Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

Dear Reader:

The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martin’s True Crime Library, the imprint the
New York Times
calls “the leader in true crime!” Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martin’s is the publisher of perennial bestselling true crime author Jack Olsen, whose SALT OF THE EARTH is the true story of how one woman fought and triumphed over life-shattering violence; Joseph Wambaugh called it “powerful and absorbing.” Fannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson tell the story of a beautiful honors student who was lured into the dark world of sex for hire in THE COED CALL GIRL MURDER. St. Martin’s is also proud to publish two-time Edgar Award-winning author Carlton Stowers, whose TO THE LAST BREATH recounts a two-year-old girl’s mysterious death, and the dogged investigation that led loved ones to the most unlikely murderer: her own father. In the book you now hold, DARK DREAMS, legendary FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood teams up with equally legendary true-crime writer Stephen G. Michaud to investigate numerous sexually related crimes—and why they happen.

St. Martin’s True Crime Library gives you the stories
behind
the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martin’s True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because it’s all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure it’s got the St. Martin’s True Crime Library logo on the spine—you’ll be up all night!

Charles E. Spicer, Jr.
Executive Editor, St. Martin’s True Crime Library

1
Infinite Darkness

2
It Begins Inside the Mind

3
Inside the Fantasy

4
Fantasy Made Real

5
“Am I God?”

6
Sexual Sadists

7
Sexual Slavery

8
Profiling

9
A Serial Rapist

10
Jack the Ripper

11
A Serial Killer

12
Linkage Analysis

13
Equivocal Deaths

14
Revenge Murder

15
A Complete Killer

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Index

A fourteen-year-old girl is kidnapped while hitchhiking with a young male companion. Her abductor immediately kills the youth, then keeps the girl as his captive. He tortures her, binds her with chains, and forces her to pose for photographs in heavy makeup and suggestive clothing. After several days he strangles her with a bailing-wire garrote, then dumps her body in the loft of an abandoned barn
.

A twenty-one-year-old woman with no history of arrest or psychiatric problems becomes emotionally attached to a male corpse at the funeral home where she works. After his burial she grieves for the deceased, growing so distraught that coworkers complain of her behavior, and she is forced to resign
.

Three years later, while employed at a second funeral home, she again develops a romantic interest in a dead body. Determined this time not to lose the object of her macabre desire, she moves his embalmed remains to an isolated place where she spends three days alone with the body. In a lengthy, handwritten account of the two incidents, she describes touching the second corpse and positioning it so as to simulate cuddling and fondling
.

Three male children, ages seven, nine, and ten, take a female playmate to an isolated building where they forcibly undress her and demand that she perform oral sex on them. They insert sticks, rocks, and bottles into her vagina and rectum before releasing the little girl with a threat to kill her if she tells. The three are later identified and arrested after assaulting another young female playmate
.

Before my retirement on January 1, 1994, I spent sixteen years examining these shocking crimes, and many others, as a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Most people associate the BSU with its best-known responsibility, profiling, a discipline that was dramatized in the book and movie
Silence of the Lambs
. The fictional heroine, Special Agent Clarice Starling, and her nemesis, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, lent a touch of Hollywood glamour to our often grim and harrowing investigations.

But besides working the occasional high-profile serial murder case or testifying at the defendant’s trial, our work also had a less-known side. Since the BSU opened for business in 1972, its personnel have studied aberrant crime, taught classes, and consulted—out of the spotlight—in scores of ongoing cases. And all the while, we were learning.

In my research, I chose to focus on previously unexplored or poorly understood deviant behaviors. These practices, ranging from dangerous autoeroticism to sexual sadism, brought me face-to-face with dark instincts I had never imagined existed.

The most appalling murder I ever encountered was that of a young girl discovered with her intestines wrapped around her neck. The child vanished one evening as she walked a short fifty feet to the next-door neighbors’ house. A few hours later, her body was found several blocks away. She also had been raped and beaten to death. To my knowledge, the crime was never solved.

In another case, a man hanged himself after leaving twenty-seven suicide notes around his home, garage, and car. Perhaps the most surprising incident of my career was the bleeding death of a woman who nearly amputated her own arm at the shoulder with a butcher knife.

My casework taught me several essential lessons. The first is that there are no boundaries to what a particular individual might do to other people or to him- or herself. The second lesson is equally wide-ranging: When it comes to sexual behavior, there are no limits to what a person might find erotically stimulating.

