Crime Seen (9 page)

Judd pulled the tape player on the conference room table over in front of him and played the real-time 911 call he made to police that night. He identified himself as an FBI agent to the dispatcher and told her he’d been shot. He was crying and begging them to hurry because he didn’t want to die. Judd just stared at the tape player and never looked up. When the call was finished and help arrived, he shut off the tape player and continued the story.

“I passed out for a bit, but remember when the medics arrived, and one of them said, ‘This guy ain’t gonna make it.’ I probably wouldn’t have made it if a thoracic surgeon hadn’t been walking out of the hospital when they rolled me in on the gurney. He looked over and took his damn scissors out and hit me on the side. Blood flew everywhere because I was drowning. They eventually got me stabilized.”

The police put an armed guard outside Judd’s room for three weeks until he was released from hospital. His wife and two children were staying with her aunt in Alabama, so he returned home alone.

Judd told us that everyone in his office had quit working on their cases to help police follow up on the multitude of leads coming in. With Judd’s police and FBI experience there were a number of potential enemies. He said, “That was at the time that J.R. Ewing got shot on the TV show
Dallas
. I found out later the office joke was, ‘Who shot J.R.?’ But they were talkin’ about me, Judson Ray.”

While Judd was recovering at home from his injuries, investigators tried to keep him away from the investigation. But it didn’t take Judd to be a profiler to figure this one out: this was personal. There was no doubt in his mind that one person he knew had to be involved—his wife.

One day, shortly after Judd had got home from the hospital, he was catching up on paying his bills. He was going through his telephone bill and noticed that the long-distance portion was high, with numerous calls out of state before the shooting. He knew that his wife must have made the calls. This evidence would put the local police and FBI firmly on the trail of those responsible. Numerous conversations recorded from wiretap authorizations obtained by police sealed the case. Judd’s wife and two hired hit men were indicted. Their charges ranged from burglary to attempted murder. All of them got ten years, although Judd’s wife was out in three.

Judd related to the class that when he had returned from the FBI’s New Agent training in Quantico, he’d known his marriage was over. He’d told his wife he wanted a divorce and custody of their two girls. “I think that started her planning to have me killed. I was worth about quarter-million dollars in insurance. That probably was one of the real motivators and the fact that I wasn’t going to be with her anymore. Looking back, I know she was under a great deal of stress and unhappy in the marriage too.

“Being a victim of a crime, in hindsight, I kind of liken it to a death experience. Oftentimes if you get a bullet in you, you’re not around to talk about it. It’s almost like I’m having the benefit of having died and to come back to say that this is how it really is. You see how victims can fuck up a crime scene? I contaminated that crime scene walkin’ all around, walkin’ through my own blood.

“If I had not lived, there’s a good possibility that we may have never known what happened because she’d set the apartment up where costume jewellery was stowed around to make it look like an intruder coming in to burglarize the place.

“I’m sure some investigator lookin’ at it is thinkin’, ‘Well this fuckin’ guy is marching this guy around trying to find more valuable stuff.’ That would be one way of lookin’ at this had I not been there to tell exactly what happened. Remember, things don’t always happen the way they look.”

Judd was right. His death would have looked like he was the victim of a burglary gone wrong. Everyone would have thought he was killed by a stranger breaking into his house.

When Judd was back to work after the shooting, he started to look at other solved cases that were similar to his. He found that the offenders’ pre-offence behaviours were often consistent with those of his wife.

“In a close relationship where one of the parties has decided that they’re going to kill the other one, I think they behave in ways which may tend to throw cops off. But I don’t think it’s strategic. In fact, I had a homicide psychologist say he thought it might have more to do with coming to grips with the reality of the decision. Meaning that if you are married and I’m going to hire somebody to kill my spouse, in order for me to become psychologically prepared, I’ve got to start behaving in certain ways. I’ve got to kind of behave in ways that convinces me that I’ve done everything I could for you. I’ve been as nice as I could to you. That’s what my wife was doing at the time. She was paying more attention to me. She would get up and want to know if I wanted breakfast. She never made me breakfast in the thirteen years we were married. I always tell the cops now, ‘Look back two or three weeks before this killing if you suspect.’ I’m only talking about hired assassin kind of killings. Look back couple or three weeks and see if there’s been a change in behaviour.”

