Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (6 page)

Intelligent and cunning for the most part, ritualistic offenders take a wide variety of routes in pursuit of their hidden desires. With their vivid imaginations, they generate an astonishing array of perversely creative ideas.

They may coerce a wife or girlfriend into helping them realize their fantasies, or they may kidnap, rape, or kill a stranger. But it is important to know that sexual criminals don’t always require victims. A ritualistic offender may also enact his fantasy using inanimate objects, paid partners, compliant partners (wives or girlfriends), or even himself.

Also, his behavior may or may not escalate from passive fantasy to outright assault. Any level of behavior may be an end in itself, as is usually true of dangerous autoeroticism. Or the offender may act out in multiple ways at the same time.

For example, he may seek out an aberrant, albeit noncriminal, sexual experience even as he is committing rapes and murders.

Inanimate Objects

Many sexual criminals who act out against inanimate objects fixate on an article of women’s clothing or some other intimate female possession. Others select a surrogate figure, such as a doll or even photographs of an imagined victim from a magazine.

Two cases involving dolls show how disturbing this behavior can be. The first, brought to my attention in the early 1980s, occurred at a university hospital where a curly haired baby doll was discovered in the men’s locker room outside the surgical center. The doll was suspended from a white cord, a hangman’s noose around its neck.

The toy had been systematically mutilated. Its skin was scorched, and pubic hairs were glued around its groin. An opening had been cut between the doll’s legs, and a long pencil had been deeply inserted into it. The doll’s wrists were bound behind its back, and a wad of blue tissue paper was jammed into its mouth. Long needles were used to pierce the doll’s left eye. On the left side of its chest, approximately where a heart would be, there was an incision, neatly sutured with black thread.

The perpetrator was identified as a premed student working as a surgical scrub assistant. Since he had not committed a crime, no charges were filed against this clearly troubled young man. In truth, he may not have been a physical danger to anyone. Acting out against the doll might have satisfied his fantasy. I wouldn’t wager on it though. Luckily, he agreed to seek professional help.

The second case involved behavior sometimes known as pygmalionism, after the mythological sculptor who created an ivory statue of an idealized woman and then fell in love with his own artwork.

A deputy sheriff in a suburban Louisiana community responded at about 4:30 one morning to a burglar alarm at a local discount variety store. The intruder was alerted by the police sirens and slipped out the back door undetected. He left behind a blonde-wigged female mannequin, disassembled at the waist and lying on the floor. The figure’s upper body was clothed in a pinafore blouse, and its white-gloved left hand was broken at the wrist.

The UNSUB had removed a light-colored skirt from her lower body, but the mannequin’s hose and panties were undisturbed, as were the dark-colored high heels on its feet. The trespasser’s loafers and a black wig rested on the floor near the mannequin’s head. An open box of condoms, taken from the store’s pharmacy section, rested on the floor nearby.

As in the hospital case, this scene obviously was the work of a disturbed mind. Still, on the evidence available, I can’t say what sort of threat, if any, he posed to the community.

Now let’s look at still another offender who acted out against inanimate objects. This individual revealed himself as complex, resourceful, and unambiguously a threat to his chosen victim.

Like most law enforcement officers, I tend to title my more intriguing cases. I call this one “the cartoon case,” though it was certainly no laughing matter. It remains one of the most interesting and unusual investigations of my career.

The cartoon case began in the early 1980s when Evelyn Smith,
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twenty-nine-year-old wife and mother of two small children, living in a midsized New England community, received a call at home from a man claiming to represent a bra manufacturer. The caller told Mrs. Smith that his company had developed a new line of women’s undergarments that they were marketing in the region. He invited her to take part in a customer satisfaction survey, offering to send Mrs. Smith six free bras if she would agree to complete a questionnaire assessing their durability, washability, comfort, and fit. She agreed to this proposal and, in an incautious moment she would long regret, revealed her bra size.

