Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (5 page)

I learned this information about vehicular modification with a twinge of recognition. When I was in Binghamton, New York, working on organized crime investigations in the mid-1970s, I often did automobile surveillance at night. I had the Bureau mechanic install switches that darkened either headlight and either or both taillights. This device allowed me to observe a person for long periods at night without being “made.” My car became known as “the Batmobile” among my FBI colleagues. How eerie that Anderson had used a similar ploy, not to further justice, but to foil it.

Sexual crimes begin as fantasy, but fortunately only a small minority of fantasies lead to sexual crimes. According to mental health professionals, everyone harbors hidden desires, if only fleetingly. Yet for the vast majority, simply contemplating forbidden acts seems to suffice. Most of us never seriously consider bringing those reveries to reality.

The sexual offender crosses the threshold where others do not. No one knows exactly why an individual graduates from simply imagining his crimes to what the serial killer, Ted Bundy, called “inappropriate acting out.” A number of factors probably intersect, but all of them stem from the compulsions to express anger and assert power.

We are fortunate that most sexual offenders do not invest as much time in fantasy as did Robert Leroy Anderson. If they did, law enforcement would have a much harder time identifying and apprehending the sexual criminal.

To help investigators and mental health professionals differentiate between those who have complex and ritualistic fantasies and those who do not, Dr. Janet Warren of the University of Virginia and I developed a typology for sexual offenders.

We divided our subjects into two categories: “impulsive” and “ritualistic,” terms for sexual criminals that are comparable to the “organized/disorganized” dichotomy that John Douglas of the BSU and I had developed earlier for killers. This simple distinction not only helps define an offender’s type of fantasy but also helps determine the manner in which he is likely to act it out.

The Impulsive Offender

This is not an intelligent criminal. He is apt to be dull witted and foolish and is least successful at evading identification and apprehension. As the term
impulsive
suggests, he lacks discipline and self-control. He makes poor decisions and carries out his crimes in an unplanned, unsophisticated manner.

An example of such a criminal (although not a sexual offender) was a thief who was once featured, appropriately enough, on a TV show about the world’s most stupid criminals.

On the program a woman reported to passing police officers that her purse had just been snatched, and she provided a very good description of the man who did it. Two blocks away officers arrested him with the handbag still in his possession. They advised him of his rights and then told him that they were going to take him back to the victim for a positive identification.

Upon arrival, and before the woman could say anything, the suspect pointed his finger at her and said, “Yep, that’s the woman I took the purse from.” Now that’s what I call a positive identification! It’s also a good example of the impulsive offender.

About the only thing that impulsive and ritualistic offenders share in common is an underlying need for power, feelings of anger, or a combination of the two. At that point all similarity ceases between the two.

The impulsive offender lacks clarity or definition and so do his fantasies. Actually, what goes on in his mind probably doesn’t rise to the level of full-scale fantasy. Whereas a ritualistic offender, such as Robert Leroy Anderson, might paint his mental pictures with patience, intelligence, close attention to detail and texture from a richly hued palette, the impulsive offender deals in stick figures. His imaginings are simple and crude, more like fragmented thoughts than well-defined scripts.

The victim appears to him in primitive terms: female-available-vulnerable. She may be a stranger, his wife, a girlfriend, or a street prostitute. He is not a discriminating criminal. Women, to him, serve a single function: They are disposable vessels for gratification. This one-dimensional attitude toward the opposite sex ties in with his view of his role in the crime, a perspective of entitlement: “I want to do it, so I will.”

I have interviewed a large number of impulsive offenders over the years, and among them one trait stands out: These men report giving little or no thought to their crimes until they actually encounter their victims. An impulsive offender may decide to commit a crime before leaving home but no further planning takes place until he actually sees the potential victim.

For example, I was called to consult on the case of a serial rapist in Texas who was known to be responsible for at least six assaults. Representative of his modus operandi was a crime he carried out early one Saturday morning.

