Part 6 (1/2)

1. Is there an abnormal amount of the material present?

One hundred fifty roller skate straps were discovered in one victim's possession.

2. Does the material belong where you found it?

There are few everyday reasons for keeping lengths of chromium chain in your bedroom.

3. How much financial investment does the individual have in the item?

A three-thousand-dollar investment in lingerie would be excessive.

On occasion, a fourth question may arise: Why did the victim keep this object hidden?

Dangerous autoeroticism commonly is a.s.sociated with masochism. Yet Hazelwood has also discovered the habit among s.e.xual criminals.

Harvey Glatman cross-dressed when he hanged himself.

Gerard Schaefer, a serial killer who himself eventually was killed by another inmate at the Florida State Prison, practiced dangerous autoerotic s.e.x in the Florida swamps.

He would cross-dress and suspend himself by the neck from tree limbs. In Roy's opinion, Schaefer was using himself as a prop in the absence of available female victims, whom he also took into the Florida swamps and hanged. He even took photos of these autoerotic sessions. The purpose of the picture taking, Roy believes, was to perfect the manner in which Schaefer hanged himself, as well as his victims, hoping to enhance both experiences for him.

Mike DeBardeleben, an archetypal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t, created his Bite it! audiotape and, according to one of his victims, dressed in a miniskirt, sweater, and high heels while he was with her.

Dangerous autoeroticism seems to exert a potent seductiveness on nominally normal people, too. On at least two occasions after Roy has lectured to professional audiences on dangerous autoerotic practices, audience members have accidentally killed themselves attempting dangerous autoeroticism themselves.

”No one knows why one person acts on aberrant s.e.xual fantasies, and another person does not,” says Hazelwood. ”What is known is that many people have aberrant fantasies which, if acted out, would be criminal.

”In the case of dangerous autoeroticism, what criminals and noncriminals have in common is that they engage in the same types of solo s.e.xual acts.”

In their textbook, Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess warn sternly: ”Do not attempt any of the autoerotic activities described or depicted in this monograph. . . . There is no reason to believe that these activities are pleasurable to the average person, and there is every reason to believe that they may prove fatal.”

6.

Louella and Earl Back in the days when he dipped his ducktail in baby oil, favored black s.h.i.+rts with pink lapels, and wheeled around Spring Branch, Texas, in a '49 Mercury, cut low to the ground, looking for girls and/or trouble, few people would have predicted that Robert Roy (he's always been known by his middle name) Hazelwood someday would become a federal agent.

Least of all Roy himself.

”I was very, very fortunate I didn't get into serious trouble,” he says of his rowdy youth. ”The last thing I ever expected to do was go into law enforcement.”

In truth, Roy had no clear notion of the future, or any plan for it. As a boy and as a man, he has always been content for opportunity to find him. The theme of chance, more or less spontaneous decision-making is strong through Hazelwood's life.

”The only thing I've always been sure of is what I didn't want to do,” he says.

Roy was born in Pocatello, Idaho, on March 4, 1938. He has no early recollections of his outlaw father, or any other member of Merle P. Redd.i.c.k's family.

The man he called Dad was Earl Hazelwood, a barber and former minor-league first baseman, who married Roy's mother, Louella, in 1941, about three years after she divorced Redd.i.c.k.

Earl Hazelwood was a contradictory and complex figure who looms large in his stepson's memory. The two came into almost immediate conflict.

”I look back now,” Roy says, ”and I can see that it was jealousy over my mother's affections. My mother and I were very close. And I wasn't his natural son.”

Earl Hazelwood had a quick temper. Roy recollects a family argument in which it appeared that his stepfather was about to strike his mother. Roy stepped between them.

”He said something like, 'I'll knock the h.e.l.l out of you!' and my mother grabbed me and put me behind her.”

Earl Hazelwood had a secret flaw, too.

”He was sick a lot,” says Roy. ”He'd come home from work and go straight to bed. On Sundays he was in bed all day. I was told he had a stomach problem. I was twenty-two years old before I realized he was an alcoholic.”

In all important ways, however, Roy believes that growing up a Hazelwood was a distinct improvement over the alternative, life with the missing M. P. Redd.i.c.k. The Hazelwood family even had about them their own whiff of renegade celebrity that Roy savored.

According to his dad's possibly apocryphal account, Hazelwood once was spelled Hazlewood. Shortly after the Civil War, however, a Hazlewood who happened to be a minister made the mistake of delivering a meal to the outlaw Jesse James, and was hanged for his trouble.

The rest of the clan, according to Earl, changed their name to Hazelwood to avoid further disgrace.

Roy's mother, Louella, was a devout, but hardly doctrinaire, Baptist.

”She didn't see anything wrong with having a beer occasionally, or dancing,” Roy recollects. ”When we'd have the youth fellows.h.i.+p night at our house, my mother would tell us, 'Okay, kids. I'm going to keep Pastor Ken and his wife busy drinking coffee in the kitchen. You go ahead and dance.”

When her oldest boy later joined another famously dogmatic and occasionally inflexible organization, the FBI, he'd discover ways of bending the rules in ways that would have made Louella smile.

Earl and Louella were married in Minnesota, then moved south in a protracted, multistage migration to his native Texas. They'd travel for a while, then stop so Earl could cut hair and replenish the family finances.

Louella bore Roy's half-brother, Jimmy, while the Hazelwoods were stopped in Nebraska. Half-sister Earlene debuted in Missouri. Louella's final pregnancy ended in a stillbirth in Kansas.

When they reached Texas, Earl settled his family for a time in a one-bedroom trailer in Houston. When he found steady work, they were able to afford fifteen dollars a month for a so-called shotgun shack-three rooms lined up in a row with a bathroom off to one side-”named for the fact that you can shoot a shotgun from the front door through the back door and not hit anything,” Roy explains.

By 1950, his dad was doing well enough at barbering to move the family to a brand-new sixty-dollar-a-month tract house in Spring Branch, then about forty miles outside of Houston.

Roy reached his full adult height, five feet nine inches, early on at Spring Branch High School. A slender youth who bore a faint resemblance to the young Sinatra, he wouldn't weigh more than 141 pounds until he quit smoking forty years later.

He was quick and agile enough to letter in basketball on the ninth-grade team. Under Earl's expert tutelage, he played shortstop through high school.

Outside of recognized sports, however, Roy had little use for socially sanctioned recreation.

On one occasion, he and two school pals headed north to Bedias, his dad's hometown, ostensibly to hunt deer on some acreage Earl owned there. The real objective was to drink beer.

The three friends lost their way and strayed onto a neighbor's property. Soon enough a pack of dogs chased Roy and his pals into a tree. Behind the dogs came the deputies.

”You're trespa.s.sing, boys,” said one officer.

The teenagers were handcuffed and driven away in cruisers, red lights flas.h.i.+ng and siren wailing, to the nearest town of any size, Huntsville, where the tipsy trespa.s.sers were brought before a magistrate.

”How do you plead, guilty or not?” the judge asked gruffly.