Part 1 (2/2)

Roy surmised Eric Christgen's killer was a white male pedophile, aged around fifty. He arrived at these inferences based upon witness accounts and the BSU's voluminous files on similar abduction murders. The offender's race, s.e.x, and s.e.xual orientation were self-evident. His age was a surmise, supported by the witnesses.

Roy also knew from the BSU's past experience with pedophiles that they do not start acting out, suddenly, in middle age. So this UNSUB, he thought, probably had a police record for past deviant acts with children.

Judging from the apparent strength required to scale the thickly overgrown hillside where he'd taken the boy to kill him, the UNSUB also probably was st.u.r.dily built.

Hazelwood wrote further that the killer would likely be a loner who had been drinking the day of the slaying. His inhibitions lowered by alcohol, he had s.n.a.t.c.hed Eric Christgen on an impulse. It was a crime of opportunity, with no prior planning.

If employed, the UNSUB would be a laborer of some sort. He was neither stable nor skilled enough to hold down a more demanding position. Most importantly, wrote Hazelwood, if not stopped he certainly would reoffend within a few months.

In Roy's experience, criminal pedophiles, along with s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts, are the only s.e.xual offenders who enjoy the actual commission of their crimes as much as they do fantasizing about them, before and afterward. They are not remorseful for the harm they do, nor do they experience guilt. They never recoil at their excesses. And at no level of consciousness do they ever wish to be caught.

Hazelwood's 1978 profile of Eric Christgen's killer had little initial impact on the investigation. At the time Roy wrote it, the BSU wasn't nearly so well known as it became in the wake of Thomas Harris's spooky novel, The Silence of the Lambs, or the ensuing movie, in which Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for his bloodcurdling portrayal of the flesh-eating Hannibal Lecter. In 1978, the quality and relicibility of the BSU's work were largely unknown.

It was also years after Hazelwood completed the profile that Michael Insco, the prosecutor in St. Joseph, finally read it. By then, the Christgen case had taken a surprise turn as well.

Some months after the murder, Melvin Reynolds, a slightly built twenty-five-year-old resident of St. Joseph, confessed during police questioning that he'd abducted, a.s.saulted, and killed Eric Christgen. Reynolds, an unemployed cook, was sentenced to life in prison in 1979.

”We had a person who'd confessed,” says Insco, now in private life as a computer-system consultant to law enforcement. ”And profiles were something we totally were unfamiliar with. At that time, all I saw was something come across my desk marked 'Psychological Profile.' ”

Three years later, a burly itinerant s.e.x killer and convicted pedophile named Charles Ray Hatcher confessed to the crime. Hatcher intimated he was good for as many as sixteen murders over several years. He'd been fifty years old at the time Eric Christgen was killed, just as Roy earlier had conjectured the boy's killer would be.

Faced with the dilemma of two men now having sworn their guilt for the same murder, Ins...o...b..gan reviewing the evidence, including, for the first time, Hazelwood's five-year-old profile. After reading it through, ”I realized that Hazelwood had written a description of Hatcher,” Insco says. ”The profile matched him on something like twenty-one points. And it wasn't just the fact that the profile fit Hatcher so closely. It also described someone far different from the man we'd convicted. It was a very impressive piece of work.”

Insco later visited the BSU, where he met personally with Roy.

”I wish that I had gone there much earlier,” he says. ”If I had known the kind of work they were doing in the BSU I really think it might have saved an innocent man from going to prison. I don't think I would have believed Reynolds.”

Charles Hatcher was sentenced to life in prison on October 13, 1983. The next day, after four years behind bars, Melvin Reynolds was released.

On December 7, 1984, Hatcher was found hanged to death from a wire in his cell at the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City. Cause of death was presumed to be suicide.

Since that first profile, Hazelwood's research projects have taken criminology where it's never been before, from the malignant misogyny of criminal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts to behavior that often is neither criminal nor violent nor predatory, but nonetheless poses critical challenges to law enforcement.

When I first met him, Roy, with Dr. Dietz and Ann Wolbert Burgess, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, recently had published the first and only textbook ever devoted to autoerotic fatalities. These accidental, often bizarre deaths frequently are mistaken by investigators for murders or suicides. Hazelwood has even identified a subset of such cases, atypical autoerotic deaths.

Another of his innovations is the ”organized-disorganized” aberrant criminal dichotomy, as familiar to homicide investigators today as handcuffs. The dichotomy is a shorthand way for police to quickly ascertain from crime-scene evidence what sort of UNSUB they seek.

