Read Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Online
Authors: Roy Hazelwood,Stephen G. Michaud
Fingerprints subsequently connected him to all three of his known homicides. When confronted with this evidence, Chadd confessed to the three murders plus the fourth homicide of the hitchhiker, which the police were unable to confirm.
Horrifying though Chadd’s account is, its value to society lies in its ability to educate us about the nature of a sexual offender with a number of personality disorders. Chadd was narcissistic, seeking only his own gratification. He was sociopathic, with no regard for the welfare of others. And he exhibits an appetite for sexual sadism that grows as it seeks satisfaction. He’s serving a sentence of life with no possibility of parole in the California state prison system.
The most resourceful, destructive, and elusive of all deviant offenders is the ritualistic sexual sadist. Just as the great white shark is the renowned predator of the oceans, the sexual sadist is the most dangerous and cunning of all aberrant criminals. He also presents the greatest challenge to law enforcement.
The sexual sadist is a meticulous planner, spending inordinate amounts of time inside his own head. He may devote months or even years imagining his intended crime, turning it over in his mind, playing with it, as one might examine a prism in a sunbeam, studying all the different ways it refracts the light.
He hates surprises and any kind of spontaneity. If possible, he will rehearse every step of his crime repeatedly and do everything imaginable to reduce his chances of failure. As a result the first crime of a sexual sadist may easily be confused with another aberrant criminal’s thirtieth offense. Such was the case with Robert Leroy Anderson’s homicides. They reflected such meticulous care in their commission that had I not known he was the perpetrator I would have assumed a much older and more experienced criminal had committed them.
This talent for planning is an important reason why police agencies try to learn whether a sexual sadist is responsible for any crime under investigation.
The sexual sadist is also stunningly brutal. As we saw with Billy Lee Chadd, the fantasies he wishes to enact with a victim are horrendous. His sexual pleasure is derived from her suffering.
Mike DeBardeleben once wrote what amounts to the sexual sadist’s credo:
Sadism:
The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism. The central impulse is to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god, to do with her as one pleases are means to this end. And the most radical aim is to make her suffer. Since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her. To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the complete domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.
In the late 1980s, Park Dietz, Janet Warren, and I decided to study these rare and deadly offenders. We originally set out to conduct face-to-face interviews with the men. But after unproductive sessions with five of them, we realized we were wasting our time. Not one cared to discuss himself except to deny or rationalize his behavior or to project the blame for his situation onto someone else.
Consequently, we chose to conduct a descriptive study of the men, relying on other sources (i.e., police reports, mental health evaluations, court transcripts, the offender’s records) for our information.
Studying the Sexual Sadist
Out of sixty-five candidates, we chose thirty men for our study. It was not a simple task to isolate this group. To qualify for inclusion each must have committed an offense in which he inflicted suffering in order to sexually arouse himself. The
infliction
of pain, we knew, was not what aroused them. It was the
suffering
. This is not a trivial distinction.
Billy Lee Chadd, for instance, found “something missing” in his assault on Delmar Bright until it hit him: “Fear! He wasn’t afraid.” So what did Chadd do? “I got my knife and showed it to him.” Once Bright exhibited that fear, Chadd regained his erection. That is a quintessential moment of sexual sadism.
Bright’s sexual orientation probably was immaterial to Chadd. Sexual sadists are sexually voracious, indiscriminate, capable in many instances of coupling with humans of either sex or any age, as well as animals and inanimate objects as the opportunity presents itself. It was Bright’s fear, not his gender or sexual orientation, that excited Chadd.
One way to understand sexual sadists is to review what they aren’t. Dietz, Warren, and I identified seven behaviors that commonly are confused with sexual sadism:
A nonsexual sadist gains pleasure from causing others pain or discomfort, usually in a social or work environment and most often to subordinates or perceived inferiors. The source of this enjoyment is the sense of power he gains from frightening, humiliating, and demeaning others. He may even inflict physical or emotional abuse. However, he is not a sexual sadist unless he is sexually excited by his victim’s suffering.
