The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (6 page)

As in the previous attack, he did not assault his victim sexually.

Before leaving the store, Trawick wiped her blood from himself using clothes from a rack, and removed his bloodstained outer shirt, which he hid. Then he walked out of the store in his T-shirt and threw the knife away.

Victim number three was another “young lady” of about eighteen whom he’d seen from his vehicle as she walked down a street about noon one day in 1992. Trawick said he parked in a garage, caught up with the woman, placed his arm around her, and held his knife to her body.

She didn’t struggle, he said, but she did lift up her skirt as they walked together. It apparently was an attempt to attract attention. He forced her to push the garment back down.

When they reached an alley, Trawick continued, he choked the woman until she passed out. When she regained consciousness and began screaming, he stabbed her to death and left. Again, there was no sexual assault.

This time, he got rid of his knife by throwing the weapon away in someone’s yard.

Trawick, who lived with his mother and supported himself by doing odd jobs, such as moving furniture, told investigators he enjoyed scaring women, including his ex-wife, who’d divorced him in 1971.

He fashioned a toy gun, Trawick explained, and used it on several occasions to frighten women. “I don’t like women all that much,” he said at one point.

In one instance, he said, he pulled the gun and growled, “Come here,” at a potential victim, but did not give chase when she ran away. In another, he immediately stopped his harassment and drove off when his target went in search of a mall security officer.

He also placed obscene calls for the same reason, but elaborated that the calls were never directed at “people,” just “women,” an important distinction to him.

According to one published report, Trawick sometimes telephoned women anonymously to tell them their husbands had been injured or killed in car wrecks. He liked to listen to their fright and pain.

Making the calls was “sort of a thrill,” he said.

The Smith slaying, Trawick said, began in this way.

He’d had a bad day, and was cruising around the mall in his van when he saw Monica walking to her car. At that point, Trawick insisted, his intent only was to scare her with the gun.

Trawick followed Smith back to the apartment complex and drove into the parking lot past the empty guard shack, pulling up next to Monica in his van as she was walking from her car.

During the police interrogation, one of his questioners tried to bluff Trawick, telling him that a guard had taken
down his license plate number that night. Trawick knew better, and at one point later in the questioning even returned to the subject. “I was thinking there wasn’t any, there wasn’t a guard there,” the killer recalled.

Trawick said he showed Smith the barrel of the toy gun. But before he could say anything to her, she put down her purse and the container of yogurt and “was just saying ‘you can have anything you want’ and she started taking her pants off,” he told the police.

Trawick jumped out of the van and pushed Smith into it. He also grabbed her purse from the pavement.

Inside the van, he finished removing her pants and bound her with nylon rope he’d used in moving furniture. He gagged Monica, who was lying on her stomach, with duct tape. Although she made no resistance, he said, he hit her in the back with his fist before covering her with a tarp and driving off.

Altogether, Trawick recalled, he spent approximately ten minutes in the parking lot with Smith, with his engine running and his headlights on. The interior of the van also was periodically illuminated as he got in and out of the vehicle.

No one reported seeing a thing.

According to his statement, Trawick then drove around in a random search for a secluded neighborhood, where he intended to assault Smith. She still made no sound or attempt to escape even though one of her hands came free as they drove. Trawick found that very unusual, he said.

Along the way, he jettisoned his roll of duct tape.

When he found a sufficiently quiet spot, Trawick stopped the van, climbed in back, and strangled Smith, his thumbs pressing down together over her pharynx. “She didn’t fight hardly at all,” he said.

He also battered her on the head with his hammer and stabbed her beneath her breastbone. He remembered angling his knife blade upward so as to hit her heart.

Trawick later burned the hammer handle and threw the
metal head away. He kept the knife, though, and cleaned, polished, and reoiled it.

At the time of his arrest, he said, it was still in his van.

Total time spent in the “secluded neighborhood” was six or seven minutes, according to Trawick. He said he did not rape Smith because “I couldn’t.” He did insert one finger in her vagina.

