Dark Dreams

by Roy Hazelwood

The “monster” who committed these heinous crimes was a well-groomed, middle-aged man, six feet tall, and weighing about 185 pounds. In one of the photographs, he is wearing a police uniform; in the other, he is dressed as an airline pilot. Is this the image you expected for a sexual criminal?

Uh, well, yeah actually. That’s exactly what I pictured

In fact, the mentally ill are responsible for less than 3 percent of sexual crimes. Such people usually pose a greater threat to themselves than others. Richard Ramirez was an exception to the rule.

A wonderful and wise sociology professor once said to me, “Roy, when you have more than one answer to a question, you don’t have the answer!”

I disagree

behavioral studies do not suggest that men who watch or listen to them are, as a result, driven to commit crimes. Certainly offenders with preexisting fantasies might seek out such stimulation and even attempt to incorporate some of its elements into future crimes. But to say that a cause-and-effect relationship exists is simply not supported by scientific inquiry.

I dislike pornography for a multitude of reasons, but speaking as a professional, I have to say that I don’t believe that it causes sexual violence.

I get big “my wife will read this” vibes. I mean, he might honestly dislike all pornography. Seems somewhat unlikely.

Still another theory, recently advanced by so-called evolutionary psychologists, takes the radical view that rape is a natural biological phenomenon. To paraphrase one adherent, rape is an unfortunate but nonetheless adaptive strategy for passing on one’s genes that is seen in a number of animals besides man, including fish, birds, and other primates. In my view, this reasoning will go the way of the extra Y chromosome theory.

Uh, rape is a natural phenomenon and so is murder, and so are just about all human behaviors because humans are animals. Natural doesn’t mean GOOD. The author of this book has weird ideas.

A professional woman attacked a state police officer with a heavy, blunt object after he had stopped her for DWI. Her position at trial was temporary insanity due to PMS, and it was successful.

That’s fucking terrible

The rapist achieves his gratification, not from the sexual release, but from the thrill of domination, control, and power.

Another misperception is that sadists are aroused by the infliction of pain. In fact, what excites the sadist is the suffering of the victim. It is true that sexual sadists use physical and/or psychological pain to produce suffering, but the suffering is the most important thing to them.

The longer a sexual offender fantasizes prior to committing his crimes, the more specific his desired victim’s characteristics will be.

A long ball slugger, for example, goes about the game very differently than the spray hitter. Third basemen and pitchers do not see the action on the field in the same way.

Haha, I don’t know enough about sports to picture this analogy

Robert Leroy Anderson, for example, demonstrated at least two paraphilias: sexual bondage (not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a paraphilia but generally accepted as one) and sexual sadism.

This dude is pretty old fashioned. Every married couple with handcuffs has a paraphilia

Again Mrs. Smith notified the police, who once more tried to trap him. She deposited the bras in the bin as directed, and officers kept close watch on it throughout the night and into the next morning. They saw nothing. Believing the subject had decided not to retrieve the bras, the police went to the bin only to discover they were gone! Unknown to the police, the container had a trapdoor on the back side. Sometime during the night the offender must have crawled through the vacant lot to the bin, opened the trapdoor, and retrieved his prize—Mrs. Smith’s two bras.

Competence

I once consulted on a serial murder case in Florence, Italy, where the killer struck once every seven years!

If he’s talking about “The Monster of Florence” then uh... that guy’s still not caught

I have encountered successful people who display all the hallmarks of the antisocial personality disorder, commonly called psychopaths, in disciplines as diverse as law enforcement, medicine, sales, professional sports, and television evangelism.

These fields are less diverse than the statement would imply, but okay

Yet reality can never fulfill fantasy’s expectations. Why? Because fantasy is always perfect. Mike DeBardeleben surely recognized this but was not deterred. He was determined to make the criminal act conform as closely to his deviant fantasy as possible.

When I have the opportunity to interview one of these men, I always ask if the death penalty would have deterred him from his crime. Without exception, he’ll say no. I asked one rapist why, and he responded by asking me a series of questions. Had I ever skipped school? Yes. Did I know in advance that I would be punished if caught? Yes. Then why did I do it? Because I didn’t think I would be caught, I said. There you go, he said.

When “Dark Secrets” came into my possession, I prevailed upon my wife-to-be, Peggy Driver, to type the manuscript. She presented me with fifty-seven pages of appalling typescript, double spaced. The fact that she later married me, despite the assignment I had pressed on her, attests to Peggy’s selfless nature.

So your wife 1000% read this book

But the defense attorney had forgotten the first rule of a lawyer in court: Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.

“Discovery,” the chemist Albert Szent-Györgyi once said, “consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”

For example, Ted Bundy abducted and killed two women in one afternoon at Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle. The subsequent search of the surrounding woodlands turned up twenty-six pairs of women’s underpants, none belonging to either of Bundy’s victims.

I prefer to think of the human mind as an immense hard drive, a massive collection of data from which nothing of potential value to its owner is ever deleted.

You can think this, but this isn’t true

Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, which houses relics of some of the darkest crimes in English history.

Ooh, I wanna go

In 1991, a jury found Byers guilty of the killings, and he was sentenced to 165 years in prison. He would be eligible for parole after 35 years.

This makes no sense