When I have the opportunity to interview one of these men, I always ask if the death penalty would have deterred him from his crime. Without exception, he’ll say no. I asked one rapist why, and he responded by asking me a series of questions.
Had I ever skipped school?
Yes.
Did I know in advance that I would be punished if caught?
Yes.
Then why did I do it?
Because I didn’t think I would be caught, I said.
There you go, he said.
Extreme narcissism leads the criminal to the belief that he is superior to everyone in general, and to law enforcement in particular. He considers himself invulnerable to identification and arrest. Even if he did consider the possibility of arrest, the offender typically becomes so focused on acting out his fantasies that the question of detection becomes immaterial. Billy Lee Chadd, whom you’ll soon get to know, became so emotionally involved in one of his crimes that he could easily have been overpowered by the victim.
Law enforcement should be deeply grateful for the narcissistic personality disorder; it is the serial sexual offender’s Achilles’ heel. You can almost take for granted that after a while the bulletproof syndrome will set in, and he will begin to take unnecessary risks. Boredom will push him in search of the bigger jolt he gets from pushing the envelope, risking more.
Don’t confuse such outrageous behavior with a hidden wish to be caught. Ted Bundy, for example, was arrested three times during his killing career. On each occasion he was drunk or high and was driving erratically late at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood. You might expect that someone as intelligent as Bundy would make a mistake like that only once, at most.
In my view Bundy wasn’t inviting capture, either subconsciously or consciously. He meant to stay free, he wanted to keep killing, but his narcissistic ego prevented him from correctly perceiving the peril of his behavior.
The authorities who arrested him in Florida had no idea that Bundy (already infamous throughout the West) had murdered the sleeping coeds in Tallahassee and the twelve-year-old child in Lake City. He was headed from Florida to Houston and could have easily reached his destination had he not been drinking and driving erratically on the streets of Pensacola. This behavior led to his recapture. If not for this classic narcissist’s misstep, Bundy would have gone on to kill again.
I don’t believe any aberrant offender ever wants to be caught, even subconsciously. I do believe that some honestly are appalled at their behavior and sincerely would like to stop what they are doing. Some offenders have told me that they were scared by their violent fantasies and behavior, but I have never met an offender who said that he wanted to be caught.
One sadistic serial rapist, Jon Simonis in Louisiana, did tell me he was glad he was caught before he committed murder, which he feared he would soon do because “rape was becoming boring.” He wasn’t bothered by the crimes he had committed so far, and he certainly did not want to be locked up or punished for them. He just didn’t want to kill.
Psychopaths
Perhaps the most frightening personality disorder is that of the psychopath. Professionally, the condition is known as antisocial personality disorder (APD). This term has replaced psychopath in the modern psychiatric lexicon, just as psychopath once replaced sociopath. In earlier times, people in this category were called “morally insane” or simply “evil.”
Psychopaths do not feel remorse or shame, guilt or appropriate fear. They do not learn from punishment. They are easily bored. They like excitement. They find it difficult to delay gratification, no matter where their self-interest may lie.
In a classic (though not scientifically validated) test of psychopathy, the subject is told he can have a quarter now or a five-dollar bill tomorrow. The psychopath always takes the quick two-bits.
Psychopaths are chronic liars, even when they have no need or reason to lie. They have no understanding of, or concern for, the harm they cause others.
I once asked a psychopath what he thought about love.
“Intellectually I understand the concept,” he said, “but I have never experienced it.”
This man had raped and tortured more than fifty women across twelve states. Two of his victims, devout Christians, visited him in prison, hoping to bring their attacker to Jesus. I asked him if he felt it was healthy for the women to continue calling on him.
“Probably not,” he answered, “but it sure is good for my ego.” Typically, his own gratification was his only concern.
“A Normal, Easy-Going Guy”
Sexual serial killers, for all their depredations, remain rare among criminals. Rarer still is the opportunity to review their most private records, which are their most prized possessions and are usually well hidden.
In the course of my work as a behavioral investigator, I’ve been given access to the innermost thoughts and fantasies of a wide number of these criminals. One example stands out because the offender, Billy Lee Chadd, wrote an extremely detailed account of his crimes and fantasies after he was captured.
Chadd, who originally meant the manuscript to be published—he hoped to make money with it—appears to have embellished his accounts in places, according to Mike Pent, the California deputy district attorney who prosecuted him. Nevertheless, Chadd has provided us an intimate window on his mind. Without such documents, we would know far less than we do about these bizarre and extremely dangerous men.
Billy Lee Chadd, a native San Diegan, husband and father, described himself as a “normal, easy-going guy.” Eventually, he claimed to have killed scores of people. In his manuscript the number is just four. Mike Pent says his office was able to confirm three.
Chadd’s first confirmed homicide, committed at age twenty, was the 1974 rape-murder of a thirty-year-old San Diego woman. She was found lying in bed on her stomach. Her hands and feet were bound with window sash cord, and she had been blindfolded with a towel. The young woman had been violently raped vaginally, anally, and orally. Chadd also strangled her and used a steak knife to stab her repeatedly in the neck.
