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:
RELATIONAL
PARAPHILIC
SITUATIONAL
VICTIM DEMOGRAPHICS
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.
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Fantasy Made Real
Intelligent and cunning for the most part, ritualistic offenders take a wide variety of routes in pursuit of their hidden desires. With their vivid imaginations, they generate an astonishing array of perversely creative ideas.
They may coerce a wife or girlfriend into helping them realize their fantasies, or they may kidnap, rape, or kill a stranger. But it is important to know that sexual criminals don’t always require victims. A ritualistic offender may also enact his fantasy using inanimate objects, paid partners, compliant partners (wives or girlfriends), or even himself.
Also, his behavior may or may not escalate from passive fantasy to outright assault. Any level of behavior may be an end in itself, as is usually true of dangerous autoeroticism. Or the offender may act out in multiple ways at the same time.
For example, he may seek out an aberrant, albeit noncriminal, sexual experience even as he is committing rapes and murders.
Inanimate Objects
Many sexual criminals who act out against inanimate objects fixate on an article of women’s clothing or some other intimate female possession. Others select a surrogate figure, such as a doll or even photographs of an imagined victim from a magazine.
Two cases involving dolls show how disturbing this behavior can be. The first, brought to my attention in the early 1980s, occurred at a university hospital where a curly haired baby doll was discovered in the men’s locker room outside the surgical center. The doll was suspended from a white cord, a hangman’s noose around its neck.
The toy had been systematically mutilated. Its skin was scorched, and pubic hairs were glued around its groin. An opening had been cut between the doll’s legs, and a long pencil had been deeply inserted into it. The doll’s wrists were bound behind its back, and a wad of blue tissue paper was jammed into its mouth. Long needles were used to pierce the doll’s left eye. On the left side of its chest, approximately where a heart would be, there was an incision, neatly sutured with black thread.
The perpetrator was identified as a premed student working as a surgical scrub assistant. Since he had not committed a crime, no charges were filed against this clearly troubled young man. In truth, he may not have been a physical danger to anyone. Acting out against the doll might have satisfied his fantasy. I wouldn’t wager on it though. Luckily, he agreed to seek professional help.
The second case involved behavior sometimes known as pygmalionism, after the mythological sculptor who created an ivory statue of an idealized woman and then fell in love with his own
artwork.
A deputy sheriff in a suburban Louisiana community responded at about 4:30 one morning to a burglar alarm at a local discount variety store. The intruder was alerted by the police sirens and slipped out the back door undetected. He left behind a blonde-wigged female mannequin, disassembled at the waist and lying on the floor. The figure’s upper body was clothed in a pinafore blouse, and its white-gloved left hand was broken at the wrist.
The UNSUB had removed a light-colored skirt from her lower body, but the mannequin’s hose and panties were undisturbed, as were the dark-colored high heels on its feet. The trespasser’s loafers and a black wig rested on the floor near the mannequin’s head. An open box of condoms, taken from the store’s pharmacy section, rested on the floor nearby.
As in the hospital case, this scene obviously was the work of a disturbed mind. Still, on the evidence available, I can’t say what sort of threat, if any, he posed to the community.
Now let’s look at still another offender who acted out against inanimate objects. This individual revealed himself as complex, resourceful, and unambiguously a threat to his chosen victim.
Like most law enforcement officers, I tend to title my more intriguing cases. I call this one “the cartoon case,” though it was certainly no laughing matter. It remains one of the most interesting and unusual investigations of my career.
The cartoon case began in the early 1980s when Evelyn Smith,* twenty-nine-year-old wife and mother of two small children, living in a midsized New England community, received a call at home from a man claiming to represent a bra manufacturer. The caller told Mrs. Smith that his company had developed a new line of women’s undergarments that they were marketing in the region. He invited her to take part in a customer satisfaction survey, offering to send Mrs. Smith six free bras if she would agree to complete a questionnaire assessing their durability, washability, comfort, and fit. She agreed to this proposal and, in an incautious moment she would long regret, revealed her bra size.
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Page 5
