The Evil That Men Do Part 11

"How do you know that?" the doctor asked skeptically.

"From the way he committed his crime," Roy said. "We try to think the way he thinks."

"And how do you do that?" the psychiatrist pressed.

"A lot of experience."

Then came the challenge.

"If I were to give you a series of tests, do you think you could test out with a particular mental disorder?" he asked.

Hazelwood and Douglas said yes, they thought they could.

"So we went to his office at night," Roy recalls. "He took John into one room and me to another. And he said, 'Okay, I want you to test out as paranoid schizophrenics.'

"And both of us did. He just thought that was amazing. He couldn't believe it."

11.

The Mindzappers For a time early in the 1980s almost all the profiling responsibility in the BSU fell to either Hazelwood or John Douglas or the two of them together.

"We worked closely on so many cases," Hazelwood says. "I remember one year I did sixty profiles and he did eighty. And we traveled together on several homicides."

A Canadian double-murder case from the mid-1960s that Hazelwood and Douglas profiled together, two decades later, also was one of the oldest ever brought to their attention.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who requested the BSU's a.s.sistance, reported that the victims were teenage sweethearts, Maurice* and Chloe,* who lived in a small town in eastern Canada. After failing to solve their double murder using traditional investigative methods, the Mounties hoped a fresh, behavioral approach to the twenty-year-old crime might yield results. Upon hearing of the new profiling service at Quantico, they decided to give it a try.

As RCMP agents recounted the story to Hazelwood and Douglas, one snowy Sat.u.r.day night, Maurice and Chloe went bowling together with friends. Afterward, they climbed into Maurice's car and headed for his house. Chloe was to sleep over with Maurice's family and then drive to church with them the next morning.

They never made it home.

Maurice's car was found with its lights on along a little-used access road leading up a hill to his family's house. The wheels were pulled sharply to the right. Skid marks in the snow indicated the vehicle had stopped suddenly. The driver's door was open, as was the left rear door.

Two sets of footprints led from the car doors to the rear of the sedan. From there, the footprints and a trail of blood led to a ditch about fifteen feet away, where Maurice lay dead. He had been shot once in the back, and again in one ear at extremely close range, with a 30.06 rifle.

Chloe's footprints led from the car's closed front pa.s.senger door up the hill toward Maurice's house. The killer's prints led in the same direction from where he'd shot Maurice in the ditch, and intercepted Chloe's trail about 150 feet from the car.

There investigators found the girl, also murdered, curled in the fetal position. Chloe was surrounded by a series of wildly distorted snow angels, artifacts of her desperate fight with the killer, who had savagely clubbed her to death. He had not s.e.xually a.s.saulted her.

The keys to the car were in her right front pocket. The bolt from his 30.06 lay beneath her.

The killer's footprints then led away from the murder scene, back to the car, past the ditch, and past the dead Maurice and on toward the highway below, where his trail was lost.

Approximately thirty-six hours after the killings, the rifle was found, wrapped in an oilcloth. The killer had carefully placed the murder weapon in a garbage can within a block of Chloe's residence. The rifle's stock was split and broken. He had attempted to tape it back together.

Since the motive for the murders clearly was neither theft nor rape, Hazelwood and Douglas inferred that a deep personal rage lay behind the crimes. Although Maurice might have been the killer's primary target, the impersonal way he was dispatched suggested Maurice's death was incidental to his primary objective, killing Chloe.

Nor were these spontaneous murders. Chloe's killer did not hitchhike through the snow that night with his 30.06, hoping the two would pick him up. Nor was he waiting on the hillside in ambush: All footprints led away from the car.

The likeliest scenario was that the killer was hidden in the back of the vehicle when Maurice and Chloe emerged together from the bowling alley that night.

It was the agents' opinion that he waited until they turned up the hill, and then sat up and announced his presence. The reason Hazelwood and Douglas believed he waited until that moment was the sharp angle at which the car's wheels were turned.

"If I am holding a gun on Maurice the entire ride, and say, 'Now pull over,' he'd pull over," Hazelwood explains. "But if I rise up and say suddenly, 'Stop the car!' it will startle him, which explains the wheels being jerked."

The physical evidence told Hazelwood and Douglas that Maurice was marched to the rear of the car, where the a.s.sailant shot him in the back.

Hazelwood and Douglas surmised that as Maurice was killed Chloe grabbed the car keys and jumped out of her side, slamming her door behind her as the teen scrambled up the hill toward Maurice's distant house.

The mortally wounded Maurice, meantime, staggered a few feet to the ditch, trailing blood as he went. The killer followed him, and discharged a second round into the teen's ear. This murder was unemotional, detached.

Chloe's was not. It was clear from his tracks and the second crime scene that he ran after the girl and attacked her furiously. The later discovery of the rifle bolt under her body also suggested the power of his frenzy.

