Obsession (14 page)

Prior to his ultimate arrest, Thompson was picked up by the police for a variety of offenses that should have set off warning buzzers. In addition to the collar in April 1984 when he was discovered in a woman’s bedroom and claimed to be a burglar, he was arrested and even served time on other charges, and he was picked up on drug charges as well as numerous driving offenses. We know that sex offenders often have prior records of non-sex-related crimes, and that burglary is
a common precursor to rape. Certainly, if someone is arrested for burglary while a series of rapes is being investigated, that person should be evaluated as a suspect for the rapes as well.

Within the police organization, too, different departments need to communicate with one another. In September 1990, Thompson was arrested for dangerous driving in a car that was described a week later on TV when the program
Crimewatch
featured the vehicle in its coverage of a recent rape. The traffic cop who’d stopped him never made the connection, which was a tremendous embarrassment to the force when this mistake was later realized.

Shelton had his share of lucky breaks, too. In late spring of 1985, a woman called the police after spotting him hanging around first-floor apartment windows. When questioned at the scene, Shelton said he was trying to find an address and thought he had it wrong. The officer checked him out and found no outstanding warrants and so let him go.

This pattern repeated itself several times over the next few years, as Shelton was arrested for voyeurism and other related offenses. In February 1987 he was arrested for criminal trespass after someone saw him—in a ski mask—standing outside a neighbor’s apartment window. He told police he was looking for a lost dog; the cop never made the connection between this and the serial rapist they were looking for. Later that year, Shelton was even called in for questioning after police tracked him in connection with a Peeping Tom report. At the time, Shelton was convinced they had him, but it turned out they were looking for a suspect in a burglary in that area. They knew that the burglary UNSUB had cut himself on a window, and when Shelton’s hands came up clean and undamaged, they let him go. In December 1988, he was arrested for voyeurism in the middle of the West
Side Rapist’s stomping grounds, with several rings of master keys to an apartment building in his pocket. Still, he was charged only with the minor offense and let out on bond the same day.

These are only some of the more egregious examples of times
somebody
should have been suspicious. We’re talking about mostly sex-related offenses, in the vicinity of numerous crime scenes, and a guy who looks a hell of a lot like the composite drawing the police had been updating and circulating for years.

Even Shelton was surprised the police let him go so easily. He couldn’t believe they didn’t know that peeping was how he found his future victims.

Finally, in some ways, Shelton represents a short-coming of the criminal justice system. In 1982, he and a girlfriend had staged a fake robbery at a money exchange in Colorado, where he was living at the time. He ended up with a fine and a suspended sentence and moved back to Ohio. The whole time he was committing these rapes, destroying lives, he was on probation.

Before we condemn his probation officer, though, it should be noted that the guy was distrustful of Shelton and did his best to get him off the streets, but simply didn’t have the power or authority to do more than he did, which was get him arrested for violation of probation in 1986 (following an assault conviction related to a fight at a bar). The officer also wrote to the authorities in Colorado to inform them that Shelton was in violation of his probation agreement; aside from the arrest, Shelton didn’t have steady employment, hadn’t sent full restitution out to Colorado for the robbery, and kept changing addresses, among other violations. The officer requested that Colorado extradite him and lock him up. The answer came back within days: Colorado didn’t want him, he was Ohio’s headache now.

Shelton’s story and Thompson’s confirm something we’ve got to get across to those in the criminal justice system. It is that, in many cases, early crimes are a harbinger of future, more serious violence. When we see someone with a long arrest record for voyeurism or breaking and entering, we should consider him a likely candidate for future rape—if he hasn’t done so already. We know that many of the juvenile offenders of today become more violent adult offenders tomorrow.

Between the two of them, Shelton and Thompson admitted to raping more than seventy women and young girls. Who knows how many others they victimized—women who were just too afraid to report the crime. We owe it to all of them and to future victims to learn from these cases so that the next time we can spare potential victims the pain and suffering these people went through.

I
’ve seen the look in the eyes often enough to know right away what it means.

Most often it’ll be when I’m giving a speech or part of a seminar or other public presentation. It happened several times when I was out on the road in connection with the publication of
Journey into Darkness
.

Just as we’re finishing up, she’ll make her way to the front of the room and say something to the effect of, “Mr. Douglas, I wonder if I could talk to you a moment.”

“Sure,” I’ll reply. There might still be a number of people around me, some wanting to follow up on things I’ve said during my presentation, others posing the single question I’m asked most often—How can I get into behavioral profiling?

“Why don’t you wait until everyone else is gone?” I’ll suggest. “Then we’ll have some time to talk.”

She waits patiently until the last of the crowd drifts off. Then she tells me her story.

It could be someone she knew well, or a total stranger. It could have happened in a public park or when she came home unexpectedly and surprised a burglar. It could have been a mild-mannered individual
who apologized for everything he was doing to her and kept asking for reassurance that he wasn’t hurting her, or it could have been a man who tortured her simply to hear her scream and beg for her life. He could have driven up beside her in the mall parking lot as she was walking to her car and pulled her into the back of his windowless van, or he could have been a guy she’d been dating for the last six months. She could have been twelve when it happened to her, or she could have been sixty-eight. The common denominators are that a man did it to her, he did it to her against her will, and her life has not been the same—indeed, in some ways, she feels her life has not been her own—since then.

