In an adjacent corner, a door led to a small room containing the family’s washer and dryer, and a wall filled with wooden storage cabinets. Bulla walked through the doorway into the darkened room. But before he could locate a light switch, his shoulder bumped into something solid that gave way when he made contact with it. He stumbled back, aimed the white beam of his flashlight onto the object, and instantly jumped back in shock.
What he had bumped into was the stiff body of Josephine, eleven, dangling from a pipe. A noose, fashioned from the same type of cord used on the others, bit a deep hemorrhaged groove into her neck. Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. Her mouth had been gagged with a strip of towel that made her tongue bulge out above the top of the gag. It was swollen and the color of eggplant.
Josie wore a pale blue T-shirt and nothing else. Her panties had been pulled down to her ankles, just above her saggy royal-blue socks. The back strap of her bra appeared to have been sliced with a knife.
Around Josephine’s body was wrapped a web of cord; this reinforced my belief that the UNSUB had arrived at the home with a large length of this cord in his “murder kit.” Like some Boy Scout gone bad, he’d come prepared. Her wrists were tied together behind her back and bound to a rope encircling her waist. Another length of cord had been wrapped around her knees, followed by yet another around her ankles. The tips of her toes almost touched the concrete floor. On her leg was a milky gelatinous substance that appeared to be semen. It had run down her leg over her sock and formed a tiny puddle on the floor.
Bulla took a deep breath, shook his head, and headed back upstairs.
“We got another body in the basement,” he announced to the officers and detectives who had just arrived at the scene and were busy combing through the house.
Before the discovery of Josie’s body, the killings had all the makings of a revenge- or retaliation-style homicide. But now the case had taken a macabre, darker twist. It now seemed to reek of a homicide that had sexual underpinnings. This meant that police were dealing with a much more sinister, complex type of killer.
When the call about the Oteros came over his radio, Wichita Police Department detective Bernie Drowatzky had been riding through the northeast part of town, looking for a couple of suspected heroin dealers. Like Bulla, he knew only that there had been a report of a possible murder-suicide at 803 North Edgemoor. Upon arriving, he quickly learned that police had discovered four bodies, including two children.
Drowatzky, who was known as a cop’s cop, didn’t like what he was hearing. Over the years, he’d immersed himself in plenty of violent crimes—he’d solved grisly murders, survived bloody shootouts, taken down armed suspects using only his fists—but something about what was unfolding inside the Otero house felt deeply bizarre and disturbing.
While all the detectives and crime scene technicians were moving through the house, Drowatzky, who would eventually arrive at the scenes of three other BTK murders over the next three years, fanned out across the neighborhood with several officers. They interviewed residents about anything they might have seen happen outside the Otero house that morning. Eventually he located a witness who had caught a glimpse of the Otero family’s tan-colored Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon backing out of the garage at approximately 10:30 A.M. The driver, according to this neighbor, was a short man with a “Middle Eastern” complexion.
Another neighbor also reported seeing a dark-haired stranger quickly back out of the family’s driveway. Whoever was driving the car was in such a rush that yet another neighbor had to slam on his brakes to avoid plowing into him as the neighbor backed onto Murdoch Street.
A few hours later, the car was located in the parking lot of Dillons grocery. A witness at the scene told police that the driver exiting the car looked terribly nervous. His whole body appeared to be shaking.
It was hours past sunset when Charlie Stewart, the lead detective working the case, broke the news to the three surviving Otero children that their two youngest siblings weren’t going to be coming home from school.
From fifteen-year-old Charlie Otero, Stewart, known for his rock-solid investigative skills, learned that the family had moved to Wichita in fall 1973 from the Panama Canal Zone, where Joseph, thirty-eight, had served the last stretch of his twenty-year hitch in the Air Force. An aviation fanatic with a penchant for bongo playing and practical jokes, he decided to move his family to Wichita, known as the “Air Capital of the World,” in order to pursue a career in flying. For the past couple of months, Joseph, who had a commercial pilot’s license, worked as a mechanic and flight instructor at a local airport.
Like his wife, Julie, thirty-four, to whom he’d been married for the past sixteen years, Joseph was born in Puerto Rico. The couple’s five kids, ages nine through fifteen, were all well mannered and studious, and seemed to adore their parents. The only other member of the family was their often unpredictable German shepherd mix, Lucky, a trained military guard dog the Oteros had brought with them when they moved from Panama.
The dog was pacing around the backyard when police arrived, something that perplexed detectives when they spotted boot prints near the spot where the UNSUB had cut the family’s phone line. Why, they wondered, hadn’t the foul-tempered Lucky started barking to sound the alarm?
After speaking with the distraught, dazed children, a picture of the family’s morning routine began to come into focus, along with some rough details about what may have happened over the course of the morning.
