Read Online The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators by Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood
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rugs, and furniture.
Troublemakers were placed on suicide watch: locked down naked, with no mattress or blanket, under twenty-four-hour guard in a brightly lit cell with only a Bible and their wedding ring to remind them of their higher responsibilities.
After two days of this, Roy would personally visit the inmate, excuse the guard, and speak privately. “I’d tell him that if he’d tell me he was sorry for what he’d done, I’d let him out, and no one would ever know he’d apologized. It worked ninety percent of the time.”
If it didn’t, Hazelwood shipped the miscreant off to a far less congenial environment, the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, then being operated as a special lockup for soldier-inmates with behavior problems throughout the European stockade system.
Although Roy couldn’t know it, these one-on-one encounters with the baddest of the bad in his custody were an invaluable prelude to his later confrontations with America’s most deviant offenders.
Mentally sparring with a killer is very different from sharing a lemonade on the veranda with your Aunt Kate. It is very hard work in which a simple slip of the tongue, or even a mistaken gesture, can cancel days, even weeks, of effort.
There’s no cookbook, either.
In Stuttgart, for example, Roy was faced with the problem of a glib and personable inmate whom the prison psychologist had diagnosed as a psychopath.
This prisoner, a persistent reoffender with a long record of incarceration, had voluntarily assisted with overhauling the stockade’s archaic office record-keeping system. But in the weeks he worked around Roy’s staff, Hazelwood realized that though superficially charming, the inmate was a chronic liar who failed to complete most of the tasks he was given.
Besides enjoying the change of scenery, he also took advantage of the circumstance to ingratiate himself with several members of Roy’s staff, while he became intimately familiar with the other inmates’ records, gathering information he no doubt planned to use to his advantage.
Hazelwood knew he would have to make a countermove before the prisoner had consolidated his relationships and established his own power center inside the prison staff, a potentially dangerous challenge to Roy’s authority.
But confrontation, a public showdown, wouldn’t work. This was a model prisoner, and Hazelwood could only undercut his own credibility by treating the popular inmate peremptorily. The answer had to be a response in kind—subterfuge replying to stealth.
Consequently, contraband postage stamps were discovered in the prisoner’s bunk, a rules violation from which there was no appeal. He was summarily issued a one-way ticket to Dachau.
“You know I didn’t steal those stamps,” the inmate said indignantly to Roy on his way out the door. “You set me up, didn’t you?”
Roy nodded and smiled and wished the man a safe journey. The defeated prisoner paused briefly and smiled back, apparently appreciating the craftiness with which he had been finessed.
Hazelwood’s next overseas posting was South Vietnam, where in 1967 he was assigned command of the Fourth MP Company, known at the time as the “Fucked-Up Fourth” for its lack of discipline, low morale, and dismal performance record. At the time Roy took over, seven soldiers in the company were in the stockade for attempting to kill a noncommissioned officer with a hand grenade.
Roy again intuitively recognized that creativity would get him much further than confrontation, an insight also of great value for interviewing violent deviant offenders.
On his first day in charge of his new command, Hazelwood inspected the MPs’ living quarters and equipment. “They were pretty awful,” he says. “I picked up one soldier’s rifle and discovered that it was rusted shut.
“The first sergeant said, ‘Sir, here’s your chance to establish your authority. Court-martial the soldier.’
“I said, ‘No, I think I’ll put
Troublemakers were placed on suicide watch: locked down naked, with no mattress or blanket, under twenty-four-hour guard in a brightly lit cell with only a Bible and their wedding ring to remind them of their higher responsibilities.
After two days of this, Roy would personally visit the inmate, excuse the guard, and speak privately. “I’d tell him that if he’d tell me he was sorry for what he’d done, I’d let him out, and no one would ever know he’d apologized. It worked ninety percent of the time.”
If it didn’t, Hazelwood shipped the miscreant off to a far less congenial environment, the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, then being operated as a special lockup for soldier-inmates with behavior problems throughout the European stockade system.
Although Roy couldn’t know it, these one-on-one encounters with the baddest of the bad in his custody were an invaluable prelude to his later confrontations with America’s most deviant offenders.
Mentally sparring with a killer is very different from sharing a lemonade on the veranda with your Aunt Kate. It is very hard work in which a simple slip of the tongue, or even a mistaken gesture, can cancel days, even weeks, of effort.
There’s no cookbook, either.
In Stuttgart, for example, Roy was faced with the problem of a glib and personable inmate whom the prison psychologist had diagnosed as a psychopath.
This prisoner, a persistent reoffender with a long record of incarceration, had voluntarily assisted with overhauling the stockade’s archaic office record-keeping system. But in the weeks he worked around Roy’s staff, Hazelwood realized that though superficially charming, the inmate was a chronic liar who failed to complete most of the tasks he was given.
Besides enjoying the change of scenery, he also took advantage of the circumstance to ingratiate himself with several members of Roy’s staff, while he became intimately familiar with the other inmates’ records, gathering information he no doubt planned to use to his advantage.
Hazelwood knew he would have to make a countermove before the prisoner had consolidated his relationships and established his own power center inside the prison staff, a potentially dangerous challenge to Roy’s authority.
But confrontation, a public showdown, wouldn’t work. This was a model prisoner, and Hazelwood could only undercut his own credibility by treating the popular inmate peremptorily. The answer had to be a response in kind—subterfuge replying to stealth.
Consequently, contraband postage stamps were discovered in the prisoner’s bunk, a rules violation from which there was no appeal. He was summarily issued a one-way ticket to Dachau.
“You know I didn’t steal those stamps,” the inmate said indignantly to Roy on his way out the door. “You set me up, didn’t you?”
Roy nodded and smiled and wished the man a safe journey. The defeated prisoner paused briefly and smiled back, apparently appreciating the craftiness with which he had been finessed.
Hazelwood’s next overseas posting was South Vietnam, where in 1967 he was assigned command of the Fourth MP Company, known at the time as the “Fucked-Up Fourth” for its lack of discipline, low morale, and dismal performance record. At the time Roy took over, seven soldiers in the company were in the stockade for attempting to kill a noncommissioned officer with a hand grenade.
Roy again intuitively recognized that creativity would get him much further than confrontation, an insight also of great value for interviewing violent deviant offenders.
On his first day in charge of his new command, Hazelwood inspected the MPs’ living quarters and equipment. “They were pretty awful,” he says. “I picked up one soldier’s rifle and discovered that it was rusted shut.
“The first sergeant said, ‘Sir, here’s your chance to establish your authority. Court-martial the soldier.’
“I said, ‘No, I think I’ll put
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