Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  To illustrate this point, I often tell my students that the oldest rape victim I am aware of was ninety-three years old, and the youngest was two hours old. When I ask how many people believe either of these crimes was committed out of sexual need, not one person has ever raised a hand.

  What did these two victims have in common? Vulnerability, helplessness, and lack of threat to the attacker. The rapist achieves his gratification, not from the sexual release, but from the thrill of domination, control, and power.

  You might define fantasy as a mental rehearsal of a desired event. This mental rehearsal plays a central role in the enactment of sexual offenses. It serves as a kind of editing mechanism that allows the offender to focus on the details of the crime that are uniquely arousing to him. To suit his needs, he can rearrange parts and assign them to their appropriate places.

  The fantasy also serves as an arena for rehearsal, allowing the offender to practice his crime with no personal risk. Finally, it provides a template or map for the offender to follow while he commits the crime.

  The development of a ritualistic offender’s fantasy is similar to the production of a stage play. The central figure is the playwright/director—the offender. In his fantasies, he scripts the action, chooses the settings, and selects the props. Of course, he casts himself (who else?) as the star, but he also requires a costar—his victim. Once he has fully developed the criteria for her, he’s ready to begin his search for someone to play that role. When the play is ready to open, the crime is about to occur.

  Over the years I have recognized two disturbing trends relating to violent sexual fantasies. First, offenders today are conceptualizing their crimes (Saint Augustine’s step one) at a much earlier age than their predecessors did. Second, as a result, their fantasies are growing more complex and, in some cases, deadlier over time.

  The following example from my case files demonstrates not only this early conceptualization but also what a profiler looks for when he reviews sexual crimes. As you read the case of Robert Leroy Anderson, you will clearly see how this ritualistic offender progressed from the fantasy he scripted in his mind to the horrifying acts he committed in real life.

  In 1997, I was contacted by Patty Froning, an assistant state attorney general in South Dakota, who wished to retain me as an expert witness to review two homicides. The murders were committed twenty-three months apart. Froning wanted to know whether I thought they were committed by the same individual.

  I later testified under questioning by Larry Long, the chief deputy state attorney general, that I believed this to be the case. In the process of consulting with the prosecution team and investigators, I learned about other aspects of the crimes. The one that struck me most forcibly was the central role that fantasy played in the two murders.

  Piper Potts was an attractive young woman from Texas who met her future husband, Vance Streyle, at a Bible college in Oregon. They married in 1988 and three years later moved to a trailer located on forty acres in Canistota, South Dakota, a rural community about twenty miles west of Sioux Falls.

  A deeply religious couple, the Streyles realized their dream of having their own part-time ministry, the Prairie View Bible Camp for children. From the road, passing motorists could see the pews they had set up in their yard.

  The Streyles had two children, Shaina and Nathan, who were three and two years of age. Little Nathan’s second birthday fell on Monday, July 29, 1996, the day they lost their mother.

  That morning at about 6:30, Vance Streyle, twenty-nine, drove to his plumbing job as usual. Piper, twenty-eight, ordinarily would have left a short time later to take her children to the baby-sitter on the way to her job at the Southeastern Children’s Center in Sioux Falls. In fact, she called the baby-sitter, Mrs. Jordnson, at 9:20 to say they were on their way.

  Piper Streyle never arrived at Mrs. Jordnson’s house or at her job. Her husband called home at noon and left a message on the answering machine. “Honey, where are you?” Vance asked.

  Around three o’clock, Patty Sinclair, who worked with Mrs. Streyle at the day-care facility, called to check on her friend. Shaina answered the phone instead.

  “I don’t want my mommy to die!” the little girl blurted into the receiver. “I don’t want my daddy to die!” Shaina then added, “They’re probably killed.”

  Stunned, Patty Sinclair directed a coworker to call the McCook County Sheriff’s Office as she redialed the Streyles’ number. Sinclair spoke with Shaina again, but this time she kept the child on the telephone for nearly forty-five minutes until Sheriff Gene Taylor arrived at the trailer.

