The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (9 page)

Then one day in the Cornell bookstore he discovered a text,
Forensic Medicine,
by the British physician Keith Simpson. The experience proved an epiphany every bit as profound for him as the discovery of Harvey Glatman had been for Roy Hazelwood.

It changed Park Dietz’s life.

“That book was my salvation,” he says. “It was full of dead babies and skeletons and bodies in trunks. It made me see that there was a way to do criminology and medicine at the same time, so that my parents would pay for my education and I could do what I wanted to do.”

His senior honors thesis at Cornell was on the sociology of deviance. When he later studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Dietz worked in the same medical examiner’s office Roy Hazelwood had on his AFIP fellowship five years earlier. It was in the Baltimore morgue, coincidentally, that Dietz encountered his own first autoerotic fatality, a young girl who’d hanged herself with her panty hose.

Forensic psychiatry afforded Park Dietz an avenue of access to explore strange behavior, the stranger the better. In an early and memorable case, he interviewed a young schizophrenic who, during a psychotic episode, deliberately had placed his right arm across a train track for the limb to be severed by a passing locomotive. When the psychiatrist wondered
why
the gory self-amputation, the patient said the explanation lay in the Gospel according to Matthew, and quoted to Dietz the applicable verses.

“Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”

Where forensic psychiatry disappointed Dietz was in the way it subordinated scientific inquiry to the narrower, practical needs of the law. “At the time, it wasn’t considered a psychiatrist’s job to critically assess a police investigation,” says Dietz, “or even to get hold of information about it. Certainly we were not to go out and reinvestigate where the police already had been. Nor were we to ask them to go back to check something.”

Park Dietz, however, wanted to
investigate
aberrant behavior, not just study or describe it. Instead of a doctor-diagnostician, he wanted to be a doctor-detective.

It was Roy Hazelwood, says Dietz, who showed him the way.

“It was when I first started working with Roy on the autoerotic fatalities research project that I got the idea that forensic psychiatrists were probably getting a lot of things wrong by not conducting our own inquiries,” he explains. “So I started to do that, and for a while I called it investigative forensic psychiatry.”

Dr. Dietz’s first major opportunity to apply what he learned from Roy and to demonstrate his new approach to forensic psychiatry came eighteen months after meeting Hazelwood. He was retained by government lawyers to examine and evaluate would-be assassin John W. Hinckley, Jr., who shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981.

Hinckley, twenty-five, became obsessed with Jodie Foster after seeing her play the young prostitute, Iris, opposite Robert De Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, in the film
Taxi Driver.
Hinckley began harassing the nineteen-year-old Foster by telephone and mail.

Just as the unstable Bickle eventually became a political assassin, Hinckley decided to kill Reagan in an effort to impress Foster. He’d later call the shooting “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.”

Dietz interviewed Hinckley at a number of federal detention centers up and down the eastern seaboard. He was first to uncover Hinckley’s motive for the shooting.

But the forensic psychiatrist also discovered one reason why Hinckley chose to shoot at Reagan from such close range, practically guaranteeing that he’d be captured, if not killed himself.

Poor eyesight.

“We went to Colorado to interview Hinckley’s parents,” Dietz says. “They let us go through his bedroom. I found some shot-up targets the Bureau had missed when they
searched the home. They were labeled, so we could see that Hinckley was a lousy shot beyond close range.”

Another question was why Hinckley waited to shoot until Reagan was departing the Hilton, rather than when the President was walking in. The crime scene photographs offered no explanation, so Dietz decided to visit the Hilton himself.

“It was clear when we got there that Hinckley didn’t have a clear shot when the President was on his way in,” he says.

“There was a curve in the brick wall at the Hilton, which limited the amount of time he would have had to aim and shoot. But as the President emerged, Hinckley had more time and stood at closer range.”

Hinckley also planned to draw Jodie Foster to him by abducting a planeload of airline passengers, whom he intended to trade for the young movie actress as his hostage. Dietz shed light on those plans with a discovery he made while sorting through Hinckley’s personal effects.