The caller unexpectedly said nothing more, so Mrs. Smith hung up and forgot about the conversation. However, about six weeks later the man phoned again to announce that he had her bras and wished to bring them over. Mrs. Smith stalled, telling him that she would have to talk to her husband. She asked him to call back in two days.

When he did, she informed him of her decision not to participate further in the project. “He asked me what I was afraid of,” she later told the police. “Did I think he was going to come over and bite off my tit?”

Shocked, she hung up.

The phone rang again a short time later. “It’s a good day for a top down,” the familiar voice said. “How about I come over and take yours down?” Again Mrs. Smith hung up the phone.

Two months later she received in the mail four crude cartoons that depicted her likeness in various degrading positions. In one, the female figure was bound and gagged as a masked male figure undressed and raped her. The accompanying text listed her bra size, along with several slang expressions for breasts, and made dark mention of Mrs. Smith’s having to earn “her keep” in captivity. Another drawing showed a man holding a knife to her neck as he tore off her bra with his other hand.

Frightened for her safety, Mrs. Smith went to the local police. Fortunately, they took the complaint seriously, and telephone traps were put on her phones. But the police were never able to pinpoint where the calls came from. The victim’s attempts at tape recording the calls were not much more successful.

Her anonymous tormentor called once more to say that he knew a brown, unmarked police car had been parked in front of the Smith family residence earlier—which was true. During this call he also delivered an ultimatum. He said he wanted to meet her, and if she didn’t cooperate fully, someday he would be waiting for her when she came home. “He stated that he didn’t want to hurt me,” Mrs. Smith reported, “but his attitude on the phone was threatening.”

He told her, “If you don’t meet me voluntarily, I’ll have to force you; but then it wouldn’t be as enjoyable for both of us. I don’t want to use force, but I will if I have to.”

A few days later a second envelope arrived in the mail. This one contained four more violent cartoons, each explicitly portraying her forced abduction, sexual bondage, and rape. Then five months of silence followed.

When he called again, Mrs. Smith finally got his voice on tape.

“Remember our last conversation?” he asked. “I gave you a choice. You can meet me voluntarily, or I can do it the hard way.”

After consulting with detectives, she agreed to meet the man, hoping to lure him into a trap. Three investigators staked out the agreed location, where Mrs. Smith arrived on schedule and waited for forty-five minutes. When the UNSUB failed to make contact, she gave up, conferred briefly with the officers, and then drove home.

Later that afternoon he called again. He said he had watched her in the parking lot, that he had seen her speaking with three men, and that he knew they were police officers. Then he made a new suggestion. He said he would leave her alone on condition that she place two of her bras in a paper bag and drop them into a Salvation Army clothing bin located in a vacant lot across from a fire station.

Again Mrs. Smith notified the police, who once more tried to trap him. She deposited the bras in the bin as directed, and officers kept close watch on it throughout the night and into the next morning. They saw nothing.

Believing the subject had decided not to retrieve the bras, the police went to the bin only to discover they were gone! Unknown to the police, the container had a trapdoor on the back side. Sometime during the night the offender must have crawled through the vacant lot to the bin, opened the trapdoor, and retrieved his prize—Mrs. Smith’s two bras.

A month passed. Then one day Mrs. Smith received a package postmarked from a distant state. Inside, she found several more bras, including portions of the two she had left in the bin.

The words, “I want to suck your stiff nipples,” were printed on one cup. “I loved stripping you in my mind, next in person!!” appeared on another. Semen stains discolored the fabrics. Also included in the package was the cover of a detective magazine, depicting a man standing behind a woman with a knife to her throat. Her bra is slipping from her breasts. The word “Me” is printed over the male, and over the female was the name “Evelyn.”

Another long, ominous silence ensued.

Then came one last menacing note, written on the stationery of a Holiday Inn in a neighboring community.

