My plan was that investigators would covertly photograph those in attendance and identify all the vehicles outside the community hall. And because I was convinced that the killer was a police buff, I suggested that an announcement should be made that the authorities were looking for potential volunteers “if the need should arise in the future when the police might need help.” The only requirements were that the applicants needed their own transportation and some law enforcement training or education.
The two detectives from Wichita scribbled down my suggestion, but it ate at me that there was something more that could be done, something altogether new.
Sitting there in my study, all I could think about were the eyes of Josephine Otero, BTK’s eleven-year-old victim in his first series of murders, the one he’d hung from a pipe in the basement of her family’s house, after strangling her parents and younger brother. Nothing in my career could ever prepare me for what I imagined this innocent little girl must have endured before finally dying of asphyxiation. I’d worked more child homicide cases than I cared to remember, but something about this one was different.
This killer didn’t feel human to me. All the guys I’d chased and studied were monsters, but even with the worst of them I usually sensed something familiar and human. No matter how horrific their butchery, I found some shred of fragility within them. But I didn’t get that with this killer in Wichita. Just when I thought I’d studied and classified every variation of evil, along comes this freak. He resided in a class all by himself.
I wandered back upstairs and climbed into bed. Before long, I felt myself begin to drift, but I fought the urge, trying to remain in that strange region between wakefulness and sleep. It was a place where I’d sometimes retrieved the information that helped me put together a profile. I waited for my mind to unearth something on the ghost I was chasing, but nothing came.
After a few minutes, my lids grew unbearably heavy. How does someone like this start? I whispered to myself as I began to fade. And how can I put an end to him?
2
The sun had yet to appear in the sky when I awoke the next morning, a few hours after finally drifting back to sleep. Out of habit, I quickly rolled over to check the legal pad sitting on my bedside table. Years before, I’d trained myself to dream about whatever case I was working on. More often than not, in the middle of the night, still half asleep, I’d open my eyes, fumble for a pen, and scribble cryptic notes on the pad, clues culled from the depths of my subconscious. My wife, Pam, hated this habit of mine because it always woke her up.
But on this chilly fall morning, the top page appeared blank. I switched on a lamp, just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Pam moaned. I turned off the light, got dressed in the darkness, and drove the winding twenty-one miles to my office at Quantico, located on the main floor of the agency’s forensic science building. The location was a definite upgrade from the previous home of the Behavioral Science Unit—in the basement beneath the FBI Academy’s library. But the downside was that my office was constantly awash with nauseous, chemical fumes from the various laboratories in the building. On any given day, researchers attempting to develop more reliable, valid methods for testing crime evidence would tinker with various types of acid, iodine fumes, and gunpowder. Explosions and eye-burning smoke were commonplace. So were clanging fire alarms and evacuations of our building.
I was the first guy in the office as usual, making it to my desk by 6:30 A.M. The first thing I did was close my office door so that no one would think I was there. I lived for the cases and loathed the unavoidable administrative duties that came with running a unit that was on the verge of mushrooming to forty-three people, including twelve FBI agents and twenty-one support personnel. I was constantly at odds with the paper-pushers above me, but the men and women of my unit knew I’d do anything for them. In between hopping from one brush fire to the next, I often spent hours each day either helping them with their work or providing a shoulder to cry on.
It was nearly noon by the time I began rifling through my filing cabinets, trying to locate the profile I’d written on BTK back in 1979. As I dug through my files, I thought back to that day in fall 1974 when I first heard about BTK from a couple of veteran homicide detectives who worked for the Milwaukee PD. Although it wasn’t part of my job description, I was itching to gain experience in the science of murder investigation. That night in 1974, I dug up what I could find on this unknown killer in Wichita at the public library. I was amazed that news of his murders hadn’t received more play in newspapers outside of Kansas and noticed that the local cops appeared to be keeping a tight lid on information about the case.
A few months afterwards, I wrote about BTK in a research paper for one of my graduate courses in abnormal psychology. In it, I noted that other mass murder cases, such as Charles Whitman (the Texas Tower sniper in Austin) and Richard Speck in Chicago, garnered national headlines, whereas the Otero family homicides received precious little play. I found myself seeing parallels to professional sports and how the athletes all want to play in the big media venues like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I wondered if BTK felt slighted by the lack of attention his killings were receiving and frustrated that he lived in such a backwater media market.
I eventually unearthed my BTK file from beneath a sheaf of similar profiles penned over the past few years. Three pages long, with a cover sheet stapled on top, it read, “The attached analysis is only as good as the information that has been provided. In addition, it may be necessary to totally change or modify this analysis if new information is developed—such as additional victims, more forensic evidence, or new information obtained from research.”
