Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
But there was also an important subgroup that Hazelwood identified, a handful of impulsive rapists with low IQs who nevertheless had been quite successful in avoiding arrest.
Their key to success was more difficult to quantify. Roy calls it street smarts, the kind of animal cunning displayed by the anger retaliatory rapist who recounted to Roy the violent rape he committed in the hospital women’s room.
Most of the forty-one told Hazelwood they adjusted their MOs over time. Across their early, middle, and late-stage assaults, the rapists learned that one of the best places to assault a woman is in her home. They gradually reduced the number of riskier attacks they committed on the street or in alleyways.
“Many of the rapists told me, ‘The woman feels safest in her home, but when I get her in that bedroom, there’s four walls and me, and that’s all there is.’ ”
The serial rapists also consistently assaulted strangers, rather than acquaintances or neighbors who might be able to identify them.
Roy asked the rapists about their initial contact with victims, a critical component of their MOs.
He differentiates an offender’s approach into three general types: “the con,” “the blitz,” and “the surprise.”
The con, just as the name implies, is the friendly, at-ease advance, something as simple as asking a woman for directions, or if she’d like to dance. Any pretense will do. Impersonating a police officer is a very common con approach.
“Prior to his arrival in Florida, Bundy used the con approach,” Roy explains, “as part of his ritual to select ‘worthy’
victims. Actually, it was practically a necessity for him to convince them to go willingly with him.”
The second type Roy calls the blitz, although the term has nothing to do with suddenness. The blitz assault is brutal, whether short-lived or long. It might be as instantaneous as a stunning blow to the victim’s head, or as protracted as strangulation to unconsciousness, then choking and then application to the victim’s mouth of a fatal dose of anesthetic, such as chloroform.
The blitz approach is frequently seen among anger retaliatory rapists.
The third method is the surprise approach, in which the offender selects his victim and then lies in wait for her—in her car, in her residence, in her backyard garden, anywhere he can get her alone for a moment.
Typically, he will come upon the victim from behind, produce a knife, and promise her she will not be hurt if she does as he says. The surprise approach is most often used by the power reassurance rapist. He relies on the threat of harm, not pain or injury, to secure his victim’s cooperation.
For the forty-one serial rapists in his study, the incidence of blitz attacks dropped from 23 percent in the early offenses to 17 percent among the last rapes. Surprise approaches fell from 54 percent to 44 percent, while the most sophisticated approach, the con, rose from 24 percent to 41 percent.
Those who used minimal physical force and relied instead on the threat of violence to control their victims did so consistently across all three phases.
Yet the survey showed that a minority of offenders, like Barry Simonis, do escalate their violence. Ten of the forty-one rapists increased their violence over time.
Roy zeroed in on these ten, hoping to find root causes for their escalation. He was surprised to find none. There were no significant differences in these rapists’ personal histories that were predictive of escalation. Whether or not a parent
was physically abusive, for example, would not necessarily determine if their son would be violent, too.
However, those who did escalate their violence also committed the most rapes; increasers averaged forty victims, while nonincreasers averaged twenty-two.
They also assaulted more frequently, every nineteen days as opposed to every fifty-five days.
“It’s obvious,” says Hazelwood, “that a police jurisdiction should give priority to UNSUBs who are increasing the level of violence each time. They’ll assault twice as many victims as a nonincreaser in about one-third the time.”
None of the forty-one decreased their violence over time.
The most common nonsexual offense on the serial rapists’ rap sheets was breaking and entering or attempted burglary. Reason: “If law enforcement can’t prove attempted rape,” Roy explains, “they’ll charge him with something they can prove.”
About three-fourths of the rapists reported multiple paraphilias, as Simonis had. Twenty-one of the men were compulsive masturbators. Twenty-six said they collected detective magazines and violent pornography.
The responses suggested these rapists commit their crimes largely indiscriminately. Of the forty-one rapists, 15 percent said the victim’s attire was a reason for the assault; 39 percent cited race; 95 percent cited gender; and all but one rapist said that victim availability was the reason she was assaulted. A quarter of the survey sample said they had no specific criteria at all for choosing victims.
