The Evil That Men Do Part 21

"Those cards and that notebook were amazing," John Ba.s.s recollects. "Ward had everything indexed, cross-referenced, and organized. He would have made a perfect file clerk."

The next topics were ritual and MO.

"Ritual," Roy said, "is that part of s.e.xual crime that is committed to enhance the psychos.e.xual enjoyment of the offender. It is the signature of a crime that a criminal investigative a.n.a.lyst looks for to link cases to one individual. The ritual remains relatively static over time.

"MO," he went on, "evolves over time as the offender matures and gains experience in committing similar crimes. The primary functions of an MO are to protect the identify of the offender, ensure control of the victim, and facilitate his escape."

Roy ill.u.s.trated his points with a case from his files.

"A man breaks into a home, captures the husband and wife, and takes the wife out of the room and has her change into panty hose and high heels," Hazelwood recounted.

"Breaking into the house was MO. Tying up the husband was MO. Having the woman change into panty hose and high heels prior to the a.s.sault would be ritual."

Van Pelt's next objective was to establish with Hazelwood the behavioral links between the kidnap-rape of Laura Grant, to which Ward already had confessed, and Nikia Gilbreath's abduction-murder.

The district attorney produced an easel chart which listed on one side various features and factors of the Gilbreath case, and on the other, corresponding features and facts of the Grant case.

Examples of parallel MO, Roy testified, included the fact that no males were present at the early-morning hours of the abductions and that women with children were targeted. The presence of the kids, he explained, made their mothers more cautious, and easier to control, at least initially.

Comparable instances of ritual, Roy said, included the obvious importance of lingerie in both cases, as well as the fact that both victims were taken from their homes and driven to a second location. In both cases, that decision heightened his risk of capture, but was absolutely essential to playing out his ritual.

On cross-examination, court-appointed defense attorney Chris Townley, by reputation an able and dogged advocate, showed Hazelwood no deference.

Mocking Roy's list of case similarities, Townley archly suggested that since both women lived in Georgia and neither had gray hair, those similarities might have been included in his a.n.a.lysis, too.

Hazelwood allowed politely that yes, these were similarities, too.

Townley also established that possessing an item, such as a woman's purse, does not make a man a fetis.h.i.+st.

"It depends on why he has the purse," Hazelwood answered.

Nor does the identification of multiple paraphilias in a defendant's character prove him guilty, Townley a.s.serted.

Hazelwood agreed again.

Townley chipped away where he could in his cross-examination, but he could not unravel the broad and distinct picture Ralph Van Pelt and Roy Hazelwood had created of Ray Ward as a troubled, deviant killer.

"Hazelwood was an excellent witness, and that helped us a lot," says the former prosecutor.

Ward's jury deliberated only briefly before voting him guilty of capital murder. In the ensuing penalty phase of the trial, members of the panel would be surprised to see Roy take the stand once again-this time as a defense witness.

Based on the detailed information provided by Laura Grant, Roy believed Ward was an essentially nonviolent power rea.s.surance rapist. Chris Townley wanted the jury to hear Hazelwood's description of such an offender, and then make the jump in their own minds to the Gilbreath case. As they deliberated whether Ward should be executed, Townley hoped they'd consider that Ray Ward probably had not kidnapped Nikia Gilbreath with the intent of killing her. The asphyxiation had been a ghastly, tragic mistake.

With Ralph Van Pelt's and the FBI's approval, Roy agreed to testify as a defense witness.

"In the Laura Grant case, what type of offender would you be looking for?" Townley asked.

"I would cla.s.sify that rapist as a power rea.s.surance rapist," Roy replied, and then he briefly explained his typology.

"So," said Townley, "he is not trying to inflict physical pain, or trying to subject someone to physical abuse?"

"No. In the Laura Grant case, you would have seen a beating, possible cigarette burns, that type of thing."

What about the odd incident with the Christmas tree, the defense attorney asked.

"In my opinion," Roy answered, "he was trying to reinforce with her the fact that he is a nice guy. You'll recall that he dropped her off a block from her house, asked for her phone number and that sort of thing. He was trying to reinforce in her mind that he was a nice guy."

Townley also explored with Hazelwood what is known about the root causes of fetis.h.i.+sm.

"The most prevalent and accepted theory," Roy said, "is that at some point very early in their lives fetis.h.i.+sts come into contact with a particular object at the same time they are being s.e.xually aroused."

At that moment, he went on, the object is believed to somehow become "imprinted" and henceforth is always a.s.sociated by the fetis.h.i.+st with s.e.x gratification.

In one example from the professional literature, Roy told of a large number of Englishmen who developed rubber gas mask fetishes. Research indicated that as boys during World War II, these males had been forced to wear gas masks during the German air raids, occasions when their protective mothers also held them tight to their bosoms. The experience may have s.e.xually excited the boys, imprinting the rubber gas masks on their libidos.

Roy agreed with Townley that the fetis.h.i.+stic impulse can be very, very strong.

"For example," he said, "fetis.h.i.+sts know the consequences of an illegal act, there's no question about that. But that consideration is overcome by the desire for that gratification of breaking into the house and stealing a pair of panties."

