remember Roy as a short guy with peculiar interests,” Dr. Dietz says. “I shared those interests, and that’s why I liked him.”
Dietz, the son of a Camp Hill, Pennsylvania physician, is today as central a figure among forensic psychiatrists as Hazelwood is in law enforcement.
Among the infamous defendants Dietz has evaluated for both prosecution and defense attorneys have been Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee’s flesh-eating serial killer; Arthur Shawcross, the upstate New York serial killer; Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who murdered her two sons; John du Pont; and Betty Broderick of San Diego, whose murder of both her ex-husband and his wife prompted not one, but two made-for-TV movies.
Dietz has also done pioneer studies of stalkers, andworked as a security consultant to celebrities including Michael Jackson and Cher.
He operates the Threat Assessment Group in Newport Beach, California, a consultancy to government and business which focuses on the potential threats posed by disgruntled employees and solutions for dealing with them.
Dr. Dietz’s fascination with aberrant minds started even earlier in his life than did Hazelwood’s.
“I can trace that interest in odd behavior back at least as far as my boyhood, when I tagged along with my mother when she did volunteer work at the state hospital in Harrisburg, near where we lived,” he recalls.
“She’d organize Christmas parties. I’d help with refreshments and decorations and would sometimes dance with the patients.”
Dietz says he never seriously doubted that he’d follow his father into medicine, or that his specialty would be psychiatry. However, as his interest in odd behavior deepened, he began to question what sort of light, if any, psychiatry could shed on these subjects.
A premed student at Cornell in the late 1960s, where he studied biology and psychology, Dietz seriously considered bolting for the University of California at Berkeley to take up criminology.
Then one day in the Cornell bookstore he discovered a text,
Forensic Medicine,
by the British physician Keith Simpson. The experience proved an epiphany every bit as profound for him as the discovery of Harvey Glatman had been for Roy Hazelwood.
It changed Park Dietz’s life.
“That book was my salvation,” he says. “It was full of dead babies and skeletons and bodies in trunks. It made me see that there was a way to do criminology and medicine at the same time, so that my parents would pay for my education and I could do what I wanted to do.”
His senior honors thesis at Cornell was on the sociology of deviance. When he later studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Dietz worked in the same medical examiner’s office Roy Hazelwood had on his AFIP fellowship five years earlier. It was in the Baltimore morgue, coincidentally, that Dietz encountered his own first autoerotic fatality, a young girl who’d hanged herself with her panty hose.
Forensic psychiatry afforded Park Dietz an avenue of access to explore strange behavior, the stranger the better. In an early and memorable case, he interviewed a young schizophrenic who, during a psychotic episode, deliberately had placed his right arm across a train track for the limb to be severed by a passing locomotive. When the psychiatrist wondered
why
the gory self-amputation, the patient said the explanation lay in the Gospel according to Matthew, and quoted to Dietz the applicable verses.
“Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”
Where forensic psychiatry disappointed Dietz was in the way it subordinated scientific inquiry to the narrower, practical needs of the law. “At the time, it wasn’t