Part 5 (1/2)

Unfortunately, it appeared that the businessman's weight prevented him from also releasing himself. A session of self-arousing s.e.x had cost him his life.

Cause of death: exposure.

Manner of death: accident.

Case closed.

After receiving official Bureau sanction to proceed with his project, Roy began collecting cases for consideration. Altogether, there would be 157 histories included, most of them submitted by U.S. and Canadian police officers who attended cla.s.ses at Quantico.

From a law enforcement point of view, this approach ensured he'd gather the best possible selection of histories. Students only submitted cases for consultation and discussion at Quantico if they otherwise defied solution, or were so strange that the officer sought enlightenment from experts.

Among the mysteries Roy helped to explain was a college professor discovered dead in full western gear, including chaps, twin .45s in his hip holsters, and a ten-gallon hat on his head. Another victim was found dead in scuba gear. A third was fully attired as a surgeon.

One female victim was dressed as a harem girl.

He was able to show the officers how in each case the individual died of accidental asphyxiation while engaged in dangerous autoerotic acts.

In another consultation, Roy reviewed the death of a black woman, twenty-three, who was found nude in her bathroom, resting on her knees, with her head submerged in the bathtub. Her hands were bound in front of her, and a nine-and-one-half-inch metal bolt, which she had previously inserted within her, lay on the floor beneath her b.u.t.tocks. A rope was looped around her neck, with the two free ends draped over her right shoulder.

”She is thought to have been engaging in a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic fantasy (hence, the bound wrists),” Hazelwood wrote in his a.n.a.lysis, ”inducing hypoxia with the neck ligature, when she lost consciousness, falling across the tub and into the water.”

The most violent death was also the most horrible. A young man with a roller-skate-strap fetish trussed his wrists and ankles with twenty-eight of them. Then he lowered himself into a garbage can, b.u.t.tocks first, with his knees drawn up to his chest, intending to sink to the point where the garbage can constricted his chest and induced hypoxia.

His escape mechanism was a roll of wire standing next to the garbage can. As Roy reconstructed the death, the young man failed to appreciate how low his center of gravity would go, making it impossible to tip over the garbage by grasping the roll of wire.

He died, slowly and painfully, from progressive asphyxiation.

”Neighbors,” says Roy, ”reported that they thought they heard a dog howling all night. It was this young man.”

5.

Terminal s.e.x In October 1979, Dr. Park Dietz, then director of forensic psychiatry at the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ma.s.sachusetts, invited Hazelwood to appear with him on a panel to discuss autoerotic fatalities at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law.

”I remember Roy as a short guy with peculiar interests,” Dr. Dietz says. ”I shared those interests, and that's why I liked him.”

Dietz, the son of a Camp Hill, Pennsylvania physician, is today as central a figure among forensic psychiatrists as Hazelwood is in law enforcement.

Among the infamous defendants Dietz has evaluated for both prosecution and defense attorneys have been Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee's flesh-eating serial killer; Arthur Shawcross, the upstate New York serial killer; Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who murdered her two sons; John du Pont; and Betty Broderick of San Diego, whose murder of both her ex-husband and his wife prompted not one, but two made-for-TV movies.

Dietz has also done pioneer studies of stalkers, and worked as a security consultant to celebrities including Michael Jackson and Cher.

He operates the Threat a.s.sessment Group in Newport Beach, California, a consultancy to government and business which focuses on the potential threats posed by disgruntled employees and solutions for dealing with them.

Dr. Dietz's fascination with aberrant minds started even earlier in his life than did Hazelwood's.

”I can trace that interest in odd behavior back at least as far as my boyhood, when I tagged along with my mother when she did volunteer work at the state hospital in Harrisburg, near where we lived,” he recalls.

”She'd organize Christmas parties. I'd help with refreshments and decorations and would sometimes dance with the patients.”

Dietz says he never seriously doubted that he'd follow his father into medicine, or that his specialty would be psychiatry. However, as his interest in odd behavior deepened, he began to question what sort of light, if any, psychiatry could shed on these subjects.

A premed student at Cornell in the late 1960s, where he studied biology and psychology, Dietz seriously considered bolting for the University of California at Berkeley to take up criminology.

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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 l.u.s.t 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 h.e.l.l.

”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 a.s.sess 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 a.s.sa.s.sin John W. Hinckley, Jr., who shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan at the Was.h.i.+ngton Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981.

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

Just as the unstable Bickle eventually became a political a.s.sa.s.sin, 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.”