The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (10 page)

Among the atypical deaths, one victim was discovered seated on a couch, dressed only in a shirt.

He’d set up a projector and screen to watch an erotic film.

Judging from the plastic bread bag found near his left hand, and the aerosol can he still grasped in his right, the twenty-three-year-old victim apparently had planned to enhance the experience both by asphyxia (the bread bag) and by inhaling the can’s fluorocarbon propellant.

Instead, he suffered what the medical examiner believed was a fatal cardiac arrhythmia.

Hazelwood counsels investigators that the autoerotic experimenter, unlike a suicide or murder victim, invariably includes some sort of escape, or self-rescue, mechanism in his or her apparatus. Tempting death may be a partial objective for many of them—achieving it is not.

The safety arrangement need not be elaborate. “It may be nothing more than the victim’s ability to stand and relieve the pressure on his neck,” says Hazelwood.

Evidence of bondage also is commonly found at autoerotic death scenes. Bondage, although not yet recognized as a distinct paraphilia by the American Psychiatric Association,
is in fact integral to such a wide spectrum of aberrant sexual activity, especially criminal behavior, that Hazelwood emphasizes its importance in all his presentations.

Hazelwood and Dietz distinguish between two types: motor bondage (restricted movement of limbs) and sensory bondage (blindfolds, hoods, gags, etc.), and they have devised a method for discriminating sexual bondage from the general use of restraints.

In their opinion, an investigator may confidently conclude sexual bondage is involved when

1. the victim has been bound in a variety of positions, or
   
2. bindings aren’t necessary for restraint (as in the upper arms or calves), or
   
3. the bindings reflect that time and effort were spent ensuring their neatness and symmetry; for instance, if both wrists are bound identically, or each eye is covered with an exactly two-inch-long piece of white adhesive tape.
   

Fetishism also is frequently encountered in autoerotic cases, as well as sexual crimes in general. Twelve of the victims in
Autoerotic Fatalities,
for example, practiced some form of fetishism.

Almost any inanimate thing can be a fetish.

“I always caution investigators not to apply their own criteria when searching for materials that someone else might find sexually exciting,” Hazelwood says.

For that reason, he asks three questions when assessing whether an object is a possible fetish item.

1. Is there an abnormal amount of the material present?

One hundred fifty roller skate straps were discovered in one victim’s possession.

2. Does the material belong where you found it?

There are few everyday reasons for keeping lengths of chromium chain in your bedroom.

3. How much financial investment does the individual have in the item?

A three-thousand-dollar investment in lingerie would be excessive.

On occasion, a fourth question may arise: Why did the victim keep this object hidden?

Dangerous autoeroticism commonly is associated with masochism. Yet Hazelwood has also discovered the habit among sexual criminals.

Harvey Glatman cross-dressed when he hanged himself.

Gerard Schaefer, a serial killer who himself eventually was killed by another inmate at the Florida State Prison, practiced dangerous autoerotic sex in the Florida swamps.

He would cross-dress and suspend himself by the neck from tree limbs. In Roy’s opinion, Schaefer was using himself as a prop in the absence of available female victims, whom he also took into the Florida swamps and hanged. He even took photos of these autoerotic sessions. The purpose of the picture taking, Roy believes, was to perfect the manner in which Schaefer hanged himself, as well as his victims, hoping to enhance both experiences for him.

Mike DeBardeleben, an archetypal sexual sadist, created his
Bite it!
audiotape and, according to one of his victims, dressed in a miniskirt, sweater, and high heels while he was with her.

Dangerous autoeroticism seems to exert a potent seductiveness on nominally normal people, too. On at least two occasions after Roy has lectured to professional audiences on dangerous autoerotic practices, audience members have accidentally killed themselves attempting dangerous autoeroticism themselves.

“No one knows why one person acts on aberrant sexual fantasies, and another person does not,” says Hazelwood. “What is known is that many people have aberrant fantasies which, if acted out, would be criminal.

“In the case of dangerous autoeroticism, what criminals
and noncriminals have in common is that they engage in the same types of solo sexual acts.”