The kitchen appeared to hold the lion’s share of the clues in explaining the opening moments of the attack. From the looks of things, the kids were in the midst of preparing their lunches when the killer or killers entered. The three older Otero siblings had already departed for school. Josephine had just finished fixing a sandwich that consisted of a smear of potted meat between two pieces of white bread. She wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in a lunchbox covered with flowers, left sitting on the stove. Joey stood at the kitchen table beside his father, spreading meat on a piece of bread. His open lunchbox with pictures of policemen on it sat on the table beside him. Joseph was hunched over the table, eating pears from an open can.
Stewart and other detectives figured that it must have been just around this moment that Joseph asked one of the children to take out the garbage and place it in the trash can sitting back behind the house. Two theories emerged over what happened next. In the first scenario, Josie, who had finished with her lunch-making duties, pulled on her white mittens, grabbed the garbage pail, and walked out the back door. It was at this moment that the intruder grabbed her and forced her back into the kitchen, where he confronted the rest of the family. Police retrieved her mitten, which might have fallen off when she was jumped by the attacker, on the concrete stoop just outside the back door.
In the second possible scenario, Joey was the one who was dispatched on garbage duty. The fact that he hadn’t finished making his lunch probably wouldn’t have fazed his father, who had the reputation for being a taskmaster. Josie might have been giggling over the fact that her brother might not get to finish making his sandwich before heading off to school. So, in the spirit of brotherly retaliation, Joey grabbed her gloves, lovingly caressed the trash bucket with them, then headed outside, where he was quickly overtaken by the UNSUB.
Exactly what happened next also proved difficult for detectives to determine with any certainty, although a couple of facts seemed clear. It didn’t appear that anything had been taken from the house, which ruled out the chance of the attack’s being a botched burglary. It also didn’t seem likely that this was the work of two intruders. And because the interior of the house didn’t indicate that a struggle had taken place, it seemed unlikely that the killer entered the house brandishing only a knife. To maintain the kind of control that it appeared he must have had, he in all likelihood used a gun. The prevalence of ropes, medical tape, and other bindings signified to detectives that the killer had arrived prepared.
Polic
e speculated that after the attacker somehow managed to subdue the family and tie them up, he quickly decided to get rid of Joseph. With this one wild card out of the picture, the killer could continue his work at a more leisurely pace. Exactly what Joseph must have been thinking during those final moments, no one will ever know. But this one-time champion boxer, who was also a black belt in karate, surely must have been cursing himself for not putting up more of a fight when he had the chance, before allowing himself to be tied up.
Time was another factor. Even after he managed to kill Joseph, the UNSUB would have been constantly watching the clock. He knew he had to work quickly. With that many people living at the residence, the odds were good that somebody—one of the other Otero siblings, a classmate, another parent or a neighbor—might show up at the house. Yet he still wanted to savor the sick thrill of what he was doing, reminding himself that he couldn’t spend much time with Julie, Joseph, and Joey. He hadn’t come for them. From what I could see, they were just appetizers. It seemed obvious that he’d been watching the family, and what he really longed for was the main course and the dessert, all rolled into one—eleven-year-old Josephine.
Judging from the abrasions on the upper portion of Julie’s neck, just below her ears, she had been strangled from behind while she lay on her stomach. The killer had evidentially straddled her, lifting her torso up off the bed while choking her. Beside her, traces of semen were found on the sheets and pillow; these were eventually determined to have come from her husband. The presence of Josephine’s glasses in her parents’ bedroom led detectives to believe that the killer had purposely left them there to confuse investigators.
Another bit of evidence that puzzled detectives was the chair with a broken rung found in the boys’ bedroom. In her interview with police, Carmen June claimed that the chair came from the bedroom she shared with Josephine. Upon learning that, detectives began to suspect that the killer had moved the chair into the boys’ bedroom, then held Josephine in his lap, forcing her to watch her brother suffocate. The wooden rung could have been cracked while he struggled to hold the squirming child, who probably would have fought to keep from watching Joey die. Even though traces of bruising could be seen encircling his neck, Joey was the only member of the family to die from asphyxiation, not strangulation. With a plastic bag over his head, along with the two T-shirts, the boy probably took four to five minutes to expire.
The killer’s decision to take Josie down into the basement indicated just how badly he wanted her and to what lengths he’d travel to act out the fantasies writhing inside his head. He no doubt knew that such a move would have been incredibly risky. He could have easily gotten trapped down there if someone had entered the house. Nevertheless, he was clearly eager to take the risk.
The presence of the gag in her mouth provided another window into the mind of her killer. There was really no need to gag her because the others were all dead and, due to her location in the far corner of the basement, neighbors wouldn’t be able to hear her scream. Nor was there any reason to hang her to a pipe or to tie her up at all if all the suspect wanted to do was rape her. What he did was all about his need to script, direct, and produce a crime to fulfill his fantasies of dominance and control. She was no longer human, merely a prop.