I rolled my chair up tight against my desk and laid the pages down on top of the clutter. As I began reading the words I’d typed years before, I felt it all coming back to me:
MULTIPLE HOMICIDES. WICHITA. The murders of the BTK Strangler are the result of a fantasy acted out. A fantasy where for the first time in his life, he is in a position of importance and dominance. He is an inadequate type, a nobody, who, through his crimes, has placed himself into a position of importance. The BTK Strangler is now a somebody who is receiving the recognition he feels is long overdue him. To show his inadequacies, he is not even very original in his crimes. He must pattern himself after other notorious killers such as the .44 caliber killer, better known as the “Son of Sam” in New York City. Much of the verbiage that your subject is using (in his letters) probably comes out of recent publications in detective magazines.
Your subject is alienated, lonely and withdrawn. He would not be expected to have any lasting relationships with others and would lead a solitary existence dominated as mentioned above—by fantasy and magical thinking. His killing is an attempt on his part to find affection and acceptance. He fears everyone, including himself. He would not be expected to have ever enjoyed any normal relations with women and probably has never had a normal heterosexual relationship with one. When he is not killing, he experiences intense fear that he is not “normal” and therefore kills to cope with his disorder in an attempt to escape from his own fantasies. Thus, he can be expected to kill again and to do so in a compulsive repetition of the pattern he has already established. His victims can be anyone either male or female, who are both loved and outgoing. His victims will be in a position of vulnerability, one where he can totally render them helpless. His victims represent his own feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. His own life has been disruptive. He probably comes from a background where his family was broken. He was raised by an overbearing mother who was inconsistent with her discipline. His father probably left home, either by marital separation or death, when he was a youth. Your subject may have been raised by foster parents.
Your subject was an average student in the classroom. However, he was more adept at disrupting the class by using profanity and pranks. His language and statements make us believe that he has some military experience and/or is a police buff. He
probably has had run-ins with police in the past, such as assault, and/or breaking and entering (B&E). His involvement with B&Es will show that the items taken were of insignificance. Items taken were more for reason of a fetish or a strong urge to obtain an article of clothing that he is fond of—or the thrill of committing a crime that will leave little evidence to investigating officers. The BTK Strangler may have a history of voyeuristic activities and he may have an arrest record for same. He hunts his victims by selecting neighborhoods where he can peruse different homes without being detected. Furthermore, his victims will live in an area where, if need be, he can have an easy escape route, such as a neighborhood park, where he can secrete himself to elude the police.
His killings are impulsively motivated and without elaborate planning. He seeks out targets of opportunity. Such individuals of this type are frequently mechanically adept. They suffer from insomnia and thus would find difficult to hold steady employment. Control of himself and of his environment is essential for such a person. Although he is gaining in confidence, he is still shy, withdrawn, asocial and isolated. Such persons have typically been raised in overly strict and religious fashions.
As a counter strategy technique, your department must not make any statements concerning the killer’s mental condition. That is to say, don’t allow the media to label him as some psychotic killer. If they have already done so, your best strategy would be to align yourself with the killer and not the psychiatric experts. Any press releases should clearly state that he is a killer who must be apprehended and that he is not a psychotic animal, if the press has already painted him to be this. This approach may reduce the killer’s anxiety concerning his own psychiatric health and reinforce his own guilt feelings by removing the rationalization of the excuse of psychiatric cause and hence non-responsibility for his acts.
Extended periods between his murders may be for reasons when he was absent from the area either as a result of military service, schooling, incarceration, or mental treatment. It is not uncommon for subjects such as yours to frequent police hangouts in an attempt to overhear officers discussing the case. Furthermore, such offenders will be at the crime scene observing detectives investigating the case and looking for clues to the homicide. All this allows the murderer to fulfill his ego and gain a feeling of superiority. He may go so far as to telephonically contact your department and provide information relative to the crime.
Your advantage in this case is that his very strong self-centered attitude will be his downfall. He will provide information to a friend or an acquaintance in a local tavern concerning information that he knows about the case. He may even pretend to be an officer working the case. If the BTK Strangler reads police detective magazines, he probably sent away for a “police badge” that he carries on his person. In fact, he may even use this MO to gain admittance into his victims’ homes. He probably flashes his badge whenever opportunity lends itself. (Example paying for a drink in a tavern.) His egocentricity keeps him in your city and he will probably kill again.
Reading an analysis I’d written five years before was nerve wracking. Of course, it was just a thumbnail sketch of what I’d told police when I’d contacted them on the phone, shortly after I’d sent it back to Wichita in 1979. Even though I firmly believed I’d nailed this guy dead-on, I was constantly asking myself if I’d missed something or placed too much the emphasis on the wrong bit of evidence. The pressure to get it right was overwhelming. Knowing that what I wrote could send investigators off in the wrong direction, which could indirectly result in more dead bodies, weighed heavily on me. It was one of the reasons I was so obsessive about my work.