The best-educated of the group was a black professional, who stands out as one of Hazelwood’s more intriguing interviews, too.
“When I walked in the door,” Roy recalls of this visit, “I said, ‘My name is Hazelwood.’
“He said, ‘I know who you are. You’re Roy Hazelwood.’ ”
Roy asked why he knew his name.
“When I was raping I did a literature search on you,” the inmate answered. “I’ve read everything you’ve written.”
Martin Mason* was one of only five serial rapists who would not allow his interview to be audiotaped.
As a youth, he had been something of a black Horatio Alger hero, extremely bright and highly motivated. His father was imprisoned when Mason was young. His mother, a professional woman, made tremendous personal sacrifices to make sure her son made it through graduate school and into his highly paid profession.
The first of Mason’s paraphilias to surface was voyeurism.
He told Roy he used to window-peep his mother when she played bridge with her friends. He also peeped on his favorite male schoolteacher as he ate dinner or watched television with his family.
Mason said his fantasy was to walk up to this teacher’s door with a .38 and shoot him. When he told his mother about the fantasy, she said, “Well, you’ll grow out of it.”
Mason was full of self-loathing and anger.
“What I could discern from that interview was that he believed he was eventually going to screw up
because
he was black,” Hazelwood remembers. “And he felt there was nothing he could do about it.”
Mason told Roy he tried in various unsuccessful ways to cope with his deviant impulses. When he raped for the first time, he rationalized that if he acted out every one of his fantasies—which included torture and simulated murder (Mason was a sexual sadist)—then perhaps he’d be sated and could stop.
When that didn’t work, he tried audiotaping an assault.
“Then anytime I wanted to rape I reasoned I could play it back and masturbate to it,” he said to Hazelwood.
However, what he heard was so horrendous he could not bear to listen. So he erased the tape.
“Did you destroy it, too?” Roy asked.
“No, I just erased it,” Mason answered.
“Why?”
“Because I’m obsessive-compulsive. I’d never destroy it.”
The far deeper question was why Mason committed his crimes in the first place.
“If I knew why some people act out and others don’t, I’d retire today,” says Hazelwood, who nevertheless believes the answer has to do with self-perception.
“One of the reasons that we all don’t act out is that we have inhibitors, or brakes, to control desires,” he says. “They can be social status, religion, personal values, or fear of jail.
“Those who do act out are losers. They are convinced they are losers, so they don’t see how they have anything more to lose by yielding to their desires.
“Basically, that is what Mason was saying to me. ‘I know I’m going to screw up. Regardless of how successful I may appear to be, I know I’m going to screw up. So why not go ahead and do it and enjoy it? I’m going to give in to it.’
“I frequently run into this theme with offenders. Sexual sadists. Serial rapists. It is a common theme.”
The case was peculiar from the outset.
Gloria Bruno of Hilo, Hawaii, was senile, according to her doctor’s diagnosis, and required care and supervision. Yet the eighty-four-year-old grandmother insisted upon living alone, even rejecting her son and daughter-in-law’s repeated offers to move in with her and see to her needs.
Then Gloria Bruno vanished on an October afternoon in 1981.
She was seen several times that day, wandering around the neighborhood in an apparent mental fog. Local business owners reported Bruno walked into their stores throwing leaves about, saying they would keep Satan away. One young man told police of encountering her along a rural roadway. He recalled that the octogenarian had been shielding herself from the intense Hawaiian sun with a newspaper.
Five days later, Mrs. Bruno was found dead in the woods not far from her home. She was discovered in the thick underbrush, supine and partially undressed. Her blouse had been removed. Her camisole was wrapped around her neck. The waistlines of her pants and underpants were even with
her pubic arch. Beneath her heels, officers found indentations in the soil.
She had not been sexually assaulted, nor had her two rings been stolen. At autopsy, Hilo medical examiner Dr. Alvin Majoska found a band of purplish discoloration on Bruno’s throat.
