Part 25 (1/2)

She was found lying on the ground, comatose and close to death, with her throat slashed. Examination with a rape kit revealed pubic hairs of unknown origin around her v.a.g.i.n.al area, and seminal fluid in her v.a.g.i.n.al tract. Only a medical ”miracle” at the hospital saved her life.

The whole scene had been staged.

She was a drug addict who supported her habit by working as a prost.i.tute. Despairing of her existence-but unwilling to have her child grow up knowing that Mom killed herself-she faked what looked like an a.s.sault and rape.

The pubic hairs, for example, were taken from one customer. From another, she obtained the s.e.m.e.n specimen found in her v.a.g.i.n.a. She chemically induced unconsciousness, and slit her own throat with a razor blade, which she managed to dispose of before slumping to the spot where she collapsed, was discovered, and then rescued.

Because he played no official role in the Brawley investigation, Roy did not testify before the grand jury. However, his colleague and research partner, Park Dietz, did.

The forensic psychiatrist testified to many of the behavioral clues that point to pseudovictimization, including offender behavior which could be inferred from the victim's report.

As the grand jury reported in its published notes, Dietz and Hazelwood and Dr. Janet Warren were then conducting research into s.e.xual offenders who degrade their victims, as Tawana Brawley alleged that she had been degraded by her attackers.

”There are two princ.i.p.al reasons that offenders degrade their victims,” the grand jury notes report of Dietz's testimony. ”The first reason is anger. Angry rapists often punch their victims in the face, and the face is a significant target. There were no injuries at all to Ms. Brawley's face. Even the fecal smearing avoided the face.

”An angry rapist who chooses to smear feces on a woman would smear the face, and probably attempt to put the feces in her mouth. More important, however, angry rapists are not known to smear their victims with feces.

”The other motive for degradation is s.e.xual sadism. s.e.xually s.a.d.i.s.tic offenders can hold their victims for periods of time and degrade and humiliate them. They will torture their victims with physical means that leave scars and often kill them.

”Most s.e.xually s.a.d.i.s.tic offenders operate alone, according to Dr. Dietz. A significant number operate with a partner, but not in a group of three or more.

”Dr. Dietz did not see any reason that an offender would put cotton-like material into Ms. Brawley's nose and ears [but] did see reasons why Ms. Brawley might do so.

”The cut hair, if it was cut, the wearing of burned clothing and the fecal smearing can all be seen as non-permanent degradation of oneself.

”Dr. Dietz concluded that Tawana Brawley's physical appearance when she was found is consistent with self-infliction and a false allegation. It is inconsistent with known patterns of offender behavior”

The grand jury concluded in its 170-page report that Tawana Brawley had made up the whole story, and dismissed each of her ”advisers' ” allegations.

Hazelwood received a letter of commendation from Robert Abrams for his a.s.sistance to the investigation. As an informal member of the Brawley task force, he also received a special T-s.h.i.+rt designed and printed as a commemorative souvenir of the experience.

The front of the T-s.h.i.+rt features a sketch of the Poughkeepsie armory, where the task force was headquartered. Lettering on the back reads: ”Brawley Task Force-244 days of fact, fiction and feces.”

Alton Maddox later was suspended from practicing law for five years after refusing to cooperate with a lawyers' disciplinary committee investigating his conduct during the Brawley affair.

C. Vernon Mason was disbarred for seven years by the New York State Supreme Court for price-gouging his poorer clients. He entered the New York Theological Seminary as a student.

In 1991, the Reverend Al Sharpton was stabbed and superficially injured by a white man during an outdoor rally.

He has since entered politics. He has run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from New York. In 1997, Sharpton placed a close second in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

Tawana Brawley, who never testified before the grand jury and was never charged in the case, subsequently moved to Virginia with her mother and Ralph King, and later attended Howard University. She left the university in 1992 and became a Muslim. Now Maryam Muhammad, she lives in Temple Hills, Maryland, and reportedly has worked in a Was.h.i.+ngton-area hospital.

In November 1997, Steven Pagones's $395 million defamation suit, filed nine years earlier against Brawley and her advisers, finally came to trial in Poughkeepsie.