“You’re lucky I didn’t go through with my plans for you, Evelyn,” it read. “I had everything all set. I had a reservation made in your husband’s name, I had tape to tie your hands with, and a Polaroid to take pictures of you tied up and naked. I’m not sure why I let you off this time—maybe next time I won’t. My plans were perfect, had I decided to go through with them you would have been completely at my mercy. In fact you still are.”

Accompanying the note were Polaroid photographs of a man, presumably the caller himself, nude except for a ski mask.

The police at last had a solid lead. Reasoning that the subject might actually have stayed at the motel, they arranged to examine each of its rooms, comparing the decor with the background in the photograph. Eventually they found an exact match. It was then a simple matter to determine from the motel records who had stayed in that room on the day the letter was mailed.

The suspect proved to be Andrew Johnstone,
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a businessman in his early thirties with no known criminal history. Authorities arrested Johnstone at the airport as he returned from a business trip. Inside his briefcase they found a three-ring binder containing approximately one hundred detective magazine covers.

It’s pretty clear that the relational component of Johnstone’s fantasy was hunter-prey. Not surprisingly, he also exhibited multiple paraphilias, or sexually deviant behaviors. Obviously, he had a fetish for bras. He had demonstrated intense interest in them throughout the case, apparently collected them, and he masturbated onto them. He was also sexually fixated on breasts. Such an aberrant attraction to a body part has been called
partialism
, but that is an old term that has largely fallen out of use.

It was useful to the investigation to be aware of the subject’s breast fixation. When Johnstone was identified, detectives knew that he probably collected pictures of breasts, magazines featuring them, or other material relating to them.

Johnstone’s fetish meant he also might try to incorporate bras into his sex life, perhaps by asking partners to model them for his voyeuristic pleasure. From both his written and oral communications, it was apparent that this offender had watched Mrs. Smith over time, and he wrote of wanting to see her tied up, a strong indication of voyeurism.

In the profile I prepared for the cartoon case, I wrote that the UNSUB was a bondage practitioner. The cartoons he drew had vividly suggested this theme. When he sent the letter on motel stationery to Mrs. Smith, he wrote about her being tied up and helpless. He specifically mentioned captivity, too. Clearly, the situational component of his fantasy was captivity.

Yet another paraphilia suggested by the evidence was sexual sadism. Consider this fantasy, as he described it to her: “I had a Polaroid to take pictures of you tied up and naked… You would have been completely at my mercy. In fact, you still are.”

The case information is insufficient to infer Johnstone’s ideal type of victim. We don’t know, for example, why he chose to telephone Mrs. Smith in the first place. We can assume, however, that she fit his criteria, at least in breast size. Otherwise he would not have devoted so much time to her or put so much effort into learning about her.

The self-perception fantasy was simple to isolate. This offender fantasized himself as being all-knowing and all powerful—godlike. Note that he phoned to tell her about the brown police car and the undercover officers who were watching her at the meeting place. He also warned that if she didn’t cooperate, he would be waiting for her in her home. Finally, he threatened harm. “If you don’t meet voluntarily, I’ll have to force you,” he said.

He wanted her to believe he knew everything that happened, that he could enter her home at will, and that he was prepared to use whatever force necessary to have his way. To reinforce these messages, a short time later he sent her more cartoons depicting forced abduction, sexual bondage, and rape. Thus did he try to put himself in a position of power and reinforce Mrs. Smith’s fear.

I was particularly interested that Mrs. Smith heard from her tormentor at unpredictable intervals, from a day or so up to five months apart. In many investigations, overworked investigators too quickly assume that if the UNSUB is not acting out, he has moved, died, been hospitalized, institutionalized, or joined the military. This assumption is usually true, but not always.

The sexual offender is never fully inactive. He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.

Johnstone chose not to act until he was ready. There are theories of criminal behavior based on statistical data, but don’t expect the criminals to pay attention to them. Offenders are in charge of their fantasies, and they decide how, when, where, and if they’ll act on them. I once consulted on a serial murder case in Florence, Italy, where the killer struck once every seven years! But his behavior was no less dangerous because of its intermittent nature.