Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Read online

  In the early 1980s, when authorities in Texas arrested drifter Henry Lee Lucas, hardly a soul expressed any skepticism over Lucas’s claim to have murdered as many as six hundred people. Why? Because, according to popular stereotype, Henry Lee Lucas looked like a pervert! He was unshaven, poorly groomed, shabbily dressed. Nearly penniless, he drove a worn-out wreck of a car. Everything about him was uncouth.

  His alleged accomplice, Ottis Toole, looked just as bad, if not worse. The appearances of both men fit well within the public’s perception of what a serial killer should look like.

  We at the BSU cringed when we saw the pictures of Lucas and Toole. We knew that they would reinforce the mistaken notion that sexual offenders typically look different from other people—and thus encourage many innocent victims to overlook dangers that come in more ordinary forms.

  In the late 1970s, before Lucas and Toole were captured, we hoped that Ted Bundy had effectively disproved the public’s mistaken perceptions. Bundy was handsome, well-spoken, and educated. He did not appear capable of the horrible sexual crimes for which he was accused and later convicted. Bundy’s arrest made a lot of people very uncomfortable because it forced them to rethink their previous ideas about sexual criminals. When Bundy stood trial for two murders in Florida, his wholesome appearance complicated the prosecutors’ job. Fortunately, both juries heeded the evidence, and Bundy was convicted and sentenced to death.

  In contrast, Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles killer known as “the Night Stalker,” fit the public’s stereotypical concept of serial killers. In thirteen months Ramirez murdered at least thirteen victims whose ages ranged from six to eighty-four. He sexually assaulted and, in some cases, mutilated the victims after death. Ramirez had dark, penetrating eyes, disheveled black hair, a pentagram on one hand, and poor dental hygiene. He was difficult to control in court, often erupting into verbal and physical obscenities. Richard Ramirez was mentally disturbed, and he looked it!

  Sadly, violent crimes committed by the severely disturbed tend to attract a disproportionate amount of attention from the press. In fact, the mentally ill are responsible for less than 3 percent of sexual crimes. Such people usually pose a greater threat to themselves than others. Richard Ramirez was an exception to the rule.

  Who is the sexual offender? A few examples demonstrate the wide range of individuals who fit the description.

  Jon Barry Simonis was a former star high school athlete with a full-scale IQ of 128 (the average is 90—110). By his own count, Simonis raped and battered as many as seventy-five women across at least twelve states.

  The sexual sadist Gerard John Schaefer is believed to have killed more than twenty women—and he was a deputy sheriff. The “Son of Sam,” David Berkowitz, was a mailman. John Wayne Gacy was a building contractor active in local politics. Harvey Glatman, the Los Angeles “Lonely Hearts Killer” of the 1950s, was a television repairman. Australian-born spree killer Christopher Wilder, who tortured and murdered women from coast to coast, was a millionaire entrepreneur.

  What goes into the creation of a sexual criminal?

  During my lectures, I frequently pose this question, “What have you heard are the causes of sexual violence?”

  Responses invariably include poverty, childhood sexual abuse and/or emotional abuse and/or physical abuse, violence in the media, pornography, peer pressure, lack of discipline at school or in the home, single parenting, lack of morality in our society, chemical imbalance in the brain, childhood brain damage, genetics, mental illness, inappropriate role models, alcohol and/or drug abuse. All these factors have been proposed by experts as a rationale for seemingly inexplicable behavior. Which are correct?

  A wonderful and wise sociology professor once said to me, “Roy, when you have more than one answer to a question, you don’t have the answer!”

  Any purported explanation for why an individual commits sexual violence is incomplete if it ignores the most important variable, the criminal himself. Each person is a unique product of nature and nurture, genetic destiny, and environmental influences. What has a great impact on one person may have no effect at all on another. So while a number of factors seem to contribute to the genesis of a sexual offender, no single element is the cause of deviant behavior.

  Let’s take a closer look at a few of the more common theories.

  Poverty

  A great number of sexual offenders come from poor families, and a great number of them don’t. For every criminal raised in a poverty-stricken environment, we can find countless law-abiding citizens who overcome that disadvantage to lead honest lives.

  Childhood Abuse

  My research on serial rape supports the view that a large number of sexual criminals have been childhood victims of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. Yet, as is true with poverty, there are many more abused kids who do not become sexually violent as adults.

  Violence in the Media

  Movies and television often are blamed for glamorizing violence. In 1977, a fifteen-year-old Florida youth named Ronny Zamora claimed in court that he killed an elderly female neighbor because of “television intoxication.” Zamora’s attorney said his client had become addicted to violence by watching television. Fortunately for society, the jurors didn’t buy into that theory.

  Books, magazines, and music have also been faulted for promoting violence. Rap music, especially, has been accused of objectifying women and using gender-demeaning terminology in the lyrics. While I might not personally appreciate certain kinds of music or films, behavioral studies do not suggest that men who watch or listen to them are, as a result, driven to commit crimes. Certainly offenders with preexisting fantasies might seek out such stimulation and even attempt to incorporate some of its elements into future crimes. But to say that a cause-and-effect relationship exists is simply not supported by scientific inquiry.