In their textbook, Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess warn sternly: “Do not attempt any of the autoerotic activities described or depicted in this monograph. . . . There is no reason to believe that these activities are pleasurable to the average person, and there is every reason to believe that they may prove fatal.”

Back in the days when he dipped his ducktail in baby oil, favored black shirts with pink lapels, and wheeled around Spring Branch, Texas, in a ’49 Mercury, cut low to the ground, looking for girls and/or trouble, few people would have predicted that Robert Roy (he’s always been known by his middle name) Hazelwood someday would become a federal agent.

Least of all Roy himself.

“I was very, very fortunate I didn’t get into serious trouble,” he says of his rowdy youth. “The last thing I ever expected to do was go into law enforcement.”

In truth, Roy had no clear notion of the future, or any plan for it. As a boy and as a man, he has always been content for opportunity to find him. The theme of chance, more or less spontaneous decision-making is strong through Hazelwood’s life.

“The only thing I’ve always been sure of is what I didn’t want to do,” he says.

Roy was born in Pocatello, Idaho, on March 4, 1938. He has no early recollections of his outlaw father, or any other member of Merle P. Reddick’s family.

The man he called Dad was Earl Hazelwood, a barber and former minor-league first baseman, who married Roy’s mother, Louella, in 1941, about three years after she divorced Reddick.

Earl Hazelwood was a contradictory and complex figure who looms large in his stepson’s memory. The two came into almost immediate conflict.

“I look back now,” Roy says, “and I can see that it was jealousy over my mother’s affections. My mother and I were very close. And I wasn’t his natural son.”

Earl Hazelwood had a quick temper. Roy recollects a family argument in which it appeared that his stepfather was about to strike his mother. Roy stepped between them.

“He said something like, ‘I’ll knock the hell out of you!’ and my mother grabbed me and put me behind her.”

Earl Hazelwood had a secret flaw, too.

“He was sick a lot,” says Roy. “He’d come home from work and go straight to bed. On Sundays he was in bed all day. I was told he had a stomach problem. I was twenty-two years old before I realized he was an alcoholic.”

In all important ways, however, Roy believes that growing up a Hazelwood was a distinct improvement over the alternative, life with the missing M. P. Reddick. The Hazelwood family even had about them their own whiff of renegade celebrity that Roy savored.

According to his dad’s possibly apocryphal account, Hazelwood once was spelled Hazlewood. Shortly after the Civil War, however, a Hazlewood who happened to be a minister made the mistake of delivering a meal to the outlaw Jesse James, and was hanged for his trouble.

The rest of the clan, according to Earl, changed their name to Hazelwood to avoid further disgrace.

Roy’s mother, Louella, was a devout, but hardly doctrinaire, Baptist.

“She didn’t see anything wrong with having a beer occasionally, or dancing,” Roy recollects. “When we’d have the
youth fellowship night at our house, my mother would tell us, ‘Okay, kids. I’m going to keep Pastor Ken and his wife busy drinking coffee in the kitchen. You go ahead and dance.”

When her oldest boy later joined another famously dogmatic and occasionally inflexible organization, the FBI, he’d discover ways of bending the rules in ways that would have made Louella smile.

Earl and Louella were married in Minnesota, then moved south in a protracted, multistage migration to his native Texas. They’d travel for a while, then stop so Earl could cut hair and replenish the family finances.

Louella bore Roy’s half-brother, Jimmy, while the Hazelwoods were stopped in Nebraska. Half-sister Earlene debuted in Missouri. Louella’s final pregnancy ended in a stillbirth in Kansas.

When they reached Texas, Earl settled his family for a time in a one-bedroom trailer in Houston. When he found steady work, they were able to afford fifteen dollars a month for a so-called shotgun shack—three rooms lined up in a row with a bathroom off to one side—“named for the fact that you can shoot a shotgun from the front door through the back door and not hit anything,” Roy explains.

By 1950, his dad was doing well enough at barbering to move the family to a brand-new sixty-dollar-a-month tract house in Spring Branch, then about forty miles outside of Houston.

Roy reached his full adult height, five feet nine inches, early on at Spring Branch High School. A slender youth who bore a faint resemblance to the young Sinatra, he wouldn’t weigh more than 141 pounds until he quit smoking forty years later.

