The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (4 page)

For example, a rapist may alter how he approaches his victims, or even shift his victim class from, say, prostitutes to hitchhikers or runaways hanging around bus stations. They are, after all, victims of convenience.

But like the metallurgist rapist with his clothing changes and counting ceremony, ritual isn’t just part of the crime—it is central to the offense.

Similarly, the pornography he purchases, or makes at home, must tap into that fantasy in order for him to become aroused by it.

Aberrant offenders use pornography to validate their deviance as well. The more they see of it, and masturbate to it, the more their behavior is reinforced.

Bundy used pornography that way. He told us that material in which sex and violence were intertwined aided him in creating inner justifications for his crimes. He even persuaded himself the killings were necessary.

Rare as sexual offenses were at the time of Harvey Glatman’s final arrest, they commonly went unreported. And even if they were brought to the authorities’ attention, successful prosecutions were unusual.

Hazelwood recalls an episode he encountered in 1962 as a young second lieutenant at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

A staff sergeant’s wife reported her husband for sexually abusing his two daughters, aged ten and six. The girls’ mother had known about the abuse for twelve months before reporting it.

“I couldn’t understand why she didn’t report it immediately,” says Hazelwood. “And no one seemed to know the motivations for his behavior. No one understood it.

“ ‘Why do you think this guy was having sex with his daughters?’ I asked one senior investigator.

“ ‘Well, his old lady probably cut him off,’ he said.

“I said that even if that was true, it didn’t explain why his wife didn’t report him at once.

“ ‘Oh, some women are just like that,’ an agent from the Criminal Investigation Division told me.”

Typical of the time, the case eventually imploded, leaving no record, other than the permanently scarred victims, that the incest ever occurred.

“I remember investigators saying that the sergeant was a ‘sick pervert,’ ” Hazelwood continues.

“I agreed. ‘Yeah, of course.’ I didn’t know anything about this subject. But I wondered how he’d been so successful in covering up. If he was so sick, how was he able to become a staff sergeant? He got up and went to work every day. He belonged to a church.

“I had a thousand questions that didn’t compute with ‘sick, weird pervert.’ When you say sick pervert, you think of
stoop shoulders, green teeth, and strange eyes. You think of Henry Lee Lucas. This NCO looked like everyone else!

“His captain said he’d testify on his behalf. The officer told me that the sergeant had been in his command for two years and was an outstanding trooper.”

In the end, Roy recalls, it wasn’t a quest for justice but practicality that dictated the case’s outcome.

“The sergeant’s attorney convinced the girls’ mother that she’d lose her husband’s income and their on-base housing if he was convicted and sent to prison. So she withdrew her charges.

“That case has bothered me for a long time.”

At the time, most law enforcement officers, military or civilian, were reluctant to investigate sexual offenses because they lacked the training to do so, lacked support from their superiors, and feared being tainted among their colleagues for working with perverts.

“It was just one of the sadly neglected areas of law enforcement training,” says Frank Sass, a retired FBI agent who joined the Bureau in 1948 and later inaugurated what was known as sex crime instruction at Quantico. “We were all so damned naive that we didn’t know what we were talking about. We were sadly lacking in knowledge in those days.”

A vivid case in point was Harvey Glatman.

Born in Denver in 1928, he was an athletic, musically gifted boy with jug ears, acute acne, a lopsided smirk, and a reported IQ of 130.

Very early in his boyhood Glatman developed an unhealthy attraction to ropes and bindings. His mother once discovered Harvey alone in his bedroom, nude, with one end of a string tied to his penis, and the other attached to the doorknob. Her son wouldn’t say what he intended to do with this apparatus.

When he was about twelve, Harvey’s parents began to notice angry red marks on his neck, telltale signs that he was experimenting with autoerotic asphyxia.

Known informally today among teenagers as “head rushing” or “scarfing,” autoerotic asphyxia involves temporarily diminishing the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain. The resultant cerebral hypoxia, as it is called, can induce a sense of exhilaration—not unlike the giddiness that pilots sometime experience in the thin air at high altitudes—and is believed by many people to enhance sexual sensations. This euphoric state is most commonly achieved by mechanically compressing the carotid artery and/or jugular vein, often by self-hanging.

