The Evil That Men Do Part 10

"This guy shows a slide and tells the cla.s.s that it is one of the few instances of a female African American autoerotic fatality," he recalls.

"Well, after the instructor goes through the whole nine yards, describing the case, a hand goes up in the cla.s.sroom. It was the investigator who'd actually worked the case.

"He says, 'Well, you got half the story right. She is a woman. But she's not black.'

" 'What do you mean, she's not black? She has black features, black hair.'

" 'No,' the cop says, 'she's in an advanced stage of decomposition. She's white and she's decomposing there.'

"Now that was embarra.s.sing."

When Hazelwood arrived in 1978, he knew at a glance to drop the term "s.e.x" from the course t.i.tle. The cla.s.s was renamed "Interpersonal Violence."

He cleaned up the cla.s.sroom, as well. Instead of p.o.r.nography and dirty jokes, he taught the nuts and bolts of s.e.xual crime investigation, fundamentals such as interview techniques and the collection and preservation of evidence.

Later, Hazelwood and Ken Lanning would coauthor "The Maligned Investigator of Criminal s.e.xuality," a wide-ranging survey of law enforcement agencies' att.i.tudes toward s.e.xual crimes. Although the piece was respectfully worded, the agents took police organizations to task for their tendency to trivialize s.e.xual crimes, sometimes stigmatizing s.e.xual-crime investigators as "wienie waggers," sometimes compounding the victims' trauma by lack of empathy, sometimes forgetting how emotionally devastating these crimes can be.

They argued in the article that s.e.xual-crimes investigators should be chosen from volunteers, not a.s.signed to the work as punishment or discipline, as commonly has been the case. They also advised screening out those officers who are drawn to s.e.xual crimes for the wrong reasons.

"Some investigators," Hazelwood and Lanning wrote, "are voyeuristic. . . . They get a vicarious thrill out of interviewing victims or viewing the p.o.r.nography often a.s.sociated with s.e.xual crimes. They may demand s.e.xual acts from prost.i.tutes, ask a rape victim to describe her a.s.sault an unreasonable number of times, or make copies of seized materials for their private use."

The agents were equally adamant on the issue of confidentiality.

"The investigator is absolutely dependent upon the victim for information pertaining to the crime and the criminal; he must not betray the victim's trust."

The BSU's "p.o.r.no show for cops," as Roger Depue remembers it, soon became a legitimate and respected course at Quantico. From a ten-hour, noncredit elective cla.s.s for National Academy students when Roy took over, by 1979 Interpersonal Violence had been expanded to a thirty-hour course for which the University of Virginia awarded two credits. The following year, the cla.s.s was upgraded again to forty-four hours and three credits.

Hazelwood also sought out Howard Teten, the original guru of criminal personality profiling at Quantico, to learn the craft.

Teten, a veteran of the San Leandro, California, Police Department evidence unit, had joined the FBI in 1962. Later, Teten taught applied criminology to Bureau recruits in the Training Division's old post office building facility, where Roy had taken his cla.s.sroom instruction.

When the Bureau opened its new Academy at Quantico in 1972, Teten came south to teach applied criminology in the newly established Behavioral Science Unit. Unlike the rote drudgery Roy had slogged through just the year before, the Academy offered new agents dramatically upgraded cla.s.sroom instruction. Not only were the Quantico facilities the best in the world, but the quality of instruction improved dramatically, too. Teaching slots no longer went to the first available agent, but to the best-qualified agent.

The BSU's first chief was Agent Jack Kirsch, a former reporter for the Erie (Pennsylvania) Dispatch Herald who'd joined the FBI in 1950.

Kirsch candidly recalls that despite his determination to impart useful, practical information at the BSU, the new unit was not an immediate success with the police enrollees.

"A lot of our students were not outwardly hostile, but they weren't the most receptive group," he says.

Roger Depue, who arrived as a BSU faculty member in 1974, also encountered considerable skepticism among the students.

"The level of instruction was pretty basic, a lot of theory and war stories," says Depue. "Plus there was a natural animosity. Law enforcement officers back in those days did not trust the behavioral sciences.

"I remember they'd sit in the back of the room, arms folded, chair leaning against the wall with a 'What the h.e.l.l is this guy gonna tell me?' expression. Often, their comments would begin with 'Bulls.h.i.+t.' "

One exception to the BSU's generally cool reception by its police-officer pupils was the Criminology Section, originally led by Howard Teten and agent Patrick J. Mullany, a former Christian Brother.

