Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (9 page)

Chadd blames the criminal justice system for making him into a sexual predator, but the passage above amply demonstrates the power of his aberrant urge: “I never had experienced such sexual pleasure.”

Still, at this stage, he was a young and relatively inexperienced offender. This is obvious from the minimal amount of time he invests in victim selection, the crude method of entry (throwing a brick through the door), the lack of any attempt to protect his identity, and the failure to control (bind and gag) the victim after his departure. Even without benefit of Chadd’s written reconstruction, an experienced investigator could look at these telltale signs at the crime scene and conclude that the rapist was fairly new to his chosen crime.

When Chadd reflects on his excitement during the rape, we begin to observe his tendencies toward sexual sadism. This deviance will emerge in a much more pronounced fashion in his descriptions of his murders. Chadd unwittingly tells us a crucially important fact about his narcissism when he writes of revisiting the rape in his mind. He decides, “It wasn’t bad at all.” Moments before he’d called it the best sexual experience of his life, even saying that he had collapsed and nearly was blind for a few moments.

Chadd needs to project the idea that nothing means very much to him, especially anything to do with a victim. She’s his to use and discard. He is in total control. He dominates and is not dominated. Of course, he then admits the opposite—that he was not in control, that his urges, not his will, directed his actions. “I knew,” he writes, “I would do it again.”

At seventeen, Chadd was transferred to CYA’s Youth Training School. There he attempted suicide by hanging. “If I would have been successful,” he writes, “four people would be alive today.”

He was then sent to Atascadero State Hospital (ASH) where, Chadd claims, he had his first homosexual encounter. “It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it was sex.”

He writes of first using drugs and of trading homosexual acts for drugs at Atascadero. He also claims that following his transfer back to CYA, he blackmailed a teacher into giving him good grades by threatening to tell the authorities about the teacher having sex with a staff member. Whether true or imagined, such an episode served to reassure Chadd of his power, even over those in authority.

According to his manuscript, upon release Chadd committed his first and only nonsexual murder. As he describes this killing, which San Diego authorities cannot confirm, it occurred on the roadway bridge while he was hitchhiking.

Chadd recalls seeing a young man and his dog sitting by the road on the other side of the bridge. He crossed over to them and sat down as well, although the stranger clearly had already staked out the spot. Words were exchanged.

The other hitchhiker was both big and tough looking, Chadd writes, but he was certain he could take the stranger. So without warning Chadd kicked up at the other man’s groin, and a fist fight began. Chadd was knocked down then picked up a big rock as the stranger moved in to punch him again. As he did so, Chadd smashed the stone into the man’s forehead, dropping him to the ground. Suddenly, Chadd explains, he realized the stranger was utterly in his power. He felt godlike, able to grant life or take it away, although he does not appear to have considered his options for long. Chadd smashed the unconscious man’s head open, killing him at once.

He says he was surprised at how easy murder is and how much he enjoyed it, particularly the feeling of supremacy. Chadd pitched the man’s body, as well as his travel bag and dog, over the bridge and into the river below, discovering as he did so that he felt little fear of discovery for his crime.

“Later that night I thought about what I had done. I asked myself why I did it. But no answer came to me. I wasn’t sorry or anything. And I admitted to myself that I enjoyed it. And I wondered if all murderers felt as I did.” He explains that though he wished to share how he felt with someone, he realized the smarter move was to keep it to himself. “I just filed it away in the corner of my mind, where I was beginning to compile quite a few dark secrets. A corner from which I could summon out the memories to look at them again and again. To relive my crimes and revel in the horror of my victim…”

In his matter-of-fact account of the hitchhiker’s murder, the primary issue expressed is power. Chadd is beginning to perceive his need for it. During the rape he drew psychosexual pleasure from exercising power and control and wrote about it. In the young man’s murder, his narcissism blossoms: “…it was easy and I was enjoying the feeling of supremacy. A supremacy like I had never known before.”