  By now it was after five. Taylor found the children and the family dog, a blond Labrador named Chase, but no sign of Mrs. Streyle. The trailer was in disarray; yet the children had not been harmed physically. Nathan made hardly a sound; Shaina was in tears.

  “Mommy’s going to die,” she told Sheriff Taylor and Jim Stevenson, a South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) agent. Patiently, the two men extracted the three year old’s account of what had happened.

  “A mean man,” as Shaina described him, driving a black vehicle with black wheels, came into the trailer and grabbed their mother. She reported that there was a lot of yelling and that the man shot a gun. Their mother told them to run and hide. Shaina also said that the man had taken Nathan’s blue tent, a birthday present he had received the evening before.

  As Shaina recounted the fragmented story, her father arrived home. Sobbing in his arms, she blurted out that the man had taken Nathan’s tent. Choking back his own tears, Vance Streyle reassured his daughter that it was okay; they had another tent. Shaina was insistent that her mother was going to die, saying, “She’s not coming back.”

  The investigation quickly turned up several witnesses who reported seeing a truck or sport utility vehicle painted a flat, black color in the vicinity of the Streyle residence that day. One couple who lived in the area saw a nervous young man in jeans and a baseball cap walking from the trailer to a black Ford Bronco parked in the driveway.

  But authorities had nothing substantive to go on until late on the evening of July 29. That’s when Vance Streyle suddenly recalled a visit to the trailer three days earlier by a chubby, balding stranger in his mid-twenties. The man had said his name was Rob Anderson.

  Vance notified the police, who returned to the residence to follow up on the new information. Streyle remembered Anderson as an affable guy with a limp handshake. He had driven up in a black Bronco at about 7:30 A.M. the previous Friday, and at first he didn’t seem to know what he wanted to say. He seemed surprised that Vance Streyle was home and mumbled something about having driven by the house several times over the past months.

  Finally, as Piper Streyle walked to the front door, Anderson inquired about enrolling his children in the Bible camp. Vance told him that the camp was closed for the year, but that they would be glad to add his name to the list for 1997. Mrs. Streyle wrote his name and phone number on a piece of paper, and Anderson left.

  By the next morning, investigators had fully identified the Streyles’ visitor as Robert Leroy Anderson, twenty-six, a high school dropout and twice-married father of four who lived in Sioux Falls. Anderson worked as a maintenance man on the 11:00 P.M.-7:30 A.M. shift at John Morrell & Co., a Sioux Falls meat-packing plant.

  DCI assistant director Bob Grandpre and other law enforcement officers went to Anderson’s house, where they awakened him and said they wanted to speak with him. The suspect pulled on his jeans, a T-shirt, and his baseball hat and voluntarily drove his blue Ford Bronco to the local police station. An investigative team searched the Bronco and his home while Anderson underwent a seven-hour interrogation.

  Beneath the carpeting in the Bronco’s cargo area, officers found a plywood platform with holes drilled in it, each obviously designed to accommodate wrist or ankle restraints. A toolbox containing chain and wooden dowels also was found in the vehicle, as were traces of black, water-based paint and a partial roll
of duct tape. Dog hairs, similar to those of the Streyles’ family dog, also were recovered, along with some furniture-moving straps.

  Anderson remained calm, denying any knowledge of Piper Streyle’s fate or whereabouts, but he did concede that he had visited the Streyles’ trailer the previous Friday morning. After some equivocation, he also admitted that he had returned on Monday. He said he had come back because he wanted to use the Streyles’ archery range. Anderson claimed that he had knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He said he could hear children playing within and assumed that Mrs. Streyle was taking a nap, so he left.

  The conversation touched on topics as diverse as the suspect’s boyhood speech impediment, his professed interest in anal sex (which Anderson reported his wife did not share), and the unsolved disappearance of another local woman, Larisa Dumansky. Mrs. Dumansky was a twenty-nine-year-old Morrell employee who had vanished from the meat-packing company’s parking lot two years before. Anderson denied any knowledge of her disappearance.

