Part 14 (1/2)

”I think it's the initial response that they give off, that's produced by their pain. That is what the s.a.d.i.s.tic person's actually looking for. It's not that he doesn't enjoy inflicting the pain, but the final product is the reaction you get from it. If you inflicted pain and they showed no response whatsoever, it would be like making s.e.x to a dead person. You'd get no thrill out of it.”

”What was the turn-on?” Roy asked. ”Was it s.e.xual intercourse or control?”

”It was a mult.i.tude of things. The rapes were a s.e.xual thing a lot of the time, but it was also mainly the idea of being dominant, having complete control, having the woman at your disposal and mercy to do what you wanted to do.”

The interview continued for another seven and a half hours.

”Barry, will you tell us what your sentence is?” Roy asked in closing.

”I'm not sure I remember them all. I have about twenty-one life sentences, plus an additional 2,386 years to go.”

”Any possibility of parole?”

”Zero possibility.”

Off camera, Simonis made several further disclosures to Hazelwood. He said that although he had no chance of ever legally walking free of Angola, he was glad in a way to have been stopped when he was. Rape, said Simonis, was beginning to bore him. About the time Lieutenant Milan arrested him outside the Lake Charles convenience store, his fantasies increasingly were of murder.

* Simonis granted the author permission to use his name.

13.

”I'm Going to Have s.e.x with You”

A worry preoccupied Hazelwood as he came away from his meeting with Barry Simonis. He could not erase thoughts of the terrible pain the police detective's wife had endured for simply saying that Simonis was a gentleman. The incident alerted Roy to a potential problem he hadn't fully considered before.

All over the United States, he knew, women receive advice on how to react when confronted by a rapist. Allegedly authoritative voices on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines counsel all sorts of responses, from the use of weapons to pleading pregnancy to claiming you are infected with a s.e.xually transmitted disease.

Thinking about the detective's wife, Hazelwood realized that hundreds, if not thousands, of women around the country might say exactly the same thing in the same situation, because they had been told that was the best strategy to pursue with a s.e.x offender.

Roy's rapist typology, however, indicates there should be no blanket strategy for rape victims. Avoiding, or minimizing, harm depends on several variables.

In the subsequent paper he published with fellow BSU agent Joseph A. Harpold, Hazelwood identified three ”critical variables” that he believes women should be trained to a.s.sess before deciding what their most reasonable course of action is.

First of the critical variables is location. A woman confronted at midafternoon in a grocery store parking lot obviously has different options than she would at 4:00 a.m. along a deserted roadway.

Hazelwood points out that screams or noisemakers-whistles and the like-might help the former victim, but be useless to the latter.

The wisdom of carrying a weapon or a disabling chemical such as Mace also varies according to the situation. A c.o.c.ked gun stuck in his ear would easily dissuade many would-be rapists. However, the armed woman might place too much faith in her weapon and forget her native caution. She might neglect to lock a door, or forget to peer into the backseat of her vehicle before getting into it, thus raising her risk of a potentially deadly confrontation.

A false sense of security might lead her unthinkingly into places that common sense tells her to avoid.

The second variable is the victim's personality.

Anyone advocating vigorous verbal or physical resistance to the threat of rape, for example, should recognize that not every victim can be combative on cue. It may not be in someone's nature to behave that way. Conversely, Hazelwood says, ”an independent and a.s.sertive individual will be hard-pressed to submit to a violation of her body without a struggle, even if she has been advised that pa.s.sivity is her best course.”

The third and most important variable is the offender himself.

Knowing how best to respond entails understanding the type of rapist confronting you.

Acquiescence might only encourage a power rea.s.surance rapist by feeding his fantasy of consenting s.e.x. In a similar vein, pleading for mercy from an offender such as Barry Simonis might be, as Simonis told Hazelwood, ”the most stimulating part” of the a.s.sault.

In a case from his serial rapist survey that Hazelwood sometimes uses in his lectures, a power rea.s.surance rapist approaches a teenage girl in a parking lot.

”Do you want a ride?” he asks.

”No.”

She walks on.

The stranger drives up again, this time blocking her way with his car. He pulls a gun from his T-s.h.i.+rt.

”I think you better get in the car,” he says.

This particular girl has attended rape cla.s.ses where she has been taught not to let a would-be attacker depersonalize her. She has learned not to antagonize him, but to encourage him to see her as a real person, to talk to him.

As Roy explains, ”Now, you have a rapist whose fantasy is a consenting s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p, and you have a victim who's been told to try to get the offender to relate to her as a human being, rather than as an object. She begins telling him about her family, and how she skipped school that day. And she asks him what he's going to do.

” 'Well, I'm going to have s.e.x with you,' he says.

” 'When you're finished, will you take me back home?' she asks.”

This technique, designed to help her survive a rape, actually feeds her rapist's fantasy.

In the end, Roy and his coauthor called for multidisciplinary programs to train women to quickly and competently a.s.sess their peril and then to finesse or overcome it.

”We know of no such comprehensive training program,” they wrote, ”but we know that one is possible.”

The more encompa.s.sing consequence of his encounter with Simonis was Roy's decision to undertake his serial rapist survey. It was a natural next research step for the BSU after John Douglas's and Bob Ressler's serial killer survey and Roy's book on autoerotic fatalities. Serial rapists are a clear and serious problem for law enforcement. Until Hazelwood's prison study, they also were largely a mystery.

”There'd been hundreds of rape studies done,” says Hazelwood, ”but no one had ever looked at serial rapists.”

He had three major research objectives that grew out of the Simonis interview.

”One, I wanted to find out what made serial rapists so successful,” he explains. ”What traits did they have in common? Two, I wanted to see if they varied their MO or rituals over time. Three, I wanted to test whether rapists escalate the violence of their crimes. Simonis did. But I wasn't sure about other serial rapists.”

In order to gain valid trend information and to ensure there were no fluke inclusions in his study, Hazelwood set the bar high.

Generally, a rapist is considered a serial offender if he commits three or more s.e.xual a.s.saults. To qualify for inclusion in Hazelwood's study, the offenders must have committed at least ten doc.u.mented s.e.xual a.s.saults.

”You can't look at just three or four rapes and gauge why someone was so successful, or if they changed over time or if they escalated their violence,” says Hazelwood. ”I set the figure arbitrarily at ten in order to capture this behavior.”

To recruit his subjects, he combed the records from prisons in twelve states, and found forty-three men who met his criteria. All were guaranteed confidentiality. All were also advised not to mention any past crimes for which they had not been charged, or of which the police were unaware.

It was Roy's version of don't ask, don't tell.

Out of that group, only two men declined to partic.i.p.ate. Both explained to Hazelwood they had nothing against him or his research, but they did bear grudges against the authorities in general, and that included FBI agents.