Hazelwood, Robert R. (Roy Hazelwood)

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HAZELWOOD, Robert R.
(Roy Hazelwood)

PERSONAL:

Male; married; wife's name Peggy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Southern VA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

CAREER:

Federal Bureau of Investigation, agent beginning 1971, supervisory agent with Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy, beginning 1978; retired; Academy Group, Inc., Manassas, VA, forensics consultant. Writer and speaker. Military service: U.S. Military Police Corps; served as major.

WRITINGS:

(With Park Elliott Dietz and Ann Wolbert Burgess) Autoerotic Fatalities, Lexington Books (Lexington, MA), 1983.

(With Ann Wolbert Burgess) Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, CRC Press (Boca Raton, FL), 1987, third edition, 2001.

(As Roy Hazelwood; with Stephen G. Michaud) The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(As Roy Hazelwood; with Stephen G. Michaud) Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to over forty professional journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert R. "Roy" Hazelwood has worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for over twenty-two years, sixteen of which he spent in the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit. He has become one of the country's leading experts in the complex, and often perplexing, world of sexual criminals, serial killers, and other such offenders. Now retired from the bureau and currently living in southern Virginia with his wife, Hazelwood has allied with the Academy Group, Inc., a forensic consulting firm whose clients range from government and industry to criminal justice. In addition to his FBI service, Hazelwood also served as a major for the U.S. Military Police Corps. Exposed to excessive violence throughout his long career, Hazelwood decided to share his knowledge and has published over forty journal articles as well as several books on the topic. He has also teamed up writer Stephen G. Michaud to share his vast first-hand knowledge in the books The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators and Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind.

The Evil That Men Do documents Hazelwood's FBI career as an expert assigned to explore and uncover the motivations and psychology of sexual predators. At first his role was not highly respected within the bureau, but after he developed a successful method for entering the minds of serial killers and rapists, Hazelwood helped transform sexual crime investigation into a well-respected area of study.

Upon beginning his FBI career, Hazelwood quickly realized that no serious study had ever been made of serial rapists. As he notes in The Evil That Men Do: "There'd been hundreds of rape studies done, but no one had ever looked at serial rapists." Deciding to conduct some research of his own, Hazelwood gathered forty-one men from twelve different states, all of whom had been imprisoned for rape. Combined, these individuals were responsible for 837 rapes and had attempted approximately 400 more. While at the conclusion of his research Hazelwood found no comprehensive reason why some individuals act out and others do not, he did acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to co-found the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) with Robert Ressler and John Douglas. This FBI program serves the purpose of profiling serial killers.

The Evil That Men Do follows Hazelwood's career through several well-known criminal cases, among them the notorious Tawana Brawley case of 1987, the Lonely Heart Killer case, the "Ken and Barbie" killings, the Atlanta child murders, and the 1989 explosion on the USS Iowa that killed forty-seven people. Also included are case studies, biographical information, and statistics. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly stated that "Michaud is most interesting when he ably summarizes Hazelwood's groundbreaking work and least interesting when he slips into simple hagiography of the dedicated lawman." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt commented in the New York Times, "In fact, you learn so much from cases like these that by the end, in a chapter called 'You Be the Analyst,' you find you are able to put together many of the clues in the 1986 rape-murder of a young typist in the FBI's San Antonio office."

Michaud and Hazelwood have also teamed up to write Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Mind. This time taking the investigations and psychological aspects of each individual case a bit further, techniques and psychological profiles of the offenders are openly discussed by the authors. Hazelwood shares his tactics for successfully tracking down these very same perpetrators and also recounts the dangers he has faced in the course of doing his job.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, February 4, 1999, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators, p. E8

Publishers Weekly, December 14, 1998, review of The Evil That Men Do, p. 66.