Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
Pseudovictims sometimes have a history of making similar accusations, and that history may be a long one, too. In the most extreme case Roy knows of, a woman made two identical false rape allegations twenty-seven years apart.
False allegations of rape also may follow similar incidents of which the pseudovictim is personally aware, or learns about in media reports, or sees portrayed in the movies, on television, or in popular fiction.
In one example of this copycatting, a woman walked into a police station to report she had been stopped on the highway at 1:00 a.m. by a black police officer, who raped her at gunpoint. She described him as six two, with a black patch over his left eye. He was missing three fingers from his gun hand, too, she said.
The city police suspected an impersonation rape, and issued a composite sketch, along with a warning, to the public.
A week later, the woman admitted she’d made up the whole thing.
Two weeks after that, two women came forward to say that they, too, had been driving on the beltway and had been stopped and raped at gunpoint by the same assailant.
Informed that the previously publicized allegations were false, the women turned and wordlessly departed the police station.
A short while before Tawana Brawley made her accusations, a former classmate, also a black girl, reported that two white men had abducted and raped her. She recanted the story.
Geneva Buxton later told the grand jury that on the afternoon of November 24, after visiting her jailed son she and Tawana Brawley were passed on a Goshen street by two white men in a vehicle. She said the pickup slowed and made a U-turn, then drove by again, slowly, as the occupants looked “real hard” at Brawley.
In the weeks following her accusations, three more black females, one in New Jersey and two in New York, also falsely reported they’d been sexually assaulted and smeared with feces by groups of white males.
In an illustrative case, an imaginative sixteen-year-old girl told police she’d been attacked and raped in a service station rest room on a day that she skipped school.
According to her story, the girl consumed a half bottle of vodka, and had stopped to use the rest room when a razor-wielding assailant followed her inside.
They struggled. She suffered three superficial scratches on her neck, as well as single cuts, ostensible defensive injuries, lengthwise on both her palms.
She said that after raping her, the man carved “Don’t forget” into her lower abdomen, bracketing the words with acute diagonals similar to the > “greater than” and < “less than” symbols on a computer keyboard.
The teenager later admitted fabricating the story.
While pseudovictims tend to avoid injuring sensitive areas of their anatomy, one woman in Roy’s casebook required surgery for removal of a tree branch she’d inserted into her vagina.
Typically, the pseudovictim’s report will be either extremely vague or lavishly detailed. Roy once served as a consultant to authorities in a British serial rape case where the suspect was alleged to have assaulted seventeen victims. Hazelwood reviewed the statements from all seventeen women, noting that each, except for one, was able to tell her story in three to five pages of text. The exception’s account ran to twenty-seven pages. She finally came to the alleged rape itself in the middle of page 26.
Hazelwood told prosecutors that he found this victim’s story suspicious. The next day, the defendant in the case abruptly confessed to sixteen of the rapes, but adamantly insisted he knew nothing of the elaborately narrated story that Roy questioned.
A pseudovictim will stress his or her powerlessness to repulse the attack as a face-saving factor, and the rape will be described as both violent and degrading.
As the investigation continues, the pseudovictim may evince scant interest in actually identifying his or her attacker. Tawana Brawley did not speak to investigators after November 30.
Pseudovictims also may exhibit features of borderline personality disorder, the mental warp portrayed with icy brilliance by actress Glenn Close as the depraved Alex Forrest in the movie
Fatal Attraction.
Like Forrest, they can be impulsive, moody, histrionic, reckless, and highly unstable in their relationships.
Their romantic attachments especially can be obsessive, and a not uncommon object is the detective assigned to their case.
Roy’s advice to the incautious rape investigator contemplating such an affair is simple: Don’t do it. “Remember the rabbit in the pot,” he says.
Both the most interesting and unique false allegation he’s ever encountered was made by a twenty-seven-year-old woman, mother of an eight-year-old child.
She was found lying on the ground, comatose and close to death, with her throat slashed. Examination with a rape kit revealed pubic hairs of unknown origin around her vaginal area, and seminal fluid in her vaginal tract. Only a medical “miracle” at the hospital saved her life.