He had been roaming through a neighborhood, armed with a handgun and intending to burglarize an apartment. He suddenly decided to target a particular second-story apartment, even though it would have been much simpler to enter one on the first floor. He had no idea who or how many people resided inside the apartment or even if anyone was home. He wore no mask, disguise, or gloves. He simply decided that was where he would commit his crime, and he wanted to do it, so he did.

He climbed the patio fence of the occupied downstairs apartment, swung up to the second-floor balcony, and put his shoulder to the locked French doors, tearing them from their hinges as he knocked the door frame loose, creating quite a disturbance.

A woman and her male companion were sleeping together inside. The man got up to check on the noise and was confronted by our impulsive offender, who, until that moment, had thought only of burglarizing the residence. But after discovering the woman, he decided to exploit her availability and vulnerability. Producing his handgun, he ordered the man into a closet with a warning not to interfere or he and the woman would both be killed.

Every phase of the sexual assault was brutal. He forced the woman to perform fellatio and then raped her anally. He was liberally profane, threatening, and demanding as he spoke to her. If the victim was slow to comply, he struck her repeatedly until she did as she was ordered. Before fleeing out the front door, he placed the woman in her bathroom shower and ransacked the apartment.

From beginning to end, his attack showed the recklessness that is so characteristic of the impulsive sex offender. He randomly selected his target with no concern for potential risk and then impulsively seized the chance to sexually assault an available victim, taking no precautions to protect his identity.

The Ritualistic Offender

If the impulsive offender is a glutton, then the ritualistic offender is a connoisseur of his crime.

He is the thinking criminal, a virtuoso of his own aberrant urges. He spends enormous amounts of time in fantasy, carefully working out the details before acting out the mechanics of his ritualized sexual offense. This offender is not as frequently encountered as the impulsive criminal, perhaps because he is more successful in evading detection. The ritualistic offender is cunning, methodical, and usually invisible. He’s Ted Bundy, Leonard Lake, Christopher Wilder. Unfortunately, he can also be your neighbor, coworker, or some anonymous employee behind a counter at your local mall. Neither his appearance nor his behavior provides a clue to his dark desires.

Depending on the amount of information available, it is generally a simple task for the trained analyst to determine whether a given criminal is ritualistic or impulsive. Yet even after I establish to my satisfaction that a sexual criminal is indeed ritualistic, I still have a lot of work to do. All ritualistic offenders bring different, individual perspectives to a crime.

By way of analogy, think of a baseball team. All nine players are members of the same club; but they can bring widely differing skills, mental approaches, and levels of experience to the game. A long ball slugger, for example, goes about the game very differently than the spray hitter. Third basemen and pitchers do not see the action on the field in the same way. The same is true with ritualistic offenders; there are many types.

To narrow down the complexities of so many individual offenders, Dr. Warren and I identified five specific components that are common to all ritualistic offenders’ fantasies. We call them:

1. RELATIONAL
   
2. PARAPHILIC
   
3. SITUATIONAL
   
4. VICTIM DEMOGRAPHICS
   
5. SELF-PERCEPTIONAL
   

Relational

The relational component is whatever the offender fantasizes the relationship between himself and his victim to be. Within this category we see a wide range of behaviors. For instance, although these men target strangers as victims, the most common relational fantasy I have encountered among them is boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, or lover. At the opposite end of the relational continuum is the fantasy of “master-slave.”

To define a rapist’s relational fantasy, I examine his crimes through a three-step process: (1) learning what the offender said to the victim and/or demanded that she say to him; (2) interpreting the amount of physical violence that he used against the victim; and (3) ascertaining the type and sequence of sexual acts involved.

For example, an offender who is acting out a “boyfriend-girlfriend” fantasy is typically not profane and can be even complimentary. He uses little or no physical force, preferring the types of sexual acts I call “criminal foreplay” (i.e., kissing, caressing, and cunnilingus), behavior that reflects his desire to have the victim become (in his mind) an active, willing partner.

On the other hand, a perpetrator acting out a master-slave relational fantasy will degrade his victim verbally with epithets such as “slut,” “whore,” or “bitch.” He demands subservience.