Chadd also is maturing as a criminal. This time he takes action to protect his identity. He throws the victim, along with his belongings and dog, into the river. “No witnesses, no body or weapon. I was pretty confident,” Chadd writes.

The lack of fear is, in itself, abnormal. Chadd has crossed a critical barrier. Not only has he killed, but he recognizes that it was easy and believes he won’t get caught. He likes it and he’s getting good at it. He is learning through experience. He is about to become a serial killer.

One of the most striking aspects of Billy Lee Chadd’s writings is his complete lack of self-knowledge. Like many serial killers, he can’t articulate why he doesn’t feel normal guilt or fear. “I asked myself why I did it,” he writes. “But no answer came to me. I knew what I had done was wrong. But where was [sic] the feelings of guilt that were supposed to accompany such a deed? What was it that caused me to feel such elation? What was it that allowed me to take another human’s life with no feeling of remorse?”

This lack of remorse is a classic symptom of the psychopath’s personality. It becomes even more apparent as Chadd’s memoir continues. He remembers going home to his pregnant wife, whom he brutalized when she refused him sex. “I started to choke her. I could see fear in her eyes…. My wife was cowering in a corner with tears in her eyes. The fear she showed would fire me even more. I couldn’t see her face, just those eyes, afraid and pleading. I felt myself slipping into the strange feeling of supremacy again. I wanted to kill.

“Then I suddenly realized who I was choking. I thought, ‘My God, what am I doing?’ I let her go, but the drive to destroy was still there. I don’t know how but I shifted my anger from her to inanimate objects. I started breaking anything that would break… I kept shouting ‘DIE! DIE!’ Not anyone in particular, just ‘DIE!’”

Chadd writes that he then left the family trailer. “Without her fear to feed upon,” he recalls, “I slowly started to calm down.” His actions were being driven by his sexual sadism and his desire to destroy. The description in “Dark Secrets” of his second killing, but first known sexual murder, stresses both themes. Here is his account of the 1974 rape-murder of a San Diego woman.

“My body was giving me massive spurts of adrenaline,” he writes. “My heart was going like a trip hammer as I reached for the door knob… The excitement and fear poured back over me again….

He discovered her standing in her bathtub, naked, and forced her at gunpoint into her bedroom, where the assault took place.

“She was writhing in pain, and I loved it. I was now combining my sexual high of rape and my power high of fear to make a total sum that is beyond explaining. I can’t begin to describe the feeling. It is one that must be experienced to know how it feels. I was completely beyond all contact with reality. I was alive for the sole purpose of causing pain and receiving sexual gratification. I have never experienced a high like this from any drug.”

He remembers laughing on the way home in his car. Neither afraid nor sorry for committing the brutal act, he says he’d never felt more satisfied in his life, like a “supreme ruler.” He even relived the rape-murder in a wet dream that night.

Chadd did not restrict himself in “Dark Secrets” to actual crimes. When his three-year-old son died at the hospital, he turned his deviant wrath on the female doctor who treated the boy. “I would lay awake at night and fantasize about what I would do before I killed her. The ways of torture that I called to mind would have done justice to the Marquis de Sade. Oh, he had nothing on me…”

Chadd explained his fantasy was to kidnap the doctor and take her up into the mountains to slowly dismember her, enjoying her screams as he did so. When only her head and torso were left, he intended to paralyze her, cut out her tongue, blind her, and puncture her eardrums. Then he would leave the doctor for the police to find, knowing that the hospital would keep her alive, creating a “living hell” for her.

A year after he committed the murder in San Diego, Chadd was working in Las Vegas, where he met Delmar Bright, twenty-nine, a hotel porter. According to Chadd, Bright offered him twenty dollars and a six-pack of beer if he would pose in the nude. Chadd agreed. Then, still according to Chadd, Bright made a homosexual advance and, producing some extension cords, asked that Chadd tie him up. Chadd agreed, told Bright to lie on his stomach and to put his hands behind his back.

