Free Criminal Minds by Jeff Mariotte Page B

he found that a card had been slipped between two pages in the “Moving and Storage” section. He showed his colleagues, and they canvassed the nearby storage facilities. At one, the manager recognized DeBardeleben’s picture and opened up his unit.
    Inside, they found much counterfeit money, a single printing plate, bubble lights for posing as law enforcement, drugs and drug paraphernalia, and much more. They also found things that hinted at another pastime they hadn’t known about: a bloody chain, women’s phone numbers and addresses, panties, a dildo, handcuffs, and lubricant. They also found hundreds of sexually explicit photographs—stills that showed what kind of man they’d captured. Audiotapes made it all real in an even more horrible way.
    What DeBardeleben had recorded were torture sessions. His voice could be heard, along with the voices of women in intense agony, begging their captor to stop what he was doing or kill them and be done with it. The victims who survived his attacks reported a man who was obsessed with causing pain, who forced them to perform the most degrading acts imaginable, and who photographed it all and threatened to make the photos public if they told anyone.
    With this information, the Secret Service began to track DeBardeleben’s movements during the last few years. None of what they found was pleasant.
    DeBardeleben was a pure sexual sadist, the kind that is categorized as an anger-excitation rapist. He had murdered at least two women and possibly many more; however, by the time he was sentenced to 375 years in prison on rape, kidnapping, robbery, sodomy, and forgery charges, the prosecutors from other vicinities decided not to bother pursuing convictions on the murders. Not only had DeBardeleben recorded his crimes on audiotape and in photographs, he had also filled notebook after notebook with his own writings, a diary of perversity that stunned all who read it.
    Anger-excitation rapists are the most dangerous kind of rapist, because the suffering of their victims is what stimulates them sexually. That is, it’s not the act of inflicting pain that they respond to; it’s the suffering of their victims from that pain. Edmund Kemper was not a sexual sadist, because his dismemberment of his victims was postmortem. A sexual sadist like DeBardeleben wouldn’t bother with that—once the victim is beyond pain, there’s no point to it. Former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, who has done in-depth studies of sexual sadism, calls sexual sadists “the great white shark of sexual crimes.”
    DeBardeleben was born on March 20, 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father was rigid and controlling, and his mother was an alcoholic who punished him frequently and whom DeBardeleben started beating up when he reached his teens. His younger brother eventually committed suicide. His first arrest, on a weapons charge, was at age sixteen. He joined the army but was court-martialed and booted out. He was married five times, and he treated his wives as horribly as he treated his victims, bending them to his will, punishing them, and making them participate in his criminal activities.
    DeBardeleben made tapes on which he played both roles, running through a script dictated by his own internal fantasies and acting out the role of the victim, begging for mercy and screaming in pain. He also sometimes dressed in women’s clothing when acting out these fantasies.
    But it’s his writings that are most illuminating. “The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism,” DeBardeleben wrote. “The central impulse is to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god, to do with her as one pleases, to humiliate her, to enslave her are means to this end. And the most radical aim is to make her suffer. Since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her. To force her