"Somehow they end up doing it anyhow?" asked Townley.

"Yes," said Roy.

Apparently, this added objective information about Ray Ward did nothing to sway the jury in his favor. On July 12, 1991, the panel voted the death penalty for him.

They did so without ever hearing Roy's most interesting contribution to the case, his speculative reconstruction of how the Gilbreath murder in fact took place.

Hazelwood believed Mrs. Gilbreath was a carefully selected victim, probably chosen when Ward helped drill the water well for the Gilbreaths.

He knew also from long experience with such offenders that Ward no doubt had fantasized a great deal about Nikia Gilbreath before committing the actual crime.

Ward's intent probably was for Nikia Gilbreath to bring to life his lingerie fetish fantasy, just as Laura Grant had been forced to do at knifepoint. Murder, however, was not on Ward's mind. Women's underwear was.

Roy surmised that Ward surveilled the Gilbreath household, and knew its rhythms. The tire tracks suggested he parked his vehicle that Thursday morning, where Nikia's mother later found the Gilbreath Cutla.s.s partially hidden on the old logging road. He then walked the half mile to the Gilbreaths'.

Ward would have watched the house from cover, knowing from his previous reconnaissance that Joe left via the back door each day at 6:30. Once Nikia's husband had rumbled away in his pickup, Ray Ward walked into the house through the back door.

Had Ward knocked on the front door, Hazelwood pointed out, Mrs. Gilbreath would have automatically pulled on a robe before opening the door.

He encountered Mrs. Gilbreath not in her bed, but on the couch in the living room, where she'd gone back to sleep after fixing Joe lunch that morning. The telephone cord was probably the first thing handy with which to bind her, and it was taken directly from the wall near the sofa.

Ward may have gained her compliance by threatening to harm the sleeping Amber. That would explain the lack of defensive wounds. The bruises discovered on her back, plus the broken ribs she also suffered from behind, most likely were caused by the 245-pound offender digging his knees into her as he hog-tied Nikia, wrist and ankle, with the blue cord, on the sofa.

Roy guessed Ward then covered Mrs. Gilbreath with the nylon bedspread and carried her out the front door to the family car, where he likely put her in the trunk. He then returned to the front porch and pulled the balky outer door closed over the new carpet, hoping to create the appearance that Mrs. Gilbreath had driven somewhere with Amber in the car.

Nikia Gilbreath, whose first concern would have been to protect Amber, probably remained silent while still in the house. Once safely away where Amber was no longer threatened, however, Nikia very likely started screaming and resisting as best she could. Everyone said Nikia was a fighter.

Roy inferred from the evidence that as Ward moved his bound and struggling victim from her car to his vehicle, he tried to m.u.f.fle her screams with wads of paper towel he grabbed from her trunk and shoved down her throat. He did not realize he was asphyxiating her.

Ward must have believed Gilbreath was alive as he drove away with her; otherwise he surely would have fled immediately, leaving her dead body at the scene.

He probably did not learn what he had done until he arrived at his preappointed site for a.s.saulting her, likely an empty or abandoned structure not too far away. The discovery would have panicked Ward.

At that moment, his motive would s.h.i.+ft from s.e.xual gratification to self-preservation. Roy believed the frightened killer continued driving in the direction he was headed, north, until he reached the dump, eight miles away, where Nikia Gilbreath's body was found three days later.

The dump site, Roy also believed, was selected on the spur of the moment, and was chosen only because Ward needed to quickly dispose of Mrs. Gilbreath's body lest he be discovered with it.

From the position in which she was later found, it appeared that he hastily placed her body into the dump, risking being seen and identified as he did so. The only precaution Ward took was to remove and carry home the bedspread and blue telephone cord ligatures. In his haste, he somehow grabbed the loose swimming suit bottom, too.

Either that, or as his attorney suggested, Ray Ward really could not resist a fetish object.

During his murder trial nearly two years later, a security search of Ward's cell revealed he'd secreted away a range of contraband doc.u.ments and photocopies. Among the materials Ward somehow managed to procure under heavy guard was a nude autopsy photograph of Nikia Gilbreath.

17.

Linkage a.n.a.lysis An aberrant offender's behavior is as unique as his fingerprints, as his DNA-as a snowflake.

The challenge for the investigator is to exploit that singularity, to find the behavioral equivalent of the latent fingerprint or the electroph.o.r.etic "bar codes" of a DNA a.n.a.lysis that can establish an offender's ident.i.ty beyond any reasonable quibble. You need to isolate the snowflake.

With serial offenders, one means of doing so is linkage a.n.a.lysis, a compare-and-contrast behavioral a.s.say developed by Hazelwood and others at BSU.

This procedure looks at MO and ritual as Hazelwood did in the Gilbreath case.

"You can say that cases are linked when the number of MO characteristics and ritualistic characteristics reach a point that you have never seen in combination before," Roy explains.

"For example, an attorney may ask me in court, 'How many victims have you seen who were twenty-one years old?'

" 'Well, a lot of people.'

" 'How many of them have been white females?'

" 'A lot of them.'

" 'How many have been bitten on the breast?'

" 'Quite a few.'

