Odom and Lawson took her to an isolated area, where Odom raped the woman and turned her over to Lawson, who quickly killed her by cutting her throat. Then Lawson amputated both her breasts and her reproductive organs. He might also have consumed a portion of her body.
The two men were arrested the next day and both were later convicted. “I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist,” Lawson later told officers.
Great White Sharks
Sexual sadists sort themselves along a behavioral continuum. At one end we have fantasy and nothing more. Then innocuous solo sex. Then the behavior intensifies. The sexual sadist acts out with consenting or paid partners. Finally, there is full-blown, criminal sexual sadism that results in severe injury or death. Sadists at this extreme of the spectrum, a group whom I call “the great white sharks,” form a distinct minority even among sexual sadists.
Of least concern to law enforcement is the sexual sadist who is content merely to fantasize a victim’s suffering. He is aroused and masturbates but never attempts to act out the fantasy. Such behavior is certainly strange, but just as surely, it is not criminal. Society cannot punish people for what goes on inside their heads. Nor is it criminal to graduate to the next level, practicing sexual sadism with a compliant or paid partner.
Further along we encounter “muted” sexual sadism. This term was coined by Dr. Robert Prentky, a noted forensic psychologist. He defines muted sexual sadism as a crime with the elements one would expect to observe in overt sexual sadism (bondage, captivity, demeaning photography of the victim) minus the physically injurious violence (whipping, burning, painful insertion of foreign objects).
The sexual sadists of interest to Dietz, Warren, and myself were the great white sharks, those at the extreme end of the continuum. Twenty-two of these men had killed 187 victims, and seventeen of them were serial killers. Probably best known among them were John Wayne Gacy and the Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi. Others in the study were equally violent: Mike DeBardeleben, Gerard John Schaefer, Billy Lee Chadd, and Harvey Glatman. This last, known as Southern California’s “Lonely Hearts Killer” of the 1950s, is of special significance to me because his reign of terror introduced me to what became my life’s work.
It’s Culture, not Race
If you were to look at photos of the thirty sexual sadists in our study, you would be struck by two things: The first is the sheer ordinariness of these men’s appearances. You couldn’t, by looking at them, imagine the horrors they inflicted on their victims.
Equally striking is their skin color. The vast majority of sexual sadists in our study—twenty-nine out of thirty—were whites of European descent. The question has interested me over the years: Why are so few ritualistic sexual killers black or Hispanic?
In fact, blacks and Hispanics are statistically underrepresented, not only among sexual sadists, but among most classes of ritualistic serial criminals. Bob Ressler and John Douglas, in their serial killer survey, interviewed thirty-six murderers responsible for 118 deaths. Of these, thirty-three were white males. When Ann Burgess and I studied forty-one serial rapists (responsible for 837 rapes and more than 400 attempted rapes), our group comprised thirty-six whites and five blacks. In my study of twenty compliant wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists, seventeen were white, two were Hispanic, and only one was black.
A similar disproportion occurs among people who indulge in dangerous autoeroticism. While not criminal, this practice is certainly a form of ritualistic sexual behavior. In our study of 150 fatalities that resulted from it, 139 of the victims were white and only 7 were black.
The lone black offender in our study of thirty sexual sadists expressed his sexual sadism in a highly individual way. He would capture victims and keep them in his residence for up to six weeks. During that time he conditioned their behavior using poisonous snakes. The women were kept nude from the waist up most of the time and totally nude on occasion. He gave them meticulous instructions on how to please him and even had them memorize a set of “ten commandments” he had composed for them to obey.
To my knowledge, this man never killed anyone. Unlike other sexual sadists, he released his victims when he grew bored with them. However, the women were instructed that they must return to him if he so demanded. If they didn’t, or if they reported him to the police, he warned them they very likely would find a snake in their shower, under their bedcovers, in their car, or in their mailbox. It was a very effective form of psychological coercion. The women did as they were told, without exception.
A Flawed Theory
The question of black versus white behavior among deviant offenders arose in the early 1990s at a program for top law enforcement executives at the FBI Academy. After I had spoken, Ira McKenna, the highly respected black chief of police in Detroit, Michigan, asked me a question.
What differences, if any, he inquired, had I noticed in the ways black and white rapists committed their crimes? I answered, in part, that black rapists cross the racial line much more frequently than do white rapists, and that black rapists tend to assault elderly women much more often.
On the way back to my office I thought further about the question. Surely it was worth deeper exploration. So I decided to compile a list of behaviors I had commonly seen in ritualistic sexual assaults and then assess each from both a black and a white perspective. Based on my experience, I listed the race of the offender more closely associated with a particular behavior. The following is a partial listing of my original chart.
As I looked at this analysis, I felt I was close to a possible major breakthrough for law enforcement. I could think of several rape cases in which the victim was unable to identify the race of her attacker. If an investigator could determine that any or all of the above features were present, I reasoned, then couldn’t the race of the unidentified rapist be surmised? It seemed like a promising project.