  Meanwhile, investigators found a pair of Anderson’s blue jeans in the laundry area of his trailer. They were stained inside with both blood and semen. Later tests on the stains would prove inconclusive as to their source. The search also turned up two handcuff keys and a container of black, water-soluble spray paint, such as that discovered in his Bronco.

  When the police interviewed one of Anderson’s neighbors, Dan Johnson, he recalled seeing Anderson carefully clean the interior of his blue Bronco on the morning of the 29th. Mr. Johnson reported that Anderson then left for a while and returned around 2:00 P.M., when he again cleaned the vehicle’s interior.

  Confronted with the handcuff keys, Anderson admitted they were his but said he didn’t own any handcuffs to go with them. He also denied Dan Johnson’s account of the cleaning of the Bronco.

  Vance Streyle later picked out Robert Anderson in a lineup as the man who had come to his home on the morning of the 26th. His daughter, Shaina, also identified him as the “mean man” who had forcibly taken her mother away. At 1:30 on the morning of August 2, the Sioux Falls police arrested Robert Anderson at Morrell’s and charged him with kidnapping Piper Streyle.

  They had identified their suspect quickly—a key to success in any criminal case—but the investigation still was a long way from completion. Piper Streyle was still missing.

  Hundreds of officers and volunteers scoured the area around the Streyles’ trailer looking for further evidence. They found nothing. However, botanist Gary Larson from South Dakota State University was able to point the investigation in a more useful direction. Larson identified bits of vegetable matter taken from a toolbox in the back of the Bronco as honewort and black snake root, which are known to grow along certain wooded stretches of the Big Sioux River north of Sioux Falls, near the small town of Baltic. Police realized it was not a coincidence that on July 29, the day of Piper Streyle’s abduction, a motorist driving near Baltic had found the torn half of a black-and-white T-shirt that Mrs. Streyle had been wearing when she was last seen.

  That’s where Anderson had taken her.

  A search of the lightly inhabited area turned up the other half of her T-shirt beneath a small tree. Dangling from a branch directly above it were several lengths of duct tape, wadded up together and matted with human hair, that proved to be microscopically indistinguishable from Mrs. Streyle’s hair. Nearby were a large dildo and a partially used wax candle. One torn end of the duct tape matched a roll taken from Anderson’s Bronco. The vehicle also yielded hair specimens believed to have come from Piper Streyle. Stuck to the blade of a folding knife recovered from the Bronco were bits of cloth fiber that matched her cut shirt.

  Anderson was charged with kidnapping Piper Streyle and went on trial the following spring. He was not charged with murder since there wasn’t yet sufficient evidence to prosecute him successfully for that crime. The prosecution team, led by South Dakota attorney general Mark Barnett, would show the jury that the defendant had bought the black paint that Monday morning and sprayed it on the Bronco to change the appearance of the vehicle.

  The use of water-soluble paint was just one example of how thoroughly Anderson scripted his crime. Applying a coat of easily washed-off, water-based paint is not a spontaneous inspiration. It reflected substantial forethought and cunning.

  A reconstruction of events derived from the evidence, witnesses, and informant information established that Anderson drove to the Streyles’ trailer on the 29th. He handcuffed Mrs. Streyle, retrieved the note with his name and phone number, carried her out to the Bronco, and then drove to the thinly settled area near Baltic. Securing her to the platform in his vehicle, he gagged Piper Streyle with duct tape. He cut her shirt open with his folding knife, sexually assaulted and killed her, and disposed of the body.

  Anderson then returned to the Streyle residence and retrieved a watch he had dropped during the struggle as well as the expended shell casing from the round that Shaina reported he had fired. This second trip to the residence accounts for the Streyles’ neighbor seeing him walk from the trailer to the Bronco. Dan Johnson and other witnesses placed him back at home in the Bronco (now blue once more) by 2:00 that afternoon, which means that somewhere along the way he also stopped and washed off the black paint.