" 'I see, and how many of them were struck in the face four times?'

" 'A lot of them were.'

" 'Now, Mr. Hazelwood, how many cases have you seen in which the victims were all twenty-one-year-old white females who'd been bitten on the breast and struck in the face four times?'

"I'd have to say I'd never seen that exact combination before. Then if I saw that exact combination in another case, I could say the two cases were linked."

The offender's MO is behavior meant to ensure his success, facilitate his escape, and protect his ident.i.ty. Ritual is behavior that heightens his psychos.e.xual gratification. Sometimes, the two are not easy to tell apart.

For example, Roy has never seen an offender's method of entering a structure be anything but MO. However, the way he approaches a victim on the street, or in her bed, can be either MO or ritual.

One of the earliest and most complex cases for which Roy Hazelwood provided the police a linkage a.n.a.lysis was that of a Swiss serial killer.

While in Europe together on a business vacation with their wives in the late 1980s, Hazelwood and Roger Depue accepted an invitation to visit Aarau, a small town about ten miles west of Zurich.

Their host in Aarau was a local police commander named Leon Borer, who took the opportunity to inquire if his guests would be curious to look over some unsolved cases in his files.

If the American agents liked, while they were consulting the criminal records, Commander Borer's officers were happy to drive Frau Hazelwood and Frau Depue on escorted motor tours of the breathtaking Swiss countryside.

Everyone immediately agreed to the idea.

Among the unsolved cases that Roy and Roger Depue reviewed for Borer in Aarau that summer was a series of child murders, mostly strangulations, which had begun in 1980. After poring over the files, Hazelwood and Depue visited various of the crime scenes, spoke to a number of the children's parents, and sketched a brief profile of the homicidal pedophile for Borer.

No progress was made toward cracking the case until August 1989, when Roy learned that a suspect named Werner Ferrari had been arrested in connection with the recent murder of a little girl in Hagendorf, close to Aarau. Ferrari, forty-two, confessed both to his homicide and to the killings of three boys, dating back to 1983.

Like Harvey Glatman three decades earlier, Werner Ferrari seemed to appear out of nowhere. Also like Glatman, Ferrari was more than just a lucky, or determined, deviant criminal. He seemed to have the same innate grasp of the successful MO: Be careful, move around, don't be seen, and don't leave any physical evidence.

Ferrari had staggered the intervals between his crimes, known and suspected, from between three weeks and twenty-two months. He also cannily avoided committing them one after another in a geographic cl.u.s.ter, so as to alarm the local populace and thus place greater pressure on the police to stop him. He finally was caught and charged with murder in August 1989 after an uncharacteristic, perhaps subconsciously intentional, lapse: Werner Ferrari left a live witness who identified him to the police.

Besides the four murders to which he confessed, investigators suspected Ferrari in six other child abductions and homicides, for which he denied any culpability.

Three of these victims (two girls, one boy) were never found, and there were no witnesses or hard physical evidence to link Ferrari to any of the three open cases where bodies were recovered. With his confessions, there was no question that Ferrari would be locked up for life. But lacking hard evidence one way or the other in their open cases, the Swiss police were loath to close them simply on their suspicion that Werner Ferrari was responsible.

That is when Commander Borer thought again of the FBI.

On the chance the Swiss authorities had missed or overlooked behavioral evidence of value either to themselves or to the courts, Borer asked Roy to return to Aarau to conduct a linkage a.n.a.lysis.

Hazelwood flew to Switzerland on a Friday in early May, and was driven straight to Aarau, where Borer showed his FBI guest to his a.s.signed room at the local police dormitory.

Ordinarily, Roy's routine when traveling on business is fixed and unvarying. He checks into upmarket chain hotels with big, quiet accommodations and hunkers down, leaving his room only as required. For sustenance, he relies nearly exclusively on room-service steaks (well done), American cheese sandwiches (white bread, maybe a little b.u.t.ter), and the odd bowl of Campbell's tomato soup, none other.

"Do you know what's important about American cheese sandwiches on white bread?" he asks. "Wherever you go, they are exactly the same. I like that."

Together with the spaghetti ajo e ojo he first tried at the suggestion of the Mafia hood in Binghamton, plus fast-food cheeseburgers and French fries, these dishes more or less const.i.tute Hazelwood's preferred diet in its entirety.

"It's embarra.s.sing to order dinner with him," says Dr. Dietz.

In Aarau, Hazelwood took a deep breath as he inspected his spartan quarters, a small dorm room for one with no telephone and no television.

"Well, at least there won't be any distractions," Roy thought and went looking for a McDonald's.

For the next four days, investigator after investigator sat down with Hazelwood to brief him, through interpreters, on each of the ten cases.

The first victim, twelve-year-old Ruth Steinmann, lived in Wurenlos, a northeast suburb of Zurich. The slightly built brown-haired child was last seen climbing aboard her bicycle at school late in the afternoon on Friday, May 16, 1980. When Ruth did not come home, her parents went in search of her in a woods near where they lived. As they called for their daughter, both father and mother observed a jacketed young male walking toward them from the woods. When he saw the Steinmanns, he turned away, jumped on a moped, and sped off.