Judd’s wife had set the stage for a crime that she thought she would never be suspected of. And because of that, her actions were not well guarded and came to light during the investigation. She never thought that anyone, least of all her husband, would look through her old long-distance phone bills and put the crime together. Judd had done a methodical reconstruction of his own crime scene and solved it himself.

Typical of Judd, he never strayed far from his sense of humour, saying, “You should get suspicious when your wife all of a sudden starts treating you nice. I loved her spaghetti, but that night, it was laced with phenobarbital.”

THE MASTER CLASSES

“Teachers open the doors, but you must enter by yourself.”

—Chinese proverb

I FIRST MET SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT
Roy Hazelwood late one afternoon when he’d just come back to his office after teaching one of his National Academy courses. I’d heard he’d worked for former BSU chief Roger Depue and helped develop the fellowship program and I wanted to personally thank him for extending the opportunity to Canadians. Roy was sitting behind his desk and wearing a suit, but otherwise was the antithesis of what you’d expect an FBI agent to look like. He was short, slim and wore large eyeglasses. I often saw other BSU members leaving the office at the end of the day carrying athletic bags and taking advantage of a workout at the Academy gym before heading home. Roy didn’t look at all like the type that went to the gym at the end of his day. He looked far more likely to shut his office door, open his desk drawer, pour a few shots of something into his coffee cup and chain-smoke more than a few cigarettes until he was ready to call it a day.

Prior to joining the FBI, Roy had worked in the Criminal Investigation Command of the military police. After several years as an FBI agent in the field, he returned to instruct at the Academy in Quantico and eventually took a position in the BSU to do research and teach the “Sex Crimes” course to National Academy students.

When Roy first arrived at his recently vacated basement office, he found that some people with a dubious sense of humour had done some decorating. Bras and panties were hanging on the wall and the desk had a robed statue on it. If you pressed the top of the head, a penis protruded from his frock. Boxes of pornographic magazines and sexual paraphernalia were promptly thrown in the garbage. Roy could see he needed to set a different tone. He renamed the “Sex Crimes” course the “Interpersonal Violence” course to focus on the true seriousness of the crimes.

Roy was one of the main instructors for the academic phase of my training. He made it clear to my class right from day one that no off-colour jokes or stories would be tolerated. He had us watch the 1985 award-winning, groundbreaking and controversial ABC made-for-television movie
Deadly Justice: The Rape of Richard Beck
. Actor Richard Crenna plays the title role of a tough-guy detective who believes that rape victims are at least partly responsible for the crimes committed against them. But when Beck himself is raped and brutalized by two criminals, he undergoes a painful transformation. I could see why it was important to Roy that we view this fictionalized depiction of the mindset of some women and men in a just-ending era of indifference or denial. There was no room for any residue of that stereotypical thinking in Roy’s classes.

One of the concepts that Roy taught me that I used in every violent-crime analysis in my career as a criminal profiler involved determining the key aspect in crime scenes of whether they were organized or disorganized. Roy found that some were indicative of preplanning and control, while others seemed more spontaneous and unplanned. He discussed the concept with John Douglas and together they developed from their experiences a list of characteristics, unique to each of the two types of crime scenes.