If, for example, a killer brings with him the weapons and restraints he requires to commit the crime, and then takes pains to secrete his victim's body, he is demonstrating foresight, and is probably an experienced, mature, coherent criminal-”organized.” If, by contrast, the crime scene is chaotic, and reflects no planning nor any particular care taken to get away safely, the offender is apt to be young, inexperienced, or possibly even psychotic-”disorganized.”

When it is clearly evident that an UNSUB is organized or disorganized, that knowledge is vitally useful in focusing the critically important early stages of a criminal investigation.

”The disorganized and organized cla.s.sification of crimes was fantastic, a brainstorm,” says Vernon J. Geberth, a retired New York Police Department lieutenant commander and author of the standard police textbook, Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures and Forensic Techniques. ”For a police officer to be able to define and describe behavior without using clinical terms was just fantastic.”

Besides noting his evident style, my first impression of Roy in Des Moines that Monday night was how different he seemed from the other BSU agents Hugh and I had met. Roger Depue, unit chief during the BSU's heyday of the 1980s, once told me that overseeing Hazelwood and his brother profilers was a little like coaching a football team with eleven quarterbacks.

”They were all different, with very strong ideas about what they wanted to do, and how to do it,” said Depue.

Intelligent, highly motivated, hardworking, and good company, especially when they've had a few drinks, profilers tend to combine the giant, fragile ego of the brain surgeon with the tireless intensity of genius-level computer programmers.

They can be a strange bunch.

Depue remembers camaraderie in the unit, a sense of specialness that this platoon of psychological commandos-Psychology Today called them ”mind hunters”-shared. But the fault lines in the unit also ran deep. There are certain present and former BSU agents it is best not to invite to the same function.

Roy, a natural diplomat, remains on cordial relations with all his old buddies. He's centered in a way that many of them are not. He also maintains a healthy perspective on his work.

Roger Depue recalls that Hazelwood was one of the very few BSU agents who could leave profiling's horrors on his desk each night, and then pick up the burden of reconstructing ghastly murders afresh each morning.

As Roy tells it, the key is not to dwell in the overwhelming evil, but to sequester it or defuse it. He employs one of the homicide investigator's trustiest emotional allies in this battle, mocking irreverence.

Some years ago, after listening to Hazelwood lecture at a conference, an older female psychologist approached him.

”How do you cope with all that violence?” she asked.

”I looked her right in the eye and said, 'Masturbation!' ” Hazelwood recollects.

She literally staggered.

”I said, 'I'm joking! I'm joking! I'm joking!' I do the same thing you do. I compartmentalize. This is my job, not my life. I have a home and family and a faith in G.o.d.”

Another common inquiry: Why the fascination with such extreme criminal behavior?

Hazelwood often senses this questioner's implicit a.s.sumption that cops and criminals are two sides of a very thin coin, a connection he emphatically rejects.

”I always answer that one with a question of my own,” he says.

” 'When you go to the zoo, what is your favorite animal to look at?'

”Some people say, 'I like the snakes.' Others say, 'I like the lions.'

” 'Why?' I ask.

” 'Because they're dangerous.'

” 'Well,' I say, 'that's why I study s.e.xual offenders, because they're dangerous.' ”

As the c.o.c.ktail-hour conversation matured into a genial exchange of stories and opinions, my attention wandered repeatedly to a typescript lying on the table between us. It was ent.i.tled ”An a.n.a.lysis of Materials Seized from James Mitch.e.l.l DeBardeleben,” and it rested beneath Roy's gleaming Zippo, emblazoned with the insignia of the Fourth Infantry Division, Hazelwood's old unit in Vietnam. Whenever he lit a smoke, Roy returned the lighter to the transcript, like he was checking a poker bet.

I was intrigued.

”DeBardeleben is a fascinating case,” Hazelwood finally said, gesturing toward the report. ”It ought to be your next book.”

The year before, Mike DeBardeleben, then forty-three, was arrested in Knoxville by Secret Service agents who for years had known him only as ”the Mall Pa.s.ser,” a rare solo forger who printed his own bills and pa.s.sed them himself, princ.i.p.ally in malls.

Hazelwood told us that although DeBardeleben was as wily a counterfeiter as the Treasury Department ever encountered, his true dimension as a sort of omni-criminal only became clear after Secret Service agents tossed the two miniwarehouses where he'd stashed his printing gear.

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