“He did and I tied him up… I took my knife and laid it next to the bed. I took another cord and put it around his neck in a slip noose. I said, ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you.’ He obviously thought I was just playing around. He started to tell me that he had my pictures, and I had left fingerprints all over the house. Damn! he was right! I mentally thanked him for reminding me. I said, I’m going to kill you faggot!

“My high was beginning to take over again… I started breathing hard and my palms got all sweaty… I felt the now familiar exuberance sweep over me again. I was going to kill.”

Bright began to laugh. “It was all a big joke to him… But it was all too real for me. I wanted to kill, but there was something missing. FEAR! He wasn’t afraid. I got my knife and showed it to him… This is for real. I saw a twinge of uncertainty in his eyes now. It was working, he was beginning to get scared. I put the knife to his throat and cut him. Not deep. Just enough to draw blood.

“Here it was. I could see it now. Terror. He knew I was serious. He opened his mouth to scream, but I yanked on the cord and the scream came out as a strangled gurgle.”

Chadd commits yet another bloody murder and masturbates in the midst of it. Then after describing how he “sanitized” the apartment of possible forensic evidence, Chadd recalls, “I started to giggle as I walked away from the place. By the time I got to the corner, I was laughing hysterically. I calmed myself and still smiling, hailed a cab.”

Like Robert Leroy Anderson and many other ritualistic offenders, Chadd was finally undone by the narcissistic need to share details of his murder. He tells his wife, who is so frightened by the admission that Chadd backs off, saying it was just a joke. From my experience with this type of killer, I believe that had Chadd thought his wife would countenance such behavior, eventually he would have involved her in his sexual murder fantasy and possibly in the crimes themselves.

Chadd describes how he and his family hitchhiked throughout the United States and his eventual enlistment in the marines. He reports that he enjoyed his military service and became proficient in martial arts.

Eventually, he chanced upon his fourth murder victim. She was a young woman who, with her eighteen-month-old son, asked Chadd where a particular bus stop was. Chadd showed her the location, and they caught the bus to her house. When he learned that she rode the bus home from work each day, Chadd offered to give her a lift once his car was repaired.

She let him inside, where he began kissing her. She was responsive until Chadd tried to undress her. She told him that her other children were due home soon, and he pushed her onto the bed and began to undress her forcefully. She reacted violently and stood up.

“I was no longer in control,” Chadd writes. “My monster decided I couldn’t handle it. So with a roar of rage, he got up off the bed and grabbed her by the throat and started choking her. All I could do was watch. I tried to stop what was happening, but I could not. It wasn’t me anymore…” In the end, “I wanted her to know I was going to kill her. I needed the fear that knowledge would bring… I’m the Hillside Strangler. I’m going to kill you, bitch… Oh, the luscious terror she showed. It was the best yet. Looking at me coming closer with the cord, knowing I was going to kill her, had her paralyzed with fear… I started strangling her and I was laughing as I watched her eyes… Yes this was it… The joy I felt couldn’t compare with anything I could try to imagine. The ultimate high.” He stabbed her in the back, shouting, “Die, you bitch!” The victim’s cause of death was a slashed throat.

Once again, Chadd cannot resist the urge to share what he had done. This time, he tells his brother. Like so many serial killers, he has begun to unravel. Chadd might have gone on killing for years had he been able to keep himself together psychologically. But the same combination of rage and aberrant urges that turned him into a killer eventually combined to overwhelm and consume him.

His last entries tell of becoming drunk and trying to run his wife down with his car. Apparently, he was arrested in connection with this incident. The end of his criminal career came shortly thereafter when he was working at the Naval Medical Center San Diego near Balboa Park. He noticed a dying officer’s wife and daughter as they came to visit each day. Chadd consulted the hospital records, determined where they lived, then abducted and raped both women. He was arrested in Louisiana for these assaults.