The weapon was extremely important to him, Hazelwood and Douglas believed. Although he'd smashed the stock in his a.s.sault on Chloe, he obviously carried the damaged weapon all the way back into town, and there discovered that he'd left the bolt behind.

"My bolt! Where's my bolt?!" the profilers imagined him wondering in distress, knowing he'd never find it in the snow.

The importance of the weapon to him was demonstrated by the fact that although he knew he had to get rid of it, he still carefully wrapped it in oilcloth.

He had been patient enough to hide himself in the back of Maurice's car and to bring his own weapon, but the crime scene was on balance disorganized. There was no attempt to hide or disguise what he had done-Maurice and Chloe would be found very soon-and he plainly was out of control when he killed the girl. Moreover, he had neglected to provide for his own escape, or even to improvise one. He simply walked away.

The combination of a disorganized scene and the victims' ages argued for a relatively young killer, nineteen to twenty-one years of age, the agents agreed. He didn't own his own car, or have access to one, or else he would have used a vehicle that night.

But he had developed a giant personal anger against Chloe. Combining all these factors, Hazelwood and Douglas concluded that he lived quite near her, probably with his parents.

What had generated such enormous hatred?

The only person Chloe had ever dated was Maurice. Both agents felt the killer was a socially inadequate loner who had created in his imagination a fantasy relations.h.i.+p with Chloe. She was his dream lover. Hazelwood and Douglas felt that over a period of time the fantasy grew increasingly important to him even as it became ever more untenable. He began to feel betrayed.

"She was his girlfriend," explains Hazelwood. "She didn't know that. But he knew it."

The agents told the Canadian investigators that the killer would have been very agitated in the days following the double murder. He'd be obsessed by the press coverage. He quite likely attended Chloe's funeral.

Six months after crafting this re-creation of the crime and portrait of the killer, Hazelwood and Douglas were contacted once again by the Mounties, who had exceptional news to share.

In a development unconnected with the BSU's consultation on the case, a woman had walked into an RCMP substation halfway across Canada from where Maurice and Chloe had been killed twenty years before, and asked if the murders ever had been solved.

A records check indicated it had not.

"Thank you," she said, and turned to leave.

"Oh, ah, wait a minute," the Mountie on duty asked. "Why do you want to know?"

She decided to be frank.

"Because my brother may have done it."

The woman explained how her family had lived near Chloe's house in Eastern Canada. Her brother, Antoine,* had startled her after the murder, she said, by confiding that Chloe was his girlfriend, when she knew that to be untrue. After the murder, he had begun constantly bathing and was.h.i.+ng himself. She had been further troubled by Antoine's obsessive interest in the crime's aftermath. He carried around a photo of Chloe in a notebook he filled with newspaper clippings about the case.

All of this had come back to her twenty years later, she went on, because Antoine, who still lived with her, seemed to be repeating the same behavior. He was fixated on a restaurant waitress, although he hardly knew her.

Once the broad outlines of her story checked out, and the Hazelwood-Douglas profile was consulted, the Mounties reexamined their physical evidence. Looking closely at the wrapped rifle stock, preserved in an evidence locker for two decades, they discovered a human hair-Chloe's-wedged in its splinters.

Then the Canadian authorities looked at the photos they'd taken of Chloe's funeral. Sure enough, Antoine appeared in one picture, leaning against a telephone pole across the street, looking on intently.

The Mounties subsequently informed Roy that Antoine was tried and convicted for the double murders.

At about the same time they were working the Canadian double homicide, Hazelwood and Douglas also were a.s.signed a serial prost.i.tute murder case with its own unique twist: For a while, it appeared that the two profilers inadvertently had shared their special expertise with the killer himself.

The bodies of five prost.i.tutes-all strangled to death with ligatures-had been discovered, one by one, dumped in remote spots progressively closer to a military base in a large western state. In each murder, a souvenir was taken, a watch or a piece of jewelry.

There had been no witnesses and no useful physical evidence left behind. The victims apparently had not struggled. This killer was careful and patient-organized.

The homicide detective in charge of the investigation-who in twenty years had never failed to solve a killing-was sent to Quantico to work directly with Hazelwood and Douglas on the case.

His ident.i.ty and certain facts of the investigation must be kept a secret. The investigator has never been told that for a while his own department suspected he was the killer they were looking for.

"We spent three days with him," says Roy, "and we went over the cases in great detail. I remember it was our belief the killer was someone at the military installation. Because the bodies were found out in the wilderness, we a.s.sumed he was familiar with the terrain and comfortable in it.

"We surmised that he was an outdoorsman, and we believed he was a noncommissioned officer. It seemed to us that an enlisted man probably would have been too young to commit such mature murders.

"Beside the profile, we told the detective what the UNSUB's postoffense behavior likely would be. We also offered some proactive techniques, investigative suggestions, and interview suggestions should they develop a suspect."