  Pornography

  I dislike pornography for a multitude of reasons, but speaking as a professional, I have to say that I don’t believe that it causes sexual violence.

  Opponents of pornography often point to Dr. James Dobson’s death-row interview with Ted Bundy to support their cause. But they frequently—possibly intentionally—misquote Bundy on the subject. Speaking with the convicted murderer on the eve of his execution, Dobson questioned Bundy closely about the reasons for his deadly behavior.

  Bundy said that pornography had had a tremendous effect on his life, but nowhere in the interview did he say that pornography had made him violent. He did not say pornography caused him to become a serial killer, and there is no reason to believe that was the case.

  Nevertheless, my experience, education, and training led me to believe that pornography contributes, both passively and actively, to sexual violence in some individuals.

  Humans learn something from every experience, good or bad. What are the lessons that are taught by pornography? First, it treats women and children as objects. By taking away their individual humanity, it supports the mind-set that seeks to use others solely for sexual gratification. Second, it teaches that sex is merely a bodily function, having no special significance. When the essential connectedness of sexual contact is denied, the physical or emotional needs of a partner have no relevance. Third, pornography conveys the message that sex is an expression of instinctive urges, with no need for love or commitment. These are not healthy lessons.

  Pornography may play an even more serious role in the process that leads to violent sexual assault by providing offenders with a continuous source of new ideas.

  Certain pornographic images validate aberrant tendencies by showing the offender that his behavior is not so unusual within our society after all; in certain circles it is even accepted. Further, pornography reinforces violent sexual fantasies by providing a continuous and never-ending source of richly graphic inspiration.

  From my interviews with rapists, sexual killers, child molesters, sexual sadists, and the wives and companions of these sexually violent men, I know that ritualis
tic sexual offenders not only own pornography but they typically collect it. They pore over it, spending endless hours with a favorite picture or video, all the while reinforcing the aberrant fantasy.

  A medical examiner once brought to my attention a rape-homicide case in which the victims, a woman and her prepubescent daughter, were stabbed to death in their home. The mother’s body was discovered with her legs bent at the knees and spread apart. It was obvious the killer had intentionally positioned her that way.

  The murder weapons were two knives belonging to the victims. Both mother and child had been stabbed multiple times. Shoe prints left at the scene indicated that the killer had been wearing military boots. Before leaving, he took a Polaroid of the crime scene and placed it on top of the victim’s television set, where it immediately caught investigators’ attention.

  When the subject was later arrested, a search of his possessions revealed a detective magazine, inside of which was a picture of a rape-homicide that was practically identical to his own crime. The accompanying article explained that the victim had been stabbed with two of her own knives, her legs had been positioned in the same manner, and the killer, a U.S. soldier, had worn combat boots during the commission of the crime. However, there was no young child in the magazine story. This discrepancy is telling for it suggests that the killer murdered the daughter simply because she was at home when he attacked her mother.

  Genetics

  Some years ago, a new theory connected the presence of an extra “Y” chromosome in a male’s genetic material to a superabundance of testosterone, which was believed to result in violent behavior. No one has ever developed scientific evidence to support this theory, and it is largely discounted today.

  A more recent, and also unsubstantiated, hypothesis holds that individuals can inherit a gene that predisposes them to commit criminal acts. This genetic explanation for criminality poses an interesting dilemma for sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, and penologists.

  If such behaviors are determined from birth, professionals could do little to prevent them; and rehabilitation would be a hopeless task. I believe that this theory will prove to be another false lead in the quest to understand violence in our society.

  Still another theory, recently advanced by so-called evolutionary psychologists, takes the radical view that rape is a natural biological phenomenon. To paraphrase one adherent, rape is an unfortunate but nonetheless adaptive strategy for passing on one’s genes that is seen in a number of animals besides man, including fish, birds, and other primates.

  In my view, this reasoning will go the way of the extra Y chromosome theory.

  Insanity

  It’s all too easy to dismiss sexual offenders as being “sick,” “perverted,” or “deranged.” However, this assumption does not explain the 97 percent of crimes committed by individuals who are not psychotic (insane).

  One of the more esoteric explanations for criminal behavior I have heard is brain shrinkage. This theory arose when the executive director of a huge U.S. charity was charged with embezzlement after he stole $250,000 from the organization’s funds and took his teenage girlfriend to Las Vegas. The seemingly reputable defendant argued that he should not be held responsible for his acts because his brain had shrunk, thus affecting his ability to discern right from wrong. I didn’t buy this defense and neither did the court.

  Premenstrual Syndrome

  A professional woman attacked a state police officer with a heavy, blunt object after he had stopped her for DWI. Her position at trial was temporary insanity due to PMS, and it was successful.

  Blood Sugar Imbalance

  Even junk food has been blamed for causing violence. In San Francisco in November of 1978, Supvr. Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were gunned down at city hall by Supvr. Dan White. At trial the following May, White’s attorney blamed his client’s violent behavior in part on the inordinate number of Twinkies that White had consumed. The argument’s been known ever since as “the Twinkie defense.” White, who was charged with first-degree murder, was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

  Some of these theories and ideas sound implausible, but in the unpredictable arena of human behavior, it doesn’t pay to dismiss any possible reason, however bizarre it may seem, without examining it closely. Yet I’m confident that no single factor of any sort will ever suffice to explain the millions of variations that occur among individuals. No two people are alike, and the factors that combine to cause people to turn to violence—especially sexual violence—will always be unique.

