Part 25 (2/2)

They differ from other s.e.xual criminals in another way, too.

A criminal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t may capture his intended prey using a simple con. Typically, he will then a.s.sault and discard her, dead or alive, in a matter of hours or days.

But when he's hunting for a companion, he is deliberate, patient, and infinitely resourceful. In the first instance, he's focused on his goal. In the latter, the process matters. Although he never loses sight of his objective, to dominate and emotionally destroy the woman he selects for a companion, half the fun for him is getting there.

Roy's first interview subject in the compliant companion survey had helped her husband capture one girl, whom he killed while trying to cut her vocal cords, and then another victim, who was kept for several years as a s.e.x slave.

For a large part of that time, the girl was kept in a box in the couple's bas.e.m.e.nt. Later, she slept at night in a coffinlike wooden container beneath their water bed.

Another young wife was enlisted by her husband to lure his selected victims from shopping malls and country fairs to his vehicle.

Roy consulted in one case where a s.a.d.i.s.tic killer kept several women in his thrall at once. James Ray Slaughter of Oklahoma City-married with three children-maintained extramarital liaisons with four other women, three nurses and a psychiatrist.

All became pregnant by Slaughter, and all but one acceded to his demand that their fetuses be aborted. Slaughter insisted that only his wife, Nikki, would bear his children.

Then one of the women, a nurse named Melody Wuertz, defied Slaughter and bore a daughter by him. When he learned of Wuertz's decision, he coolly plotted her death, recruiting one of his other mistresses, Cecilia Johnson, into his plan.

At Slaughter's order, Johnson supplied him with evidence to help stage Wuertz's murder scene. She collected a set of soiled men's undershorts from a patient on her hospital ward, as well as the patient's head hair, and mailed them to her master. Slaughter in turn planted the hair and soiled underwear in Wuertz's residence, and then shot to death both Melody Wuertz and his one-year-old daughter, Jessica. He then mutilated both bodies to make the crime appear to have been a satanic, ritualistic murder.

The double murder went unpunished for two years until Cecilia Johnson broke down, admitted her role in the plot to a grand jury, and then committed suicide.

All twenty women in Hazelwood's survey shared their remarkably similar hidden h.e.l.ls with him. But each woman's story is uniquely heartbreaking.

Debra Davis, the youngest of six sisters in a working-cla.s.s family, was born in November 1957, in Talahoma, Tennessee. She was raised from the age of four in Houston.

”I was very quiet and very shy, a real loner,” Debra recalls of her girlhood. ”I was sick quite a bit.”

Debra was s.e.xually molested at age six by an eighteen-year-old neighbor boy. Although the boy and his family moved away a week later, Debra's world did not grow any sunnier. ”I kind of faded into the woodwork,” she recalls.

Depression, a common consequence of s.e.xual molestation, became her intermittent burden. She was given to mood swings-”feeling out of control,” as Debra describes it-plus bouts with low self-esteem and guilt. Whatever went wrong, Debra tended to blame herself for it.

A pretty girl, just four feet nine inches tall, Debra discovered herself pregnant at age seventeen in 1975, and left home to marry the child's father, her high school sweetheart.

Their first son was born later that year. A little brother came along in 1978, followed in 1981 by Debra's third and last child, a daughter.

In 1983, Debra suffered a major depression, and made a serious attempt at suicide using pills. That same year, life with her husband, Jimmy, fell apart. Too broke to divorce and set up separate households, Debra and Jimmy decided to go on sharing the same residence, if not the same bed.

Then Robert Ben ”Dusty” Rhoades came into her life.

She met the thirty-eight-year-old Rhoades, a tall ex-marine, at a Houston nightclub. He was wearing an airline pilot's uniform. They danced a few times that night.

Rhoades reappeared a week later at the same club, this time in western wear. Debra liked his easy, rea.s.suring manner. They danced some more and had a few drinks. She found it all very pleasant. Debra started calling him Bob in the familiar way she might refer to an uncle.

She had no thought of falling in love with him. It didn't even occur to her that she might. To Debra, the relations.h.i.+p simply was a welcome change of pace from the stresses of her split household.

”We talked all the time,” she remembers. ”He was my best friend. I told him everything.”

Bob spoke little of himself.

”He only told me what he wanted me to know, and that was very limited, no details,” Debra says.

Rhoades admitted he was a truck driver, not a pilot, which hardly mattered to her. He also told Debra of growing up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his father, Ben Rhoades, was arrested twice for molesting Bob's cousins, one boy and one girl. Ben Rhoades later committed suicide.

Bob intimated that he, too, might have been molested as a youngster.

”He had a real rough time of it,” says Debra.

Gradually, Rhoades began to win Debra's trust. He contributed paychecks to the beleaguered family exchequer, counseled with Debra, sent her flowers, and took her out to dinner.

Still, they remained just friends in Debra's mind until one night when Bob called from the road.

”I gotta tell you something,” he said. ”I really love you.”

Rhoades's timing was exquisite. The sudden, dramatic profession of love jolted Debra, disconcerted her. But it was not wholly unwelcome.

Debra was vulnerable.

When he returned to Houston, Bob took her out to a romantic candlelit dinner, and then later that night made pa.s.sionate love to Debra. The moment was spectacular for her, and the comfortable friends.h.i.+p soon deepened into something much more serious.

She was hooked.

”I felt I was the only thing that mattered to him,” Debra says. ”He did anything and everything I wanted. I felt like I was a queen.”

Rhoades even welcomed Debra and her three kids to come live with him. She recalls that they all got along fine.

Nor did Bob's attentions flag.

”When we went out I was like his paper doll,” she says. ”He dressed me just the way he wanted. I'm a jeans and T-s.h.i.+rt girl. He wanted the garters, the panties, all the nice stuff, things I would not normally wear.”

Bob also contributed ideas about the type of makeup Debra wore, and how to apply it.

The first hint of a hidden objective came on a date one night in his car outside a dance joint when he clapped a handcuff on Debra's wrist. The gesture was not overtly hostile, but it unsettled her. Debra told him she was not amused, and he removed it.

Far less ambiguous was the Sat.u.r.day night that Rhoades took Debra to a swingers' club in Houston. She had a.s.sumed when he said swingers he meant swingers in the country music sense of the word. She learned otherwise when a woman at the club slipped her hand up Debra's leg.

”I got mad at him and slapped him and said, 'Let's leave!' Afterward he told me how closed-minded and naive I was.”

Rhoades eventually coaxed Debra back to the club and the spouse-swapping scene in Houston, with which he seemed very familiar.

”I remember he got me totally wasted one night and we went to this couple's house. This guy was dragging me into the bedroom and Bob's got the woman in the living room.

”I said, 'I'm leaving. I am not comfortable with this.'

”Well, Bob takes me into the living room where this girl is totally pa.s.sed out and he's trying to make love to her. I got really upset, and we left.”

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