During the intense three days in Virginia, word came back to the investigation that two more bodies had been found. "He was just devastated," Hazelwood recollects.

"Then the guy went home and the murders stopped. He called us for more ideas. We told him that maybe the killer had left town, and suggested he check transfers from the base."

About six months later, an emergency call came down to the BSU from FBI headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Director William Webster had been contacted directly by the detective's superior with deeply disturbing news.

The investigator's girlfriend had turned him in as a suspect in the killings.

The woman related how she'd seen a box of women's watches and jewelry among his possessions. On nights that the victims had disappeared, she said, he'd been hyper, couldn't sleep, demanded s.e.x. She recalled driving out into the woods with him, where he'd point out sinkholes, and remark how ideal they were for secreting bodies.

There were some other oddities as well. Hazelwood and Douglas had told the detective that his killer probably hung out in bars near his victim disposal sites. But they hadn't predicted how strange his behavior would become.

"One day," says Hazelwood, "he recovers the body of a teenage girl whose parents lived on the base. He puts her body in the trunk of his car, and drives to this bar. He forces everybody inside to come out and look at the body in his trunk. Then he drives to her parents' house, brings them out to his trunk, and asks them if that is their daughter."

Director Webster ordered that Hazelwood and Douglas fly at once to consult with the suspect officer's superiors.

"Oh my G.o.d, we've given the store away," Hazelwood said to Douglas on the plane. "He knows everything we think!"

The profiling partners then pondered the situation for a moment. "Of course, this is going to be extremely interesting," Douglas then added hopefully.

"Yeah!" Hazelwood agreed, also looking for some positive spin on a grim dilemma. "And from a teaching standpoint, the story is great. We're always talking about how killers inject themselves in the investigation. Well, here's an example!"

The jollity ceased when Hazelwood and Douglas reached the local FBI office.

"The only two people there who knew why we'd come were the SAC and the a.s.sistant SAC," says Hazelwood. "Everybody else in the office was hinky. They thought one of them might be in trouble, and here were two mindzappers from Quantico coming in to tell management how to screw with the guy's mind."

Working in secrecy, Hazelwood and Douglas reviewed every shred of available evidence. "We spent days going over his personnel file and everything else known about the man," says Hazelwood. "There was nothing that remotely suggested a propensity toward violence, temper, authoritativeness, or abuse of his position. We even interviewed his ex-wife. 'He is not a violent person,' she told us."

The fact that the detective's girlfriend had no concrete evidence to offer against the accused also had important weight in their deliberations.

"We thought he'd shared the facts of the case with her, but that she hadn't actually seen anything," says Hazelwood. "We felt she was repeating what he had described. And we also guessed she was angry at him because he'd broken up with her and she was trying to get even. That turned out to be the case."

And the macabre scene with the dead girl in his trunk? "We believed he was exhibiting signs of stress. We thought he was close to a nervous breakdown, caused by his inability to solve this string of killings."

At Hazelwood's and Douglas's suggestion, the detective's girlfriend was approached in a low-key, nonthreatening manner.

"We suggested they bring up that there was nothing to corroborate her story, but not to make her suspect that they didn't believe her over their fellow officer.

"We felt they should say something like, 'We certainly appreciate your bringing this to our attention. We have put a lot of man-hours into this case. So far, we've simply found nothing. Can you give us anything to corroborate what you say?'

"The rest of the advice was to tell her how the thing was escalating, that there was going to be a major political impact. We felt she needed to see how the case was going well beyond her specific problem with him."

The detective's girlfriend at last conceded she'd fabricated the story, putting the investigation back where it started.

Soon thereafter, however, another woman came forward to report her suspicions of her boyfriend. This time the doubt and worries proved well founded.

As the profile had predicted, the suspect was an NCO and avid outdoorsman. According to his companion, before his recent transfer to another post, he used to take her on frequent camping trips. While they were out alone together in the woods, she said, he'd disappear for hours. On these occasions, she sometimes would catch him hiding off in the distance, pointing his crossbow at her.

She also enjoyed sunbathing in the nude, the woman continued, but she did not enjoy it when he sneaked around with his camera, clicking pictures of her.

When authorities checked to see when her friend had been transferred, they discovered the date coincided with the last known prost.i.tute murder in the series.

Again, Hazelwood and Douglas offered interview tips to the investigators. One of the most important suggestions, the profilers stressed, was to confront the suspect when he was out of uniform.

This type of offender, Hazelwood and Douglas said, closely identified himself with the military. In uniform, he'd be self-a.s.sured. In mufti, he'd be far more vulnerable.

So the investigators in fact did wait for a Sunday, when they found their suspect in his civvies. Under questioning, in his walking shorts, he confessed to the killings.

12.

"My intentions Were to Inflict Fear"

Intimate as a profiler becomes with an offender in the process of studying his crimes, the relations.h.i.+p between BSU agent and UNSUB usually is remote and short-lived.