Among violent sexual offenders, often the only logic to their crimes is internal. The criminal alone knows why he commits his deviant acts. Although we can find patterns and common elements among them, no two offenders ever commit exactly the same sexual crime. In the world of dark minds, the darkness truly is infinite.

The sexual component of a crime is not always self-evident either. The behavior may be blatant, or it may be so subtle that it escapes detection, even by experts. Then again, some crimes may only seem to be sexually motivated.

I once worked for a public defender whose client was accused of the robbery/murder of an elderly woman. The victim was discovered dead on the floor at the foot of her bed. She had been struck twice in the face with sufficient force (according to the medical examiner) to have stunned her or rendered her unconscious. The cause of death was two stab wounds in the chest. Her pants and panties had been pulled down to just above her knees.

There was no sign of forced entry or of a struggle. All doors and windows were secured. Her purse, containing credit cards, was missing. But more than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and in excess of forty thousand dollars in negotiable securities were left untouched in her unlocked office safe in an adjacent room.

An ATM security camera caught my public defender’s client attempting to guess the victim’s cash card number. When he was later arrested, he told the police he’d found the card at a bus stop in a bad neighborhood of town.

I know that’s an unlikely sounding story, but I believed him. Here’s why:

He’d stupidly allowed himself to be videotaped in front of the ATM, trying to guess the card code. Yet the prosecution contended that this inadequate criminal supposedly was smart and savvy enough to enter a total stranger’s house, leaving no physical trace of himself. Then he approached the victim in her bedroom and struck and stabbed her twice before she could raise a hand in her defense.

If
this defendant had been capable of such improbable sophistication, I said, then
surely
he also would have searched the open safe to steal her jewels and securities.

I thought this was a staged crime. Someone who knew the victim had killed her then pulled down her clothing to suggest a sexual motive in the case. Further, I said, if I had been that person, I too would have left her credit cards in a rough area, knowing that some punk would try to use them.

I didn’t testify in the case. But the public defender presented my logic via her arguments and questioning and persuaded the jury that this defendant lacked the cunning to have committed the crime. The case remains officially unsolved.

Thanks to the vast diversity of human nature, an investigator may expect to encounter a wide range of behaviors. Offenders may be attracted to nonliving objects (fetishism), animals (bestiality), or people. Or they may be drawn to all three.

Some people preferentially act out their desires with prepubescent children (pedophiles), teenagers (hebephiles), or the elderly (gerontophiles). Others select age mates as their victims, and a few will sexually assault victims of any age.

Certain offenders commit exclusively homosexual crimes, others limit themselves to offenses against heterosexuals, and still others are attracted to either gender.

Ted Bundy is an example of a necrophiliac, the term used for one who preferentially assaults the dead. Yet to the vast majority of sexual criminals (as to the rest of us!), such an act is abhorrent.

Some sexual crimes involve only the sense of sight (voyeurism and exhibitionism), only the sense of hearing (telephone scatology), or only the sense of touch (frotteurism). However, most offenders will employ all of the available senses.

Many offenders are aroused by a victim’s suffering (sadists), while others are excited by their own pain (masochists). Then there are sadomasochists, who may be aroused in either way—simultaneously or in separate incidents.

Highly ritualistic behavior marks some types of sexual crimes, while others are characterized by impulsiveness. At times, we find strange mixes of both ritualism and spontaneity.

I’ve encountered sexual offenders who almost always seriously injured or murdered their victims. For others, such injury greatly diminishes or destroys the gratification process.

A victim’s torment may be protracted by extended captivity. Conversely, as in cases involving comatose patients, those under anesthesia, or victims who have been given the “date rape” drug Rohypnol, the target might be completely unaware of what is happening.

Some offenders select victims who are total strangers. Others attack those who are well acquainted with them—associates, clients, patients, customers, students, or relatives. In short, you name it—anything is to be expected with sexual criminals.

Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between criminal and noncriminal sexual behavior. After all, many practices that would have shocked previous generations in our country tend to be more common today. The distinction between what is acceptable and what is not may even depend on the jurisdication where the behavior takes place.

A detective in one of my courses brought to my attention a case involving a woman and two of her dogs. When she brought some film into her local pharmacy for processing, the employee who developed it saw that the photos depicted the customer having sex with the dogs. The police were called, and an investigator presented the matter to the local prosecutor.