Scrapes were evident on her feet, arms and thighs. She was bruised above her left ear and right eye.
Twenty-five feet away from the body, searchers found her sweater and blouse, neatly folded. A nearby depression in the earth suggested she had rested there. The police later recovered Bruno’s new shoes along a gravel road approximately a half mile from where her body was found.
Dr. Majoska believed the disoriented victim had kicked off her shoes and wandered alone into the woods, where she became lost. The pathologist was unable to pinpoint just when she died, but he attributed her death to “asphyxiation following ligature strangulation” in what Majoska ruled was “a probable homicide.”
But by whom, and for what motive?
Gloria Bruno was well known in Hilo. Her sudden death thoroughly appalled the city, and confounded police investigators. There was nothing remotely similar to the case in anyone’s memory. Nor was there a viable suspect anywhere in town, on the island, in the state of Hawaii, or anywhere else.
The community struggled with its puzzle for fifteen months, and might have done so indefinitely if not for a serendipitous visit to Hilo by Roy Hazelwood, who came to town to conduct an FBI field school. In the course of his lectures, Roy was approached by Sergeant Roy Luis of the Hilo police, who asked if Hazelwood would review the case and profile the offender.
Back in the BSU bunker, Roy began with Dr. Majoska’s autopsy, and considered the fact that Bruno had not been sexually
attacked or mutilated. Nor had she been severely battered or stabbed. Nothing was stolen.
Since there is no such thing as a wholly motiveless crime, Hazelwood concluded that Bruno probably had not been murdered. Somehow, she’d killed herself. And since suicide seemed unlikely, the only possible answer was that she’d died in some sort of personal mishap.
Yet how?
As Hazelwood saw it, the keys to reconstructing Gloria Bruno’s death were the sun and her dementia. He agreed with the medical examiner that she probably removed her uncomfortable new shoes along the gravel roadway and then wandered on, randomly, into the roadside brush, probably in search of shade from the intense Hawaiian sun. She would have discarded, or mislaid, her newspaper sunshade near where she first entered the brush.
Hazelwood pictured her lost and dazed by the noonday heat, possibly dehydrated, and increasingly disoriented. He suggested in his report that she might have groped along a barbed-wire fence that ran parallel to the road, hoping to find her way out of the rough terrain. Later investigation disclosed that bits of her hair and clothing were caught on the fence.
Roy believed that, unable to regain the roadway, and desperate for relief from the sun, Bruno then lurched deeper into the fields, where she finally found a clearing under a large tree. She shed her blouse and sweater there, folding them to serve as a pillow as she rested—hence the indentation—before moving on.
She didn’t get far.
In the nearby copse where her body eventually was found, Bruno apparently continued to disrobe. Hazelwood believed that as she pulled the camisole over her head, it became entangled in the branches around her head. Bruno must have panicked and struggled, which would explain the scratches and bruises on her extremities and head.
The camisole also would have constricted her throat where, as those who practice autoerotic sex know, even slight pressure on the jugular vein or carotid artery can induce instant unconsciousness. Possibly, the exhausted woman simply collapsed from her exertions.
Hazelwood surmised that as Bruno slumped to the ground, her camisole caught fast on the surrounding branches, pulling it tighter around her neck, asphyxiating the frail grandmother, and creating what later appeared to be a purple ligature bruise.
As she struggled to loosen the garment, her heels would have dug into the earth. Her subsequent exertions would have caused her pants and underpants to slide down her waist and hips, later creating the impression they had been pulled. The lightweight camisole might then have slipped free of the bushes, but remained closely wrapped around her neck as she collapsed to the ground and died.
Roy’s conclusion confirmed a rule of criminal investigation first promulgated in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and made part of the BSU canon by Howard Teten: Once all other possibilities are eliminated, whatever is left, however improbable, is what happened.
And if Gloria Bruno’s demise was bizarre, Hazelwood’s explanation of it was appreciably less sinister than what the citizens and police of Hilo had feared.