The whole scene had been staged.
She was a drug addict who supported her habit by working as a prostitute. Despairing of her existence—but unwilling to have her child grow up knowing that Mom killed herself—she faked what looked like an assault and rape.
The pubic hairs, for example, were taken from one customer. From another, she obtained the semen specimen found in her vagina. She chemically induced unconsciousness, and slit her own throat with a razor blade, which she
managed to dispose of before slumping to the spot where she collapsed, was discovered, and then rescued.
Because he played no official role in the Brawley investigation, Roy did not testify before the grand jury. However, his colleague and research partner, Park Dietz, did.
The forensic psychiatrist testified to many of the behavioral clues that point to pseudovictimization, including offender behavior which could be inferred from the victim’s report.
As the grand jury reported in its published notes, Dietz and Hazelwood and Dr. Janet Warren were then conducting research into sexual offenders who degrade their victims, as Tawana Brawley alleged that she had been degraded by her attackers.
“There are two principal reasons that offenders degrade their victims,” the grand jury notes report of Dietz’s testimony. “The first reason is anger. Angry rapists often punch their victims in the face, and the face is a significant target. There were no injuries at all to Ms. Brawley’s face. Even the fecal smearing avoided the face.
“An angry rapist who chooses to smear feces on a woman would smear the face, and probably attempt to put the feces in her mouth. More important, however, angry rapists are not known to smear their victims with feces.
“The other motive for degradation is sexual sadism. Sexually sadistic offenders can hold their victims for periods of time and degrade and humiliate them. They will torture their victims with physical means that leave scars and often kill them.
“Most sexually sadistic offenders operate alone, according to Dr. Dietz. A significant number operate with a partner, but not in a group of three or more.
“Dr. Dietz did not see any reason that an offender would put cotton-like material into Ms. Brawley’s nose and ears [but] did see reasons why Ms. Brawley might do so.
“The cut hair, if it was cut, the wearing of burned clothing
and the fecal smearing can all be seen as non-permanent degradation of oneself.
“Dr. Dietz concluded that Tawana Brawley’s physical appearance when she was found is consistent with self-infliction and a false allegation. It is inconsistent with known patterns of offender behavior”
The grand jury concluded in its 170-page report that Tawana Brawley had made up the whole story, and dismissed each of her “advisers’ ” allegations.
Hazelwood received a letter of commendation from Robert Abrams for his assistance to the investigation. As an informal member of the Brawley task force, he also received a special T-shirt designed and printed as a commemorative souvenir of the experience.
The front of the T-shirt features a sketch of the Poughkeepsie armory, where the task force was headquartered. Lettering on the back reads: “Brawley Task Force—244 days of fact, fiction and feces.”
Alton Maddox later was suspended from practicing law for five years after refusing to cooperate with a lawyers’ disciplinary committee investigating his conduct during the Brawley affair.
C. Vernon Mason was disbarred for seven years by the New York State Supreme Court for price-gouging his poorer clients. He entered the New York Theological Seminary as a student.
In 1991, the Reverend Al Sharpton was stabbed and superficially injured by a white man during an outdoor rally.
He has since entered politics. He has run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from New York. In 1997, Sharpton placed a close second in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
Tawana Brawley, who never testified before the grand jury and was never charged in the case, subsequently moved to Virginia with her mother and Ralph King, and later attended Howard University. She left the university in 1992
and became a Muslim. Now Maryam Muhammad, she lives in Temple Hills, Maryland, and reportedly has worked in a Washington-area hospital.
In November 1997, Steven Pagones’s $395 million defamation suit, filed nine years earlier against Brawley and her advisers, finally came to trial in Poughkeepsie.
On July 13, 1998, after eight months of protracted and acrimonious legal wrangling, a six-person jury decided that Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox indeed had defamed Pagones. Sixteen days later, they assessed Sharpton $65,000 in damages, Maddox $95,000, and Mason $185,000. Altogether, the awards roughly matched the amount of money Steven Pagones reportedly spent in waging the legal battle against his accusers.
