by John Douglas
Ron then drove away across the freeway, thinking about maybe going to Cincinnati for the weekend. No, maybe he would just go to Ann Arbor, but wasn’t sure how to take the back roads to get there. He was back near Brighton, on the service road for Route 23, when he spotted Shawn riding his bike and recognized him as the beautiful boy from the convenience store. He stopped the Jeep about thirty feet behind him and walked up to him.
“Hey, I want to talk to you,” Ron called out. Shawn stopped. He talked to him for about a minute or so, asking if the road he was on went to Ann Arbor.
Then he said sharply, “Come with me! I’ve got a knife.” He did actually have a knife, but it was in the Jeep.
Fearfully, Shawn went with him, saying he couldn’t be gone too long. Ron put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Leaving Shawn’s new bike, Ron started the Jeep. First he drove south, then turned around and headed north. He tried to make conversation, asking the boy about school.
Between Flint and Saginaw he decided to go to the cabin. He’d asked for and been given the key. He said he considered Shawn a friend and at no time was he concerned the boy would run away, even when they stopped for cigarettes at another convenience store. Ron waited in the Jeep while Shawn went to the men’s room. When asked if he worried about what Shawn’s parents would be going through, he replied, “I didn’t even think about it.”
The cabin was rustic, a bedroom and kitchen with an outhouse in the back. Inside the cabin, he drank more beer and smoked more cigarettes and marijuana and got Shawn to indulge, too. He said he let Shawn play with his loaded .22 rifle and 12-gauge shotgun. He opened some canned food and heated it on the stove. They slept together in the lower bunk of the cabin’s bunk bed. The next morning, he had a hell of a hangover, complicated by the mescaline and Valium he downed regularly. Shawn asked, “Are you sure you’re gonna take me back and not hurt me?”
“Sure,” Ron replied. “If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it by now.”
Late in the afternoon, Ron had them drinking again, then performed oral sex, masturbating to climax on his belly. He kept Shawn in something of a stupor induced by a potent combination of alcohol, marijuana, and fear. Later, he escalated his behavior, though he said he felt badly that he had done to Shawn what an older guy had done to him. When he instituted sex again, it was with a slide-lock belt tightened around Shawn’s neck, which he explained would heighten the sensation.
That was when he said he began “feeling really weird,” not thinking straight. He went outside for a walk to try to clear his head, then came back in and straddled Shawn on the bed, gradually tightening the belt. At first Shawn struggled and Ron held him down. Then he stopped struggling and was still. Ron passed out, flooded with relief, and slept next to him that night in the bed.
When he awoke Monday morning, he felt Shawn’s thigh. It was cold. His naked body was already stiff. The belt was still tight around his neck. He said he freaked out, jumping up and banging his head on the upper bunk. He ran out of the cabin and threw up. He was “hungover like hell,” crying and trying to piece everything together. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Shawn’s face. He had a few beers and smoked a joint to steady his nerves.
Still panicked, he went for a ride in the Jeep, trying to think what to do. He stopped for breakfast and coffee, hoping it would make his light-headedness go away. He drove around some more and went out to sit by the lake before coming back to the cabin. He picked up the rigid body by an arm and a leg and lugged it to the back of the Jeep. He found a place by the side of the road to dump it, then gathered sticks which he placed over it and covered it with leaves and ferns. Then he drove the twenty miles back to Saginaw.
As we’d predicted, this was not the subject’s first sexual crime involving young boys. In September 1973, when he was fourteen, Bailey abducted a fifteen-year-old boy at knifepoint, tied his hands, carried him off on his bicycle and then sexually assaulted him before finally letting him go. The victim identified him from a school yearbook picture. Bailey was first admitted to the Hawthorne Center as a result.
He was let out after fourteen weeks, and by June of the next year he’d been picked up again for threatening a twelve-year-old boy with a knife and fondling his genitals. This resulted in a second stay at Hawthorne. He was discharged after eight weeks as “a model patient throughout his hospitalization.”
In May of the next year he accosted a ten-year-old boy with a fishing knife, took him on his bike to an open field where he drugged the boy, pulled down his pants, forced him to take several pills, and choked him for sexual gratification. When the boy came to, Bailey was gone, but the boy was able to identify him. Ron’s father, Al, asked that he be readmitted to Hawthorne but he was sent instead to Wayne County Youth Home. The authorities there decided Ron needed long-term care and recommended he be sent back to Hawthorne. In the meantime, he was released to his parents. Apparently, though, that didn’t work out and in August, Al called the police, reporting that his son had “flipped.” That same day, Ron was admitted to Hawthorne for the third time.
After seven weeks there, during which he was found fondling a younger boy, Ron ran away. When he was apprehended, he was again sent to the Wayne County Youth Home. A couple of months later he was transferred to the Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital. He tried to escape, and bounced back and forth between the youth home and the hospital.
There was a recurring pattern to Ron’s treatment. After an incident and his arrest, he would initially deny any responsibility, constructing an alternate scenario which absolved himself of guilt. For one of the crimes, he said he had choked the boy to keep him quiet so they wouldn’t be attacked by nearby construction workers. Eventually, he would admit his responsibility and swear he had changed and that it would never happen again.