He then drove to the roadside dump site. A car came by, and “I didn’t have time to, uh, dispose of the body,” he told his questioners, “so I just put the tailgate down” and pitched Smith’s dead body down into the ravine. He remembered seeing clearly where it came to rest, despite the darkness of the night.

Trawick dumped the contents of Smith’s purse, except for her wallet, in a trash barrel. From the wallet, he removed eighty dollars in cash—with which he bought gas that night—plus her driver’s license and credit cards. He tossed them, and the wallet, out the van’s window on his way home.

Roy noted in his later analysis that Monica Smith was what the BSU calls a “low-risk” victim; that is, she had gone nowhere and done nothing which normally would have placed her at risk of being the victim of a violent offense.

Her murder, however, was a chancy, “high-risk” crime. Trawick had followed Monica to the apartment complex parking lot, where Smith’s chances of encountering someone she knew were quite good. Moreover, he spent ten minutes with her there. Also, after killing her, he disposed of her body almost casually, at a site where she very likely would soon be found, and she was.

Even when he had her under his control, Trawick improvised his actions. An organized killer would have brought with him what the BSU calls “weapons of choice.” Trawick simply used what was at hand in the van: a knife, a hammer, duct tape, nylon rope, and the tarp.

Trawick clearly put almost no planning into his murders, at least not the final three. That is not to say he hadn’t repeatedly
fantasized committing them. But the murders themselves were spontaneous, free-form crimes in which Smith and the others were all victims of opportunity.

His motive also clearly was irrational, a generalized and deep-rooted anger toward women. The mutilation of the prostitute and the extreme force he used against the completely passive Monica Smith bespoke an enormous rage.

Trawick’s impulsiveness, lack of planning, irrationality, and apparent willingness to take risks suggested strongly that he was a loose cannon, out of control. Anyone who’d ad-lib homicide in the way he did surely wouldn’t give much thought to the presence or absence of a guard at the apartment complex that night.

Or would he?

Hazelwood combed carefully through the mass of available evidence, from trial testimony to Trawick’s personal correspondence. He read all the depositions and police reports, reviewed photos, studied the autopsy report, and personally visited the shopping center, the apartment complex, the crime scene, and even Trawick’s neighborhood.

He examined every jot and tittle of evidence, and extracted from the whole a surprisingly consistent behavior pattern.

First, Roy noted that many of the crimes Trawick committed early in his criminal career—offenses such as obscene telephone calls—involved no physical contact at all with the victim, and therefore posed a minimal risk of arrest for him. Trawick was aware of what could get him into trouble, and what was less likely to.

He apparently remembered these lessons. His various comments to the police suggested that although he seemed to act willy-nilly, in fact he paid close attention to protecting his anonymity.

He had fled when the girl in the mall went in search of a security officer. He carefully searched the department store for security devices before committing his murder there. He
coolly escorted his third murder victim down a street and into an alley before killing her.

“Trawick,” wrote Hazelwood, “is the type of offender who kills out of anger, but it is a controlled anger. That is to say, he will not engage in behavior which poses an immediate threat to his well-being.”

That is why, Roy continued, Trawick took note of the missing guard the night he killed Smith, and proceeded onto the apartment complex premises in pursuit of her for precisely that reason. He even told the police about it.

“Had a guard been present,” Roy wrote, “Ms. Smith would not have become a murder victim.”

Trawick was convicted of capital murder in criminal court and sentenced to death. Before a civil jury was given a chance to reflect on Roy’s analysis, a settlement was reached in the case. Mrs. Smith received an undisclosed sum, which she donated to charity.

In a second premises liability case, Hazelwood again was engaged as an expert, this time by the defense team.

Although the behavioral issues in the case were less nuanced, its reality was far starker. Over the spring and summer of 1995 in Dallas, a paroled killer named Juan Chavez, twenty-seven, paired up with a young accomplice to wantonly and brutally murder twelve people, injure five more, and rob six other victims, principally in and around the Oak Cliff district, south of the Trinity River.

A Dallas police spokesman told the
Dallas Morning News
that Chavez is “the most prolific killer in Dallas County history.”

