DARK DREAMS (Chapter 1)Infinite Darkness A fourteen-year-old girl is kidnapped while hitchhiking with a young male companion. Her abductor immediately kills the youth, then keeps the girl as his captive. He tortures her, binds her with chains, and forces her to pose for photographs in heavy makeup and suggestive clothing. After several days he strangles her with a bailing-wire garrote, then dumps her body in the loft of an abandoned barn. A twenty-one-year-old woman with no history of arrest or psychiatric problems becomes emotionally attached to a male corpse at the funeral home where she works. After his burial she grieves for the deceased, growing so distraught that coworkers complain of her behavior, and she is forced to resign. Three years later, while employed at a second funeral home, she again develops a romantic interest in a dead body. Determined this time not to lose the object of her macabre desire, she moves his embalmed remains to an isolated place where she spends three days alone with the body.
In a lengthy, handwritten account of the two incidents, she describes touching the second corpse and positioning it so as to simulate cuddling and fondling. Three male children, ages seven, nine, and ten, take a female playmate to an isolated building where they forcibly undress her and demand that she perform oral sex on them. They insert sticks, rocks, and bottles into her vagina and rectum before releasing the little girl with a threat to kill her if she tells. The three are later identified and arrested after assaulting another young female playmate. Before my retirement on January 1, 1994, I spent sixteen years examining these shocking crimes, and many others, as a member of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. Most people associate the BSU with its best-known responsibility, profiling, a discipline that was dramatized in the book and movie Silence of the Lambs. The fictional heroine, Special Agent Clarice Starling, and her nemesis, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, lent a touch of Hollywood glamour to our often grim and harrowing investigations.
But besides working the occasional high-profile serial murder case or testifying at the defendant's trial, our work also had a less-known side. Since the BSU opened for business in 1972, its personnel have studied aberrant crime, taught classes, and consulted-out of the spotlight-in scores of ongoing cases. And all the while, we were learning. In my research, I chose to focus on previously unexplored or poorly understood deviant behaviors. These practices, ranging from dangerous autoeroticism to sexual sadism, brought me face-to-face with dark instincts I had never imagined existed. The most appalling murder I ever encountered was that of a young girl discovered with her intestines wrapped around her neck. The child vanished one evening as she walked a short fifty feet to the next-door neighbors' house. A few hours later, her body was found several blocks away.
She also had been raped and beaten to death. To my knowledge, the crime was never solved. In another case, a man hanged himself after leaving twenty-seven suicide notes around his home, garage, and car. Perhaps the most surprising incident of my career was the bleeding death of a woman who nearly amputated her own arm at the shoulder with a butcher knife. My casework taught me several essential lessons. The first is that there are no boundaries to what a particular individual might do to other people or to him- or herself. The second lesson is equally wide-ranging: When it comes to sexual behavior, there are no limits to what a person might find erotically stimulating. Among violent sexual offenders, often the only logic to their crimes is internal.
The criminal alone knows why he commits his deviant acts. Although we can find patterns and common elements among them, no two offenders ever commit exactly the same sexual crime. In the world of dark minds, the darkness truly is infinite. The sexual component of a crime is not always self-evident either. The behavior may be blatant, or it may be so subtle that it escapes detection, even by experts. Then again, some crimes may only seem to be sexually motivated. I once worked for a public defender whose client was accused of the robbery/murder of an elderly woman. The victim was discovered dead on the floor at the foot of her bed.
She had been struck twice in the face with sufficient force (according to the medical examiner) to have stunned her or rendered her unconscious. The cause of death was two stab wounds in the chest. Her pants and panties had been pulled down to just above her knees. There was no sign of forced entry or of a struggle. All doors and windows were secured. Her purse, containing credit cards, was missing. But more than twenty thousand dollars' worth of jewelry and in excess of forty thousand dollars in negotiable securities were left untouched in her unlocked office safe in an adjacent room. An ATM security camera caught my public defender's client attempting to guess the victim's cash card number.
When he was later arrested, he told the police he'd found the card at a bus stop in a bad neighborhood of town. I know that's an unlikely sounding story, but I believed him. Here's why: He'd stupidly allowed himself to be videotaped in front of the ATM, trying to guess the card code. Yet the prosecution contended that this inadequate criminal supposedly was smart and savvy enough to enter a total stranger's house, leaving no physical trace of himself. Then he approached the victim in her bedroom and struck and stabbed her twice before she could raise a hand in her defense. If this defendant had been capable of such improbable sophistication, I said, then surely he also would have searched the open safe to steal her jewels and securities. I thought this was a staged crime. Someone who knew the victim had killed her then pulled down her clothing to suggest a sexual motive in the case.
Further, I said, if I had been that person, I too would have left her credit cards in a rough area, knowing that some punk would try to use them. I didn't testify in the case. But the public defender presented my logic via her arguments and questioning and persuaded the jury that this defendant lacked the cunning to have committed the crime. The case remains officially unsolved. Thanks to the vast diversity of human nature, an investigator may expect to encounter a wide range of behaviors. Offenders may be attracted to nonliving objects (fetishism), animals (bestiality), or people. Or they may be drawn to all three. Some people preferentially act out their desires with prepubescent children (pedophiles), teenagers (hebephiles), or the elderly (gerontophiles).
Others select age mates as their victims, and a few will sexually assault victims of any age. Certain offenders commit exclusively homosexual crimes, others limit themselves to offenses against heterosexuals, and still others are attracted to either gender. Ted Bundy is an example of a necrophiliac, the term used for one who preferentially assaults the dead. Yet to the vast majority of sexual criminals (as to the rest of us!), such an act is abhorrent. Some sexual crimes involve only the sense of sight (voyeurism and exhibitionism), only the sense of hearing (telephone scatology), or only the sense of touch (frotteurism). However, most offenders will employ all of the available senses. Many offenders are aroused by a victim's suffering (sadists), while others are excited by their own pain (masochists). Then there are sadomasochists, who may be aroused in either way-simultaneously or in separate incidents.
Highly ritualistic behavior marks some types of sexual crimes, while others are characterized by impulsiveness. At times, we find strange mixes of both ritualism and spontaneity. I've encountered sexual offenders who almost always seriously injured or murdered their victims. For others, such injury greatly diminishes or destroys the gratification process. A victim's torment may be protracted by extended captivity. Conversely, as in cases involving comatose patients, those under anesthesia, or victims who have been given the "date rape" drug Rohypnol, the target might be completely unaware of what is happening. Some offenders select victims who are total strangers. Others attack those who are well acquainted with them-associates, clients, patients, customers, students, or relatives.
In short, you name it-anything is to be expected with sexual criminals. Sometimes it's hard to draw the line between criminal and noncriminal sexual behavior. After all, many practices that would have shocked previous generations in our country tend to be more common today. The distinction between what is acceptable and what is not may even depend on the jurisdication where the behavior takes place. A detective in one of my courses brought to my attention a case involving a woman and two of her dogs. When she brought some film into her local pharmacy for processing, the employee who developed it saw that the photos depicted the customer having sex with the dogs. The police were called, and an investigator presented the matter to the local prosecutor. After examining the pictures, the assistant district attorney asked if the dogs belonged to the woman.
Why would that matter? the investigator wondered aloud. "Because if they don't belong to her, she can be charged with animal abuse," the prosecutor explained. "But if the dogs are hers, there has been no criminal violation in this state." Although certain aberrant sexual practices (such as.