The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (37 page)

Like Glatman, Bob Rhoades scared his victim half to death, then killed her.

He was extradited from Arizona to Illinois, where he pleaded guilty to the Walters murder. He was given a life sentence in Illinois, and is a suspect in a number of other abduction-murders in other states as well.

In the aftermath of her experience with Rhoades and the disclosure of his crimes, Debra fell into a disastrous third marriage, and attempted suicide for a second time.

“I was having a real rough time with it,” she says. “I was feeling lots and lots of guilt. My way of thinking at the time was that if I’d just stayed with Bob, that young girl would not be dead. It would have been better if I had died. I felt that if I loved this evil man, then / must be an evil person, too.”

As she recovered, she heard from local FBI agent Mark Young that Roy Hazelwood would like to speak with her for a survey he was conducting. Debra agreed to cooperate, and told Hazelwood her story.

“Roy had this big book of questions,” she recollects, “and he started asking me questions about childhood and about my family. It seemed that once I started talking to him, I finally could talk about it. No one ever wanted to listen before.

“And the whole time he kept reassuring me that I was a victim, that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t do anything wrong. The more he made me understand, the better I felt.

“It was so important for me to hear that from him. Roy made me realize what really had gone on, that I wasn’t a bad person just because I loved a bad man. Roy gave me the courage to take control of my life.”

Debra regularly speaks on spousal abuse to audiences in the Houston area. She also counsels physically and sexually abused women. The last thing she heard about Bob Rhoades was that he’d developed colon cancer.

“And when I heard that I just busted up laughing,” she remembers. “Mark Young asked me, ‘Debbie, are you all right?’

“I said,’ Yeah, I’m fine!’

“ ‘Why are you laughing?’

“ ‘Well, after all these years, I couldn’t get him, but God did. I hope he has a long, painful time. He deserves it.’ ”

Michelle Townsend* wishes her tormentor agony in equal measure, but lives in constant dread of him.

Her story begins in the autumn of her senior year in high school, when Michelle, seventeen, was a slender, green-eyed schoolgirl.

Jack* was thirty-five, a Vietnam vet who managed the business where one of her sisters worked.

Michelle at the time was unhappy and confused, still
mourning an older sister who’d died in a car accident, and perplexed over her sexual orientation.

“I didn’t have much experience with men at all,” she explains. “I found him both intriguing and mysterious. He was charismatic and attentive. Four days after we met, he proposed.

“I wasn’t in love, but I saw this as a way to escape my problems. I thought I could eventually fall in love with him, and rid myself of feelings for other women.”

Self-destructive emotional currents guided her thoughts as well.

“I have problems with boundaries and saying no,” she says. “I feel guilty when I say no, like there’s something wrong with me.”

Approximately six weeks after he proposed, and one day after her eighteenth birthday, Jack and Michelle were married by a justice of the peace.

“He was real attentive at first. I was like on a pedestal. I was his showpiece. He picked out and bought my clothes. He had me change my hair to blond, and grow it out. He had me start wearing makeup. He put me in mostly high heels and boots.”

Jack, who was large, over six feet, demanded total power over her.

“He controlled
everything,”
she says, “everything that came out of my mouth, every thought I had.

“He said I was like a new book, and he was going to write all the pages.”

Jack and Michelle spent a trouble-free first three months of marriage in the old farmhouse he was renting. Then one day she decided to clean and straighten Jack’s “War Room.”

“It was his personal shrine to two tours of duty in Vietnam,” she says. “The walls were covered with certificates, maps, guns, ammunition belts, knives, and photographs of dead Vietnamese soldiers.”

As Michelle was cleaning, she came upon a ratty old reddish pink suitcase in a closet. She opened it to find it stuffed with sadomasochistic pornography, most of it depicting women being sexually brutalized. She found Ace bandage rolls and scalpels in the worn suitcase, too. There also were broken arrows. She’d soon learn their use.

Her new husband walked into the room at just that moment—it might not have been a coincidence—and exploded in a rage. Jack roared that Michelle had violated his privacy. He demanded an immediate divorce.