In the bottom of Hinckley’s suitcase the forensic psychiatrist found a Band-Aid can. Stuck to its bottom was a folded-up note that previous searches had overlooked.

Written on the secreted sheet was a skyjack demand that Hinckley had cribbed almost verbatim from the book
The Fox Is Crazy, Too,
which Dr. Dietz also found in the suitcase.

Besides applying what he learned from Hazelwood to the Hinckley investigation, by 1981 Dietz also was well into his joint research with Roy on dangerous autoeroticism. Dietz had begun his work with a review of the medical literature, which he found disappointing.

“It was largely garbage,” Dietz says. “One or two case histories. A couple accounts of people who survived. A hodgepodge of information.”

His historical researches took him as far back as a.d. 1000 and a Mayan stone sculpture from that era. On display at the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City, the sculpture
depicts a naked man with a rope around his neck. The figure is scarred on his cheeks and forehead. His penis, clearly carved in erection, is partially missing.

Although the sculpture does not prove the Maya had discovered hypoxia, to Dietz it strongly suggested they did. He also points out that the Maya believed the souls of those who hanged themselves went straight to paradise, where they were met by the goddess Ixtab, who is depicted in an extant manuscript in a kneeling posture, her one visible nipple erect. She is suspended by a noose around her neck.

Eight centuries later, the Marquis de Sade included an autoerotic hanging scene in his novel
Justine,
probably the best-known treatment of sexual asphyxia in Western literature.

Much more compelling to the scientist in Dietz was an anonymously written pamphlet,
Modern Propensities: Or an Essay on the Art of Strangling,
that he traced to a microfilm collection at Yale.
Propensities,
published in London at the end of the eighteenth century, describes in detail the deaths of two men due to sexual asphyxia: one a Reverend Parson Manacle (possibly a pseudonym), and the other, Francis Kotzwarra, a Czech musician and minor composer, whose demise is possibly the earliest recorded example of an accidental autoerotic fatality being mistaken for homicide.

On September 2, 1791, Kotzwarra visited a London prostitute named Susannah Hill. After performing what her trial transcript describes only as “several acts of the grossest indecency” with her, Kotzwarra asked Hill to fetch some cord with which he wanted to hang himself.

She obliged, and watched as Kotzwarra accidentally killed himself. Charged with manslaughter, the prostitute saved herself with her seeming honesty and frankness over what had occurred. Hill withheld nothing of the incident, repeating to the judge the same unpleasant details she had related to both a neighbor and a constable.

The court reporter added his own bit of corroborative detail:

She was neatly dressed in common apparel; and, on her countenance, we could discover nothing that seemed to indicate a rooted depravity; nor was there any thing in her person particularly attractive: from which it may be inferred that the unfortunate—if not lamented—Kotzwarra trusted more to the charms of the
cord
than to those of his fair one.

Dietz’s discovery of Kotzwarra’s prototypical autoerotic death led the forensic psychiatrist to suggest a title for their book in progress,
Kotzwarraism.
Hazelwood was adamantly opposed.

“I think it was the only thing about which we ever had a true disagreement,” Roy recalls. “I was inflexible. The book was going to be called
Autoerotic Fatalities.
Park agreed.”

Hazelwood, Dietz, and Ann Burgess from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 150 deaths in all. Of the seven female victims, four were white. Of the 143 male victims, 139 were white.

The victims’ average age at death was twenty-six. Three out of ten, male and female, were married.

The oldest victim was a seventy-seven-year-old man; the youngest was a nine-year-old paperboy found asphyxiated in a deserted stable. Sears catalogs opened to lingerie ads were spread around him on the floor.

According to Hazelwood, children as young as six have died during experimental asphyxia. Some years ago, three California children died in their grade-school washroom as a result of placing their necks in cloth towel dispensers and twisting.

Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess also evaluated eighteen nonasphyxial autoerotic fatalities. Among them, six victims
died by electrocution, four suffered heart attacks, three from inhaling an aerosol propellant, two from aspirating vomit, and one from “popping” a volatile nitrate. Another, the midwestern businessman originally believed to have been kidnapped, died of exposure. The eighteenth victim’s cause of death was undetermined.

From his extensive interviews with survivors and associates of the victims, Roy discovered how difficult autoerotic practices can be to detect. One father told Hazelwood that he’d noticed a red linear mark on his son’s neck. When he asked his son about it, the boy reasonably explained he’d been playing football, and that someone had grabbed his T-shirt from the rear, causing the shirt collar to leave the mark. One month later, his father found him dead, clothed in his mother’s lingerie, suspended from a rope in his closet.

“There are no definitive signs of involvement with dangerous autoeroticism,” says Hazelwood. “Outside of general, nonspecific indicators such as red eyes or red marks around the neck, there are no clues. I know of nothing that will alert a person to the possibility that someone is participating in this type of activity. To all appearances, they are perfectly normal and healthy people. They certainly are not psychotic.

“Unlike suicides, victims of dangerous autoeroticism rarely are described as depressed, anxious, irritable, or particularly stressed prior to their deaths. To the contrary, the great majority are described as optimistic and future-oriented.”

Nor does there seem to be a single source, or type of source, from which most people learn about the practice. Besides fictional treatments such as
Justine,
the victims’ apparently learn about hypoxia from friends and acquaintances, discover it by accident, read about it in magazines (Larry Flynt’s
Hustler
published a widely read article, “Orgasm of Death,” in 1981) and newspapers, or encounter it in the cinema, most recently in the movies
And Justice for All
and
In the Realm of the Senses.

Those attracted to terminal sex, as it has been called, also are willing to fill in their blanks. The 1970 movie
A Man Called Horse,
for example, features the British actor Richard Harris as an itinerant nineteenth-century British nobleman who is subcutaneously skewered and threaded with buckskin cords by a band of Indians. The Indians test Harris’s mettle by hoisting him high above the ground by the leather ligatures in a sort of aboriginal crucifixion ceremony.

The scene, reprised in two sequels, is powerful but hardly erotic.

Nonetheless, Hazelwood recalls a
Horse-inspired
autoerotic fatality in which the victim, wearing a horse bit and bridle, pierced his nipples with fishhooks before hanging himself by the neck.

The props and paraphernalia found at an autoerotic death scene will vary according to the victim’s fantasy, and the variations are endless.

Roy cites a case in which a man was found dead, cross-dressed in his wife’s lingerie, with a pair of her panties pulled over his head. He had suspended a ligature from a garage rafter and tied a thirteen-loop hangman’s knot in its free end. Then he climbed on a stool, placed his neck in the noose, and stepped off. His feet did not quite touch the garage floor, so he died from asphyxiation.

The key to understanding his ritual came later, with the discovery among his personal papers of a handwritten fantasy script, describing the military execution of his wife for treason.

As Roy put the evidence together, the victim was enacting this script, standing in as surrogate victim. By donning her lingerie he symbolically became his wife. For the condemned’s hood, he used her panties. Stepping off the stool was analogous to the hanging victim’s thirteenth and final step before dropping to his or her death.

In another case, a shoe fetishist secured a rope to a door-knob,
ran the line over the door, and accidentally asphyxiated himself while hanging from it, totally nude, on the opposite side.

“Surrounding him,” Roy recalls, “were four full-length mirrors. Attached to them, and the door behind him, were women’s high-heeled shoes.

“He had hanged himself surrounded by the shoes. Everywhere he looked he would see himself and his love objects.”

Asphyxiation caused by hanging is by far the most common form of accidental autoerotic fatality.

“Outside of jails or mental institutions, I’ve never seen a nude suicide by hanging,” says Hazelwood. “So if I find someone hanging nude in their bedroom I’m going to suspect it is an autoerotic fatality.”