In his clinical, emotionless confession, Chadd said he went to the first murder victim’s residence intending only to burglarize it. Inside, however, he confronted her as she emerged from her tub, naked and wet, and became aroused.
From his confession it might appear that Billy Lee Chadd was an opportunistic rapist, a term I use to describe a man who arrives intent on committing one crime, usually robbery, but seizes the opportunity to commit another—rape.
But Chadd was also a sexual sadist who left nothing to chance. He took the woman to the bedroom and raped her. Afterward, realizing that she could identify him, he decided to kill her. That is the essence of his confession.
As an investigator, I would have been happy to obtain such a straightforward admission of guilt. It meant that the case was closed and Billy Lee Chadd would be taken off the streets for a long, long time.
But then came a twist. In jail Chadd handwrote a manuscript that he titled “Dark Secrets.” Its contents certainly merit the title.
When “Dark Secrets” came into my possession, I prevailed upon my wife-to-be, Peggy Driver, to type the manuscript. She presented me with fifty-seven pages of appalling typescript, double spaced. The fact that she later married me, despite the assignment I had pressed on her, attests to Peggy’s selfless nature.
Self-Portrait of a Killer
“Dark Secrets” is Chadd’s intimate reflection on his crimes and why he committed them. Portions of the text are graphic. Throughout the document, Chadd casts himself in the most positive light possible. His intelligence is evident, as is his belief that he is essentially normal. In both regards, he is an archetypal ritualistic offender.
He says he led “a double life,” a husband and father who nevertheless had this little problem—a violent streak toward women. He rationalizes his behavior by noting that he came from a broken home. Both his mother and stepfather were alcoholics. From the time
he was eight, Chadd writes, he can remember very few times his mother was out of bed before noon. Friends taught him how to steal at an early age. He boasts that by age eleven he could drive a car, and that he stole them “quite frequently,” without suffering any serious legal consequences.
At age fifteen Chadd fell in love with his future wife, with whom he says he “began having sex when I was sixteen… We made love almost daily until July of my 16th year. Then all hell broke loose in my life.”
Chadd describes his first real trouble with the law, a rape case, as a miscarriage of justice. This is the aberrant offender’s familiar pattern of blame projection. It’s always someone else’s fault.
One midnight, he writes, a visiting friend, drunk and also high on drugs, announced that he wanted to go across the street to rob a house. Chadd claims he stayed in his friend’s truck, only to be awakened some hours later by flashlights and voices. It was the police, and he was under arrest. According to Chadd, he could not have committed the crime because of his unspecified physical abnormality, which the victim could not help but notice had he been her attacker. Yet she made no mention of it in her testimony. Chadd’s attorney apparently refused to pursue the matter. “I even told him to ask these questions. I wasted my breath. I was found guilty on her testimony and a partial footprint found in her driveway…. I was sentenced to two years.”
Chadd escaped from the California Youth Authority (CYA) on two occasions. The second time, he writes, he “really did” rape someone.
A subsequent sexual assault begins with a random knock on a door. “Bad luck for the poor lady that she was home. I told her our car had broken down and I asked if she would let me use her phone. If she would have said no and closed the door, nothing may have ever happened to her. She did say no, but she then explained that her husband was at work and she never let strangers in when she was alone. ALONE.”
Chadd returns to the house, breaks through the front door with a brick, and discovers the woman in her bathroom. He grabs her by her hair. She begins to scream. He puts a knife to her throat as he drags her back to a bedroom and tells her to shut up or he’ll kill her. “When we got to the bedroom, I just shoved her down on the bed and threw up her housecoat. I tried to cut her panties off but my knife wasn’t sharp enough… I pulled her panties off and pulled down my Levi’s and got on her… she just laid there. So I told her to start moving or I’d hurt her….
“Up till that night, I had balled quite a bit but I had never experienced such sexual pleasure. I was completely overcome with passion. I dropped my knife… I even lost my vision for a few seconds. I collapsed on her and I was so spent I couldn’t even move. Had she only known my condition, she could have picked up the knife and stabbed me and I couldn’t have done anything to stop her…
“I told her to stay on the bed and I left the house… Later that night, I thought about the rape and I decided it wasn’t bad at all. And I knew I would do it again.”
Chadd blames the criminal justice system for making him into a sexual predator, but the passage above amply demonstrates the power of his aberrant urge: “I never had experienced such sexual pleasure.”
Still, at this stage, he was a young and relatively inexperienced offender. This is obvious from the minimal amount of time he invests in victim selection, the crude method of entry (throwing a brick through the door), the lack of any attempt to protect his identity, and the failure to control (bind and gag) the victim after his departure. Even without benefit of Chadd’s written reconstruction, an experienced investigator could look at these telltale signs at the crime scene and conclude that the rapist was fairly new to his chosen crime.
When Chadd reflects on his excitement during the rape, we begin to observe his tendencies toward sexual sadism. This deviance will emerge in a much more pronounced fashion in his descriptions of his murders. Chadd unwittingly tells us a crucially important fact about his narcissism when he writes of revisiting the rape in his mind. He decides, “It wasn’t bad at all.” Moments before he’d called it the best sexual experience of his life, even saying that he had collapsed and nearly was blind for a few moments.