Then, over time, my wonderful theory came crashing down. I began noting cases in which several of the behavioral features I had associated with white offenders were present, yet the attacker turned out to be black.
The case of Malcolm Malone* was one of several that made me rethink my hypothesis.
Larry Ankrom of the BSU and I once interviewed an incarcerated black sexual sadist who had raped more than forty white women. Malcolm Malone was a well-educated and intelligent professional. His rapes were highly sophisticated. He had left no fingerprints and protected his identity so well that half of his victims thought he was white and the other half believed he was black.
The key to his success was patient and obsessive planning. In some cases he invested up to two years in preparation before carrying out an assault. Besides maintaining a secret 3 × 5 card catalog of his victims, on which he recorded a name, address, and age for each, he also kept track of the amount of fuel his car consumed and the number of miles he traveled in the course of each lengthy surveillance.
His modus operandi was to enter a victim’s home when she was away and conduct a careful study of her private life. He read her magazines, looked in the medicine cabinet to check her prescriptions, thumbed through her checkbook, noted her taste in alcohol, examined her phone bills, and read her mail.
In the process he came familiar with the layout of the residence. In some instances he broke into the victim’s home on the night before the intended attack to hide the “rape kit” (i.e., rope, gloves) he liked to employ in his assaults.
The idea behind all of his meticulous planning and investment of time was to emotionally traumatize his victim even as he physically brutalized her. Characteristically, he would reveal the intimate knowledge he had gained by questioning the frightened woman.
“Why are you taking (such and such) medication?”
“Congratulations on paying off your car last month.”
“Why don’t you call your mother in Tampa more often? The last time you called her was March 14.”
“You need to write your brother Billy more often. He has written you three letters without a reply.”
Very quickly, Malone would convince a victim that he knew everything about her. She had no secrets, nothing that was hers alone. This is a vivid example of the master-slave relational fantasy. The sadist perceives himself to be a god, her god, and he can prove his godlike omniscience to her by flaunting the information he possesses.
He’d tell the woman her boyfriend’s name, and often he knew when they last had sex together. Then he would demand that she describe the encounter in detail, telling her that if she left anything out, she would die. One of his victims was a mental health professional. As he raped her, he forced her to explain his motive.
Malone finally was caught inside an intended victim’s empty house after a neighbor saw the lights go on and called the police. He answered the officers’ knock at the door and calmly explained that he was alone in the residence because he lived there. However, when an astute policeman asked him the telephone number, he didn’t know it and was arrested.
Under my working hypothesis, Malone’s behavior would have suggested to investigators that he was white. Yet he clearly was black. He had been raised in a middle-class home by his black mother, who was employed as a professional. During the interview, Malone told Larry and me that he dated only white women. He was married to a white woman at the time of his crimes.
I credit my experience with his case for leading me to a fuller and more practical understanding of the factors governing offender behavior. As similar cases involving black ritualistic sexual criminals came to my attention, I noted that these offenders also tended to come from middle-class or higher families. I realized that it isn’t race but socioeconomic and cultural influences that determine these behaviors.
As a corollary, I believe that as more blacks and Hispanics move into the middle class, they will begin to display more of the ritualistic behaviors currently associated with white offenders.
Compulsive Drivers, Police Buffs, Try-Sexuals, and Family Men
Our study of the thirty sexual sadists yielded many surprising and provocative results. Seventeen of them had no arrest record prior to the crimes for which they were imprisoned. The fact that some of the most heinous offenders operating in North America had no arrest history is a strong testament to their planning and intelligence.
Twelve of them were compulsive drivers. This is a behavior found often in the more physically violent sexual offenders. Ted Bundy (who was not a sexual sadist) drove enormous distances in search of victims. Jon Simonis, a serial rapist and sexual sadist included in our study, drove eighty thousand miles in just ten months.
Simonis told me that driving gave him a sense of freedom from responsibility. A student of mine, with strong credentials as a psychologist, suggested that driving provides the offender with constantly changing visual stimulation requiring no effort on his part. He can simply sit in his seat and watch the scenery change.
Nine of the thirty men were police buffs. They collected police paraphernalia, drove vehicles that resembled police cruisers, maintained scanners, and might even have taken courses in police work or applied to become officers.
Mike DeBardeleben, who may hold the record for long-distance driving among sexual offenders, operated a Thunderbird that he had modified to resemble an unmarked police car. He also installed red lights and a siren beneath the Ford’s grille. Inside he kept both a police scanner and a two-way radio.
One method he used to gain access to victims was to “patrol” lightly traveled roadways late at night and early in the morning, searching for women drivers who were alone. When he spotted a likely victim, he would pull her over with grille lights flashing. He would show her a badge (purchased out of a detective magazine) and advise the woman that she looked very much like a female robber being sought by the police. Therefore, he claimed, he had to take her to the station for an elimination lineup.
