Part 6 (2/2)

Before Roy had a chance to answer, down came the gavel.

”Guilty,” said the judge. ”That'll be a twenty-five-dollar fine.”

Roy did not have that much money, which meant calling his dad.

Earl Hazelwood drove up from Spring Branch and dealt with the situation adroitly. Resisting a fatherly impulse to lecture his stepson, Earl paid Roy's fine and drove home with his grateful stepson. No record was ever made of the incident.

Another time, Roy unwisely stopped for a meal at a hamburger drive-in located within a rival high school's home turf.

”I was with the love of my young life, Charla West,” he recalls. ”I had some words with this guy, who grabbed me and cut me under my right arm with a switchblade. I still have the scar.”

Overmatched in hostile territory, Roy slyly rescued himself by means of a ruse. ”I grabbed some of my blood and smeared it all over the front of my s.h.i.+rt. Then I bent over, fell to the ground and started moaning. It worked. He thought he'd really killed me and took off.”

Meanwhile, Charla vomited all over his front seat.

By this time, Earl Hazelwood was operating two seven-chair barbershops in Spring Branch. As a result the mortgage was paid and there always was food on the Hazelwood family table, but only because Louella managed the home economy, says her son.

”One time my dad won something like a hundred thousand dollars in a poker game. Then he took it to Las Vegas and lost it all in three days. On another occasion, my mother went home to North Dakota for a visit. While she was gone, he gave me her car and bought new Fords for each of them. When she got home she raised h.e.l.l with him. He had to return the Fords and take back her car.”

In retrospect, Roy believes Earl Hazelwood was manic-depressive-or bipolar, in modern psychiatric parlance-swinging between exultant highs and troughs of despond.

”My dad chased rainbows. He was constantly making deals, selling this and buying that. I'd come home night after night to find him sitting up in the living room, bent over, an ashtray full of cigarette b.u.t.ts next to him. He was thinking of ways to make money!”

Man and boy finally did stumble toward common ground, growing closer as Roy matured from aimless adolescence into adulthood, a process Earl did much to abet. If he wasn't much of a role model, Earl Hazelwood nevertheless provided Roy with frank and sensible advice.

When Roy graduated from high school and announced he planned to buy a '57 Chevy, his Dad asked him, ”Where do you want to live?”

”What do you mean?” Roy asked.

”You're eighteen, a man now,” Earl said. ”You have thirty days to find yourself a place to live and get a job.”

He let that prospect sink in for a moment, then suggested an alternative. If Roy would forget about the car and consider heading for college, Earl said, he'd help finance Roy's education.

School had scant allure for Roy, but the prospect of manual labor was even less appealing.

”Uh, college sounds pretty good,” he said.

It was Dad, as well, who urged Roy to join the ROTC at Sam Houston State, and to remain with it even though Roy hated the ROTC.

”You can certainly drop it if you want,” Earl said, but he then reminded Roy he'd surely be drafted into the army the moment he graduated. ”You'll be the one who's going to be peeling potatoes instead of giving the order for them to be peeled,” Earl advised.

Roy heeded what he was told, and entered the military police as a second lieutenant after college. True to his nature, he didn't choose the MPs out of any particular interest in law enforcement or intention of making them his career. Rather, Roy perceived that among his alternatives-infantry, cavalry, engineers, and the rest-MPs were the least likely soldiers to sweat and get dirty.

Earl was satisfied.

Then in 1962, Roy was sent to Oxford, Mississippi, to help protect James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

”My dad almost disowned me over that,” he recalls. ”He was a racist. When I told him I had orders to go to Ole Miss, he said, 'Resign your commission.' I told him I couldn't. I'd taken an oath to uphold the Const.i.tution of the United States.”

Time and Earl's advancing ill health eventually resolved all conflicts between them. In 1975, as his dad lay dying a painful death from emphysema in a Houston hospital, Roy spent two weeks with him. To the end, Earl remained in charge of their relations.h.i.+p.

”Go on back home,” he announced to Roy from his hospital bed one day. ”You were here when it counted. You don't need to come back for my funeral.”

Not long thereafter, Earl expired in Louella's arms.

7.

Organized and Disorganized Roy's best-known contribution to criminology-the organized-disorganized criminal behavior dichotomy-first occurred to him one day while he was taking a shower.

He had been contemplating James Odom and James Lawson, Jr., a pair of convicted rapists who'd met as inmates at a state mental inst.i.tution in California. While locked up together, the pair had shared their fantasies; Odom described to Lawson his dreams of rape, and Lawson confided to Odom his violent imaginings of female evisceration and mutilation.

”We'd fantasized so much that at times I didn't know what was real,” Odom later said.

Upon their release, the two hooked up in South Carolina and went hunting victims together. They abducted at gunpoint a twenty-five-year-old convenience store clerk and drove the woman to an isolated location. Odom raped the victim in the backseat of a Ford belonging to Lawson's father. Then Lawson cut her throat with a knife the clerk had sold him earlier, and savagely mutilated her dead body with it.

”I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person, and destroy her so she would not exist,” Lawson said in his subsequent confession. ”I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body.”

Odom and Lawson put scant effort into concealing what they'd done. Their victim was soon discovered, the car was easy to trace, and within days they were arrested for the clerk's murder.

As Hazelwood pondered this crime, he couldn't get over how haphazard and sloppy the killers had been. ”I said to myself, 'Gosh, this was really not well planned, not well thought out. These guys were really kinda disorganized.'

”And I compared them to Ed Kemper. He was really organized. Kemper put a lot of time and effort into his crimes.”

Edmund Emil Kemper III occupies an extralarge niche in the BSU's early history with aberrant criminals. Not only was the six-foot nine-inch, three-hundred-pound necrophile a highly intelligent and well-spoken serial killer, an ideal subject for interview, but Kemper also had a s.a.d.i.s.tic wit.

He was serving seven life sentences in California's Vacaville State Prison when Bob Ressler, pursuing his serial-killer study, paid Ed Kemper a call. It was their third meeting.

After spending several hours together with Kemper, talking murder and dismemberment in a locked cell adjacent to death row, Ressler buzzed for a guard. None came. He buzzed again, and a third time. After fifteen minutes of waiting, still no guard.

The agent tried not to betray his nervousness, but Kemper saw his chance.

”If I went apes.h.i.+t in here, you'd be in a lot of trouble, wouldn't you?” he toyed with Ressler. ”I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

As Ressler disconsolately imagined how easily such a scene might play out, he gamely warned Kemper of the trouble he'd be in for committing such a crime.

”What would they do, cut off my TV privileges?” the killer replied with a smirk.

Inwardly berating himself for the stupidity of allowing such a situation in the first place, Ressler continued to keep Kemper talking, trying out every interrogation and hostage-negotiation trick he'd ever been taught-plus some he made up as he went along-hoping someone, soon, would happen by to rescue him.

Finally, a guard appeared to escort the homicidal giant back to his cell.

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