  On May 8, 1997, Anderson’s jury found him guilty of kidnapping Piper Streyle. Two months later state circuit judge Boyd McMurchie sentenced him to life in prison.

  No one was satisfied with this outcome. Anderson complained in court that he was an innocent victim of vindictive prosecution. “I hope you rot in hell,” he told Barnett just before his sentencing.

  “I might,” Barnett later said, “but it won’t be because I convicted Robert Anderson.”

  In fact, Barnett was no happier about the punishment Anderson had received than was the defendant, though for a different reason. The attorney general vowed in court that there would be another day of reckoning. “Sooner or later, he’ll face a homicide charge,” Barnett predicted.

  My major conclusion about Robert Leroy Anderson was his clear sexual sadism.

  This condition is not well understood. Frequently people mistake cruelty for sadism. Another misperception is that sadists are aroused by the infliction of pain. In fact, what excites the sadist is the suffering of the victim. It is true that sexual sadists use physical and/or psychological pain to produce suffering, but the suffering is the most important thing to them.

  I based my opinion that Anderson was a sexual sadist on four factors: First was his obvious interest in sexual bondage, a hallmark of the sexual sadist. Anderson kept chains, eye bolts, handcuff keys, and furniture-moving straps in his truck, as well as duct tape and a plywood platform with restraint holes. These instruments of bondage were significant because sexual sadists are attracted to, and sexually excited by, the helplessness and vulnerability of a bound victim.

  Second, the evidence clearly indicated physical torture. This included, of course, the platform, but Anderson also had wooden dowels and a dildo. He had confessed to an acquaintance his fantasy of forcefully inserting such objects into a woman. The fact that the partially used candle was found near the dildo and shirt suggested that it had also been used to torture Mrs. Streyle.

  The T-shirt that had been cut up the middle in the front and back also provided important clues, as did the wadded duct tape with her hair matted in it. I believe that Mrs. Streyle was bound to the platform on her back and that Anderson then cut the front of the T-shirt. The wadded duct tape would have been used to gag her and muffle her screams as he tormented her. Then he turned her on her stomach, cut the shirt up the back, and continued to torture her.

  Third, Anderson told the police and several witnesses that he enjoyed anal sex. Our research at the FBI shows that sexual sadists strongly prefer this form of sex. I believe that the discarded dildo and wooden dowels found in Anderson’s truck were used to act out this fantasy against Mrs. Streyle.

  Finally, sexually sadistic offenders habitually
plan their crimes in much greater detail than do other criminals. The evidence showed that Robert Leroy Anderson had an elaborate plan in mind when he called on the Streyles’ residence. Piper Streyle obviously was not a random victim of violence. She was chosen well in advance of the abduction, and the area to which Anderson took her was carefully preselected.

  Anderson also gathered and/or constructed the materials he needed to act out his aberrant fantasies. He shaped the plywood platform so that it not only fit the contours of his Bronco cargo area but was easily hidden beneath carpeting. His toolbox was essentially a sadist’s kit, containing implements of torture. And he had gathered the bondage paraphernalia he needed.

  Anderson’s ingenious stratagem for temporarily disguising his Bronco reflected meticulous planning. When I speak of this case, someone invariably suggests that Anderson must have gotten the idea from the movie The Jackal, in which Bruce Willis also spray paints his car then washes off the camouflage coat in a car wash.

  However, Mrs. Streyle was abducted and killed the summer before The Jackal was released. This was a case of film imitating life, not the other way around.

  Establishing that Robert Anderson is a sexual sadist permitted me to make several other inferences about him. Had he been an unidentified subject (UNSUB)—as is often the case in my consultations—these additional insights might have helped the authorities identify Piper Streyle’s killer. As it was, the findings helped flesh out the prosecution’s understanding of their suspect.

  For example, I could tell the investigators with confidence that Mrs. Streyle’s killer probably preferred anal sex, bondage, and foreign-object penetration with his consenting partners.