Glatman as a youth achieved his autoerotic highs by hanging from attic rafters. How a twelve-year-old Coloradan in 1940 would have learned of such practices is unexplained, although it is possible Glatman discovered cerebral hypoxia in failed attempts at suicide.

The family doctor downplayed the seriousness of Harvey’s solo-sex habits, predicted he’d outgrow them, and prescribed sedatives for the boy in the meantime.

Harvey’s father took a somewhat harsher view of his behavior.

According to a 1950 report done at New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary, where Harvey later served time, Glatman Senior was “hostile and domineering” and drove the boy into “frenzies of fear by continually upbraiding him for masturbation.”

The writer noted that Harvey “was told it would drive him crazy and would rot his brain. He was told his pimples resulted from it, and that the pimples revealed his habit to the whole world. He was told that every time the act occurred he lost the equivalent of a pint of blood.”

However terrorized the boy must have been by his father’s threats, he was not deterred in his dangerous autoeroticism. When Glatman as an adult couldn’t find a suitable female victim, he’d dress up in women’s clothes and hang himself.

Such behavior turns out to be recurrent among sexual sadists, the most polymorphously perverse of all aberrant criminals.

Glatman’s first arrest came just after high school, in Boulder, Colorado. He accosted girls with a toy gun, tied their hands and feet, and then gingerly fondled his victims. He occasionally robbed the girls, but only for insignificant amounts of money that he never spent.

Then he moved to New York and began committing felony robberies as the so-called Phantom Bandit. After doing five years at Sing Sing, where he received intensive psychiatric care, Glatman returned to Colorado, and then moved on to Los Angeles, where his mother set him up in a small television repair business.

When Harvey left Sing Sing, an optimistic prison counselor wrote that “he is beginning to understand himself, and is making great strides in overcoming his neurosis, although a great deal of work remains to be done with him.”

Indeed.

Socially isolated in Los Angeles, Glatman began seriously to connect with his paraphilias, primarily sexual bondage and a rope fetish. Searching for images to serve as raw material for his paraphilic fantasies, he found one source that was plentiful even in the straitlaced fifties—detective magazines.

Glatman later told investigators that he collected detective magazines, “sometimes for the words, sometimes for the covers,” which in those days invariably portrayed an ample-chested victim, often bound with ligatures and with a gag in her mouth, helpless and horror-struck, cringing under the menacing figure of a male.

Only after Hazelwood and his longtime colleague, Dr. Park Dietz, published a critical study of such periodicals in 1986 did the tone of these cover illustrations change.

Glatman set about making his fantasies real. He posed as a freelance detective-magazine photographer under the names Johnny Glynn and George Williams, and joined a lonely hearts club in pursuit of potential victims. With sure instincts for the vulnerable, and skills at manipulation, he
persuaded these women to disrobe for him, as well as to allow him to bind them for his “shoots.”

Glatman tied his knots and wrapped his ligatures with painstaking, exquisite care. Judging from the photographic evidence, it must have required considerable time. Only after the intricate work was completed to Glatman’s aberrant taste did he then murder his victims.

After he was caught, the Lonely Hearts Killer claimed to have raped his three known murder victims. However, Glatman also disclosed that he was impotent in the absence of bondage.

Hazelwood believes Glatman may have fabricated the rape story as a means of making his behavior more comprehensible to the policemen who interrogated him. In those days, even veteran police officers weren’t likely to understand how for some sexual offenders all that is required for sexual gratification is a rope, a camera, and a weapon.

Bob Keppel writes in his book,
Signature Killers,
that Glatman, again like Ted Bundy and many other sexual killers, kept a box full of trophies—photos of the victims and articles of their clothing to help him relive the killings.