Michelle pleaded that she’d made an innocent mistake, and begged Jack for another chance.

Suddenly he seemed to reconsider, and presented to Michelle what she took to be a nonnegotiable demand. She could redeem herself by helping him act out certain fantasies suggested by the materials Michelle had discovered. Or he’d find another woman who would.

Michelle agreed to cooperate.

“I was told that what I’d discovered was practiced by all married couples, only not talked about,” she says. “He told me that all normal people do these things, and he wanted to teach me all about it. He said it was a need of his that must be fulfilled every once in a while so that he could control his temper.

“I wasn’t into it, and I didn’t understand it, and I couldn’t imagine being turned on by what appeared to be hurting one another. I felt there was something wrong with me, however. I didn’t want to fail him as his wife.

“He assured me it was only a game, and that no one really gets hurt.”

Jack explained what he required in detail. He called his fantasy “the Games,” and said they unfolded in five episodes: (1) Capture, (2) Struggle, (3) Torture, (4) the Final Kill, and (5) Postmortem Rape.

The moment he began describing what he wished for her to do, Michelle had the feeling that Jack had done this
many times in the past—that “the Games” were really a reenactment.

“I always felt deep in my heart that he’d done this before, that he’d killed women,” she says. “I felt I was rehearsing for my own death.”

In part one, “Capture,” Michelle was to costume herself in loose-fitting garments, such as an old dress, that would be easy for Jack to tear from her body. She was then to assume some sort of preoccupied pose, such as combing her hair, or dancing in a room by herself.

As she did so, Jack would creep up from behind—
always
from behind—and violently grab Michelle, one hand over her mouth, the other around her neck, and pull her face to one side.

Then came “Struggle.”

Michelle was to respond in terror, communicating that fright with her eyes as she struggled with him, before falling into unconsciousness. Sometimes she was told to add verisimilitude to “Struggle” by going outside and smudging her face and arms with dirt.

They rehearsed the scene again and again, often working on it all day. Sometimes Jack would have Michelle smoke a joint to relax. Sometimes they’d watch slasher movies together. Michelle was instructed to carefully study the female victims for tips on how she was to behave.

Sometimes “the Games” were played under strobe lights to the accompaniment of sixties-era hard rock. Michelle remembers hearing Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the stereo again and again and again.

In the midst of “Struggle,” Jack tested Michelle for limpness, lifting and dropping her arms and legs and rolling her from side to side. The more lifeless she seemed, the better. Next, she was to regain consciousness and beg for mercy. Often, Jack would demand fellatio at this stage. After she again begged for her life—“Please, don’t kill me, master! I’ll do anything!” according to the script she memorized—Jack
would throttle her. Michelle was to feign asphyxiation, and fall unconscious again.

Then “Torture” began. Jack inserted the broken arrows so it would appear they’d been brutally jammed into her anus. Then he’d carefully photograph her.

On one occasion, he purchased a plastic child’s sword and modified the toy using a coat hanger so that it would appear Michelle had been run through with an actual weapon. This Jack photographed as well.

Other times he placed his hunting knife between her legs and ordered Michelle to grasp and hold its blade with her buttock muscles.

After removing it, slowly, Jack ran the sharp blade over Michelle’s body, urging her to quiver and jerk as he did so, sometimes heightening the experience for him by smearing her and the weapon with theatrical blood.

Michelle recalls that this routine occasionally was varied with threats to “roast me like a pig.” Jack would insert a cold metal rod into her so that she resembled an animal to be roasted on a spit, and he’d talk of how “tender and juicy” she was.

At last came “the Final Kill” and “Postmortem Rape,” in which Jack would pretend either to stab or to strangle Michelle to death, usually as she hung nude from pullies over their bed, or from a large metal hook he’d installed in the living-room ceiling. This scene also was rehearsed repeatedly.

Michelle once more was to beg him for her life, wide-eyed with terror. Then she was to expire at his hands, realistically “gurgling, begging, jerking, and quivering,” she says.

Although Jack at first said “the Games” would be an infrequent thing, in time they became nearly constant.