I was in the army many years ago, and once worked for a sadistic officer. At one point he counseled me to put my house up for sale because I was about to be transferred. I did so and quickly found a buyer.
When I told the officer of the sale and asked when I would be transferred, he smiled and said that he had not made up his mind, adding that I should have checked with him before disposing of my residence.
I knew this game. He enjoyed tormenting people to prove his power over them. So I didn’t plead with him, as he hoped I would. I did not point out that I now faced enormous financial, not to mention personal, difficulties. Instead, I returned his smile and said I was content either way because my wife and I had intended to sell since we wanted a larger home. His smile disappeared. The next day I was notified that my transfer orders were on the way.
Cruelty is a common feature of sexual crimes, which by their very nature are hurtful and demeaning. However, that cruelty rarely is
sexually
sadistic. Brutal, yes. But fortunately, true sexual sadism is unusual, even among sexual criminals. In my opinion, fewer than one in ten sexual assaults are committed by sexual sadists.
I was once retained as an expert in a civil case involving a male intruder and his two victims, a man and his wife. After robbing the couple at gunpoint in their hotel room, the thief forced them to disrobe, almost as an afterthought.
He then pulled up a chair, ordered the couple onto their bed, and directed the man to perform cunnilingus on his wife. The robber watched for about thirty minutes as this went on. At one point he leaned forward and attempted to fondle the woman’s breasts, but he desisted after her husband threatened him with violence. The offender left a short time later.
No one would deny that this offender treated the couple in an intentionally cruel and degrading manner. But beyond the strong suggestion that he was a voyeur, there is no behavioral evidence that he was sexually aroused by his victims’ fear and suffering.
Pathological group behavior occurs when three or more individuals engage in a single crime, typically a gang rape. Let’s look at an example.
The victim was a nurse. As she arrived at the hospital for the midnight shift, she was accosted by a youth with a shotgun. He forced her into the rear seat of her car and, with three of his friends, drove her to a deserted warehouse.
Over the next few hours, the four teenagers raped her vaginally, anally, and orally. They penetrated her with foreign objects and urinated and defecated upon her. The nurse has never recovered from the psychological trauma of this extremely vicious assault.
Yet however brutal and cruel the youths were, they acted as they did to impress one another with their power, ferocity, and utter lack of concern for the victim. They acted in concert, as a pack, not as individuals. Of course, any one of them might have been a sexual sadist, aroused by the victim’s extreme suffering and humiliation. But the focus of the gang rape, in and of itself, was not sexually sadistic.
State-sanctioned cruelty, whether Nazi genocide or the torture chambers of the South African apartheid regime, is frequently confused with sexual sadism. Surely sexual sadists are drawn to such work. But while a deliberate governmental policy of heinous cruelty toward perceived enemies is certainly a reprehensible policy option, it is not a program designed to accommodate those who are sexually stimulated by the suffering of those being tortured.
Recently in the former Yugoslavia, the Serbian-led army systematically enslaved the Muslim women of Bosnia. They were placed in camps where Serbian soldiers made use of them as physical and sexual slaves. Girls as young as fourteen were traded for cash or appliances, such as television sets. Older females were gang-raped by as many as fifteen or twenty men at a time. Some of the women suffered such assaults intermittently for months.
Similarly, Human Rights Watch estimates that in Sierre Leone rebels of the Revolutionary United Front Party systematically raped, maimed, and mutilated thousands of women and children over the course of that country’s bloody eight years of civil war.
Doubtlessly some of these rapists were sexual sadists, too. But even though the assaults apparently were state sanctioned in Yugoslavia and part of an organized wave of terror in Sierra Leone, there was no evidence in either country that a
policy of sexual sadism
had been put in place.
Revenge-motivated cruelty
is, as the term clearly indicates, an act of retribution. The Mafia, for example, has a history of torturing and killing informants, or snitches. Sometimes, as a warning to others, the unlucky victim is given a “Sicilian necktie” he’s found dead with his tongue protruding through a slit in his throat just below his chin.
