Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  In a similar vein, one of Mike DeBardeleben’s abduction-rape victims reported that after he took her to a safe, prearranged location, he changed into a miniskirt and high heels as he bound and photographed her. On a self-recorded audiotape at a different time, DeBardeleben also directly assumed the role of the victim, pleading with an imaginary tormentor in a falsetto voice to “bite my titties.”

  How does a particular offender choose to act out his dangerous fantasies? At what level of experience, from the imaginary to the actual, will a particular person receive sufficient psychosexual gratification? These are the questions that behavioral scientists continue to explore in the quest to identify and apprehend violent sexual criminals. Unfortunately, the ultimate answers likely will be as varied as the details of the crimes themselves.

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  “Am I God?”

  The fascinating and complex field of mental health often intersects with the world of criminal justice. If you follow the media coverage of sensational crimes, you have undoubtedly heard about instances when a psychiatrist or psychologist is called into a criminal case to testify as to a defendant’s mental condition. Issues of sanity or mental competence to stand trial can have a profound impact on a case’s outcome.

  Equally important is the contribution that an understanding of criminal psychology can make even before an offender is identified, apprehended, and charged. This is where the behavioral scientist’s insights can be most useful.

  Personality Disorders

  According to the American Psychiatric Association, a personality disorder is any human trait that becomes “inflexible and maladaptive,” causing a person “either significant functional impairment or subjective distress.” This bland description masks what a twisted, tortured thing “significant functional impairment” can be in a serial sexual offender.

  There are many types of personality disorders. Examples include the antisocial personality disorder (APD), the borderline personality disorder (brilliantly portrayed by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction), the schizoid personality disorder, and the narcissistic personality disorder.

  Personality disorders are common among sexual offenders, but they are by no means confined to criminals. They are diagnosed in men and women of all races and in all cultures and of widely varying degrees of mental health. A personality disorder is not something you welcome, any more than you want to get diabetes or emphysema. But being diagnosed with one does not mean you are clinically, or legally, insane or even noticeably different from many other people.

  Nor are personality disorders always obstacles to personal success. Quite the opposite. I have encountered successful people who display all the hallmarks of the antisocial personality disorder, commonly called psychopaths, in disciplines as diverse as law enforcement, medicine, sales, professional sports, and television evangelism.

  Some personality disorders that are common in the general population (and not necessarily pathological) take on a much different manifestation among aberrant offenders. Many years ago, Park Dietz remarked to me his belief that narcissism is the most common personality disorder among sexual offenders, more prevalent even than antisocial personality disorder. I have found this to be true, particularly among ritualistic sexual criminals.

  The Narcissist

  Take, for example, Mr. Johnstone, who victimized Mrs. Smith in the cartoon case. His fantasies were of unlimited success and power. He believed that he was special and could be understood only by other special people. He displayed a strong presumption of entitlement. These are the classic characteristics of a narcissist.

  The narcissist demands constant admiration. He does not hesitate to take advantage of others to achieve his goals, and he is indifferent to their feelings and needs. Essentially, he believes that he is the only one whose satisfaction counts in this world. Everyone else is just a prop in his background scenery.

  A sexual offender’s narcissism can be demonstrated in many ways. Before the crime a narcissistic offender exhibits selfishness, self-centeredness, and an inability to accept criticism, even constructive criticism. During the crime the narcissistic criminal may engage in “high-risk” activity, even though he is otherwise an organized offender.

  However, the period following a crime is when his narcissism often is most obvious. One of the classic ways in which such an offender betrays his self-centeredness is by courting the media. After Robert Leroy Anderson’s murder convictions, for instance, he granted a press interview. Anderson declined to discuss whether or not he was guilty, but he did speak at length about how similar he was to Albert Einstein. The killer told the reporter he planned to read publications about and by Dr. Einstein in the hope of learning more about TIME magazine’s Man of the Century.

  A Show-Off for A Client

  Of all the self-defeating actions a narcissist’s ego commonly leads him to commit, perhaps the most foolish is a defendant’s decision to act as his own lawyer. It’s axiomatic that such an attorney has a fool for a client, but it is also a measure of how powerful the narcissistic urge can be that a man must show off for the cameras, even if his performance may cost him his life.

  In 1979, Ted Bundy was tried and convicted in front of a television audience for the bludgeon murders the year before of two sleeping coeds at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in Tallahassee. During the rampage he also assaulted three other young women and left them for dead.

  I remember watching Bundy on TV as he defended himself. He pulled off a kind of courtroom triple play during an evidentiary hearing when he appeared as the defendant, his own attorney, and as a witness. In his second homicide trial, for the abduction-murder of a twelve-year-old girl in Lake City, Florida, Bundy even managed to marry his girlfriend as he examined her on the stand! Carol Bundy later became the mother of his child.