One victim, Kevin Hancock, a security guard at the Indian Ridge Apartments on Mount Ranier Street in Dallas, took two bullets to the neck and was paralyzed.

Hancock sued his erstwhile employers, claiming among other things that a broken front gate at the apartments had allowed Chavez and Fernandez access to the property, and thus to him.

In Hazelwood’s opinion, however, so ruthless and rabid were the two killers that no practical security measure would have prevented “Johnny” Chavez and his mentally slow partner, fifteen-year-old Hector “Crazy” Fernandez, from shooting and paralyzing Hancock.

Johnny Chavez, tenth in a family of eighteen brothers and sisters, was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and brought to Dallas as an infant by his parents, migrant farm workers.

Greg Davis, the Dallas County assistant district attorney who later prosecuted Chavez, believes ethnic hatred may have underlain the defendant’s cold-bloodedness. Although robbery was Chavez’s putative reason for many of the assaults, Davis points out that almost all of the victims were other Hispanics, most of them among the least-prosperous-looking residents of Oak Cliff’s shabbier neighborhoods.

Chavez’s killing career actually began ten years earlier, on December 28, 1985, when Johnny, together with his brother Jesse and a friend, Julian Garcia, decided to rob their Oak Cliff neighbor, Vicente Mendoza. Garcia later testified that he wanted the money to finance a trip to Mexico.

They kicked in Mendoza’s front door and robbed him at gunpoint. Then, to eliminate him as a witness, Johnny shot Vicente dead in the top of the head. He also shot Mendoza’s cousin in the eye.

Chavez was arrested three weeks later in Houston. In 1987, he was tried and convicted for the Mendoza murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was paroled in 1994.

Back in Dallas, he met Fernandez, who’d recall to jurors that he began hanging out with Johnny “because he was nice to me. He was cool and stuff.”

Their homicide spree began the following spring.

At about 8:00 p.m. on an evening in late March, Chavez pulled into an Oak Cliff self-service car wash where twenty-three-year-old Jose Castillo was washing his vehicle in an open-air stall. Then for no reason except, as Davis suggests, “the thrill of killing,” Chavez shot Castillo several times.

Two months later, just after midnight on May 20, 1995, Chavez and Fernandez used a 20-gauge shotgun to murder eighteen-year-old Juan Hernandez as he sat at the wheel of his 1983 Buick Regal in a food store parking lot.

They stole the Buick, stripped it, and then torched the vehicle. The burned-out hulk was recovered nearby nine days later.

The two then stole a red pickup truck, again in the same general vicinity, sometime between 8:00 p.m. and midnight on June 23.

At 12:15 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, Chavez and Fernandez came upon two women and a man together in the parking lot of a west Dallas restaurant. They leveled a handgun from the stolen pickup’s cab and demanded wallets from all three, who readily complied.

A few minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez rolled into a movie theater parking lot in the northwest part of the city and similarly accosted a young couple walking to their car.

“Give me your wallet,” Johnny demanded of twenty-nine-year-old Timothy McKay. Then he gave McKay’s companion, Pattie Matherly, to the count of three to surrender her purse.

Forty minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez were back in Oak Cliff, where they discovered Kenneth Shane on the curb outside 610 East Tenth Street. Shane was unloading some possessions from his car. Chavez pointed a handgun at Shane, took his wallet, and shot him once in the chest.

The next spasm of violence began just after midnight on July 2.

The killers approached thirty-nine-year-old Jose Morales as he was placing a call from an outdoor pay phone in a largely Hispanic neighborhood just north of Dallas’s Love Field. Chavez shot Morales in the chest and took his wallet, which contained two dollars in cash. Then as Morales lay wounded on the ground, Johnny Chavez shot him a second time in the chest, killing him.

The killers next targeted Susan Ferguson, a uniformed but unarmed forty-one-year-old security guard at a construction site in the area.

Fernandez told investigators Ferguson raised her hands in surrender.

“Do you have any children?” he remembered Johnny asking the woman.

“Yes,” she replied.

Chavez then shot Ferguson in the face, just below her nose, and ran over her in the stolen Chevrolet Caprice they were driving.