By 1977, his primary therapist, Dr. José Tombo, reported that he was making excellent progress. When he was caught using drugs and sexually approaching another patient, Dr. Tombo characterized this as “a normal growth pattern,” given the defendant’s past psychosexual history. He was released in October 1977 with a discharge diagnosis of “adjustment reaction of adolescence.” He was put on five years’ probation for the charges outstanding against him and instructed to continue outpatient therapy with Dr. Tombo.
In February 1980 he moved with a friend to Summerfield, Florida, where he stayed until May 1983, working in the tire delivery business. While there, he admitted to accosting and kidnapping several fourteen- to sixteen-year-old boys. His victim of preference was thin and blond and looked like he had at that age. He liked using belts or elastic bands around his or his partners’ necks to create an erotic high. He estimated this had happened three to five times, around the Hernando and Daytona Beach areas. On one occasion, he accosted a boy in a mobile home park, saying, “Why don’t you suck my dick?” The boy’s family called the police and Bailey was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and again put on probation.
On Wednesday, July 18,1984, two boys found the partially clothed body of fifteen-year-old Kenny Myers of Ferndale, just over the Wayne County line north of Detroit, close to the Middle Rouge River bank in Edward Hines Park, in Westland, just southwest of the city. They flagged down a passing Wayne County sherriff’s car. Kenny’s mother had reported him missing two days earlier when he didn’t return home after dinner. His blue Columbia ten-speed bike was found in Detroit the same day. The blue jersey he’d been wearing was found the next day near a tennis court just outside of the park. He had been strangled with a belt and toxicology tests revealed the presence of alcohol and marijuana in his system.
A witness in Detroit reported she had seen a dirty and damaged brown station wagon with a white top approach a young white male on such a blue bike. The car’s driver got out, pushed the boy off the bike, threw him in the car, and sped off. She thought the driver was the boy’s father and that the boy had done something wrong. Still concerned, though, she tried to note the license plate number but could
n’t read it.
The Myers case remained unsolved, with little progress made until Ronald Bailey was arrested for Shawn Moore’s murder. The similarity of the two cases—the abduction from bicycle to car of a slightly built, five-foot-tall, ninety-pound white male, forced to ingest drugs and alcohol, strangulation with a belt—made police think Bailey might be good for this one, too.
Through a name and address found in Bailey’s possession, Michigan State Police contacted a young man who admitted he knew Ron, that Ron had had a damaged brown station wagon with a white top the year before, and that Ron had given him beer and marijuana on several occasions. Police traced the car. It turned out to be a 1970 Buick station wagon that Bailey had owned until December 10, 1984, when he traded it in on a 1985 Toyota pickup truck. At the time of Kenny Myers’s murder, Ron had been working for Hank Greenfield, owner of A.R.A. Systems Coffee Service in Livonia, and had parked the Buick behind the building and left it there for a month until Greenfield got tired of looking at it and told him he had to move it.
A teenage boy told Livonia police that he had been abducted by someone driving an old Buick station wagon whom he identified as Bailey and driven to Mines Park where this individual performed fellatio on him before driving him back and releasing him near his home. Similar reports came from other teens.
When Kenny Myers’s body had been found, something was apparently missing: a black plastic watch Kenny’s mom said he had bought at a flea market about a month before he disappeared, with five dollars she had given him. Lieutenant Mike Smith of the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department told a task force meeting he thought it strange that after being brought back from Florida on murder charges, Ron Bailey’s main concern seemed to be where the cheap black plastic watch that had been taken from him was and whether he could get it back. He later admitted that he had to kill the most beautiful of all the boys—the ones who reminded him of himself.
Now, there are a couple of points to this whole story, though I’m afraid they’re repeatedly missed by many supposed professionals.
In preparation for trial, Bailey was examined by a number of psychiatrists and psychologists, some appointed by the prosecution and some by the defense. The defense lawyers thought they had a pretty good case for insanity. After all, he’d been in and out of mental institutions since he was a teenager, and his psychiatric records reflected his claim that he had the classic parental situation of stern, aloof father and domineering, disciplinarian mother who was continually punishing him and warning him about women, and there was his assertion—supported by the claims of other patients—that his psychiatrist at Northville, Dr. José Tombo, had engaged in sex with him on numerous occasions. The story Bailey gave was that he considered these young boys he had abducted his friends, that he hated himself, and when he was killing Shawn, he really believed he was killing his younger self, thereby ridding the world of the harm his adult self would cause.