Teten was both a veteran investigator and an eager student of the detective's craft. He, as much as anyone, bent the BSU twig away from formal instruction toward profiling and active case consultation.

He sought out Dr. James Brussel, who'd helped capture George Metesky, New York City's so-called Mad Bomber of the 1940s and 1950s, and spent hours with the psychiatrist, reviewing cases and sharing lore. Teten also consulted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's oeuvre, in search of whatever helpful insights the great Sherlock Holmes might offer.

Teten and Pat Mullany, who held an undergraduate degree in psychology, conducted informal case colloquiums at Quantico, meeting after cla.s.s with students who brought with them strange unsolved cases in the hopes that either the FBI instructors, or perhaps their fellow students, might see something familiar or suggest an investigative strategy.

The consultations were strictly unofficial, and advisedly so. Although J. Edgar Hoover was gone, his shadow remained. The Bureau that Hoover built still operated by the book.

In the course of these discussions, Howard Teten added to his considerable fund of information and theory an enormous amount of new empirical evidence, a ma.s.s of specialized knowledge he graciously shared with Hazelwood.

As Roy delved more deeply into this strange new world of aberrant crime, the more intensely interested he became.

"Even though I hadn't given Harvey Glatman or what I'd learned at the AFIP any serious thought for years, I remember how quickly I felt at home at the BSU," says Hazelwood. "The old fascinations were still there."

10.

Atlanta The BSU remained a little-known arm of the FBI until 1980, when Roy was invited by the Atlanta Police Department to consult in that city's infamous Child Murders investigation, one of the most ma.s.sive, controversial, and socially divisive serial murder cases in the history of the American South.

The case began on July 28, 1979, along a scruffy section of Niskey Lake Road in southeast Atlanta, when a woman out searching for redeemable soda cans and bottles discovered fourteen-year-old Edward "Teddy" Smith's leg poking out from a roadside tangle of vines.

Shortly thereafter, another African American youth, thirteen-year-old Alfred Evans, was discovered dead about fifty feet away.

Smith, who had been shot with a .22, and Evans, who most likely was strangled, were old schoolmates, although they no longer lived near one another. Atlanta homicide detective Mickey Lloyd, now a major in the department, found witnesses who put the teens together at a party several nights before their murders. But that was the end of the connections and useful leads. In time, the two unsolved cases moved to the back burner.

On November 8, a thirty-nine-year-old man in search of someplace to relieve himself entered an abandoned Atlanta elementary school and discovered stuffed into a hole in the building's concrete floor the decomposed body of another black child, eight-year-old Yusef Bell, who'd vanished on his way to the grocery store seventeen days earlier.

Bell's manner of death also appeared to have been strangulation. However, there was no immediate reason to link his death to those of Alfred Evans and Teddy Smith four months earlier.

The fourth victim, Milton Harvey, fourteen, was discovered dead a week later. Harvey had been missing since early September.

By the following spring, Atlanta's black community, and the police, noticed the pattern. Although poor children who live in big-city neighborhoods always suffer a higher incidence of violent deaths than their wealthier suburban counterparts, too many of Atlanta's youngsters were vanis.h.i.+ng, only to be found dead, usually strangled, several days later.

A list of dead and missing children was begun. By June of 1980, there were ten names on it, eight boys and two girls.

Strange rumors circulated.

According to one, the local U.S. Centers for Disease Control was behind the killings. Scientists there supposedly needed the p.e.n.i.ses of recently deceased young blacks to obtain a chemical necessary for making the virus- and cancer-fighting protein interferon.

Much wider credibility was accorded rumors that the Klan or some other white supremacist group was behind the deaths.

By then, a parents' Committee to Stop Children's Murders had been formed. Lee Brown, the Atlanta public safety commissioner, announced a Missing and Murdered Task Force.

Although not yet a national story, the Atlanta Child Murders were generating fear and anger and dangerous stresses.

It was also in June of 1980 that Morris Redding, then deputy chief of the Atlanta Police Department and head of APD's Criminal Investigation Division, had an inspiration. Redding was generally acquainted with the BSU and the broad concepts behind criminal personality profiling. He also had heard much about Roy Hazelwood from officers who'd taken Roy's BSU cla.s.s in Interpersonal Violence.

