The Evil That Men Do Part 6

1. Is there an abnormal amount of the material present?

One hundred fifty roller skate straps were discovered in one victim's possession.

2. Does the material belong where you found it?

There are few everyday reasons for keeping lengths of chromium chain in your bedroom.

3. How much financial investment does the individual have in the item?

A three-thousand-dollar investment in lingerie would be excessive.

On occasion, a fourth question may arise: Why did the victim keep this object hidden?

Dangerous autoeroticism commonly is a.s.sociated with masochism. Yet Hazelwood has also discovered the habit among s.e.xual criminals.

Harvey Glatman cross-dressed when he hanged himself.

Gerard Schaefer, a serial killer who himself eventually was killed by another inmate at the Florida State Prison, practiced dangerous autoerotic s.e.x in the Florida swamps.

He would cross-dress and suspend himself by the neck from tree limbs. In Roy's opinion, Schaefer was using himself as a prop in the absence of available female victims, whom he also took into the Florida swamps and hanged. He even took photos of these autoerotic sessions. The purpose of the picture taking, Roy believes, was to perfect the manner in which Schaefer hanged himself, as well as his victims, hoping to enhance both experiences for him.

Mike DeBardeleben, an archetypal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t, created his Bite it! audiotape and, according to one of his victims, dressed in a miniskirt, sweater, and high heels while he was with her.

Dangerous autoeroticism seems to exert a potent seductiveness on nominally normal people, too. On at least two occasions after Roy has lectured to professional audiences on dangerous autoerotic practices, audience members have accidentally killed themselves attempting dangerous autoeroticism themselves.

"No one knows why one person acts on aberrant s.e.xual fantasies, and another person does not," says Hazelwood. "What is known is that many people have aberrant fantasies which, if acted out, would be criminal.

"In the case of dangerous autoeroticism, what criminals and noncriminals have in common is that they engage in the same types of solo s.e.xual acts."

In their textbook, Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess warn sternly: "Do not attempt any of the autoerotic activities described or depicted in this monograph. . . . There is no reason to believe that these activities are pleasurable to the average person, and there is every reason to believe that they may prove fatal."

6.

Louella and Earl Back in the days when he dipped his ducktail in baby oil, favored black s.h.i.+rts with pink lapels, and wheeled around Spring Branch, Texas, in a '49 Mercury, cut low to the ground, looking for girls and/or trouble, few people would have predicted that Robert Roy (he's always been known by his middle name) Hazelwood someday would become a federal agent.

Least of all Roy himself.

"I was very, very fortunate I didn't get into serious trouble," he says of his rowdy youth. "The last thing I ever expected to do was go into law enforcement."

In truth, Roy had no clear notion of the future, or any plan for it. As a boy and as a man, he has always been content for opportunity to find him. The theme of chance, more or less spontaneous decision-making is strong through Hazelwood's life.

"The only thing I've always been sure of is what I didn't want to do," he says.

Roy was born in Pocatello, Idaho, on March 4, 1938. He has no early recollections of his outlaw father, or any other member of Merle P. Redd.i.c.k's family.

The man he called Dad was Earl Hazelwood, a barber and former minor-league first baseman, who married Roy's mother, Louella, in 1941, about three years after she divorced Redd.i.c.k.

Earl Hazelwood was a contradictory and complex figure who looms large in his stepson's memory. The two came into almost immediate conflict.

"I look back now," Roy says, "and I can see that it was jealousy over my mother's affections. My mother and I were very close. And I wasn't his natural son."

Earl Hazelwood had a quick temper. Roy recollects a family argument in which it appeared that his stepfather was about to strike his mother. Roy stepped between them.

"He said something like, 'I'll knock the h.e.l.l out of you!' and my mother grabbed me and put me behind her."

Earl Hazelwood had a secret flaw, too.

"He was sick a lot," says Roy. "He'd come home from work and go straight to bed. On Sundays he was in bed all day. I was told he had a stomach problem. I was twenty-two years old before I realized he was an alcoholic."

In all important ways, however, Roy believes that growing up a Hazelwood was a distinct improvement over the alternative, life with the missing M. P. Redd.i.c.k. The Hazelwood family even had about them their own whiff of renegade celebrity that Roy savored.

According to his dad's possibly apocryphal account, Hazelwood once was spelled Hazlewood. Shortly after the Civil War, however, a Hazlewood who happened to be a minister made the mistake of delivering a meal to the outlaw Jesse James, and was hanged for his trouble.

The rest of the clan, according to Earl, changed their name to Hazelwood to avoid further disgrace.

Roy's mother, Louella, was a devout, but hardly doctrinaire, Baptist.