Chadd needs to project the idea that nothing means very much to him, especially anything to do with a victim. She’s his to use and discard. He is in total control. He dominates and is not dominated. Of course, he then admits the opposite—that he was not in control, that his urges, not his will, directed his actions. “I knew,” he writes, “I would do it again.”
At seventeen, Chadd was transferred to CYA’s Youth Training School. There he attempted suicide by hanging. “If I would have been successful,” he writes, “four people would be alive today.”
He was then sent to Atascadero State Hospital (ASH) where, Chadd claims, he had his first homosexual encounter. “It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it was sex.”
He writes of first using drugs and of trading homosexual acts for drugs at Atascadero. He also claims that following his transfer back to CYA, he blackmailed a teacher into giving him good grades by threatening to tell the authorities about the teacher having sex with a staff member. Whether true or imagined, such an episode served to reassure Chadd of his power, even over those in authority.
According to his manuscript, upon release Chadd committed his first and only nonsexual murder. As he describes this killing, which San Diego authorities cannot confirm, it occurred on the roadway bridge while he was hitchhiking.
Chadd recalls seeing a young man and his dog sitting by the road on the other side of the bridge. He crossed over to them and sat down as well, although the stranger clearly had already staked out the spot. Words were exchanged.
The other hitchhiker was both big and tough looking, Chadd writes, but he was certain he could take the stranger. So without warning Chadd kicked up at the other man’s groin, and a fist fight began. Chadd was knocked down then picked up a big rock as the stranger moved in to punch him again. As he did so, Chadd smashed the stone into the man’s forehead, dropping him to the ground. Suddenly, Chadd explains, he realized the stranger was utterly in his power. He felt godlike, able to grant life or take it away, although he does not appear to have considered his options for long. Chadd smashed the unconscious man’s head open, killing him at once.
He says he was surprised at how easy murder is and how much he enjoyed it, particularly the feeling of supremacy. Chadd pitched the man’s body, as well as his travel bag and dog, over the bridge and into the river below, discovering as he did so that he felt little fear of discovery for his crime.
“Later that night I thought about what I had done. I asked myself why I did it. But no answer came to me. I wasn’t sorry or anything. And I admitted to myself that I enjoyed it. And I wondered if all murderers felt as I did.” He explains that though he wished to share how he felt with someone, he realized the smarter move was to keep it to himself. “I just filed it away in the corner of my mind, where I was beginning to compile quite a few dark secrets. 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…”
In his matter-of-fact account of the hitchhiker’s murder, the primary issue expressed is power. Chadd is beginning to perceive his need for it. During the rape he drew psychosexual pleasure from exercising power and control and wrote about it. In the young man’s murder, his narcissism blossoms: “…it was easy and I was enjoying the feeling of supremacy. A supremacy like I had never known before.”
Chadd also is maturing as a criminal. This time he takes action to protect his identity. He throws the victim, along with his belongings and dog, into the river. “No witnesses, no body or weapon. I was pretty confident,” Chadd writes.
The lack of fear is, in itself, abnormal. Chadd has crossed a critical barrier. Not only has he killed, but he recognizes that it was easy and believes he won’t get caught. He likes it and he’s getting good at it. He is learning through experience. He is about to become a serial killer.
> One of the most striking aspects of Billy Lee Chadd’s writings is his complete lack of self-knowledge. Like many serial killers, he can’t articulate why he doesn’t feel normal guilt or fear. “I asked myself why I did it,” he writes. “But no answer came to me. I knew what I had done was wrong. But where was [sic] the feelings of guilt that were supposed to accompany such a deed? What was it that caused me to feel such elation? What was it that allowed me to take another human’s life with no feeling of remorse?”
This lack of remorse is a classic symptom of the psychopath’s personality. It becomes even more apparent as Chadd’s memoir continues. He remembers going home to his pregnant wife, whom he brutalized when she refused him sex. “I started to choke her. I could see fear in her eyes…. My wife was cowering in a corner with tears in her eyes. The fear she showed would fire me even more. I couldn’t see her face, just those eyes, afraid and pleading. I felt myself slipping into the strange feeling of supremacy again. I wanted to kill.
“Then I suddenly realized who I was choking. I thought, ‘My God, what am I doing?’ I let her go, but the drive to destroy was still there. I don’t know how but I shifted my anger from her to inanimate objects. I started breaking anything that would break… I kept shouting ‘DIE! DIE!’ Not anyone in particular, just ‘DIE!’”
Chadd writes that he then left the family trailer. “Without her fear to feed upon,” he recalls, “I slowly started to calm down.” His actions were being driven by his sexual sadism and his desire to destroy. The description in “Dark Secrets” of his second killing, but first known sexual murder, stresses both themes. Here is his account of the 1974 rape-murder of a San Diego woman.
“My body was giving me massive spurts of adrenaline,” he writes. “My heart was going like a trip hammer as I reached for the door knob… The excitement and fear poured back over me again….
He discovered her standing in her bathtub, naked, and forced her at gunpoint into her bedroom, where the assault took place.
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Page 8