On July 13, 1998, after eight months of protracted and acrimonious legal wrangling, a six-person jury decided that Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox indeed had defamed Pagones. Sixteen days later, they a.s.sessed Sharpton $65,000 in damages, Maddox $95,000, and Mason $185,000. Altogether, the awards roughly matched the amount of money Steven Pagones reportedly spent in waging the legal battle against his accusers.

Tawana Brawley did not testify in the trial.

20.

”I Felt I Was Rehearsing for My Own Death”

Gray daylight spread slowly over Kingston, Ontario, as Roy Hazelwood awoke Tuesday morning, August 13, 1996.

Summer had deserted eastern Canada. A drizzle was falling. It was going to be a dreary day.

But as he glanced out his window, Hazelwood hardly noticed the rain and ragged, lowering clouds.

His thoughts instead were of the radiantly winsome inmate awaiting him in the nearby Prison for Women. Bracing himself against the emotional ordeal he knew lay ahead that day, and the next, Roy exhaled abruptly, punched up CNN on the bedside remote, and headed for the shower.

For this excursion to Kingston, just across the headwaters of the St. Lawrence Seaway from upstate New York, lodgings had been arranged by Inspector Ron Mackay, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Violent Crimes a.n.a.lysis Branch.

Mackay is Roy's former pupil. In 1989 and 1990 the RCMP inspector was a police fellow at the BSU, where he learned profiling from Hazelwood.

”He's the best teacher, bar none,” says Mackay. ”A lot of people read a few books and think they grasp it, but don't. Roy just has this special way of making the subject understandable.”

Familiar as he was with Hazelwood, Mackay was unaware of Roy's rigid rules of the road, and unwittingly booked his famous mentor into a Victorian bed-and-break-fast at Kingston.

Hazelwood was deeply skeptical. However, once established in his tastefully appointed room with its four-poster bed-and after a steak dinner in a local restaurant with Mackay-he slept well and awakened keen for his morning interview with Karla h.o.m.olka.

She would be the eighteenth of twenty subjects in Hazelwood's survey of what he calls the ”compliant victims” of s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts. Rare and anomalous even in the realms of the aberrant, these women frequently are complicit in their husbands' and/or boyfriends' criminal acts, including s.e.xual a.s.saults, torture, and murder. That's why many of them were in prison at the time Roy interviewed them.

Yet they are victims, too, compliant also in their own horrific abuse.

”Interviewing these women has been emotionally draining,” he says. ”They bother me. They are so vulnerable, so childlike in many respects. They've been so easily manipulated.”

The compliant victim's traits and characteristics that, in combination, make her so vulnerable to a s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t include pa.s.sivity, low self-esteem, and a pervasive fear of abandonment.

Some exhibit features of dependent personality disorder, characterized by an inability to think or act for themselves. They are willing to be controlled in order to please.

Hazelwood expected his interview subjects would be homely, ill-kempt, slow-normal slovens, probably dependent on one or more controlled substances.

”In other words,” he says, ”all the biases you can imagine.”

Just the opposite was true. They tended to be intelligent (if naive), attractive, and respectable-exactly what should be expected in light of their victimizers' needs.

A s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t differs from the far more common wife batterer in that his s.e.xual partner's pain and degradation are necessary components of the s.e.x act for him. He feels no remorse for something he enjoys. Also unlike most batterers, the s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t is untreatable.

”Unless he is h.o.m.os.e.xual, the s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t hates women,” explains Hazelwood. ”To him, all women are b.i.t.c.hes, wh.o.r.es, and s.l.u.ts. This means all women; his mother, his sister, his wife, his Sunday school teacher, Mother Teresa.

”He believes that if he pushes the right b.u.t.tons, he'll find this to be true of all women. And to prove this belief, he takes a nice middle-cla.s.s woman and tears her down. He tries to create a s.l.u.t, thus proving his theory. Then he punishes her for being like that.”

s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts are amazingly alike in their s.e.xual requirements and the demands they make upon their victims. ”It's like they all studied in the same schoolroom,” says Hazelwood. ”They have the same motivation, the same fantasies. And they act out in very similar ways.”

They easily are the most destructive of predatory criminals, as well. The twenty-six felons in John Douglas and Bob Ressler's serial killer survey committed 127 known murders. Of the thirty s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts Roy has surveyed, the twenty-two who also were killers committed at least 187 murders.