Sometimes, if the rapist hasn’t been caught, I can suggest proactive strategies for identifying him or somehow getting him to come forward. Other times, when the offender has been tried and convicted, I’m asked to explain what it is that motivates a man do this to an innocent woman. And then sometimes, I can only listen and offer my sympathy, joining my outrage with hers. Whatever the case, I’m no longer surprised when women want to talk with me about these horrible experiences. Traditionally, sexual assault has been the one vastly underreported crime because people didn’t want to talk about it, partly because sexual assault is the one crime in which the victim usually has been evaluated for complicity in her own victimization. With the advent of the women’s movement and vigorous legal advocacy by people such as Linda Fairstein, head of the New York County District Attorney’s Office Sex Crimes Unit, this is beginning to change. But not nearly fast enough.

This increasing awareness, and the public outrage that goes with it, is a positive and hopeful trend. There’s another trend I’ve noticed that isn’t nearly so positive from a personal security standpoint, however
understandable and well-intentioned it may be. And that is to lump all rapes and sexual assaults together—to say, in effect, rape is rape and every one is just as damaging.

Yes, absolutely all rape is horrible and each sexual assault leaves its victim, her partner, friends, and loved ones devastated. I’ve spent enough time on rape cases and with rape victims to know this to be true. But I’ve also learned something else: we do a grave disservice to all victims and potential victims if we don’t take the time and care to distinguish between the various established types of rapes and rapists. It may seem more sympathetic and caring to proclaim, for instance, that date rape is the same as stranger rape, but that just isn’t true: so much depends on the circumstances of the assault. To assert that a date rape not involving a weapon and that does not cause the victim to fear for her life is the same as a stranger-abduction rape at knife- or gunpoint where the victim is brutally beaten oversimplifies the situation and hinders our ability to defend against both crimes and their different types of perpetrators.

There are certain things that all sexual assaults share. But what they don’t share is, in some ways, even more important if we are to learn prevention strategies from them and help victims recover from their individual traumas.

Those of us at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at Quantico—the umbrella organization that encompassed my Investigative Support Unit—have studied rape extensively enough to devise specific categories and subcategories. Much of this was based on pioneering work that had come before, including research by Dr. Ann Burgess, as well as my colleagues Special Agents Roy Hazelwood and Ken Lanning. In 1992, after more than ten years of investigation and study, these categories,
along with similar breakdowns of homicide and arson, were organized into the
Crime Classification Manual
, a standard system for investigating and classifying violent crimes, which I wrote along with Profs. Ann W. and Allen Burgess and former Special Agent Robert Ressler. An understanding of these categories won’t help the potential rapist become better at his particular obsession any more than it would make an addict who robs convenience stores for drug money turn to extortion or some other means for funding. But it could help the rest of us avoid him or, if we can’t, increase the odds in our favor. I say “we” because in one way or another, this is a crime that affects all of us.

In our research, we reviewed case files, victim statements, police reports and court testimony, school reports and psychiatric evaluations, parole and probation records, and records of family and developmental history. After all the analysis, we broke rapists down into four basic types: the power-reassurance rapist, the exploitative rapist, the anger rapist, and the sadistic rapist. We also broke down the crime of rape into more than fifty subgroups. Over the years, different researchers have assigned their own labels to the typologies but the behavior is so consistent within each that the types should be recognizable regardless of what we call them. What do we mean by each of these types of offenders?

The Power-Reassurance Rapist
feels himself to be very inadequate, not the type with whom women would voluntarily become involved. So he compensates for these feelings of male inadequacy by forcing women to have sex with him. All the while, as the designation suggests, he is looking for reassurance of his own power and potency. This type has sometimes been referred to as the gentleman rapist, or even classified
as an “unselfish” rapist, in large part because his offenses, while traumatic, are usually less physically damaging to his victim than those of the other types of offenders. Although they certainly do not all behave this way, some may apologize during their assault or ask their victim if he’s hurting her—a question that serves his need for reassurance more than it expresses a genuine concern for her. The kind terms
gentleman
and
unselfish
therefore are really only applicable within the context of the full spectrum of rapist types out there.

This type tends to be a loner who fantasizes that his victim is actually enjoying the experience and might even fall in love with him as a result. He may even contact the victim after the attack and ask her to go out with him. Of course, the reality of the rape can’t live up to his fantasies: instead of winning over his reluctant lover, he’s terrorized, hurt, and angered an innocent person, and most rapists of this type will admit that they don’t enjoy the sex with their victims. The experience, then, will not satisfy his underlying obsession and he will have to try again with another woman.

Not surprisingly, victims of choice are generally about the same age or younger and usually of the same race as the perpetrator. If he dates at all, the women will be younger and less sophisticated than he; this is the only way he can feel equal. Because of his feelings of inadequacy, he gains control by surprise; he doesn’t have the self-confidence or skills to con his way into a victim’s apartment smoothly and is more likely to break in in the middle of the night, for example. When we delve into this type’s past, we generally see a history of various unusual or bizarre masturbatory fantasies and often voyeurism, exhibitionism, cross-dressing, and/or obscene phone calls. He frequents adult bookstores or movies and collects pornography.
If he has a specific sexual dysfunction, it is likely to involve premature ejaculation, which would be exhibited in consensual relationships he may have and which he would report as a problem (from his point of view only) in his rapes.

He probably prefers the night and operates within his own residential or work area—in other words, within a very prescribed comfort zone—and usually travels to the crime scene on foot. If he is a serial offender, this is particularly true of his first offenses. He uses a weapon of opportunity, often something he finds at the crime scene, his patterns of crime are generally consistent, and the entire act, from the time he overpowers his victim until the time he leaves, is relatively brief, sometimes as little as five or ten minutes. He won’t use profanity or try to demean or humiliate his victim to the extent that the other types will, but may require her to recite a “script” in which she praises his lovemaking or expresses desire for him.