I used this “lowest common denominator” analytical process when reviewing the solved cases that Roy and other instructors gave me during my training. However, sometimes it appeared that the distinction between the two types of behaviours could not be so easily made. The crime scenes occasionally seemed mixed. Once the review exercise was completed and I was aware of the outcome of the investigation and who was responsible, I went back and tried to determine why the person demonstrated both organized and disorganized features in the same crime scene. In some cases there was a strong possibility that the offender’s normal behaviour patterns were altered because of alcohol or drug consumption at the time the crime was committed. Sometimes mixed patterns indicated that there was more than one person involved in committing the crime. In a number of the serial crime cases the offenders may have learned information from the media or even from their previous mistakes, such as one criminal who began wearing gloves after getting convicted of an earlier crime on fingerprint evidence.

It was no surprise that criminal behaviour evolved. To me, it was similar to any law-abiding citizen learning a craft or a trade—you get better at it as you learn on the job.

Roy was also my primary instructor for sexual aggression and all types of adult sexual deviancies. In other types of violent crimes I learned one must understand the mind to understand the crime. With sexually assaultive behaviour I must also understand the sexual fantasies of the perpetrator to understand their motivations and what fuels their crimes.

Roy adapted his typology system for better understanding different types of rapists as first suggested by Nicholas Groth in his book,
Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender
. For the first time I realized this type of interpersonal violence was not motivated solely by sexual aggression, but rather the offender was acting out their power, anger or sadistic nature on their victims. (Two sub-categories for stranger-on-stranger assaults, opportunist and gang related, were later added to these classifications.) The behaviours could range from a stranger sex offender attempting to simulate a consensual relationship with his victim, almost like he was on a date, to the extreme of those that entailed brutally sadistic, degrading and painful sexual and physical assaults causing victims’ immense suffering. The verbal, physical and sexual behaviour demonstrated by the attacker during the assaults were the clues to their motivations and sexual fantasies.

I initially found it quite disturbing reading through FBI “solved” files and the statements of surviving victims and the confessions of arrested rapists. Many cases contained photographs, along with audio and videotapes of victims being assaulted and tortured. My intention was never to ignore victims or be insensitive to their mental and physical suffering, but I found it necessary to compartmentalize in my mind those aspects of the crimes. It was a matter of my personal emotional survival if I was to successfully take up this work in the future.

Roy also taught me a process that he helped pioneer known as equivocal death analysis. Police and forensic experts traditionally relied on autopsy results, forensic examinations and other evidence to help determine the cause of a death. However, there were some cases where that didn’t necessarily lead to a clear determination of the manner of death or whether even a crime had been committed. This process focused on an analysis to determine whether it was most likely that death resulted from suicide, homicide or by accident. Things were changed up in these types of cases because rather than focus on the behaviours and possible motivations of an offender, the focus was on the deceased. Sometimes referred to as a “psychological autopsy,” you had to closely examine all possible clues of what was going on in their personal life in the days, weeks and months prior to their death. All of the deceased’s actions and interactions had to be taken into consideration, reconstructed and interpreted before an opinion could be given.

While at Quantico I had an opportunity to review an OPP equivocal death investigation that had been sent to the BSU for a second opinion in 1989. Roy encouraged me to start with a review of the photographs. A man was found deceased inside a one-room shack in northern Ontario. He had died from blood loss due to multiple abdominal stab wounds, five tightly grouped axe wounds to the forehead and castration. His death could clearly have been caused from any of the three types of injuries. It was unbelievable to me to think that the wounds could be self-inflicted and yet the crime scene held another clue. The door and windows of the shack were locked from the inside.

I sought out the opinions of my fellow students and we brainstormed all possible scenarios to reconstruct how this death could have occurred. We even considered staging, but when armed with a full account of this man’s personal circumstances, including a family member recently disclosing a sexual assault committed by him, his consumption of a large quantity of alcohol prior to his death and his bloody fingerprint on a liquor bottle, an opinion on the most likely manner of death emerged. We were all confident that the man died of self-inflicted wounds and it was a suicide. Roy had taught us well. The same conclusion was drawn by the FBI analyst back in 1989, as well as the original OPP investigating officer.