When I served with the army in Vietnam, I occasionally encountered dead Vietcong soldiers with their amputated penises in their mouths. This was the work of South Vietnamese soldiers who believed humans meet their god in whatever form they were in when they died. Of course, the Vietcong believed the same thing and performed the same amputations on slain South Vietnamese.
As appalling as the behavior is, such acts are done for a specific reason and sexual sadism is not it.
World headlines alert us to notorious cases of interrogative cruelty. One well-known victim of the deplorable practice was DEA agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena, who was kidnapped, tortured for four days, and then murdered by Mexican drug traffickers in Guadalajara in 1985. Another was William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, who was abducted, tortured intermittently for six months, and then killed in 1984 by the Islamic jihad. Their deaths were economic and political crimes; in both instances the victim was tortured in an effort to extract information about the workings of his agency. Sexual sadism, if it was present, was incidental not the primary motivation.
Finally,
postmortem mutilation
is another horrific act frequently confused with sexual sadism. It shouldn’t be. If a sexual sadist is aroused by a victim’s suffering, a dead victim, by definition, is of no sexual interest to him.
In a 1980 article, John Douglas and I dusted off an old term,
lust murderer
, for the postmortem mutilator. This killer typically focuses on his dead victim’s breasts, abdomen, rectum, or genitals to express his anger and frustration. Although the victim may be either a male or female, the crime is most often heterosexual, and both the offender and the victim are usually of the same race.
Jack the Ripper, for instance, was a lust murderer not a sexual sadist. Another member of this fearsome fraternity was James Lawson, who teamed with James Odom when both were inmates in a California mental institution to abduct and murder a female convenience store clerk in South Carolina.
Odom and Lawson took her to an isolated area, where Odom raped the woman and turned her over to Lawson, who quickly killed her by cutting her throat. Then Lawson amputated both her breasts and her reproductive organs. He might also have consumed a portion of her body.
The two men were arrested the next day and both were later convicted. “I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist,” Lawson later told officers.
Great White Sharks
Sexual sadists sort themselves along a behavioral continuum. At one end we have fantasy and nothing more. Then innocuous solo sex. Then the behavior intensifies. The sexual sadist acts out with consenting or paid partners. Finally, there is full-blown, criminal sexual sadism that results in severe injury or death. Sadists at this extreme of the spectrum, a group whom I call “the great white sharks,” form a distinct minority even among sexual sadists.
Of least concern to law enforcement is the sexual sadist who is content merely to fantasize a victim’s suffering. He is aroused and masturbates but never attempts to act out the fantasy. Such behavior is certainly strange, but just as surely, it is not criminal. Society cannot punish people for what goes on inside their heads. Nor is it criminal to graduate to the next level, practicing sexual sadism with a compliant or paid partner.
Further along we encounter “muted” sexual sadism. This term was coined by Dr. Robert Prentky, a noted forensic psychologist. He defines muted sexual sadism as a crime with the elements one would expect to observe in overt sexual sadism (bondage, captivity, demeaning photography of the victim) minus the physically injurious violence (whipping, burning, painful insertion of foreign objects).
The sexual sadists of interest to Dietz, Warren, and myself were the great white sharks, those at the extreme end of the continuum. Twenty-two of these men had killed 187 victims, and seventeen of them were serial killers. Probably best known among them were John Wayne Gacy and the Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi. Others in the study were equally violent: Mike DeBardeleben, Gerard John Schaefer, Billy Lee Chadd, and Harvey Glatman. This last, known as Southern California’s “Lonely Hearts Killer” of the 1950s, is of special significance to me because his reign of terror introduced me to what became my life’s work.
It’s Culture, not Race
If you were to look at photos of the thirty sexual sadists in our study, you would be struck by two things: The first is the sheer ordinariness of these men’s appearances. You couldn’t, by looking at them, imagine the horrors they inflicted on their victims.