Obsession (17 page)

After the pornography phase, the next step may be for the subject to start following women home, fueling his fantasy with actual potential objects for his desire. He’s committed no crime, nobody may even be cognizant of his actions, but whether he’s consciously aware of it or not, with each step he gets more and more comfortable with the idea of acting out his desires, until someday he’s ready to do it.

Many times, these men will hire prostitutes to act out their inner desires, which is why police often turn to them when investigating serial sexual offenses with an unusual fantasy component. Often, too, sex offenders have consenting relationships with girlfriends or even wives, and elements of their sexual fantasies—and areas of sexual dysfunction—are apparent in these relationships.

The offender’s behavior before, during, and after a sexual assault not only reveals his underlying motives and fantasies, but also provides a valuable clue to his intelligence. The ability to construct and carry out
complex scenarios, requiring a great deal of planning, clearly indicates an offender with a higher intellectual level. That’s not to say they’re rocket scientists—we grade criminals on a curve.

You can see how everything an offender does and says in the commission of a sex crime can be used against him in terms of focusing the investigation. And you can see how difficult it would be for him to disguise these elements, which is why I say we’re not giving away any secrets here. Especially in the realm of sexual offenses, where obsessions are so complex, individual, and personal, there simply would be no impetus for the offender to act any other way. If the aspect of his life that provides him his greatest satisfaction is rape, and he only gets satisfaction in rape by humiliating his victim, then he would be no more motivated to change the way he acts with his victim than he would be to stop assaulting women altogether. And if he will stop because he reads this and recognizes the truth in it—that he rapes because he’s a pathetic little nobody and nothing else makes him feel important—then great; I’ll even refund him the price of the book.

But unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to be shelling out much money on that offer. The sexual predator commits his individual crimes in the way he does because it is what he must do to satisfy himself. It’s who and what he is—the proverbial case of the leopard not being able to change his spots. To change, he must reorient his thinking.

Because they can’t disguise their obsession as they commit their crime, sexual offenders also can’t hide their inherent dangerousness—the likelihood that they will repeat offenses and/or grow increasingly more violent. A lot of people in the mental health profession and even in probation, parole, and other fields of law enforcement will tell you that violent behavior cannot
be predicted. What they’re really saying, though, is that
they
can’t predict it. In fact, without being cocky, simply stating the result of years of research and experience, plenty of us can make those predictions with a high degree of confidence.

Linda Fairstein agrees: “I do think that the behavior, with people who are trained in this field, is predictable. I mean, a good cop who’s done this work, or any colleague of mine, can study the case histories and the defendants’ backgrounds and tell you almost to a certainty which ones will be back and which ones won’t. And that’s the sad fact of it.”

People often ask me if a good profiler can observe a troublesome child and predict whether he’s likely to grow up as a violent threat to those around him. I reply, “Sure we can, but so can any good elementary-school teacher.” It’s not magic; it’s merely a question of careful observation and applying accumulated experience and data. In 1983, a study conducted on sixteen sexually sadistic offenders found that while the core fantasy was fully developed by age sixteen, it took a number of years after that to be encapsulated into the crime that led to the first arrest.

I would add to this the declaration that once someone has committed a serious crime, the best predictor of future violence is the way that crime was perpetrated, because it gives us insight into what the offender’s motivations and fantasies are—and how he may evolve. Ask Linda Fairstein or any other good prosecutor who’s seen as many cases as she has and they’ll tell you the same thing.

And this is particularly true with respect to sexual predators. In the vast majority of cases, once someone has developed the obsession that leads him to commit rape, child molestation, and other heinous sexual crimes, it is going to be very difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to turn him around.

