Part 4 (1/2)

”Additional guards also would not have deterred this crime. Cameras would not have deterred this crime. Better lighting would not have deterred this crime.

”Nothing was going to stop those two.”

* Denotes a pseudonym.

4.

The Dead Speak The world of aberrant crime forcefully reclaimed Hazelwood's attention in 1968, when Roy, by then a Vietnam veteran and a major in the army, accepted a yearlong fellows.h.i.+p at the Armed Forces Inst.i.tute of Pathology, based at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The AFIP was the best-equipped and most advanced facility of its kind anywhere in the world.

Roy by this time was familiar with the dark side of human nature.

From Fort Rucker he'd been transferred to West Germany, where Hazelwood first served as provost marshal (police chief) of the Fourth Armored Division's home base at Goppingen. He then was sent to Stuttgart, where he commanded a stockade.

There are very few jobs less attractive than being a jailer. But for Roy Hazelwood, the yearlong responsibility of managing 150 criminals was a welcome chance to interact directly with them-to be educated on criminality by criminals.

”I learned a lot running that stockade,” he says.

He also demonstrated a natural feel for dealing with felons.

One of Roy's innovations, developed with the help of a psychologist, was to color-code the facility's interior. Thus, when new arrivals first came to Captain Hazelwood's prison entrance, they found the walls and floor painted a bleak gray, underscoring the seriousness of their situation.

To emphasize that in this place their lives no longer were their own, Roy directed that black hands and feet be painted onto the walls and floor. These indicated precisely to the newcomers where they were to position their own hands and feet as they were searched, and then marched through the entrance's outer and inner gates, or sally port.

Inside the lockup, Roy added a Dantean touch. Those in maximum security found their area covered completely with a dark, dull green paint. As the men worked their way up, via good behavior, to the moderate-security wing, they discovered the vile green relieved by a white paint on the upper walls and ceiling. Those well-behaved enough for minimum security enjoyed curtains, rugs, and furniture.

Troublemakers were placed on suicide watch: locked down naked, with no mattress or blanket, under twenty-four-hour guard in a brightly lit cell with only a Bible and their wedding ring to remind them of their higher responsibilities.

After two days of this, Roy would personally visit the inmate, excuse the guard, and speak privately. ”I'd tell him that if he'd tell me he was sorry for what he'd done, I'd let him out, and no one would ever know he'd apologized. It worked ninety percent of the time.”

If it didn't, Hazelwood s.h.i.+pped the miscreant off to a far less congenial environment, the former n.a.z.i concentration camp at Dachau, then being operated as a special lockup for soldier-inmates with behavior problems throughout the European stockade system.

Although Roy couldn't know it, these one-on-one encounters with the baddest of the bad in his custody were an invaluable prelude to his later confrontations with America's most deviant offenders.

Mentally sparring with a killer is very different from sharing a lemonade on the veranda with your Aunt Kate. It is very hard work in which a simple slip of the tongue, or even a mistaken gesture, can cancel days, even weeks, of effort.

There's no cookbook, either.

In Stuttgart, for example, Roy was faced with the problem of a glib and personable inmate whom the prison psychologist had diagnosed as a psychopath.

This prisoner, a persistent reoffender with a long record of incarceration, had voluntarily a.s.sisted with overhauling the stockade's archaic office record-keeping system. But in the weeks he worked around Roy's staff, Hazelwood realized that though superficially charming, the inmate was a chronic liar who failed to complete most of the tasks he was given.

Besides enjoying the change of scenery, he also took advantage of the circ.u.mstance to ingratiate himself with several members of Roy's staff, while he became intimately familiar with the other inmates' records, gathering information he no doubt planned to use to his advantage.

Hazelwood knew he would have to make a countermove before the prisoner had consolidated his relations.h.i.+ps and established his own power center inside the prison staff, a potentially dangerous challenge to Roy's authority.

But confrontation, a public showdown, wouldn't work. This was a model prisoner, and Hazelwood could only undercut his own credibility by treating the popular inmate peremptorily. The answer had to be a response in kind-subterfuge replying to stealth.

Consequently, contraband postage stamps were discovered in the prisoner's bunk, a rules violation from which there was no appeal. He was summarily issued a one-way ticket to Dachau.