I would expect a high level of physical violence, possibly involving whipping, slapping, or hitting, and the use of painful restraints, such as handcuffs or chains. His sexual acts of choice are intended to degrade and humiliate his victim.

In a sexual homicide, testimony from the victim, of course, is not available; however, investigators can make inferences from other sources.

A few of the methods we use include: (1) accounts given by informants; (2) the nature and extent of injuries sustained by the victim; (3) the materials recovered from the offender; and (4) the theme of his pornography collection.

Robert Leroy Anderson, for example, had a master-slave relational fantasy. He told Glenn Walker, “It’s the rush…of having a total stranger do what you want.” Anderson repeatedly told Glenn Walker that Larisa Dumansky pleaded with him to do with her what he wanted but not to hurt her. These entreaties, of course, were in vain.

Compare this behavior with that of the offender who fantasizes a husband-wife relationship with his victim. “Tom”
^*
was such a rapist. Responsible for eighteen assaults, he interacted with his victims in a highly individual way. Tom would capture a victim and take her to a river or lake. There he would instruct her to periodically ask the following questions: “Do we have enough money to get the kids’ teeth fixed this year?” “What is your bowling average?” “Have you rented the mountain cabin yet?” “When are you going to get the refrigerator fixed?”

Most people would laugh at such nonsense, but to the behavioral scientist, it is critical information. These questions tell me what is in Tom’s mind, what fantasy he is trying to bring to reality.

Paraphilic

The second component of the ritualistic offender’s fantasy world is its paraphilic dimension.
Paraphilia
is the preferred mental health term for sexual deviation. Sexual sadism is a paraphilia, as are voyeurism, masochism, transvestitism, fetishism, telephone scatology, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and necrophilia, to name a few. The ritualistic offender will have a paraphilic fantasy, and he will almost always express this deviance in his crimes.

Robert Leroy Anderson, for example, demonstrated at least two paraphilias: sexual bondage (not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a paraphilia but generally accepted as one) and sexual sadism.

Situational

The third facet of fantasy is the situational component. What circumstance or setting does the offender wish to realize? To help my audiences understand the meaning of the term
situational
I use my lectures as an analogy. They take place in a situation, or setting, of the classroom; and the relationship between myself and the people in the audience is teacher-student.

Anderson’s situational fantasy was a torture chamber. He constructed a platform that conformed to his Bronco’s cargo space. He had materials to restrain his victim. He also had implements to cause his victim’s suffering. In essence, he had created a dungeon within his Bronco.

At the opposite end of the situational continuum, Tom’s situational fantasy was domestic, a “home and hearth” setting for his rapes.

Victim Demographics

The fourth component is victim demographics. Recall that the impulsive offender’s victim criterion is simply a female who is vulnerable. Not so with the ritualistic criminal. As a result of the great amount of time he spends in fantasizing, this imaginative offender develops highly specific selection standards for his victims. Leonard Lake, as we’ve noted, always looked for a slim, petite, small-breasted female of eighteen to twenty-two, with shoulder-length blonde hair.

Pedophiles select victims by gender and age but may also have a preference for victims of a particular race, hair color, or even a particular nose shape. Necrophiliacs require a dead victim, of course; beyond that their fantasies are wide-ranging. Whatever the ritualistic offender’s demographic profile, it will always be specific to his, or her, fantasy.

Self-Perceptional

The final area of fantasy is the self-perceptional component. How does the offender fantasize his role in the crime? The continuum here ranges from godlike omnipotence to feelings of extreme inadequacy.

Examples of the first type abound. Paul Bernardo, the “Ken” of Toronto’s infamous husband-and-wife, “Ken and Barbie,” sexual murders forced his victims (including “Barbie,” his wife, Karla Homolka) to call him “master.” By contrast, San Diego serial rapist Kenneth Bogard, just like Tom, imagined himself the desirable object of his victims’ affections.

Never mind that it was necessary to kidnap someone in order to play out their scenarios. Judging from the number of victims the two offenders involved in their fantasies, Bogard and Tom obviously never tired of repeating them.