"She didn't see anything wrong with having a beer occasionally, or dancing," Roy recollects. "When we'd have the youth fellows.h.i.+p night at our house, my mother would tell us, 'Okay, kids. I'm going to keep Pastor Ken and his wife busy drinking coffee in the kitchen. You go ahead and dance."

When her oldest boy later joined another famously dogmatic and occasionally inflexible organization, the FBI, he'd discover ways of bending the rules in ways that would have made Louella smile.

Earl and Louella were married in Minnesota, then moved south in a protracted, multistage migration to his native Texas. They'd travel for a while, then stop so Earl could cut hair and replenish the family finances.

Louella bore Roy's half-brother, Jimmy, while the Hazelwoods were stopped in Nebraska. Half-sister Earlene debuted in Missouri. Louella's final pregnancy ended in a stillbirth in Kansas.

When they reached Texas, Earl settled his family for a time in a one-bedroom trailer in Houston. When he found steady work, they were able to afford fifteen dollars a month for a so-called shotgun shack-three rooms lined up in a row with a bathroom off to one side-"named for the fact that you can shoot a shotgun from the front door through the back door and not hit anything," Roy explains.

By 1950, his dad was doing well enough at barbering to move the family to a brand-new sixty-dollar-a-month tract house in Spring Branch, then about forty miles outside of Houston.

Roy reached his full adult height, five feet nine inches, early on at Spring Branch High School. A slender youth who bore a faint resemblance to the young Sinatra, he wouldn't weigh more than 141 pounds until he quit smoking forty years later.

He was quick and agile enough to letter in basketball on the ninth-grade team. Under Earl's expert tutelage, he played shortstop through high school.

Outside of recognized sports, however, Roy had little use for socially sanctioned recreation.

On one occasion, he and two school pals headed north to Bedias, his dad's hometown, ostensibly to hunt deer on some acreage Earl owned there. The real objective was to drink beer.

The three friends lost their way and strayed onto a neighbor's property. Soon enough a pack of dogs chased Roy and his pals into a tree. Behind the dogs came the deputies.

"You're trespa.s.sing, boys," said one officer.

The teenagers were handcuffed and driven away in cruisers, red lights flas.h.i.+ng and siren wailing, to the nearest town of any size, Huntsville, where the tipsy trespa.s.sers were brought before a magistrate.

"How do you plead, guilty or not?" the judge asked gruffly.

Before Roy had a chance to answer, down came the gavel.

"Guilty," said the judge. "That'll be a twenty-five-dollar fine."

Roy did not have that much money, which meant calling his dad.

Earl Hazelwood drove up from Spring Branch and dealt with the situation adroitly. Resisting a fatherly impulse to lecture his stepson, Earl paid Roy's fine and drove home with his grateful stepson. No record was ever made of the incident.

Another time, Roy unwisely stopped for a meal at a hamburger drive-in located within a rival high school's home turf.

"I was with the love of my young life, Charla West," he recalls. "I had some words with this guy, who grabbed me and cut me under my right arm with a switchblade. I still have the scar."

Overmatched in hostile territory, Roy slyly rescued himself by means of a ruse. "I grabbed some of my blood and smeared it all over the front of my s.h.i.+rt. Then I bent over, fell to the ground and started moaning. It worked. He thought he'd really killed me and took off."

Meanwhile, Charla vomited all over his front seat.

By this time, Earl Hazelwood was operating two seven-chair barbershops in Spring Branch. As a result the mortgage was paid and there always was food on the Hazelwood family table, but only because Louella managed the home economy, says her son.

"One time my dad won something like a hundred thousand dollars in a poker game. Then he took it to Las Vegas and lost it all in three days. On another occasion, my mother went home to North Dakota for a visit. While she was gone, he gave me her car and bought new Fords for each of them. When she got home she raised h.e.l.l with him. He had to return the Fords and take back her car."

In retrospect, Roy believes Earl Hazelwood was manic-depressive-or bipolar, in modern psychiatric parlance-swinging between exultant highs and troughs of despond.

"My dad chased rainbows. He was constantly making deals, selling this and buying that. I'd come home night after night to find him sitting up in the living room, bent over, an ashtray full of cigarette b.u.t.ts next to him. He was thinking of ways to make money!"

Man and boy finally did stumble toward common ground, growing closer as Roy matured from aimless adolescence into adulthood, a process Earl did much to abet. If he wasn't much of a role model, Earl Hazelwood nevertheless provided Roy with frank and sensible advice.

When Roy graduated from high school and announced he planned to buy a '57 Chevy, his Dad asked him, "Where do you want to live?"

"What do you mean?" Roy asked.