The only interruption occurred when Michelle conceived. Although Jack was unhappy about the pregnancy, for the period of time Michelle carried Sarah* he was marginally less abusive. “He pushed me around, but he wasn’t as physical, as rough,” Michelle recalls.

At about this time, according to Michelle, Jack quit his job, or was fired—he never made it clear to Michelle—and turned to dealing drugs. Once in a while, he allowed her to take jobs, but only temporarily.

He introduced her to group sex with other women.

“We’d find them in bars, truck stops, once in a restaurant,” she says. Most of their recruits were young girls, to whom he’d introduce himself as Bill.

Some were brought home. Others were taken to motels. Jack’s ultimate fantasy, he told Michelle, was to kill one of the girls. Only one of them.

“He used to try to talk me into picking up a female hitch-hiker and having our way with her. He explained that when we were done, we would dispose of her body along the roadway. I always refused.”

Jack also mentioned from time to time his interest in providing Michelle with a sex slave, whose tasks would include serving as her surrogate during “the Games.”

Like his fantasies of committing joint murder, her husband never acted on this impulse, she says.

Michelle, like Debra, did try to break away. Once, after a particularly brutal beating, she went to the local police, a very small agency, with her story. The officer who interviewed her turned out to be a Vietnam vet, just like Jack. After listening to her story, he advised Michelle to return to her marriage.

She learned to cope with Jack’s physical abuse by dissociating, pushing her mind anywhere but the here and now as he whipped her, beat her, kicked her, pulled her hair, and threw her around the room. By this time, six years or more into their marriage, Michelle had been completely broken down. Jack had destroyed her will. She didn’t care what happened.

Then came a transforming moment. One day, Jack began punching and slapping Michelle as Sarah, then a toddler of about three, sat on the couch. Michelle could absorb the punishment, but she feared now for her little girl.

Jack turned for a moment, and suddenly, Michelle found herself pointing his loaded shotgun at the back of his head. He was totally unaware of the instant oblivion to which his compliant companion was about to consign him.

But she couldn’t pull the trigger.

Michelle lowered the gun, realizing that nothing could drive her to homicide. But seeing her baby in peril nevertheless had galvanized her. She had felt a force, mother love, that was even stronger than her fear of her husband. If Michelle couldn’t escape from Jack for her own sake, she could for the child’s.

She left in the night, taking with her only Sarah and some clothing. Ironically, Michelle fled to one of the very social contacts Jack had ever allowed her, a loose-knit group of wives of other Vietnam vets. These women saved her.

Mother and daughter spent weeks on the run, moving from house to house, shelter to shelter, sometimes with her enraged husband, who vowed to kill her, very close behind. Finally, Michelle returned to the doubtful security of her parents’ house, where Jack need not even approach her to keep Michelle in perpetual fear.

“In the beginning,” she writes in her personal history,

I was so terrified that I couldn’t ride sitting up in a car. I just knew he would shoot me. If anyone walked behind me, cold chills went up my spine. I had to see in all directions, and worry that he might be hiding nearby. So many little things through the day kept me in a state of panic: sounds, sights, smells. I kept the drapes pulled, and wouldn’t turn my back on an open window. Every man that I saw looked like him. I was very paranoid, and in fear for my life. . . . He lived in my dreams. . . . My eyes would open, but I couldn’t wake up. I would run upstairs, turn a light on, and sit. But my feet were still moving beneath my chair.

Michelle suffered depressions as black as Debra’s, and was hospitalized four times. Like Debra and the self-destructive third marriage she entered after discovering Bob was a killer, Michelle also plunged into a disastrous relationship with a married woman, which compounded her emotional turmoil.

But also like Debra, Michelle met with Roy Hazelwood and told him her story, the first step toward healing, and reclaiming her life.

Slowly, she put Jack, and most of the rest of her troubles, in the back of her mind. She went to college, where she did well and discovered her first small sense of self-esteem.

Although by no means fully recovered, Michelle is holding tight to her daughter, and to hope.

“I’m learning how to live all over again,” she says. “I’m attempting to take control of my life, one step at a time. With determination in my heart, I know I will make it.”