Keppel also isolates Glatman’s sexual sadism. “Glatman first photographed each victim with a look of innocence on her face,” writes Keppel,

as if she were truly enjoying a modeling session. The next series represented a sadist’s view of a sexually terrorized victim with the impending horror of a slow and painful death etched across her face. The final frame depicted the victim’s position that Glatman himself had arranged after he strangled her.

After a three-day trial, Harvey Glatman was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He discouraged his lawyers from filing appeals. “He told me that he couldn’t stand the other guys on death row,” Pierce Brooks, a legendary Los
Angeles police detective who conducted many interviews with Glatman, recalled to me just before his death in the spring of 1998. “He said they were so stupid that he’d rather be executed than spend the rest of his life around them.”

Glatman was put to death in the San Quentin gas chamber in August of 1959.

Roy Hazelwood first learned of the Lonely Hearts Killer in military police training about a year later. It was an astonishing experience for the twenty-two-year-old soldier whose knowledge of the world was largely confined to tiny Spring Branch, Texas, where he grew up.

“Glatman just seemed to come out of nowhere,” Roy recalls. “I didn’t understand anything about him. I wanted to know why he took pictures of the victims. Why did he tie them in various positions and in various stages of undress?

“Glatman seemed so ordinary to me, yet his crimes seemed so sophisticated compared to other criminals of the time. I wondered, Where did he learn these things? Why was he aroused by them?

“Why did he tie a victim’s legs entirely, instead of just her ankles? Why put a gag in her mouth when they’re out in the desert? These questions were swimming in my head.

“And another important thing that struck me was how very little people seemed then to know about this behavior. All of us in the class asked questions of the instructor.

“Basically, his answers were: ‘Well, we don’t know those things.’

“That made a hell of an impression on me. I remember thinking, ‘Someday I’m going to look into this.’ ”

Harvey Glatman ever since has served as a touchstone case for Hazelwood. He was the first sexual offender Roy ever encountered, and in many ways remains one of the most complex criminals he’s ever studied.

Harvey Glatman also was Hazelwood’s introduction to multiple killers.

An itinerant subtype of these predators—for whom the term “serial killer” was coined in the 1980s by agent Bob Ressler at the BSU—seemed to explode out of nowhere in the 1960s and 1970s, and to spread like a virus. In truth, although serial killers often can seem magically immune to capture, they are no more uniquely modern than any other criminal.

Like all irrational offenders, they sort themselves along a behavioral continuum from the patient, deliberate hunters, such as Bundy, to wild, murderous outlaws, such as the killing team of Juan Chavez and Hector Fernandez, described later in this chapter.

In between, there are startling anomalies, such as Henry Wallace, a thirty-one-year-old African American who confessed in 1996 to sexually assaulting and killing eleven black women in several southern states between 1992 and 1994. Unlike the majority of serial killers, who principally prey on strangers, Wallace raped and murdered women he knew, or worked with in various fast-food restaurants. It was a very
poorly thought-out MO, which invited Wallace’s eventual detection.

“If he elected to become a serial killer, he was going about it in the wrong way,” said Bob Ressler, who interviewed Wallace and testified as an expert witness for the defense at Wallace’s murder trial.

Another, far better known multiple, or spree, killer added his own, individual twists to the crime in 1997.

Andrew Cunanan, slayer of flamboyant Italian clothing designer Gianni Versace, lived extremely well as a domestic companion to wealthy older gay men—“a gigolo,” in his mother’s uncompromising description.

He also was a familiar figure in the haute gay worlds of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, well remembered by a succession of friends and lovers as vain, charming, highly intelligent, and articulate—a homosexual Ted Bundy.

Cunanan spent lavishly—he reportedly owed Nieman Marcus forty-six thousand dollars at his death—and dealt and consumed (sometimes injecting) a variety of drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine, and the male hormone testosterone, which can induce rages.

According to several sources, he favored sadomasochistic pornography. One partner characterized Cunanan’s sexual habits as “extreme.”

Late in 1996, his patron of the moment severed his relationship with the young man, just as two of Cunanan’s romantic interests, Jeff Trail, twenty-eight, and David Madson, thirty-three, both of Minneapolis, reportedly were trying to put him in their pasts.