"So I said, 'Let's see if we can get Hazelwood down here,' " Redding recollects.

Roy arrived from Quantico a few days later.

The important a.s.signment began inauspiciously when his wallet was stolen at Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport. Hazelwood had to borrow two hundred dollars from John Glover, special agent in charge of the FBI's Atlanta office.

Once he'd reviewed the cases, Roy had little trouble recognizing what Atlanta faced. "I was absolutely convinced a serial killer was at work," he says. A couple of the murders clearly looked like copycat killings to him. Others looked like a family member, or acquaintance, was the most likely killer. Roy deeply doubted that the serial killer had murdered either of the two young girls on the list.

But in the midst of the confusion and fear, the Child Killer certainly was out there, murdering for the sheer thrill of it, growing more confident and more skilled with each homicide. He was a cla.s.sic lone wolf, and he wasn't going to be easily stopped.

Roy also was certain from the start that the killer was black.

"I drove with three black Atlanta police detectives to the neighborhoods where the victims lived, as well as where they disappeared and where their bodies were found," he explains.

"We were in an unmarked car, but I remember turning down one street and seeing everything just stop. People walking on the sidewalk stopped. People mowing their lawns stopped. People stopped talking to each other and stared at us. It was like one of those old E. F. Hutton ads on television.

"I asked, 'What the h.e.l.l's going on?'

"These detectives said that it was me, that everyone wondered about the white guy in the car. I knew then that there was no way a white serial killer could have moved through those neighborhoods without being noticed. I knew the guy had to be black."

As the body count rose-two more young black males were added to the list in July-Roy felt both the pressure to make a positive contribution to the investigation, and the urgency of catching the Atlanta Child Killer before the city's strained social fabric began to tear.

"I called the BSU and I said, 'This thing's going to blow, and I'm going to need some help.' "

There didn't seem to be much interest at the other end of the line.

"So I called back about a week later and said, 'I'm telling you, this thing is going to blow.' That's when they sent down John Douglas."

Months had pa.s.sed since Roy's first review of the case, and six more potential victims of the Child Killer had been identified. There was no consensus among the various law enforcement agencies involved as to just what sort of person, or persons, might be committing the killings.

Hazelwood and Douglas, in consultation with their colleagues back at Quantico, went to work on a profile.

Douglas immediately agreed with Hazelwood that the killer was an African American male, and that he probably was not responsible for all the deaths on the list-which would eventually reach thirty-especially not those of the two girls. While it is wise never to say never when it comes to aberrant offenders, Hazelwood and Douglas quickly isolated and a.n.a.lyzed enough behavioral evidence to have a firm sense of the offenses the Atlanta Child Killer would, and would not, commit.

His victims, many of them poor and streetwise, were disappearing routinely, yet there were no reliable reports that any of them had been forcibly abducted, or s.n.a.t.c.hed in the night from their families' houses, except for one of the girls, LaTonya Wilson, who was taken from her bed.

The Child Killer was too cool for that. Hazelwood and Douglas knew he was using some variation on the con approach, an indication of intelligence.

They believed him to be in his mid- to late twenties.

"This type of offender has to relate to children," Hazelwood explains. "He can't be so old that he frightens them, or so young that they don't believe what he says. Whatever his lure, we said it had to be credible."

The agents' experience, and BSU research, led them next to conclude the killer probably was from a middle-cla.s.s or higher background. These were not a poor man's crimes.

Self-evidently, his hobbies and pastimes would be attractive to children.

He also was single, and probably was s.e.xually inadequate. The first conclusion flowed from his demonstrated s.e.xual preference for boys. The second was an inference. Autopsies indicated minimal s.e.xual contact between the Child Killer and his victims. In fact, the murders, at least the earliest ones, may have been caused by frustration and anger precipitated by his s.e.xual dysfunction.

Finally, Hazelwood and Douglas knew that serial killers often are police buffs, and guessed that the Child Killer probably was one, too. He might even drive an old police car, or a vehicle that resembled one, and he likely had insinuated himself into the investigation.

He enjoyed the national attention, too, and would inject himself into the investigation to enhance that experience.

"We said that he not only was gratified in the commission of his crimes," Roy recalls, "but also in the authorities' inability to solve them."

In the midst of fitting these pieces together, Hazelwood and Douglas also had occasion to knock down the claims of at least one white Georgian who wished to take credit for killing so many black children.