Tawana Brawley did not testify in the trial.
Gray daylight spread slowly over Kingston, Ontario, as Roy Hazelwood awoke Tuesday morning, August 13, 1996.
Summer had deserted eastern Canada. A drizzle was falling. It was going to be a dreary day.
But as he glanced out his window, Hazelwood hardly noticed the rain and ragged, lowering clouds.
His thoughts instead were of the radiantly winsome inmate awaiting him in the nearby Prison for Women. Bracing himself against the emotional ordeal he knew lay ahead that day, and the next, Roy exhaled abruptly, punched up CNN on the bedside remote, and headed for the shower.
For this excursion to Kingston, just across the headwaters of the St. Lawrence Seaway from upstate New York, lodgings had been arranged by Inspector Ron Mackay, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Violent Crimes Analysis Branch.
Mackay is Roy’s former pupil. In 1989 and 1990 the RCMP inspector was a police fellow at the BSU, where he learned profiling from Hazelwood.
“He’s the best teacher, bar none,” says Mackay. “A lot of people read a few books and think they grasp it, but don’t.
Roy just has this special way of making the subject understandable.”
Familiar as he was with Hazelwood, Mackay was unaware of Roy’s rigid rules of the road, and unwittingly booked his famous mentor into a Victorian bed-and-break-fast at Kingston.
Hazelwood was deeply skeptical. However, once established in his tastefully appointed room with its four-poster bed—and after a steak dinner in a local restaurant with Mackay—he slept well and awakened keen for his morning interview with Karla Homolka.
She would be the eighteenth of twenty subjects in Hazelwood’s survey of what he calls the “compliant victims” of sexual sadists. Rare and anomalous even in the realms of the aberrant, these women frequently are complicit in their husbands’ and/or boyfriends’ criminal acts, including sexual assaults, torture, and murder. That’s why many of them were in prison at the time Roy interviewed them.
Yet they are victims, too, compliant also in their own horrific abuse.
“Interviewing these women has been emotionally draining,” he says. “They bother me. They are so vulnerable, so childlike in many respects. They’ve been so easily manipulated.”
The compliant victim’s traits and characteristics that, in combination, make her so vulnerable to a sexual sadist include passivity, low self-esteem, and a pervasive fear of abandonment.
Some exhibit features of dependent personality disorder, characterized by an inability to think or act for themselves. They are willing to be controlled in order to please.
Hazelwood expected his interview subjects would be homely, ill-kempt, slow-normal slovens, probably dependent on one or more controlled substances.
“In other words,” he says, “all the biases you can imagine.”
Just the opposite was true. They tended to be intelligent
(if naive), attractive, and respectable—exactly what should be expected in light of their victimizers’ needs.
A sexual sadist differs from the far more common wife batterer in that his sexual partner’s pain and degradation are necessary components of the sex act for him. He feels no remorse for something he enjoys. Also unlike most batterers, the sexual sadist is untreatable.
“Unless he is homosexual, the sexual sadist
hates
women,” explains Hazelwood. “To him,
all
women are bitches, whores, and sluts. This means
all
women; his mother, his sister, his wife, his Sunday school teacher, Mother Teresa.
“He believes that if he pushes the right buttons, he’ll find this to be true of all women. And to prove this belief, he takes a nice middle-class woman and tears her down. He tries to create a slut, thus proving his theory. Then he punishes her for being like that.”
Sexual sadists are amazingly alike in their sexual requirements and the demands they make upon their victims. “It’s like they all studied in the same schoolroom,” says Hazelwood. “They have the same motivation, the same fantasies. And they act out in very similar ways.”
They easily are the most destructive of predatory criminals, as well. The twenty-six felons in John Douglas and Bob Ressler’s serial killer survey committed 127 known murders. Of the thirty sexual sadists Roy has surveyed, the twenty-two who also were killers committed at least 187 murders.