Obsession (18 page)

I think that’s stretching things a bit. After all, consider how many other children with equally difficult beginnings do not choose to become violent offenders. But I would assert that the various points where they got into trouble—and the escalation of behavior from the initial simpler offenses to more aggressive, daring, and/or violent acts—indicated they were moving in that direction and that some form of intervention was necessary.

All of the offenders described up to now have been members of the highly dangerous class of sexual predators—they get whatever satisfaction they derive from their crimes from the hunt and chase, rather than the sexual elements. Their offenses fit a pattern of victimizing that occurs over and over. Whatever their obsession, the rape experience for them never quite lives up to their needs and expectations, so they continue to hunt and victimize, always looking for the one that will be different, that will finally satisfy them. Of
course, if they did find their “ideal” situation—where the thrill of the hunt and the total domination of the victim completely fulfills them—they would still only be sated for a time, after which they’d be out on the hunt again, looking for another experience just as good as the last one. This is, after all, what they do in life; this is their obsession, and they will want to repeat it. Simply reliving it in their minds will not be enough to last a lifetime. Compound this with the high this insignificant, underemployed, self-doubting loser gets from outwitting the system, and you can see why the pattern is repeated.

Dr. Park Dietz of Newport Beach, California, is among the leading forensic psychiatrists in the United States. Our paths and careers have intersected continually. He has been a longtime consultant to my unit at Quantico, and he readily admits that he has learned a lot from watching us work, too. Dietz explains it this way:

“What the predator discovers when he actually commits the [initial] offense is that, first of all, it wasn’t as good as he expected it to be. Secondly, that it wasn’t as difficult to get away as he expected it to be. And because of those two things that he learns, he thinks, ‘Well, here’s what I’ll have to do to improve and make it better. And why not, since I didn’t get caught that time.’ Hence, he goes on to the second one, adding a few things that he thinks will improve it. Unfortunately for him, and for us, it’s never as good as he expects it to be because it can’t really match the fantasy. He never gains as much control as he imagines he will have.”

When a predator realizes, after each successive experience, that his fantasy hasn’t been completely fulfilled, rather than look for another outlet—a productive, legal one—he gets more frustrated and (depending on the type of predator) even angrier. This
is why we often see an escalation of violence in an UNSUB’s series of crimes. And this is why I say that until a predator is locked up, dies, or grows too old and feeble to commit his crime of choice, he will not stop.

But it’s important here to get one thing straight: not every rapist is a true sexual predator. There are some offenders who commit rape as a result of a combination of precipitating Stressors, emotional catalysts often fueled by drugs or alcohol, and situational factors. This is not to say this type can’t help himself or shouldn’t be punished for his crime—I think I’ve made myself clear on both of those points. But this type of person is not someone who would necessarily make sexual assault a career choice, and this is what makes him the only type of rapist for whom I believe there is any hope of true rehabilitation. He was functioning before the crime, and he may be able to pull his life back together and avoid the combination of factors that led to the problem.

But we have to look at the total picture to make this determination. This type of subject does not have a history of violent assaults. Instead, this one event represents the bottom of a downward spiral in his life: perhaps he’s lost his job and his wife is pregnant, or maybe his wife or girlfriend left him. The offense is not planned and the victim is usually one of opportunity, such as a neighbor. A scenario might be that the guy starts drinking heavily, depressed over his job and/ or women problems, and goes next door to talk to a sympathetic friend. His buddy isn’t home, but the man’s girlfriend—who’s always been friendly and seems to care about her neighbor’s troubles—is home, and she’s alone. The subject continues drinking, starts behaving inappropriately, one thing leads to another in his mind, and he takes advantage of the situation and assaults the woman. Analysis of his behavior
shows him to be a power-reassurance rapist, and he displays genuine remorse for his offense. If, on the other hand, the analysis shows him to be an anger or sadistic type, the assumption has to be that he has a potential for continued predatory violence.

His postoffense behavior is critical to an assessment of whether he will be able to turn his life back around. If the rape was truly more situational than anything else, he will turn himself in or readily admit his crime, shaken himself by the event and by the scope of his problems. This behavior is completely opposite from what a career rapist does. If, in contrast, the subject runs out postoffense to establish an alibi, lies in the police interview, never admits the crime, and never shows remorse, then my hope for his future dims considerably.

Says Linda Fairstein, “I don’t think every rapist is a sexual predator. I think stranger serial rapists certainly are. I think pedophiles are in that category. Both of those tend, once they do their act successfully, to repeat them over and over again. I have certainly had the date-rape offender who assaults once in a particular situation and will probably never offend again. Some of these people respond well to either incarceration, because they never want to be back and they learn from it, or from rehabilitation as it exists. But the category that we are calling predators, I think there is no known form of rehabilitation that works. I have seen no model of it that works in any degree as well as the people who are running it claim it works.”

I bring up this last type of rapist not to confuse the issue but to point out why it is so complicated to try to render definitive advice about what to do to avoid rape in any given situation and what to do with convicted rapists. Each case needs to be looked at individually, and every person who has the potential to rape
(or rape again) must be evaluated in light of his previous history and behavior.

Says Fairstein, “I’ve had scores of cases in the predator category where, for ten years, a guy has been a burglar without exhibiting any sexual assault tendencies. And then he hits on an apartment in which a woman’s alone and vulnerable and rapes her and likes it and begins to pick that up as part of his criminal behavior.”

The burglar who rapes once because it’s easy and convenient, while despicable, doesn’t worry me nearly so much as the type Fairstein just described who falls into it accidentally, but keeps on doing it. The key word here is
pattern
.

