Journey into Darkness (19 page)

Okay. But while Ron originally claimed (in keeping with his past history of not owning up to his actions) that Shawn’s death was “an accident,” the prosecution’s psychological team—Harley Stock, Ph.D., and Lynn Blunt, M.D.—got him to admit that as early as when he was driving up to the cabin in Gladwin, Ron knew he would have to kill the boy, that he would not be able to return him alive. As to why he didn’t kill Shawn the first night, he replied that they “had not had sex yet.” He further admitted that one of his motives for the murder was that he was jealous and killing Shawn would prevent him from having sex with anyone else; presumably, he meant women. While this all certainly points to mental instability, this is not insanity. He had the ability to plan, to organize, to think ahead to his crimes. His reasons
for murder betray no lack of appreciation for the difference between right and wrong; rather, they demonstrate a self-centeredness and narcissism which is at the basis of sociopathic—not psychotic—behavior. There is confusion over the difference between insanity and character disorder. A legally insane person cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Someone with a sociopathic character disorder knows the difference but chooses to do what he wants to anyway, out of anger, jealousy, or just because it makes him feel good.

What about the alleged abuse by Dr. Tombo—couldn’t that contribute to “insanity”?

Well, if it was true (Dr. Tombo denied it), then it certainly didn’t help a boy who already had severe personality problems and feelings of self-loathing. Such action would be a gross and despicable breach of patient-healer trust and should be dealt with in the most vigorous way possible. But something else must be kept in mind, as the prosecution psychiatrists pointed out. By the time Bailey came into contact with Tombo, his pattern of sexual aggression was already well established. We might have hoped for more constructive therapy. We might have hoped for a different home life and upbringing. And we might have hoped for a more effective and discriminating juvenile justice system.

But none of this justifies or explains the willful and premeditated killing of one human being by another. “In all of the defendant’s psychiatric history,” the prosecution psychiatrists concluded, “there is absolutely no indication that he behaved in any way that would be characterized as representative of an underlying mental illness.”

Apparently, the jury in the Livingston County courtroom agreed. Though Bailey took the stand and tried to conjure up the proper emotional responses indicative of contrition and remorse, he fell rather flat. The defense psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Dreyer, diagnosed Bailey as suffering from “pseudopsyehopathic schizophrenia.” Dr. Stock countered with his own diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, homosexual pedophilia, and sexual sadism that led him to inflict pain on others in order to sexually gratify himself. He said that Bailey had a character disorder which still allowed him to distinguish right from wrong and he had the ability to decide
whether or not to harm someone. “The ones who were more resistant got hurt,” Stock said. “Those who were compliant were released and sometimes recontacted.” This no longer seemed to hold true by the time Bailey encountered Shawn Moore.

In the final analysis, most jurors said it was the use of the belt that convinced them of Bailey’s rationality and premeditation. It took over a minute to choke Shawn to death with it, during which time Ron had to hold his hands down and keep him from resisting. The jury found Bailey guilty of kidnapping and premeditated murder. He began serving his sentence in Michigan, but, as with Stuart Knowlton, there were continual threats against his life from other prisoners.

He was transferred to a prison out of state for his own safety.

In the aftermath of any violent crime, particularly murder, we try to take away whatever lessons we can from it, essentially by examining the various tragedies.

And in fact, there are a number of tragedies relating to the crimes of Ronald Bailey. For one, authorities did not recognize his earliest actions as serious enough to warrant decisive action. For another, there was little publicity in the Kenny Myers case, which might have encouraged critical information from some member of the public. If there had been more publicity about such details as the type and description of the vehicle the UNSUB was thought to be driving, Bailey’s boss, Hank Greenfield, would have reported the car parked behind his office, which he saw and which rankled him every day for a month. And if that had happened, perhaps Shawn Moore would be alive today.

In my opinion, the police did all of this correctly and well in working up Shawn’s murder, consulting us at the right time and using our profile to focus their investigation. And certainly I am convinced that because of the way the Moore task force went about their job, other young men are alive today who could have been Ron Bailey’s next victims.

The other lesson I take away from the Bailey case is that however noble the callings of psychiatry, psychology, and social work may be, and no matter how hard they strive to help each troubled individual brought before them, from my own long experience I believe you can’t simply look at
someone like Ron Bailey in isolation as a patient without looking at the totality of his actions. By that I mean that while it’s the mental health professional’s job to try to help this person, it’s just as important to think of the people he’s going to interact with if he’s allowed back out into the world. (Ron was usually institutionalized for only weeks or months at a time and then released to go back to whatever he’d been doing before.)

There is a natural tendency to want to empathize with the subject, which is why so many psychiatrists don’t want to read the crime scene reports or know too much about what the person is accused of. It might bias them, they fear, make them lose their objectivity. To me, this is like an art historian not wanting to see any of Picasso’s paintings because it might bias his evaluation of the artist.

Dr. Joel Dreyer, who analyzed his problem as “a posttraumatic stress disorder on top of an already disarrayed mind,” went so far as to write, “His encounters in Northville State Hospital, I believe, were as heinous, or more so, than the crimes he committed because the hospital took him in to help him, and as the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no harm.’” A page earlier he had written, “I understood at that moment I was sitting not with a victimizer, but with a victim.”

Excuse me, doctor, but let’s keep our eye on the ball here. Ron Bailey may very well have been victimized in various instances, as many people are, in various ways. But Ron Bailey killed. He took lives that can never be retrieved. No one did that to him. And once we lose sight of the fact that this young man and others of his ilk are very much victimizers, we also lose sight of the Kenny Myerses and Shawn Moores and Cassie Hansens of the world—the true innocents.