  Part of the motivation for acting as his own attorney is the narcissistic offender’s need to assert that he is special. Connected to that is the excitement of reliving his crime on a public stage. At his Chi Omega trial in Miami, Bundy closely cross-examined a police officer, eliciting gruesome details of the crime scene. The information had no particular bearing on the issue of his guilt or innocence, but it certainly impressed the jury with the gory spectacle—Bundy’s handiwork.

  Bundy also personally took sworn depositions from a number of the coeds who were in the Chi Omega house that night. He led each of the distressed women through a step-by-step reconstruction of what they saw and when they saw it, right down to the plastic bucket with which paramedics caught one victim’s blood and teeth as she coughed them out.

  Another highly narcissistic offender, Mike DeBardeleben, also acted as his own defense attorney and is well remembered around the Manassas, Virginia, courthouse for his cross-examination of an assault victim. With Lori Cobert on the stand, DeBardeleben lingered over details of her abduction and assault. Courtroom onlookers sensed his delight in reconstructing the crime and victimizing Cobert once again. “I felt he was really getting into it,” prosecutor Lee Millette later said.

  His pleasure in reliving his crime led the calculating and highly intelligent Mike DeBardeleben to make an uncharacteristic mistake.

  “Now, during the incident, inside this man’s car it was dark all the time, wasn’t it?” he asked Ms. Cobert.

  “I could see,” she answered.

  “The interior lights were not on, were they?”

  “No.”

  “And there were no overhead interior lights, were there?”

  “No.”

  “The only lights they had there were these little small ones next to the door at the bottom of the door, right?”

  “Correct.”

  How did DeBardeleben know about those “little small” lights next to the door if he wasn’t there? No mention of them had come out in any reports or testimony. Prosecutor Millette made sure to remind the jury of DeBardeleben’s slip-up in his summation. The panel required just thirty-eight minutes to convict.
/>   Grandstanding on the Stand

  Another reflection of the ritualistic offender’s narcissism after a crime is his insistence on testifying, even when his attorneys advise against it, as they usually do. Wayne Williams, the Atlanta child killer, took the stand and seriously harmed his case by becoming combative with the prosecutor. My colleague in the Behavioral Science Unit, John Douglas, consulted with the prosecution in the Williams case. He correctly predicted the defendant would testify no matter what his lawyers advised.

  Williams’s highly capable lawyer, Al Binder, created a portrait of his client as an oppressed, innocent “victim of an embarrassed, racially biased system that needed a suspect fast and had found one,” as Douglas writes in his book, Mindhunter.

  To counter that impression, Douglas suggested to prosecutor Jack Mallard that he exploit Williams’s mental rigidity, keep circling and circling for hours, and then strike with the question, “Did you panic, Wayne, when you killed these kids?”

  The ploy worked. When Mallard reached over to touch the defendant, then ask his question, Williams replied, “No.” Immediately, he realized his mistake and let fly a stream of invective against Douglas and the prosecution team. A very different Wayne Williams suddenly flashed into view, and the jurors took note. “They stared with their mouths open,” Douglas writes.

  Journals of Depravity

  The narcissist offender expresses himself most revealingly in the ways he preserves a record of his crimes for later use. He may keep diaries, write manuscripts, logs, or journals. Calendars help him plan and remember dates. He may draw maps, invent codes, take photographs, or record audiotapes and videotapes.

  I have read countless pages from offenders’ notebooks. I have reviewed thousands of still photographs they’ve taken of their victims. I have listened to tape-recorded tortures, rapes, and murders, as well as the offenders’ narrative descriptions and reconstructions of their offenses. And I’ve watched videos of them interacting with their captives prior to, during, and after sexual assaults.

  This material, together with the crime scene itself, is what I call the ritualistic offender’s “work product.” It is by far the richest and most reliable source of information, not only about him as a criminal, but about his personality as well. You really can’t understand a sexual criminal unless you examine his work.

  Statistical data provide useful guidelines, but they tell nothing about an individual. Interviews with sexual criminals may yield helpful subjective information (for instance, how does he select victims?), but I can attest from long experience that hard facts, particularly inculpatory information, are usually in short supply when a ritualistic criminal speaks to the police.

  Offenders exaggerate, minimize, project, deny, rationalize, and lie, lie, lie. My rule is to accept nothing a sexual criminal tells me unless I can validate it with reliable witnesses, physical trace and/or evidence, or an analysis of his known behavior. In other words I want to study his work product.

  Some self-described experts in aberrant criminal behavior reason from the general to the specific, trying to apply what is known about a class of deviant offenders overall to a particular individual sought in connection with a crime. They might say, for example, that since most sexual criminals are white males of European descent, a particular UNSUB is undoubtedly Caucasian, too.

  That was the nearly universal supposition in Seattle a decade ago when three young women, all white, all from white, upper-middle-class communities, were raped, bludgeoned to death, and then left horribly displayed—two in their homes, one in a nightclub parking lot. As the writer Jack Olsen skillfully shows in his excellent book, Charmer: The True Story of a Ladies’ Man and His Victims, the consensus held that the killer was white, too.