And this attention to patterns of behavior applies across the board. Children who start out as trouble-makers need to be recognized so that they receive intervention early enough to foster development in a more positive direction. Juveniles and young adults who’ve established a violent pattern of behavior must be seen as the danger to society they are, regardless of their age, and treated appropriately to protect their potential future victims. And once a crime has been committed, everyone in the criminal justice system—from the cop who takes the victim statement to prosecutors, to psychiatrists who make evaluations for the court, to juries and judges—needs to look carefully at the details of the crime, the behavior of the offender. What is the real likelihood this could happen again?

Without being too paranoid, all law-abiding citizens need to do some profiling of their own. You can’t necessarily stop a sexual predator in his tracks, but you can lessen the chances that you will be his victim. By this, I certainly don’t mean that victims of sexual assault have done anything wrong or anything to deserve what happens to them. I do mean, though, that sometimes good common sense can be an invaluable
commodity, even if it seems at times to be inconvenient.

Is it worth going out of your way nine times needlessly if the tenth time saves you from a bad situation? Every individual has to do her own math, weigh the trade-offs for herself, but for myself and those I care about, I’d never want to be vulnerable in a situation that could have been avoided with a little planning.

You can bet that the bad guys are planning, and it only has to happen once.

R
apes are not always easy to detect. By that I don’t mean that sexual offenders are good at covering up their crimes; I mean that a crime that appears on its surface to be a rape—even a rape “gone bad”—can actually be something else, A classic example of this was Linda Fairstein’s so-called Preppie Murder case in the late 1980s.

My unit at Quantico got involved in that one through a somewhat unusual route. Fairstein had seen an article on us in the
New York Times
a couple of months before, about how we came up with behavioral profiles of unknown offenders. So she called us to say, “We’ve got exactly the reverse situation. We know who the killer is, but we don’t have a motive. Can you try and reverse the process for me? We don’t have to prove motive in court, but everybody’s going to be asking why he did it, and it’ll be easier to get a conviction if we can explain it to them.”

What had happened was this:

Around 6:00
A.M
. on the morning of Tuesday, August 26, 1986, a mutual funds trader named Pat Reilly
was riding her bike for exercise in Central Park. Behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she stopped when she noticed an apparently female figure lying on the grass. At first she thought it was someone sleeping, perhaps a homeless person. But when she got closer, she realized it was a young woman, her denim jacket and shirt pushed up around the top of her chest, her skirt bunched around her waist. Below that, she was naked. She wasn’t moving or breathing. Reilly called 911 from the nearest phone, and an NYPD patrol car arrived at the scene a few minutes later.

The first officers on-scene quickly examined the woman and realized she was dead. They called for detectives. By now a crowd of onlookers was forming at the stone wall at the edge of the park.

“When the police found her body in Central Park connected to nothing and nobody, the first thing they believed was that she had been killed somewhere else and deposited in the park,” Fairstein explains. Parks, woods, and rivers are always favorite body-dumping sites for killers. Maybe she was a prostitute, judging from the time of night the crime must have happened. Prostitutes are always vulnerable. A stranger could have picked her up, killed her, dumped her there.

But in this case, the officers had misinterpreted the physical evidence. “They missed one-half of the crime scene,” says Fairstein. “Her underwear was some distance away under a tree.” When we analyzed the case, we agreed that this was where she had died.

Normally in this type of situation, identifying the victim is a major issue. But this time it wasn’t. The woman was carrying an ID. Her name was Jennifer Dawn Levin. She was eighteen years old, five feet eight inches tall, 120 pounds, dark-haired, and beautiful. The medical examiner determined that she had been strangled.

Her parents were notified, always the single toughest
part, emotionally, of any homicide case. They had divorced when Jennifer was only a small child, and she had gone with her mother to live in California, before coming back to Long Island some years later. When she was fourteen, she had left her mother’s house in Long Island and gone to live a more exciting life in Manhattan with her well-to-do father and his second wife.

Jennifer’s father told detectives she had been out with friends the previous night and mentioned the ones he knew about. Those friends mentioned other friends, and before long, the police had a pretty complete narrative of where Jennifer Levin had been the previous night, when she’d been there, and whom she’d been with. Detectives did not tell any of the people they interviewed that their friend was dead, only that she was missing. The last person they could determine who had seen her alive was Robert Chambers, a good-looking twenty-year-old with whom Jennifer had been very taken.

Two detectives went to the apartment on the Upper East Side where Chambers lived with his mother, wanting to know where he and Jennifer had gone after they were seen together leaving a bar called Dorrian’s Red Hand on Second Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, how long he could account for her whereabouts, and if he knew whom she was with after she left him. He agreed to go to the Central Park precinct with the detectives to tell them whatever he knew. As with Jennifer’s other friends, they didn’t tell Robert that she was dead.

One odd thing the detectives noticed was that Chambers’s face was scratched in several places. When they asked, he told them his cat had done it accidentally while he was playing with her, tossing her in the air. They were suspicious, but at that point, there was no reason to disbelieve him.

Det. Mickey McEntee questioned Chambers in the interrogation room after first Mirandizing him. Chambers told McEntee that even though several of Jennifer’s friends had seen her walk out of Dorrian’s with him about four-thirty in the morning, they’d parted company as soon as they went out the door. She had gone to buy cigarettes at the deli across the street and he’d gone home, stopping on the way to get some doughnuts at a shop at Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue.

In addition to the scratches on his face, the detectives noticed some cuts on his fingers. That was easily explainable, too, Chambers said. He had been sanding a floor for a woman upstairs in his building and the sanding machine had gotten away from him. Throughout the encounter with the police, Chambers was polite, cooperative, and confident.

Two other detectives took over the questioning—John Lafferty and Lt. Jack Doyle, commander of Manhattan North Homicide. Chambers stuck by his story. Then McEntee came back in with another Manhattan North detective named Martin Gill. It was Gill’s last day on the job. The next day he was retiring from the force.