He was quick and agile enough to letter in basketball on the ninth-grade team. Under Earl’s expert tutelage, he played shortstop through high school.

Outside of recognized sports, however, Roy had little use for socially sanctioned recreation.

On one occasion, he and two school pals headed north to Bedias, his dad’s hometown, ostensibly to hunt deer on some acreage Earl owned there. The real objective was to drink beer.

The three friends lost their way and strayed onto a neighbor’s property. Soon enough a pack of dogs chased Roy and his pals into a tree. Behind the dogs came the deputies.

“You’re trespassing, boys,” said one officer.

The teenagers were handcuffed and driven away in cruisers, red lights flashing and siren wailing, to the nearest town of any size, Huntsville, where the tipsy trespassers were brought before a magistrate.

“How do you plead, guilty or not?” the judge asked gruffly.

Before Roy had a chance to answer, down came the gavel.

“Guilty,” said the judge. “That’ll be a twenty-five-dollar fine.”

Roy did not have that much money, which meant calling his dad.

Earl Hazelwood drove up from Spring Branch and dealt with the situation adroitly. Resisting a fatherly impulse to lecture his stepson, Earl paid Roy’s fine and drove home with his grateful stepson. No record was ever made of the incident.

Another time, Roy unwisely stopped for a meal at a hamburger drive-in located within a rival high school’s home turf.

“I was with the love of my young life, Charla West,” he recalls. “I had some words with this guy, who grabbed me and cut me under my right arm with a switchblade. I still have the scar.”

Overmatched in hostile territory, Roy slyly rescued himself by means of a ruse. “I grabbed some of my blood and
smeared it all over the front of my shirt. Then I bent over, fell to the ground and started moaning. It worked. He thought he’d really killed me and took off.”

Meanwhile, Charla vomited all over his front seat.

By this time, Earl Hazelwood was operating two seven-chair barbershops in Spring Branch. As a result the mortgage was paid and there always was food on the Hazelwood family table, but only because Louella managed the home economy, says her son.

“One time my dad won something like a hundred thousand dollars in a poker game. Then he took it to Las Vegas and lost it all in three days. On another occasion, my mother went home to North Dakota for a visit. While she was gone, he gave me her car and bought new Fords for each of them. When she got home she raised hell with him. He had to return the Fords and take back her car.”

In retrospect, Roy believes Earl Hazelwood was manic-depressive—or bipolar, in modern psychiatric parlance—swinging between exultant highs and troughs of despond.

“My dad chased rainbows. He was constantly making deals, selling this and buying that. I’d come home night after night to find him sitting up in the living room, bent over, an ashtray full of cigarette butts next to him. He was thinking of ways to make money!”

Man and boy finally did stumble toward common ground, growing closer as Roy matured from aimless adolescence into adulthood, a process Earl did much to abet. If he wasn’t much of a role model, Earl Hazelwood nevertheless provided Roy with frank and sensible advice.

When Roy graduated from high school and announced he planned to buy a ’57 Chevy, his Dad asked him, “Where do you want to live?”

“What do you mean?” Roy asked.

“You’re eighteen, a man now,” Earl said. “You have thirty days to find yourself a place to live and get a job.”

He let that prospect sink in for a moment, then suggested an alternative. If Roy would forget about the car and consider heading for college, Earl said, he’d help finance Roy’s education.

School had scant allure for Roy, but the prospect of manual labor was even less appealing.

“Uh, college sounds pretty good,” he said.

It was Dad, as well, who urged Roy to join the ROTC at Sam Houston State, and to remain with it even though Roy hated the ROTC.

“You can certainly drop it if you want,” Earl said, but he then reminded Roy he’d surely be drafted into the army the moment he graduated. “You’ll be the one who’s going to be peeling potatoes instead of giving the order for them to be peeled,” Earl advised.

Roy heeded what he was told, and entered the military police as a second lieutenant after college. True to his nature, he didn’t choose the MPs out of any particular interest in law enforcement or intention of making them his career. Rather, Roy perceived that among his alternatives—infantry, cavalry, engineers, and the rest—MPs were the least likely soldiers to sweat and get dirty.