Dr. Stanton Samenow knows whereof he speaks. While most psychiatrists and psychologists have come to their views either from reading and training or whatever bias they held when they entered the profession, Samenow came by his the hard way—by intensively studying the offenders themselves. From a psychologist’s frame of reference, he did much the same thing that I did from a criminologist’s. Joining the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson, who had already been working with hard-core offenders for nine years, Samenow undertook a pioneering study of violent criminals at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Samenow went into the profession believing he could help all of his criminal patients go straight by providing them with the insight necessary to understand their backgrounds, psyches, and why they turned to a life of crime. “Instead of criminals with no insight,” he recalls, “we had criminals
with
insight. They were still antisocial. What I was doing made no difference at all. In fact, if they didn’t have enough excuses for crime earlier, perhaps what I was doing was inadvertently giving them more.”

It was this extensive firsthand experience that made Samenow abandon his earlier views. “I had to throw them away, lead sacred theoretical cows to pasture and slaughter,” he states. The first chapter of the first book of his monumental three-volume study with Yochelson,
The Criminal Personality
, is entitled “The Reluctant Converts.”

“It doesn’t refer to the criminals,” Samenow comments. “It refers to Dr. Yochelson first and later to me, and how reluctantly we gave up what we had been trained in, learned, and practiced. It just didn’t square with what was emerging over and over again. We were dealing with people who were far more victimizers than they were victims of any background or system:
people who had made choices, rather than being hapless victims of adverse environments.”

What has Samenow’s clinical experience taught him about predicting a sexual predator’s future path?

“If you’ve worked with sex offenders—people who have committed these offenses again and again and again—you know that we do not in psychiatry and psychology have a way to change sexual orientation. People who molest kids, for example, they’ve done it and they’ve done it and they’ve done it and they haven’t been caught for a fraction of what they’ve done. To turn these people back into the community knowing that we have nothing to offer them that is going to ensure the safety of kids is unconscionable.”

Samenow doesn’t believe that castration—physical or chemical—provides much of a solution, either. I agree with this premise. Most of the European studies that point to castration’s effectiveness in preventing repeat rapes and child molestations involve candidates who “self-selected” for the “treatment” that is, these were people who specifically wanted help, always the first necessity for change. For years I’ve been saying that if rape is often a crime of anger, and you cut off an individual’s balls against his will, you’re going to end up with one angry individual.

Samenow says it in a somewhat different way: “There’s no exception. Every person I’ve ever interviewed who’s been convicted of rape has committed other sorts of crimes. It may be property crimes, it may be nonsexual assaults. The issue is not only the sex crime itself. It is the mind of this kind of person. It is the person who seeks conquest of other people. Rape is an avenue for conquest; obviously it’s a sex crime. But to say that if you castrate a person, this is going to alter the entire criminal personality of this predatory individual, I don’t think there’s any evidence for that.”

We know from our research that certain behaviors can be seen as stepping-stone offenses, working up to rape. Ronnie Shelton’s career is a perfect example of this. There were warning signs in his life much earlier, even, than his arrests for voyeurism in the late 1980s.

In 1978, when he was sixteen, Shelton approached a twenty-nine-year-old nextdoor neighbor he had admired and fantasized about, knocking on her door and essentially asking her outright for sex. When she rebuffed his adolescent sexual advances, he pulled a handgun (belonging to his father) and tried to control her by hitting her with the butt of the gun. When she tried fighting back, reaching for a hammer lying nearby, he took it and hit her head to subdue her. She tricked him into believing she was having a heart attack and was able to get away from him, although he fired two shots after her as she ran from her home.

Shelton pleaded guilty to attempted rape and was sent to a medium-security institution for juvenile offenders with psychological problems. He spent eight months at the Training Center for Youth in Columbus, Ohio, and was released to return home and enroll back in high school.

It is obvious, looking back to that original offense, that Ronnie Shelton learned from his experience—not to avoid doing it again, only to do it better and more effectively. For one thing, he figured out the direct approach didn’t work for him, which I believe led to his decision (consciously or not) to use a surprise approach in his later, adult attacks. This gave him control from the outset, rendering him more powerful than his victims before, during, and after the assaults, which was much more satisfying for him. Like most “successful” repeat offenders, he also moved on to strangers, limiting his risk of identification and capture should something go wrong.