The impostor placed a call to the police in Conyers, Georgia, not far from Atlanta, claiming to be the murderer. An unmistakably unreconstructed redneck, the caller mentioned the name of the most recent known victim, and said he'd left another body at a specific spot on Sigmon Road in Rockdale County, southeast of Atlanta.

After listening to an audiotape of the call with Dr. Dietz and recognizing it for a crude ruse, Hazelwood and Douglas devised a plan for flus.h.i.+ng out the self-proclaimed serial killer. It seemed certain that the caller would monitor the Conyers police response to his information. Therefore, the agents suggested that police officers deliberately search the wrong side of Sigmon Road. The hope was that he'd surface to correct their mistake, either at the search scene or in another taunting-and traceable-telephone call.

The ploy worked.

Full of derision at the police's stupidity, the impostor ill-advisedly telephoned from his home to mock the Conyers Police Department, and stayed on the line long enough to permit a trace. He was arrested later in the day.

Hazelwood and Douglas delivered their joint profile of the Atlanta Child Killer in person to Morris Redding, Atlanta Police Department chief George Napper, Lee Brown, and a local psychiatrist who had been advising the task force investigation.

"There was a sigh of relief when we said we thought it was a black guy," Roy recalls. "One of them said, 'Thank G.o.d. We thought it was going to be a white guy. The last thing we needed was for these to be racial killings.' "

The profile proved accurate. Wayne Williams, who was arrested in June of 1981, was a single black musician and freelance photographer who lived at home with his parents, both schoolteachers. Hazelwood and Douglas seemed to get everything right but Williams's age. He was twenty-three at the time of his arrest.

Wayne Williams has never admitted to the Atlanta Child Killings, and those who have questioned his guilt point out that Williams never, in fact, was charged with killing a child. The deaths for which he ultimately was convicted were those of twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, both clearly older than Williams's victims of preference, teenaged boys (his youngest suspected victim was nine).

It is unclear why Payne and Cater were killed, but it is not uncommon for a serial murderer to occasionally select seemingly anomalous victims. John Wayne Gacy's oldest victim, for example, also was twenty-seven.

The local authorities closed twenty-three of the cases upon Williams's conviction, and left the remaining seven open, officially unsolved.

At the same time they presented their profile in 1980, Hazelwood and Douglas also explained why they suspected one of the slain girls, Angel Lenair, had not been murdered by their UNSUB.

Lenair was found in early March 1980, next to a log near a stream with her hands tied behind her, not far from where she lived. An electrical cord was pulled tight around her neck. She'd been gagged with a pair of women's panties, not hers. The ME said the black child had died of ligature strangulation.

s.e.xual a.s.sault appeared unlikely. The only physical evidence of s.e.xual contact was a very small scratch, as if made by a fingernail, detected on her v.a.g.i.n.al l.a.b.i.a.

"She was not beaten or otherwise abused," Hazelwood recalls. "I believe the autopsy showed she'd been fed potato chips and food of that nature during the days she was missing.

"We believed she had been abducted and kept in the same neighborhood. It didn't make sense to us that you would abduct someone, take them away, and then bring them back to dispose of the body.

"We thought that she'd been taken by someone with access to a nearby place where he could keep her.

"The panties found in her mouth might have come from his panty collection, we said. And it was our opinion he had little or no contact with women. The fact that he'd taken a little girl also led us to believe he was socially inept, with no confidence in his ability to capture an adult woman.

"We didn't think he was very intelligent, based on the way in which she apparently had been kept and fed junk food. We thought he would have spent time in a mental inst.i.tution. The use of an electrical cord to strangle her was another clue. It was a weapon of opportunity.

"We suggested that the police canva.s.s her neighborhood, asking kids if they knew anyone who acted strange, and hung around with kids a lot."

Such an individual in fact did live near Angel Lenair, in a derelict structure. As Hazelwood and Douglas had predicted, he also had been confined to a mental inst.i.tution-a VA hospital.

Investigators discovered him hiding beneath his kitchen sink. He was clad in VA pajamas. In lieu of a belt, he was wearing around his waist a length of electrical cord identical to the ligature around Angel Lenair's neck. (There was, however, no conclusive evidence that connected this man to the killing, and the Lenair case remains officially open.) "Do you know you have just described a paranoid schizophrenic?" the task force psychiatrist said after Hazelwood and Douglas were finished.

"That's absolutely correct," Roy answered.