their sixties or seventies.
  
• They have greater numbers of victims than other sexual offenders. Once these men begin to act out criminally, they will assault until they are caught.
  
• They are predominantly middle-class offenders. This is another reason why other people are surprised when they are identified.
  

Criminal sexual sadists pose one of law enforcement’s greatest challenges. Though rare, they are intelligent men who invest great amounts of time in planning their crimes, and they easily blend into society because they “look like us.”

Above all, they are determined.

As Jon Simonis told Ken Lanning and me: “There are a lot of steps you can take to help eliminate the average criminal, who is just spontaneous and reckless and careless. But if somebody wants somebody bad enough, it’s nearly impossible to prevent. They could have the best security in the world. They could have guards and dogs and everything else. But if you have the time and the patience, the opportunity is going to arise when you can hit someone.”

In 1990, I attended a case presentation in San Francisco given by Christine McGuire, then an assistant district attorney in Santa Cruz, and Chris Hatcher, a well-known forensic psychologist, since deceased, with whom I had consulted on a number of cases.

McGuire and Hatcher spoke before a professional audience about an astonishing case that Christine had prosecuted (and in which Chris had testified as an expert witness)—the kidnapping and seven-year sexual enslavement of college student Colleen Stan. The story, which Christine has recounted with writer Carla Norton in their book,
Perfect Victim
, began when Stan, twenty, started hitchhiking south from Eugene, Oregon, through Red Bluff, California, on May 19, 1977. Colleen was on her way to a friend’s birthday party in the Northern California hamlet of Westwood, about one hundred miles south of Red Bluff.

As she stood beside the road with her thumb out, a blue Dodge Colt drew to a stop. Inside she saw a young couple, Cameron and Janice Hooker, with their baby daughter. The Hookers told Colleen that they were headed in her direction. She gratefully got into the backseat.

Colleen could remember no particular reason why this mild-mannered couple seemed to become more and more sinister to her as they drove along, but they did. At a rest stop, the young woman had to argue herself out of bolting their company at once.

Then it was too late. Out in the middle of nowhere, as the Hookers drove to what they said was a brief side excursion to explore some ice caves, Cameron Hooker stopped the car, pulled a knife, and told Colleen to do exactly as he said. Thus began seven years of hell during which Colleen was confined in a box kept beneath the Hookers’ bed. She was sexually abused and degraded, and brainwashed into believing that she deserved the life of suffering to which they subjected her. On several occasions she might have succeeded in escaping but did not attempt it.

Perfect Victim
provides a full account of this horrendous tale, and I recommend it to the reader. It would be an understatement to say that Christine and Chris kept their audience spellbound that day in San Francisco.

Following their presentation, several people approached me with the same question: “Wouldn’t you love to interview Colleen Stan?” To their surprise, I said I was more interested in interviewing Janice Hooker. She was married to Cameron Hooker for thirteen years. I wanted to know what their courtship was like. What kind of father and provider he was? What did he read or watch on television? What type of sexual partner was he? What were his childhood and adolescence like? Did he collect things? If so, what? Did he have political views? Why did she cooperate in Colleen Stan’s abduction?

So many questions occurred to me. Then I got a great idea.

I had already interviewed a great many people with strange and violent stories to tell: serial rapists, sexual sadists, child abductors, killers of all sorts, and relatives of their victims. My colleagues in the BSU had also interviewed a wide range of aberrant offenders: serial killers, assassins, traitors, child abductors, and serial arsonists. But to my knowledge, no one ever had systematically interviewed the wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists.

A Study in Servitude

I brought my idea to John Campbell, unit chief at the BSU. He approved the research project, which I undertook in collaboration with my old research partners, Park Dietz and Janet Warren. Together, we developed an interview protocol, or questionnaire, that covered more than five hundred separate facts.

This was by far the most interesting and emotionally challenging series of interviews I ever conducted. Identifying the women wasn’t difficult; I had extensive personal knowledge about many sexual sadists, plus I enjoyed wonderful support and cooperation from FBI agents, police officers, mental health professionals, and prosecutors throughout the country.

Eventually, we interviewed twenty “compliant victims.” I refer to them as compliant, not to excuse any criminal behavior, but rather to make clear that they, too, were victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of sexual sadists.

In contrast to the sexual sadists’ stranger victims, however, the wives and girlfriends acquiesced in their treatment.

Compliant Victims

One of the most surprising facts to emerge was how quiet and conventional these women’s lives were before they met the sadistic male. All were of average or better intelligence, and they had completed from between eleven and sixteen years of formal education. Only two were unemployed at the time they began their relationship with the sexual sadist.

Eight of the women worked at unskilled jobs, six in skilled positions (i.e., secretary, salesperson), and four were professionals (i.e., teacher, business owner). Five members of the study group were in school (four in high school and one in college) at the time they met the man. Only two had used drugs before becoming the sadist’s partner. Almost all eventually would abuse illegal drugs.

They had no criminal histories to speak of—fewer than five arrests among them. One had shoplifted a tube of lipstick at age fourteen. Another had tried to steal a typewriter. A third was arrested at eighteen for stealing a check.

The main thing they shared was intimacy with a type of sexual offender who views all women as evil. He thinks of them as bitches, whores, sluts, and worse. The sexual sadist’s agenda is to prove himself right in this opinion. Consequently, he doesn’t select a prostitute or drug addict as his wife or girlfriend. Instead, he chooses a woman from a nice middle-class family and gradually transforms her into a sexual slave willing to join him in any act, no matter how degrading or depraved, to prove her love or to keep him from leaving.

Although each woman had a unique story to tell, the men they were involved with used the same techniques to bring them under their control. The process was amazingly consistent from offender to offender, and it comprised five identifiable steps.