We can also take lessons from Shelton’s early crime.
Without pointing fingers, it has to seem to most people that a young man who could bludgeon his next-door neighbor in an aborted rape attempt is a potential future threat. He’s already proven himself highly dangerous once—and that was just an occasion when he was caught. There were others, and on a statistical basis, I would expect there to have been more than an equal number of incidents in which he wasn’t caught. Whether he received therapy or not during his institutionalization, the manner of the crime indicates the young man had a lot of anger and not a lot of self-control—a dangerous combination. So at the least, any later offenses should be viewed in the context of this earlier crime—committed as a juvenile or not. Events as simple as barroom brawls should be seen as warning signs that he’s still violent, just as suicide attempts, domestic violence against family members and girlfriends, as well as the “nuisance crimes” for which he’d been arrested, all needed to be viewed as part of a dangerous “big picture”—a life in complete disarray, a chronic, proven violent offender—rather than as isolated incidents.

This is an ongoing problem throughout the criminal justice system. It drove me crazy during and after the O. J. Simpson trial, for instance, to hear first defense attorneys and, later, jurors proclaiming that this was a trial for murder, not domestic abuse. The implication was that the defendant’s established record toward his wife was not relevant to the question at hand. Come on, people! Do you think someone just wakes up one morning and thinks to himself, “Today I begin my career as a violent criminal”? There is usually an escalation, whether we’re talking about a Peeping Tom who evolves into a rapist or a wife-batterer who evolves into a murderer. Patterns of behavior cannot be ignored.

Like Ronnie Shelton in Cleveland, Joseph Thompson
in New Zealand started getting in trouble with the law early, at an even younger age. At ten, he was arrested for stealing a watch; the Children’s Court placed him under supervision. His family life was one of disruption, poverty, and neglect. He was moved repeatedly between relatives, all of whom had more children than they could comfortably feed and house, or lifestyles not conducive to raising children. At twelve, Thompson and a brother—two of the twelve children born to his mother and father, not including siblings conceived in his parents’ other relationships—were picked up by a social worker as they loitered in the street. Their mother finally came for them after the Department of Social Welfare advertised in the local news for the parents to claim the boys. From that point on, Thompson became an accomplished thief and was arrested as a young teenager in connection with a series of robberies. He joined a gang and was arrested for offenses ranging from car theft to drunk driving. By his early twenties, he’d graduated to violence, fighting in public after getting drunk. His twelve-year string of rapes began as many single rapes do, when a burglar—someone with a lot of practice getting in and out of homes unseen—saw an exciting opportunity present itself, tried something new, and found he liked it and could get away with it.

During my prison interviews of serial offenders, I talked to another sexual predator whose career started early. Monte Rissell—at home in the Richmond Penitentiary when I met with him—started raping and murdering women as a teenager after spending his earlier years in trouble for offenses ranging from writing obscenities on the walls at school to using drugs, even shooting a cousin with a BB gun. By the time he was twelve, he was stealing cars and committing burglary. As detailed in
Mindhunter
, Rissell committed his first rape-murder as a high school student following
a precipitating Stressor. Upset over losing his girlfriend, he drank some beer, smoked some marijuana, and when an opportunity presented itself—in this case, a prostitute who came home late one night, alone in the parking area of the apartment complex where she and Rissell both lived—he raped and murdered her. He went on to rape and kill four more women in the Alexandria, Virginia, area before his arrest.

Each of these rapists came from a less-than-ideal upbringing. In addition to Thompson’s background of poverty, neglect, and reported sexual and physical abuse, Shelton described years of physical abuse at the hands of his parents, and Rissell claimed that when his parents divorced, if he’d been allowed to live with his father, rather than his mother, he would have grown up to be a lawyer instead of a rapist and murderer.