"You're eighteen, a man now," Earl said. "You have thirty days to find yourself a place to live and get a job."

He let that prospect sink in for a moment, then suggested an alternative. If Roy would forget about the car and consider heading for college, Earl said, he'd help finance Roy's education.

School had scant allure for Roy, but the prospect of manual labor was even less appealing.

"Uh, college sounds pretty good," he said.

It was Dad, as well, who urged Roy to join the ROTC at Sam Houston State, and to remain with it even though Roy hated the ROTC.

"You can certainly drop it if you want," Earl said, but he then reminded Roy he'd surely be drafted into the army the moment he graduated. "You'll be the one who's going to be peeling potatoes instead of giving the order for them to be peeled," Earl advised.

Roy heeded what he was told, and entered the military police as a second lieutenant after college. True to his nature, he didn't choose the MPs out of any particular interest in law enforcement or intention of making them his career. Rather, Roy perceived that among his alternatives-infantry, cavalry, engineers, and the rest-MPs were the least likely soldiers to sweat and get dirty.

Earl was satisfied.

Then in 1962, Roy was sent to Oxford, Mississippi, to help protect James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

"My dad almost disowned me over that," he recalls. "He was a racist. When I told him I had orders to go to Ole Miss, he said, 'Resign your commission.' I told him I couldn't. I'd taken an oath to uphold the Const.i.tution of the United States."

Time and Earl's advancing ill health eventually resolved all conflicts between them. In 1975, as his dad lay dying a painful death from emphysema in a Houston hospital, Roy spent two weeks with him. To the end, Earl remained in charge of their relations.h.i.+p.

"Go on back home," he announced to Roy from his hospital bed one day. "You were here when it counted. You don't need to come back for my funeral."

Not long thereafter, Earl expired in Louella's arms.

7.

Organized and Disorganized Roy's best-known contribution to criminology-the organized-disorganized criminal behavior dichotomy-first occurred to him one day while he was taking a shower.

He had been contemplating James Odom and James Lawson, Jr., a pair of convicted rapists who'd met as inmates at a state mental inst.i.tution in California. While locked up together, the pair had shared their fantasies; Odom described to Lawson his dreams of rape, and Lawson confided to Odom his violent imaginings of female evisceration and mutilation.

"We'd fantasized so much that at times I didn't know what was real," Odom later said.

Upon their release, the two hooked up in South Carolina and went hunting victims together. They abducted at gunpoint a twenty-five-year-old convenience store clerk and drove the woman to an isolated location. Odom raped the victim in the backseat of a Ford belonging to Lawson's father. Then Lawson cut her throat with a knife the clerk had sold him earlier, and savagely mutilated her dead body with it.

"I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person, and destroy her so she would not exist," Lawson said in his subsequent confession. "I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body."

Odom and Lawson put scant effort into concealing what they'd done. Their victim was soon discovered, the car was easy to trace, and within days they were arrested for the clerk's murder.

As Hazelwood pondered this crime, he couldn't get over how haphazard and sloppy the killers had been. "I said to myself, 'Gosh, this was really not well planned, not well thought out. These guys were really kinda disorganized.'

"And I compared them to Ed Kemper. He was really organized. Kemper put a lot of time and effort into his crimes."

Edmund Emil Kemper III occupies an extralarge niche in the BSU's early history with aberrant criminals. Not only was the six-foot nine-inch, three-hundred-pound necrophile a highly intelligent and well-spoken serial killer, an ideal subject for interview, but Kemper also had a s.a.d.i.s.tic wit.

He was serving seven life sentences in California's Vacaville State Prison when Bob Ressler, pursuing his serial-killer study, paid Ed Kemper a call. It was their third meeting.

After spending several hours together with Kemper, talking murder and dismemberment in a locked cell adjacent to death row, Ressler buzzed for a guard. None came. He buzzed again, and a third time. After fifteen minutes of waiting, still no guard.

The agent tried not to betray his nervousness, but Kemper saw his chance.

"If I went apes.h.i.+t in here, you'd be in a lot of trouble, wouldn't you?" he toyed with Ressler. "I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard."

As Ressler disconsolately imagined how easily such a scene might play out, he gamely warned Kemper of the trouble he'd be in for committing such a crime.

"What would they do, cut off my TV privileges?" the killer replied with a smirk.

Inwardly berating himself for the stupidity of allowing such a situation in the first place, Ressler continued to keep Kemper talking, trying out every interrogation and hostage-negotiation trick he'd ever been taught-plus some he made up as he went along-hoping someone, soon, would happen by to rescue him.

Finally, a guard appeared to escort the homicidal giant back to his cell.