The Road to a Living Hell

First, the sexual sadist identifies a likely partner/victim. A variety of traits make a woman vulnerable to such men. Youthfulness, low self-esteem, inexperience, naïveté, difficulty making decisions, or recent emotional trauma, such as the breakup of a relationship—any of these factors can make a person more easy to manipulate.

I also noticed in my interviews that many of the women tended to be dependent. In fact, I believe some of them would be professionally diagnosed with dependent personality disorder (DPD), described in
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
, 4th edition (DSM IV) as “a pattern of submissive and clinging behavior relating to an excessive need to be taken care of.” Sexual sadists have a deadly radar for such women.

The second step is seduction. The sexual sadist’s goal is to have the targeted woman fall in love with him. He is complimentary, uncritical, full of nice surprises, such as gifts and flowers. He generally works hard at making her happy. Eventually, she falls in love with him, and her love becomes a very effective weapon that he uses against her.

You can move a lot of garbage across the bridge of love: alcoholism, infidelity, addiction, abuse. The compliant victim loves almost unconditionally; she’ll endure remarkable amounts of abuse, pain, and heartache once she’s fallen in love. And she’ll acquiesce in loathsome acts of which she once was utterly incapable.

Janice Hooker, for example, apparently wanted a second child by her husband, Cameron. He instinctively exacted a price. As Colleen Stan later told a TV reporter, “I was basically a trade-off. ‘You can have another child if I can have a slave.’… So I was a trade-off.”

In step three, the sexual sadist reshapes his compliant partner’s sexual norms using some basic behavior modification techniques. When, for example, she accedes to a sexual request beyond her level of experience, she is rewarded with feigned kindness, affection, and attention. If she refuses him, he pouts, ignores her, and generally tries to make her feel guilty. Eventually, he manipulates her into performing sexual acts that not only are beyond her experience but also her previous moral threshold.

This, of course, further reduces her self-esteem. Over time he no longer finds it necessary to reward her sexual acquiescence; he simply demands it. If compliance is not forthcoming, he physically and verbally abuses her.

The fourth step, often carried out in concert with step three, is to socially isolate the woman from her family, friends, and associates. He can’t afford to have his partner confide in others about what is taking place in the home so he gradually reduces her contacts outside their relationship.

The stratagems he employs are roundabout and often cunning. One of the women owned a clothing boutique. As she explained to me, she and her employees would go to lunch together and pay via what she called a “New York split”: the bill was divided equally among those present, regardless of what each one had to eat. She always had a wonderful time at these meals, as her employees were also good friends of long-standing.

Then she married a sexual sadist. He convinced her that even with the New York split she was spending too much money on lunches. He proposed that they both limit lunch spending to $1.50 a day and suggested that they put the amount they saved toward the purchase of new furniture she wanted. She found it difficult to disagree and consequently no longer went to lunch with her employees. He had successfully separated her from her friends and coworkers without betraying his true motivation.

Another woman had regularly telephoned her mother long-distance until her sexually sadistic husband made saving money the excuse for cutting back the calls to once a month, and then for no more than ten minutes at a time.

A third young woman and her sexually sadistic new husband moved into a beautiful lakefront house 150 miles from her nearest friends and family. He had insisted that they move to that location. Three days later he began to abuse her physically and sexually. Isolated as she was, she had no one to turn to for help or advice.

The fifth and final step is punishment. Once the relationship has reached this point, all pretense of love and caring disappears. The woman is isolated from family and friends, and she is wholly dependent on the only person left in her life—the sexual sadist.

By now he has thoroughly conditioned her to comply with his perverted sexual demands; and because she does so, he is able to affirm his belief that all women are evil. He reasons that no decent woman would participate in such disgusting behavior. Because she does participate, she justifies the hatred he has secretly had for her from the beginning. In his twisted logic, she deserves to be punished.

Among my case files, one woman’s story stands out as a telling example of this evil transformation.

Ann’s Story

Ann
^*
came to my attention several years ago when Tamia Hope, an assistant prosecutor in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, asked me to be a witness in connection with physical and sexual abuse charges she was bringing against Lyle,
^*
a Los Angeles businessman.

Ann was a married, thirty-six-year-old insurance broker at the time she met Lyle. I would describe her as a naive and trusting person. Ann informed me that although she had been sexually active in her marriage, she had never engaged in any type of sadomasochistic sex, nor had she ever engaged in oral or anal sex before meeting Lyle.

They met when he walked into her office to inquire about a sizable life insurance policy. He was about forty years old, moderately handsome, and very well dressed. Ann said she was impressed by how attentive he was during their initial conversation. Although his purpose ostensibly was business, she remembered that they touched on many personal topics that day, including their respective marriages and expectations in life.

Six months later Lyle called to say that he was interested in another, much larger policy. They met for lunch at an expensive marina restaurant. At the time Ann was having marital problems, and she was depressed. Lyle’s compliments and the undivided attention he lavished on her during their meal were more than welcome. She was in need of a sympathetic listener.

He was intelligent, articulate, and also very funny. Their lunch lasted for several hours, and then they went for a drive. Eventually, they checked into a motel, where Lyle proved to be a considerate sexual partner.

Over the next month he sent flowers and other gifts and called often, becoming a confidante with whom Ann was comfortable sharing any problem. Their sex life intensified, too. To demonstrate her love, Ann agreed to Lyle’s request that she perform oral sex. He seemed extremely appreciative, which pleased her a great deal.

Robert Leroy Anderson. Like many sexually sadistic killers, his homicidal fantasies dated back to his early teens.
South Dakota Attorney General’s Office
.