After binding her wrists, thighs, and ankles, he pushed her head through the loop in the rope hanging from a water pipe and pulled it tight, careful to make sure it lifted her body just high enough so that the tips of her toes barely touched the cold cement floor. In order to prevent the rope from biting into her neck, she would have had to strain to push against the floor with all her strength. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had demanded that Josie talk dirty to him, but my guess was that she was too petrified to play along with his sick game. The one common theme I’d learned from the interviews I’d conducted with sexual offenders was that they would script their victims—even if they were juveniles—and coerce them to talk in such a way that it sounded as though they wanted to be sexually assaulted. Perhaps Josephine was so terrified and confused about the horrible events that had just unfolded in front of her that all she could do was whimper and plead for her life. And that was the last thing the killer wanted to hear. It ruined everything. He’d come to her house to live out a fantasy.
There was no telling how long she fought to stay conscious. Her underwear had nearly been pulled down to her feet, just below the white rope he’d tied around her ankles. At some point during the ordeal, the killer tugged her blue T-shirt shirt down over her left shoulder, then cut her bra strap with a knife. Before walking back upstairs and switching off the lights to leave Josephine hanging in darkness, the UNSUB masturbated, ejaculating onto his victim’s right leg. By the time police arrived at the scene, the semen had dripped onto the floor, forming a sickening, milky puddle.
Within days of the killings, one of the city’s two daily newspapers created a Secret Witness Program, hoping to coax locals into phoning one of the papers’ columnists to feed them tips on the case. The reward money, donated by one of the newspapers, for anyone who provided information that led to the killer’s conviction eventually climbed to $7,500. Rumors about the case spread through the city like a flu virus. Not even the investigators working the homicide were immune to the tall tales.
Some of the detectives were perplexed by the seemingly large amount of semen left on the floor in the Otero’s basement. Exactly how much seminal fluid was present at the scene was never established, due to the fact that it had begun to dry and spread out by the time Josie’s body was discovered. If it could be proven that the volume was too great to have come from a single individual, it could help substantiate claims that more than one killer was involved. But first, detectives needed to determine just how much semen was discharged during a typical ejaculation. To do that, police reportedly approached a cash-strapped Wichita State University upperclassman with an overdue parking ticket and made him a proposition that involved an empty test tube. I was never able to determine what, if anything, the police learned as a result of their unusual offer.
For police, the investigation that ensued over the next few weeks quickly became as convoluted and complex as those knots found in the Otero home. Nobody could remember a case quite like this. Over a thousand neighbors, coworkers, ex-cons, and friends of the family were interviewed. The local newspapers and radio and TV stations carried reports of the killings and the latest developments in the case nonstop.
The killer had forced his way into a home—into the one place where people always believed they were safe—then savagely murdered a husband and father, a wife and mother, along with their little boy and little girl. The aftershock of the murders proved disorienting to the city’s collective soul, shaking loose everything Wichita stood for. In one brutal swoop, the UNSUB had managed to turn this law-abiding town upside down, causing nearly everyone to begin asking themselves, If he could do this to the Otero family, what would stop him from doing it to mine?
Despite the presence of Josie hanging from a pipe in the basement, detectives just couldn’t shake the idea that the murders had either been an act of retaliation or—due to the family’s having just moved to the area from Panama—was somehow connected with the narcotics trade. It also seemed possible that the killer had been targeting Julie and her daughter. If that were true, he was undoubtedly surprised to find Joseph at home on that morning, especially because there were no cars parked in the driveway. Little did the killer know that a few weeks earlier, two men had run Joseph off the road. The accident not only caved in the front end of his car, which was now in the shop, but also severely injured his shoulder.
By early February, none of the leads unearthed by detectives had led anywhere. In an effort to dig up some information into Joseph Otero’s background, an investigative trip to Puerto Rico and Panama was undertaken by Floyd Hannon, Wichita chief of police, and Bill Cornwell, chief of homicide. They traveled there to flesh out some of the rumors they’d heard about Joseph Otero.
Could this veteran pilot have been involved in the drug trade? Might this have been a gang hit? Was it possible that the murders were a ritualistic killing performed by some religious group the family belonged to?
Other than getting a suntan and having a few run-ins with the local police, who didn’t like the no-nonsense attitude of these two gringo interlopers, Hannon and Cornwell did little to crack open any new leads. By the time the two cops returned to Wichita, they were no closer to solving the murders than they had been a month before when the bodies of Joseph, Julie, Josie, and Joey Otero were discovered.
4
One down, three to go,” I told myself, sliding the stack of crime reports from the Otero murders back to its original spot on the library table.
Next up was the pile of papers containing every imaginable detail of the April 4, 1974, murder of Kathy Bright, a twenty-one-year-old assembly line worker at the Coleman Company. Owing to the fact that BTK had left behind an adult survivor who could possibly identify him, this was the one homicide for which he never directly claimed responsibility in his taunts to the media up to this point. It wasn’t until almost two years after BTK’s bombshell communiqué in February 1978 in which he informed the city that a serial killer was on the loose that police finally linked Bright’s murder to him.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 6