Okay. But while Ron originally claimed (in keeping with his past history of not owning up to his actions) that Shawn’s death was “an accident,” the prosecution’s psychological team—Harley Stock, Ph.D., and Lynn Blunt, M.D.—got him to admit that as early as when he was driving up to the cabin in Gladwin, Ron knew he would have to kill the boy, that he would not be able to return him alive. As to why he didn’t kill Shawn the first night, he replied that they “had not had sex yet.” He further admitted that one of his motives for the murder was that he was jealous and killing Shawn would prevent him from having sex with anyone else; presumably, he meant women. While this all certainly points to mental instability, this is not insanity. He had the ability to plan, to organize, to think ahead to his crimes. His reasons for murder betray no lack of appreciation for the difference between right and wrong; rather, they demonstrate a self-centeredness and narcissism which is at the basis of sociopathic—not psychotic—behavior. There is confusion over the difference between insanity and character disorder. A legally insane person cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Someone with a sociopathic character disorder knows the difference but chooses to do what he wants to anyway, out of anger, jealousy, or just because it makes him feel good.
What about the alleged abuse by Dr. Tombo—couldn’t that contribute to “insanity”?
Well, if it was true (Dr. Tombo denied it), then it certainly didn’t help a boy who already had severe personality problems and feelings of self-loathing. Such action would be a gross and despicable breach of patient-healer trust and should be dealt with in the most vigorous way possible. But something else must be kept in mind, as the prosecution psychiatrists pointed out. By the time Bailey came into contact with Tombo, his pattern of sexual aggression was already well established. We might have hoped for more constructive therapy. We might have hoped for a different home life and upbringing. And we might have hoped for a more effective and discriminating juvenile justice system.
But none of this justifies or explains the willful and premeditated killing of one human being by another. “In all of the defendant’s psychiatric history,” the prosecution psychiatrists concluded, “there is absolutely no indication that he behaved in any way that would be characterized as representative of an underlying mental illness.”
Apparently, the jury in the Livingston County courtroom agreed. Though Bailey took the stand and tried to conjure up the proper emotional responses indicative of contrition and remorse, he fell rather flat. The defense psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Dreyer, diagnosed Bailey as suffering from “pseudopsyehopathic schizophrenia.” Dr. Stock countered with his own diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, homosexual pedophilia, and sexual sadism that led him to inflict pain on others in order to sexually gratify himself. He said that Bailey had a character disorder which still allowed him to distinguish right from wrong and he had the ability to decide whether or not to harm someone. “The ones who were more resistant got hurt,” Stock said. “Those who were compliant were released and sometimes recontacted.” This no longer seemed to hold true by the time Bailey encountered Shawn Moore.
In the final analysis, most jurors said it was the use of the belt that convinced them of Bailey’s rationality and premeditation. It took over a minute to choke Shawn to death with it, during which time Ron had to hold his hands down and keep him from resisting. The jury found Bailey guilty of kidnapping and premeditated murder. He began serving his sentence in Michigan, but, as with Stuart Knowlton, there were continual threats against his life from other prisoners.
He was transferred to a prison out of state for his own safety.
In the aftermath of any violent crime, particularly murder, we try to take away whatever lessons we can from it, essentially by examining the various tragedies.
And in fact, there are a number of tragedies relating to the crimes of Ronald Bailey. For one, authorities did not recognize his earliest actions as serious enough to warrant decisive action. For another, there was little publicity in the Kenny Myers case, which might have encouraged critical information from some member of the public. If there had been more publicity about such details as the type and description of the vehicle the UNSUB was thought to be driving, Bailey’s boss, Hank Greenfield, would have reported the car parked behind his office, which he saw and which rankled him every day for a month. And if that had happened, perhaps Shawn Moore would be alive today.
In my opinion, the police did all of this correctly and well in working up Shawn’s murder, consulting us at the right time and using our profile to focus their investigation. And certainly I am convinced that because of the way the Moore task force went about their job, other young men are alive today who could have been Ron Bailey’s next victims.
The other lesson I take away from the Bailey case is that however noble the callings of psychiatry, psychology, and social work may be, and no matter how hard they strive to help each troubled individual brought before them, from my own long experience I believe you can’t simply look at someone like Ron Bailey in isolation as a patient without looking
at the totality of his actions. By that I mean that while it’s the mental health professional’s job to try to help this person, it’s just as important to think of the people he’s going to interact with if he’s allowed back out into the world. (Ron was usually institutionalized for only weeks or months at a time and then released to go back to whatever he’d been doing before.)
There is a natural tendency to want to empathize with the subject, which is why so many psychiatrists don’t want to read the crime scene reports or know too much about what the person is accused of. It might bias them, they fear, make them lose their objectivity. To me, this is like an art historian not wanting to see any of Picasso’s paintings because it might bias his evaluation of the artist.
Dr. Joel Dreyer, who analyzed his problem as “a posttraumatic stress disorder on top of an already disarrayed mind,” went so far as to write, “His encounters in Northville State Hospital, I believe, were as heinous, or more so, than the crimes he committed because the hospital took him in to help him, and as the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no harm.’” A page earlier he had written, “I understood at that moment I was sitting not with a victimizer, but with a victim.”
Excuse me, doctor, but let’s keep our eye on the ball here. Ron Bailey may very well have been victimized in various instances, as many people are, in various ways. But Ron Bailey killed. He took lives that can never be retrieved. No one did that to him. And once we lose sight of the fact that this young man and others of his ilk are very much victimizers, we also lose sight of the Kenny Myerses and Shawn Moores and Cassie Hansens of the world—the true innocents.