”You know I didn't steal those stamps,” the inmate said indignantly to Roy on his way out the door. ”You set me up, didn't you?”

Roy nodded and smiled and wished the man a safe journey. The defeated prisoner paused briefly and smiled back, apparently appreciating the craftiness with which he had been finessed.

Hazelwood's next overseas posting was South Vietnam, where in 1967 he was a.s.signed command of the Fourth MP Company, known at the time as the ”f.u.c.ked-Up Fourth” for its lack of discipline, low morale, and dismal performance record. At the time Roy took over, seven soldiers in the company were in the stockade for attempting to kill a noncommissioned officer with a hand grenade.

Roy again intuitively recognized that creativity would get him much further than confrontation, an insight also of great value for interviewing violent deviant offenders.

On his first day in charge of his new command, Hazelwood inspected the MPs' living quarters and equipment. ”They were pretty awful,” he says. ”I picked up one soldier's rifle and discovered that it was rusted shut.

”The first sergeant said, 'Sir, here's your chance to establish your authority. Court-martial the soldier.'

”I said, 'No, I think I'll put him on the lead Jeep on tomorrow's four a.m. convoy escort-with this weapon.'

”That PFC spent the entire night cleaning his weapon.”

By the time Hazelwood moved on, the Fourth was not only squared away, but had become one of the most decorated MP companies in Vietnam.

His next stop was An Khe, home of the First Cavalry Division, where for four months Roy coordinated convoy security for more than 250 miles of the most dangerous roadway in Vietnam.

His last a.s.signment was as ”number one papa san” in charge of cleaning up ”Sin City,” the one-square-mile red-light district in An Khe.

Sin City was notorious throughout that part of Vietnam for its overpriced and diluted booze (known as Saigon tea), diseased hookers, and the frequency of street brawls that broke out among the U.S. Army personnel who were Sin City's most frequent visitors.

Not unlike some western sheriff determined to tame his town's outlaw element, Roy inst.i.tuted reforms that eliminated most of Sin City's violence, improved the girls' health and hygiene, and regulated liquor prices.

The fighters tailed off dramatically when he forbade officers and enlisted men to mingle in the same establishments.

”In fact,” Roy recalls, ”we had the brothel owners construct, at their own cost, three separate facilities: one for officers, one for noncommissioned officers, and one for the enlisted men.”

He saw to it that price-gouging ricksha operators, who charged exorbitant sums to transport soldiers to and from Sin City, suddenly had an affordable compet.i.tor, a regularly scheduled, round-trip minibus service.

Hazelwood also ordered that all prost.i.tutes were to receive weekly physical examinations and be tested for s.e.xually transmitted diseases. Those who were sick were ordered out of their brothels. One violation, and the wh.o.r.ehouse itself was shut down.

Roy further directed that all employers and employees from Sin City's papa-sans to their bartenders and the bar girls were to rise at 6:00 a.m. each day and thoroughly police the entire district for trash.

”Everyone took part; it was a true democracy,” he says.

In the summer of 1968, his tour complete, Major Hazelwood returned home to confront a major decision. The army offered him a choice: attend Michigan State University to pursue an advanced degree in criminal law enforcement studies, or accept a year's fellows.h.i.+p in forensic medicine at the AFIP.

Hazelwood decided in characteristic fas.h.i.+on.

”I went to the dictionary and looked up 'forensic medicine.' It said, 'medicine as it applies to courts of law.' That sounded fascinating, so I accepted the fellows.h.i.+p.”

Roy had seen a tremendous amount of violence in Vietnam, but the AFIP introduced him to a different variety of mayhem-random, pernicious violence and its victims. a.s.sisting in autopsies at the Baltimore medical examiner's office, retrieving floaters (dead bodies) with the harbor patrol, observing the psychiatric intake ward at Walter Reed, and learning forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, Hazelwood for the first time began to sketch his own mental frame around the borders of extreme and dangerous behavior.

”My professional interest in death and violence really came together at AFIP,” he explains. ”There was so much violence, and I was confronted daily with its victims. Some of the victims would be expected to encounter violence in their lives. Prost.i.tutes and drug addicts, for example. But many of the other victims I saw were selected randomly to be killed. That point has stayed with me for my entire career.”