The key to writing the kind of analysis that actually helps investigators do their job is deceptively simple, but it’s something that takes years to teach. In fact, it was only after five years of in-depth training and analysis that I considered one of my wannabes to be an expert. The most important thing is not just to regurgitate back to the police the data they already know.
My profiles were rarely more than five pages. I always ended them with a simple request that investigators pick up the phone and call me. This was why I never inserted any proactive techniques—on how to catch the bad guys—into our reports. I feared that whatever I wrote might get leaked to the press.
In this case, however, I had a hunch that the best use of my expertise would be to develop some proactive recipes to flush this killer out of the woodwork. He’d manipulated the police and the community long enough. The time had come to return the favor and begin messing with his mind. The only question was, How the hell do we do it?
I decided to skip lunch, gather up all my notes on the case, and walk over to the third floor of a nearby building on the FBI campus. This was where the bureau’s legal unit did all its research, and I loved to sit up there in the library and gaze out through the massive windows at the green, rolling Virginia countryside. The view of all those oak and maple trees, along with all that sunlight, was definitely a hell of a lot more conducive to clear thought than an often foul-smelling office in the forensic science building. Up there, surrounded by all that blue sky and those green treetops, things just felt different.
I organized the crime scene reports and my extensive notes in front of me in neat piles on the table—one stack for each series of murders. I knew that somewhere within those stacks of paper there existed a single, simple fact, a piece of evidence—either physical or verbal—that I might be able to use against the UNSUB. It wasn’t enough for me to simply serve up some ideas that I believed might prove useful in the case. I was consumed by the idea of helping police find a way of taking this killer down. Before coming up with an effective proactive strategy, I wanted to force-feed all the gruesome, mundane details of the case into my brain one last time. The white eight-by-twelve-inch piles bulged off the table, resembling four freshly dug graves covered with snow.
The first thing that came to mind was that the cops in Wichita had done everything right. They’d interviewed thousands of people and tracked down countless potential suspects (including a former police officer), none of whom turned out to be the right guy. For the past four months, the department’s recently assembled task force, composed of six detectives, had sifted through the mountains of old case files that had accumulated over the last decade, familiarizing themselves with every convoluted twist and turn the case had taken.
One thing was certain: our UNSUB was in the driver’s seat. Not only that, he had grown smarter with every kill and seemed to enjoy toying with the police. But perhaps the most unnerving thing about BTK was how he seemed to defy so much of what we took for granted about serial sexual killers. The one thing different we knew about him now that we didn’t in 1979 was that three months after the Otero homicides, he had been responsible for the messy, nearly botched murder of Kathryn Bright.
Kathy Bright’s brother, Kevin, who miraculously survived the attacked despite being shot twice in the face, described how his sister’s killer attempted to convince them that he was a fugitive. He would, of course, need to tie them up, BTK told them. But all he really wanted was some food, money, and their car keys. Then he’d be on his way. Rader lived only a short distance from Kathy and Kevin, and had no intention of leaving them unharmed.
Having a living witness provide a firsthand account of the killer’s technique for calming and lulling his potential victims into allowing him to tie them up gave us a priceless bit of insight into how the UNSUB carried out his crimes. His homicides were difficult to pigeonhole because they possessed elements of both organization and disorganization. He was a control freak who came prepared, often arriving at the homes of his victims with rope, gags, guns, and a knife. He didn’t use force to convince his victims to go along with him. He used bullshit. He pretended to be a relatively harmless thug, using words to manipulate his victims into allowing themselves to be tied up, usually without any struggle.
But he also left some things to chance. If his intended victim wasn’t availabl
e, he would strike the next best target he could find. On several occasions, it appeared he had difficulty controlling his victims. And he was hardly the neatest killer I’d encountered, leaving behind semen near the bodies of two of his kills.
Then there was his peculiar way of posing his victims. I’d never come across another killer who did it the way he did. He primped and preened the bodies in erotic positions, clothing, and bindings as fuel for his masturbatory fantasies. But he had also laid out and displayed nearly all the bodies of his victims—except for Kathy Bright, who died of stab wounds—for the investigators who arrived at his crime scenes long after he’d fled.
It was as if he positioned the corpses the way a florist might arrange flowers. He wanted to shock, yet his visual statements were also fairly tame and modest—at least in terms of the work I’d seen other sociopathic serial killers leave behind. Compared to those maniacs who left severed heads propped up on TV sets or their victims spread-eagled on the floor with various objects inserted into their vaginas or rectums, UNSUB was downright juvenile and soft core. Nevertheless, he used his victims as inanimate props, posing them to resemble a scene out of the pages of a detective magazine, leaving them out in the open so that the first person to discover the body would practically trip over it when entering the front door of the victim’s home.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 4