We know from survivors of these encounters that DeBardeleben would handcuff them, place them in his car, wrap duct tape around their heads, and then drive them to preselected locations where he raped and tortured them, sometimes for days. DeBardeleben is believed to be a murderer as well as a rapist, but authorities have not been able to establish how many, if any, of his police-stop victims he killed.
Gerard John Schaefer was working as a deputy sheriff when he arrested two young women and took them to his “dumping ground.” Schaefer was a very intelligent sexual sadist who spent almost every waking hour thinking and writing about sexually violent acts toward women and drawing pictures of them, too. I wanted to interview Schaefer, and through his girlfriend, Sondra London, he sent me a letter.
Schaefer began by acknowledging his guilt for two murders, that of Mary Alice Briscolina in October of 1972, as well as “her pal, Elsie.” He continued, “It’s an open-and-shut situation except why they had to die. How they did in fact die. The sadism part. How one has to watch while the other dies; knowing she’ll be next. That’s what you want to hear, right?… Naturally there needs to be a spirit of cooperation here, so I’ll take the first step toward that end. I’ll give you Briscolina on the house.”
Schaefer’s interest in law enforcement remained strong over the years. The sadists in our study believed in the old axiom, “Know thy Enemy.” He wrote me that he tried to keep up with everything on homicide investigation. In the same letter he mentioned my book on autoerotic fatalities in connection with an argument he’d had over whether women engage in autoerotic bondage and orgasmic asphyxia. Apparently, he used me as an authority.
In a second letter his narcissism was unmistakable. “Not because I’m a practitioner myself, but because of my being somewhat of a recognized authority on sexual ritualism… I can see why you need my help. You really don’t have much actual knowledge about the rituals you investigate, do you? Plenty of speculations, to be sure, but nothing concrete… My speciality, as you may know… is ‘Death Strap Bondage.’”
Schaefer was familiar with the article I coauthored on detective magazines. “In your work: Detective Magazines; Porn (sic) for the Sexual Sadist, page 202, Case 1. That’s certainly Harvey Glatman. The gal he tied up and strangled was Ruth Mercado. The cop who worked the case was Pierce Brooks, who’s now with some serial killer unit [Pierce Brooks, now deceased, was the first unit chief of the FBI’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program, known as VICAP]. Why the reluctance to say so in the story? Glatman was gassed in 1958. He can’t sue anyone.”
Thirteen of the group were married and fifteen were fathers. Nine of them committed incest with their children. One of the men in the survey, Gerald Gallego, is believed responsible for ten murders. In addition to his crimes against strangers, Gallego reportedly forced himself on his daughter from her childhood well into her teens. On one occasion he allegedly assaulted her anally as a birthday present! Another time he is said to have sexually assaulted both his daughter and a female friend who was visiting.
We could document that fifteen of these men had at least one consenting homosexual encounter as an adult. Six had cross-dressed, and six had a history of voyeurism, obscene phone calls, or exhibitionism.
Taken together, the reported incest, homosexual acts, cross-dressing, and assorted paraphilias produce a group portrait of what my old friend and BSU partner, Ken Lanning, called “try-sexuals” because they’ll try anything sexual.
Dr. Gene Abel, an Atlanta-based mental health expert who is internationally recognized for his work with sexual offenders, has found that aberrant offenders rarely exhibit just a single deviation. If you know an individual is a voyeur, for example, you can expect to find that he is engaging in at least one additional paraphilia, such as fetishism.
Documenting such behavior, of course, is another question. Peeping, obscene calls, and indecent exposure typically are treated as nuisance offenses, troublesome but not serious. Yet bef
ore disregarding such offenses, investigators should try to ascertain just what the caller said over the phone or what an exhibitionist said as he exposed himself. “You are lovely, and I would like to make love to you” is very different from, “I want to stab you till my arm falls off.”
The caller in all likelihood is masturbating to this fantasy as he speaks. The idea is what arouses him. A person with such violent fantasies should be identified and evaluated for treatment, if possible, because he poses a potentially grave danger to society.
Preferences and Passions
We found considerable uniformity in our sample group when it came to their preferred sexual acts with victims. Seventy-three percent of the sadists preferred anal rape; 70 percent preferred fellatio; 58 percent vaginal intercourse; and 40 percent foreign object penetration.
Why such a strong preference for anal sex? It is tempting to surmise a connection to their adult homosexual experiences. But I don’t think the answer is that simple. Remember, anger and the will to power are the sexual sadist’s primary motivations; in addition, he is aroused by suffering. That’s why I believe his preference for anal rape is tied to the pain and degradation such an act exacts upon the victim.
This would also explain the common preference for fellatio. While not nearly as physically injurious, fellatio can be highly traumatic emotionally. It requires not only that a victim participate against her will, but that she perform an undeniably intimate act in a demeaning way with a total stranger.
Similarly, penetration by a foreign object is degrading. In my opinion, it is the ultimate objectification of a woman. It was a favorite of DeBardeleben, Anderson, and Malone, all of whom tortured victims by inserting oversized dildos into their rectums.
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Page 10