The problem with psychiatry in a forensic setting is that it is based on self-reporting. If you go to a therapist as a private patient, it is presumably because you are unhappy or mentally troubled and therefore have a vested interest in telling that therapist the truth so he or she can help you. If you see a therapist as an offender, your goal is to get out of whatever institution you’ve been placed in and therefore have a vested interest in telling that therapist whatever you have to in order to accomplish your goal. A psychiatrist
might hope his patient is getting better; naturally, that will make him feel more effective as a professional and better as a human being. He will want to believe what the subject is telling him and give him a shot back in normal life. But if by doing so, he’s possibly putting the lives of more potential victims at risk, then that’s a price I, for one, am not willing to have us pay.

Ultimately, we’ve got to ask ourselves as a society if there’s still anything sacred. And if the answer to that question is yes, then I hope the lives of innocent children are always at the top of the list.

Walking into the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., you’re at first struck by how normal the reception area seems. It could be the lobby for a business or a law office. The friendly people you meet seem like regular professionals, an image that’s hard to reconcile with the horrors you know they deal with every day. But if you look at the walls, covered by posters, photos, and plaques, you start to get a sense of the deep level of commitment and involvement these people give to their work.

Moving down the corridors the mood changes. These walls are covered with photos of smiling, childish faces, many of them with toothless six- or seven-year-old grins, posed in front of a fake forest or pasture in the classic school photo setup. The faces are happy, but you know those children are now in a very different place from the day that picture was taken. Surrounded by these faces, NCMEC staff still smile and greet you, but the atmosphere in here is different: people walk quickly past, or they’re on the phone, typing on a computer, taking notes by hand, doing at least two things at once. From them you feel the urgency surrounding their mission: there are so many faces on the walls!

I think to myself that these people face the same overwhelming stresses I faced just before my near-fatal collapse in Seattle: every case is first priority; in every case, time is critical. How can you triage when so many innocent young
lives are at stake? How can you stand to take the time for lunch, or go home at the end of the day and unwind, maybe spending time with your own small children? These kids looking out at you—and these are only the small
reported
fraction of all cases of missing and/or abused children—represent the most unspeakable of horrors.

Look at one specific photo—pick any at random—and imagine what that child’s been through. Wonder if he or she is still alive, and how long loved ones have been waiting for word. Looking at these faces one by one, you’re struck by the fact that these are normal kids. We speak of how beautiful little Cassie Hansen was, or what a promising track star Alison Parrott was, but the fact is child molesters don’t prey only on the most attractive or talented.

Many of the children on the wall are victims of opportunity more than specific targets: this little boy went to the bathroom alone; this little girl disappeared walking home from school; this one was born to a woman who, abused as a child herself, lacking self-esteem, vulnerable and lonely, turned to the wrong man for companionship.

There is another wall of smiling faces under the heading “Recovered.” When you first see it, you might get goose bumps thinking of emotional reunions. Then they explain: “Recovered” simply means located and returned. It doesn’t necessarily mean located and returned alive.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is a private, nonprofit organization that was established in 1984 under the mandate of that year’s Missing Children Act. The Center works in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and has branch offices in California, Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia. In 1990, it merged with the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, founded by John and Reve Walsh after their six-year-old son was abducted and murdered in Florida in 1981. Today, as described in one NCMEC brochure, it “spearheads national efforts to locate and recover missing children and raises public awareness about ways to prevent child abduction, molestation and sexual exploitation.”

Through the Adam Walsh Children’s Fund, it also provides assistance to missing children’s families, works toward
legislative reforms that would protect children, and educates and motivates families and concerned citizens to get involved personally in protecting our nation’s children.

Since there is no federal law requiring police or other agencies to report cases of missing children to the NCMEC, and since the stigma attached to the crimes—and the fear and embarrassment of victims—is so great, there is only sketchy data on how big the problem really is in this country. According to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, there were about 350,000 reported cases of sexual abuse of children in the United States in 1995, about ninety percent of which were perpetrated by someone the children knew—usually a family member. In its first ten years of operation, the NCMEC’s hotline, 1-800-THE-LOST, took more than 900,000 phone calls from people who wanted to make reports on lost or potentially exploited children. In approximately the same time period, the Center assisted in the recovery of more than 28,000.

The best way to protect your children, though, is to know your enemy. Because of my job and the things I’ve seen, I probably went a little overboard with Pam and my kids, but it’s important to be aware.

Even more than with other violent crimes, people are always asking me what kind of person could do this? What kind of monster could abduct, molest, and/or take the life of an innocent child? Since we know now that the image of the scary-looking stranger in the trench coat is not representative of the bulk of child molesters or abductors, how can we recognize them?

As with perpetrators of other types of offenses, these subjects exhibit behaviors—both before and after committing their crimes—that can help reveal their secret identity.

We’ll start with sexual predators, considered even by other violent criminals to be the lowest of life forms. Just as we talk about the different types of rapists (so-called gentleman rapist versus a sadistic or power assurance rapist), there are different types of child molesters. Special Agent Ken Lanning, my associate for many years at Quantico and among the world’s leading experts on crimes against children, has studied and published extensively on this subject. He gives the definition of a child molester, from a law enforcement
perspective, as someone who “engages in illegal sexual activity with children.” Children are defined as individuals who are under eighteen years old when the criminal activity takes place. Beyond that broad definition, a host of experts including Ken and Dr. Park Elliott Dietz—the noted forensic psychiatrist who has served as a consultant to my unit—define different types of child molesters.