  But this was not the case. Had investigators not paid close attention to hard evidence, the black male who actually committed the crimes, George Russell, might have gotten away with murder.

  The same was true in the Wayne Williams case. When the FBI dispatched me to Atlanta to consult in the child murders, the newspaper stories quoted alleged experts to the effect that a white man was killing Atlanta’s black children, and therefore the crimes were racially motivated.

  I was certain, from the outset, that a black man was the killer. Why? Because I visited the overwhelmingly black neighborhoods where the youths had disappeared. Any white man attempting to abduct a child would have been noticed and reported at once.

  Many law enforcement officials have learned the hard way that it is a mistake to uncritically accept what an offender tells you. Probably the most egregious example of this error was the wild story related by drifter Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have killed six hundred or more people with his partner, Ottis Toole. A lot of open murder cases were closed because of Lucas’s “confessions,” only to be reopened after he was proved to be a liar.

  The practice I find most troubling is the deliberate refusal to consider a criminal’s work product. One psychiatric expert witness once told me that he would not look at crime-scene photographs when evaluating a murder defendant for trial. Reason: He was afraid the photographs would bias his judgment! I should hope they would.

  Fond Memories

  The crime scene is a central feature of a sexual criminal’s work product, his canvas, if you will. For many offenders, the work is so valuable that they devise elaborate and occasionally ingenious ways to preserve it for later delectation.

  Why does the offender keep records when the practice raises his odds of being caught and dramatically increases the possibility of conviction? Isn’t this stupid? Does he want to be apprehended? What’s so important about these materials that he’ll risk so much to maintain them?

  When I ask offenders this question, they most frequently reply, “So I could relive the crime.” Based on my experience, I believe that’s an honest answer. Here’s how serial killer Billy Lee Chadd put it:

  “I just filed it [a murder] away in the corner of my mind where I was beginning to compile quite a few dark secrets,” wrote Chadd. “A corner from which I could summon out the memories to look at them again and again. To relive my crimes and revel in the horror of my victim.”

  The records themselves, along with the information contained in them, can have deep importance to the sexual criminal. It is well established that certain ritualistic offenders take personal belongings (such as a driver’s license, photographs, or items of clothing) from their victims to help them later reenact their crimes in their imagination. Some of these men acknowledge that they do something similar when making a record of their crimes. They are creating trophies or souvenirs, tangible artifacts of the experience.

  I think another, more subtle, motive may lie behind this practice, too—particularly among those who record their crimes in text, photos, or tapes. Mike DeBardeleben is an illustrative example.

  Counterfeiter and Killer

  DeBardeleben was brought to justice in May of 1983 by U.S. Secret Service agents, who pursued him across the United States as a counterfeiter. He was one of the most successful, and artful, lone wolf forgers that the U.S. government has ever encountered. Only after his apprehension was it discovered that DeBardeleben was also a kidnapper, rapist, bank robber, murderer, and a dozen other types of felon.

  Because so many of his crimes were sexually aberrant, the Secret Service asked me to consult on the case. In that capacity I reviewed DeBardeleben’s work product—to my knowledge, the most detailed and extensive self-documentation by any sexual sadist since the Marquis de Sade. From bloody underwear to audio tapes to sheaves and sheaves of notes, DeBardeleben saved it all.

  As I reviewed the photos he had taken of his victims, I noticed one series showing a young female being forced to fellate him while on her knees. Seen in the photos was yet another set of pictures scattered around DeBardeleben’s feet. These shots depicted an earlier victim being forced to perform the same act on him in exactly the same position.

  I was mystified, unable to figure out De
Bardeleben’s intent or what significance the photos on the floor held for him. I considered that he might have used those pictures to batter his victim psychologically or perhaps as a visual example of what he wanted her to do.

  Both theories were reasonable. From listening to his audio tapes of other crimes, I knew that he gave precise verbal instructions to his victims, and that he enjoyed verbally battering them.

  Still, these answers weren’t entirely satisfying.

  I turned the question over in my mind for quite some time until one day at home, while I was writing out my monthly checks, the answer suddenly struck me. DeBardeleben was using the pictures to critique his criminal interaction with the victim! A compulsive perfectionist, he was looking for possible ways to improve on his attempts to bring his fantasies to reality. Just as a SWAT team always meets after an exercise to critique its performance, or a football team reviews game films, DeBardeleben was conducting a comparative analysis of his sexual assaults!

  Yet reality can never fulfill fantasy’s expectations. Why? Because fantasy is always perfect. Mike DeBardeleben surely recognized this but was not deterred. He was determined to make the criminal act conform as closely to his deviant fantasy as possible.

  “They’ll Never Catch Me!”

  Another reason why ritualistic sexual offenders like to keep records is what you might call “the bulletproof syndrome.” As a narcissist, the serial sexual offender simply doesn’t believe the authorities will ever apprehend him, so he doesn’t fear capture or discovery of his records. Johnstone, the cartoon case criminal, was an example of this attitude.