Free Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, Stephen G. Michaud Page B

these women described to me the strict rules she was expected to observe. For example, skirts slit up the sides to her upper thighs were all that she was allowed to wear on her lower body. He permitted no underwear, and she was not allowed to cross her legs in his presence.
    This man’s deviant interests included fetishism, necrophilia, sadism, and masochism. To help him act out these paraphilias, she sometimes was made to wear fetish items during sex. At other times he directed her to take cold baths and then to lie perfectly still so he could pretend she was dead. On still other occasions, he would demand that she whip him.
    Mike DeBardeleben acted out his fantasies against at least four of his five wives. To enhance his pleasure, he even tape-recorded torture sessions with one of them, his fourth wife, Caryn. *
    As I listened to the Caryn tapes, I noted his pattern of demanding she call him “Daddy” and beg him to physically abuse her according to a script he forced her to memorize. Then, for comparison, I listened to tapes that DeBardeleben had made with Becky, * one of his stranger-victims. His demands and behavior with both women were virtually identical.
    “Do you like the pain?” he asked both partners.
    “Yes, I like the pain,” both Caryn and Becky answered.
    “Do you love the pain?”
    “Yes, I love the pain.”
    “How much do you love the pain?”
    “I love it a lot.”
    Caryn had served as his rehearsal partner for victims such as Becky and countless others.
    Autoeroticism
    Finally, ritualistic offenders sometimes act out using themselves as props or “costars,” if you will. Some years ago, Dr. Park Dietz, Prof. Ann Wolbert Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania, and I researched and wrote the first textbook ever devoted to fatal autoeroticism. We found that such deaths were basically masochistic. That is, most of the 150 victims we studied were acting out masochistic fantasies at the times of their accidental deaths.
    Yet masochism wasn’t the only feature we detected. A large percentage of the victims also were cross-dressed when they were discovered, a provocative finding that opened a new avenue of speculation. While I still believe the great majority of deaths due to dangerous autoeroticism are grounded in the victims’ masochistic fantasies, the males who cross-dress may not be fantasizing only masochistic plots. They may also be acting out sadistic fantasies using themselves as replacements for women who are unsatisfactory, unavailable, or unwilling.
    The case of the late Gerard John Schaefer, a Florida deputy sheriff, supports this theory. Shaefer is believed to have kidnapped and killed more than twenty young women, disposing of them in remote swamps. In a photo that he doubtlessly took, Shaefer appears cross-dressed and suspended from a tree in the swamp. From his extensive writings, it is clear that one of his preferred ways of killing his victims was by hanging them exactly this way.
    In a similar vein, one of Mike DeBardeleben’s abduction-rape victims reported that after he took her to a safe, prearranged location, he changed into a miniskirt and high heels as he bound and photographed her. On a self-recorded audiotape at a different time, DeBardeleben also directly assumed the role of the victim, pleading with an imaginary tormentor in a falsetto voice to “bite my titties.”

    How does a particular offender choose to act out his dangerous fantasies? At what level of experience, from the imaginary to the actual, will a particular person receive sufficient psychosexual gratification? These are the questions that behavioral scientists continue to explore in the quest to identify and apprehend violent sexual criminals. Unfortunately, the ultimate answers likely will be as varied as the details of the crimes themselves.

5
“Am I God?”
    The fascinating and complex field of mental health often intersects with the world of criminal justice. If you follow the media coverage of