  Perhaps the most obvious (and most frightening) explanation of all is that some offenders commit sexual crimes simply because they want to! They like it! And they have no regard for what the rest of society thinks.

  This is the dark mind’s most disturbing corner of all.

  2

  It Begins Inside the Mind

  In the late 1980s, my BSU colleague, Jim Wright, and I were asked to consult on a series of particularly gruesome murders in California. The case was unusual in that the police didn’t learn of the homicides until one of the killers killed himself.

  Leonard Lake lived on approximately two and a half acres of woodland property near the town of Wilseyville in Calaveras County, northeast of San Francisco. Lake and his partner, Charles Ng, constructed a building on the property, ostensibly for tool storage. In fact, there was a secret section in the structure designed as a prison cell for captive females.

  On June 2, 1985, Lake, then thirty-nine, and Ng, twenty-four, went shopping in a South San Francisco hardware store. A clerk observed Ng shoplift a tool, leave the store, and put the stolen item into the trunk of a car. The police were called and Ng fled, leaving his older partner to explain a series of whys.

  Why was the stolen tool in the trunk of a car registered to a missing person? Why were there also unregistered guns in the trunk? Why did the license plate belong on a different car? And why did the driver’s license that Leonard Lake produced belong to a missing person named Robin Stapley?

  Before the police could begin to unravel these mysteries, their bearded suspect reached for a cyanide capsule he’d pinned to the inside of his shirt collar and ingested the poison on the spot. Leonard Lake died four days later in the hospital.

  Ng subsequently slipped north to Canada, where he successfully fought extradition for many years. In 1999, the Hong Kong-born killer finally was convicted in California for his role in eleven murders committed with Lake and was sentenced to death.

  Investigators believe Lake and Ng’s actual victim total was much higher. A search of Lake’s Calaveras County residences and the surrounding area yielded the remains of several victims, as well as videotapes of Lake and Ng with women who had been reported missing; photographs of these and other missing women in various stages of dress; and Lake’s handwritten notes of his daily activities. Jim and I were given copies of all of the material to review.

  I was absorbed by a twenty-minute videotape in which Lake ruminates on his motives for committing the crimes. The tape, made prior to the construction of the building, reveals Lake seated calmly and comfortably in his easy chair, his feet extended on the attached footrest. In an even voice, he coolly recounts his desire to construct a bunker featuring a “slave cell” where he intends to keep a female captive as “primarily a sexual slave, but a physical slave as well.”

  Leonard Lake succeeded in making this dark fantasy come true.

  As I listened and watched Lake on the monitor, I was stunned to recognize striking parallels between his observations and those I had recently read as part of my wide-ranging (and belated) attempt to improve my grasp of Western classics.

  Seventeen centuries ago, one of the key figures in early Christian philosophy had addressed the same questions that we, as behavioral scientists, were trying to answer in our modern-day work. Strange as it may seem, it was Saint Augustine who helped me recognize the distinct stages that ritualistic sexual offenders pass through on their
way from sexual fantasy to aberrant crime.

  Augustine wrote that sin is the product of a five-step process. First, he said, the mind conceives of an action. It then considers the action as it relates to the senses—will I gain pleasure from this? Next, the individual considers the possible consequences of the act. If he is willing to risk those outcomes, he decides to act on the thought. Finally, once the act has taken place, his mind rationalizes the behavior.

  As I read this passage in The Confessions, it occurred to me that if I replaced the word “sin” with the word “crime,” Saint Augustine might have been describing many of the sexual criminals I had been studying for more than twenty-five years. Even the language of Lake’s videotape echoed Augustine’s five-step process.

  AUGUSTINE

  LEONARD LAKE

  1 The mind conceives of an action…

  “It’s something I fantasize about daily”

  2 …which is referred to the senses.

  Lake photographed and videotaped his victims

  3 The individual considers the possible consequences

  “What I’m talking about is highly illegal and violates human rights, blah, blah, blah.”

  4 He decides to commit the sin.

  “It may not work, but I want to try.”

  5 Then he rationalizes the act.

  “For anyone interested in my rationalization and justification for what I’m about to do…”

  Just as Saint Augustine recognized that sin begins as an intention, we profilers saw that violent sexual crimes originate in fantasy. Our next challenge was to understand why certain individuals allowed their fantasies to lead them to cross the normal bounds of acceptable behavior. To do that, we had to examine their motivations.

  Many people mistakenly believe that rape is a sexually motivated act. In fact, a rapist doesn’t commit the crime because he is “horny” or because his wife cheated on him, although he may use those factors as excuses. The rapist uses sex as a tool of aggression. The sexual assault is an assertion of power or an expression of anger, or it may be a combination of the two. In any event, sexual assault primarily serves nonsexual needs.