After examining the pictures, the assistant district attorney asked if the dogs belonged to the woman. Why would that matter? the investigator wondered aloud. “Because if they don’t belong to her, she can be charged with animal abuse,” the prosecutor explained. “But if the dogs are hers, there has been no criminal violation in this state.”

Although certain aberrant sexual practices (such as dangerous autoeroticism) are not crimes, society still officially condemns most deviant sexual behavior. This is especially true when children are the victims. Yet ironically, we are increasingly permissive toward the graphic portrayal of sexual violence in practically all forms of the media. Magazines, television, and the Internet are rife with explicit and often violent sexual fare.

In my experience this climate of tolerance is having two important social consequences: First, as deviant behavior becomes more common in the material we read, hear, and see, parallel behaviors quickly appear in sexual crimes, particularly those acted out against strangers. Second, an increasing number of serious injuries and/or deaths are occurring during “rough sex.” When criminal charges are filed, defense attorneys try to portray the injurious behavior as “consensual and accidental.”

I have been retained by defense lawyers in three murder cases in which the defendant claimed that his partner’s death occurred during voluntary “erotic asphyxiation,” one form of rough sex. In each case the attorney asked me to review the evidence and advise whether or not I could testify that the death was an accident.

For different reasons I told each of these clients that I would be unable to assist in the defense because the facts indicated that the manner of death was homicide. Yet in other cases, defense attorneys succeed in presenting a plausible scenario of accidental death. In our “anything goes” society, it can be difficult to convince a judge or jury that any behavior is necessarily involuntary.

Who commits sexual crimes? You may be surprised (as I often am) at the wide range of answers to this question.

Often, when I address audiences and classes, I tell them about the case that opened this chapter—the one in which a fourteen-year-old girl was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. After dumping her body, the killer anonymously taunted a member of his victim’s family by relating truthful, but investigatively useless, details about the location where he left her dead body. He said, for instance, that she would be found in a barn. That was true, but of no help in locating her.

When he was arrested some months later, investigators searched his residence. There they found a trove of telling artifacts—the undeveloped film he had shot of the victim during her captivity, articles of her clothing, bondage paraphernalia, detective magazines, and a variety of weapons.

After presenting the facts of the case, I ask my listeners to guess what the killer looked like. Their responses are as varied as the audience members themselves. However, when I show them two photographs of this criminal, practically everyone gasps in surprise.

The “monster” who committed these heinous crimes was a well-groomed, middle-aged man, six feet tall, and weighing about 185 pounds. In one of the photographs, he is wearing a police uniform; in the other, he is dressed as an airline pilot. Is this the image you expected for a sexual criminal?

My audiences—usually professionals who work within the criminal justice system—often feel uneasy when they see these pictures for the same reason that I do: the sexual killer looks so normal. He looks like us, and that resemblance is very disturbing.

Professionals and laymen alike, we all want sexual offenders to look like perverts so that we can readily identify them in our neighborhoods, schools, and shopping malls. Unfortunately, with the vast majority of sexual offenders, it just doesn’t work that way.

In the early 1980s, when authorities in Texas arrested drifter Henry Lee Lucas, hardly a soul expressed any skepticism over Lucas’s claim to have murdered as many as six hundred people. Why? Because, according to popular stereotype, Henry Lee Lucas looked like a pervert! He was unshaven, poorly groomed, shabbily dressed. Nearly penniless, he drove a worn-out wreck of a car. Everything about him was uncouth.

His alleged accomplice, Ottis Toole, looked just as bad, if not worse. The appearances of both men fit well within the public’s perception of what a serial killer should look like.

We at the BSU cringed when we saw the pictures of Lucas and Toole. We knew that they would reinforce the mistaken notion that sexual offenders typically look different from other people—and thus encourage many innocent victims to overlook dangers that come in more ordinary forms.

In the late 1970s, before Lucas and Toole were captured, we hoped that Ted Bundy had effectively disproved the public’s mistaken perceptions. Bundy was handsome, well-spoken, and educated. He did not appear capable of the horrible sexual crimes for which he was accused and later convicted. Bundy’s arrest made a lot of people very uncomfortable because it forced them to rethink their previous ideas about sexual criminals. When Bundy stood trial for two murders in Florida, his wholesome appearance complicated the prosecutors’ job. Fortunately, both juries heeded the evidence, and Bundy was convicted and sentenced to death.