Homicide - Hussey: Sex and the Badge, Part 2

I'm still in Santa Fe at Left Coast Crime. Here's Part 2 of Detective Hussey's Sex and the Badge,as promised.

As the years went by, there would be more and more instances involving deviants. There was the guy who got his penis stuck in the intake line of the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn. He must have been really enjoying himself, until his member swelled up and stuck in the pipe.

Try as he might, he was unable to free himself, even when the pump's timer shut the pump off. He was just too swollen. His skin resembled hand-tooled saddle leather. Hours later, an unsuspecting man and his wife walked to the pool area, then ran back to the lobby to call the police. When the officer arrived on the scene, the man was reported to have said, "It's not what it looks like."

What most cops learn quickly is that usually, it's exactly what it looks like. It was.

1n 1985, I went to car fire in the Meadows subdivision, south of town. When I got there I saw the charred shell of what had been the car, being hosed matter-of-factly, by a sleepy firefighter. The driver was perched on all fours, on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, with his naked rear end stuck high in the air. As I approached I realized that the rectal area and his scrotum had been badly burned.



"Third degree," Brad Baad, the paramedic said as he flushed the affected area with water.

"What happened?" I asked the tearful 19 year old?

"I dunno," he sobbed.

Brad took me aside and whispered, "I think I know. I've seen it before." He handed me a Bic disposable butane cigarette lighter. "What these kids do is, go out and eat a lot of nasty stuff, you know, onions, pigs feet, Krystal hamburgers, then when the methane gas inside them builds up, they hold a lighter to their asshole and fart, to see how far they can throw a flame."

I laughed out loud as I got a mental picture of the kid sitting in his car. "He must have set the car on fire by accident," I said.

Brad grinned and nodded.

By far the craziest thing I've seen involves a situation called auto-eroticism. The participant puts a belt or a noose around his neck and attaches it to a ceiling beam or other strong object. Many times this is done in a clothes closet. The person then slowly puts his weight onto the noose as he masturbates. Just before the noose cuts off the blood flow to the brain and the person passes out, he is able to experience an intense orgasm.

The problem comes when he goes too far to obtain this satisfaction and passes out completely. Death soon follows. Many people who practice this form of pain/pleasure do so with a partner in case they go too far. The partner can then release them and save their lives.

I responded to such a scene once in the City of Lakeland. The victim was a 42-year-old Florida Highway Patrolman. Clothed only in a t-shirt and his leather harness, he was found by his best friend and fellow trooper when the friend was sent around to check on the guy after he didn't show for his tour of duty. The bad part of this one was that when the friend found him, he went nuts and for hours, held other units and paramedics at gun point, as he sobbingly clung to the corpse of his dead partner. When he finally let other officers in, he could not quit crying. He never went back to work. It was tragic.

I've thought about Mr. Zeigler and the others over the years. I've also thought about how I felt that night when I saw old Mr. Zeigler pleasing himself. It was my first trip into the dark world that many people live in on a regular basis. It would not be my last.

Tomorrow's field trip is a look at some of the wildlife in Everglades National Park.