The two went back into the playroom and shot Kenyon, then headed upstairs to finish off Nancy and Bonnie.
In “The Slave of Duty,” while Agent Hotchner takes a leave of absence from the BAU after his wife’s murder, the team must regroup to solve a home invasion case.
That done, they hurried from the house, toting their proceeds for the night’s work: between forty and fifty dollars in cash, a portable radio, and a pair of binoculars.
In the morning, a family friend who always went to church with the Clutters came to the house. She couldn’t rouse anyone, so her father drove her to a neighboring farm, but the neighbor didn’t know where the Clutters might be. They telephoned the family, but no one answered. Together, they returned to River Valley Farm and let themselves in through the never-locked kitchen door.
The police came out in force. Assistant Police Chief Rich Rohleder was a strong believer in the use of scientific techniques for crime busting. He had built his own crime-scene kit, complete with handmade fingerprint brushes, and he carried that and his camera to the Clutter house. Rohleder found two boot prints that belonged to two different men but not to any of the Clutters. He also hatched a theory that almost no one else went along with at first: that robbery had been the motive for the murders.
By the end of the week, almost everyone in the country had heard about the vicious crime. Mass media in the United States were just becoming truly “mass,” with the rapidly increasing presence of televisions in every home. The radio carried the same information from coast to coast. The nation’s first truly notorious murder spree, that of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, was still fresh in the public consciousness, especially in the Midwest, since that spree had begun in Nebraska. The Clutter murders were on a similar level, in terms of their sensational nature.
Even in the nation’s prisons, the story played on the radio. One of the people who heard it was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary named Floyd Wells. Wells knew the Clutters. He had worked at the River Valley Farm a decade earlier. Arranging to see the warden, he told a disturbing story.
After convicts Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had been in a cell together for two weeks, Smith had been paroled with instructions not to return to Kansas. Hickock’s new cell mate was Floyd Wells. Cell mates talk, and one of the things Wells had talked about was Herb Clutter, the wealthy farmer who kept plenty of cash in the safe of his old house—at least ten thousand dollars, Wells had insisted.
Hickock, an athletic man with a face left deformed by an automobile accident, had been impressed by these stories and had come up with the idea of teaming up with his paroled pal Perry Smith to rob the house, take the cash from the safe, and then kill everyone in the house so there couldn’t be any witnesses. Wells hadn’t thought that Hickock would go through with it—he put it down to jailhouse boasting and forgot about it. Now he was convinced that Hickock and Smith had done it.
This fit Rohleder’s theory to a T. An all-points bulletin was put out for the arrest of Hickock and Smith.
After the murders, Hickock and Smith had gone to Mexico for a while, stopped in Florida, and then returned to Kansas, paying their way with robberies and bad checks. Finally, at the end of 1959, they were in Las Vegas. On December 30, a couple of patrol officers ran an out-of-state license plate, and the information came back that the plate number belonged to a car that had been stolen in Kansas. The officers watched the car and saw Hickock and Smith return to it. They had mug shots of the Clutter family’s killers, and the pictures matched the men. They moved in and arrested the suspects.
Back in Kansas, Hickock and Smith confessed. Initially Smith blamed Hickock for two of the killings, then later changed his story and took credit for all four. It didn’t matter—they had acted together, making both equally responsible under the law. They were found guilty and sentenced to hang, and on April 14, 1965, the mismatched killers took their final walk together to the gallows.
Although there had been a safe in the Clutters’ old house—the house Wells had been to—the house that Hickock and Smith had invaded was new. Herb Clutter, a college-educated businessman, did most of his business by check and had seen no need to put a safe in the new house. When the killers demanded to be shown the safe, he answered truthfully. He no longer kept large amounts of cash on hand, and he and his family were murdered for pocket money.
The case became famous as the basis for Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. Capote underplayed the contributions of Rohleder and combined him and other officers into a composite character based on Alvin Dewey, a detective with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Dewey was the bureau’s lead investigator on the case and was certainly deeply involved in the manhunt for Hickock and Smith, but in overemphasizing Dewey’s role, and in certain other aspects of the story, Capote took creative liberties. Still, his version of the facts is widely considered the truth, and it’s because of his book (and the movie adapted from it) that the Clutter home invasion still carries such emotional heft half a century later. The crime is also mentioned in the episode “The Big Game” (214) when Jason Gideon discusses why serial killers kill.
FIFTEEN YEARS after Hickock and Smith murdered the Clutters, another home invasion in Kansas made the news.
Charlie Otero, fifteen, returned to his Wichita home after school on January 15, 1974, to find his parents, Joseph and Julie, dead in their bedroom. Joseph was on the floor, bound at the wrists and ankles; he had been strangled. The same was true for Julie, but she had also been gagged. Joseph Jr., Charlie’s nine-year-old brother, was in his room, at the foot of his bed, strangled and with his head covered by a hood. Downstairs, Charlie’s eleven-year-old sister, Josephine, was hanging by the neck from a pipe, partly nude. Two other siblings, Daniel and Carmen, weren’t home from school yet.
The police found semen throughout the house. The killer had not sexually assaulted his victims, but he appeared to have masturbated on some of them. The police were at a loss for clues, and the case went unsolved.
On April 4 of the same year, brother and sister Kevin and Kathryn Bright came home to their Wichita house to find a man pointing a gun at them as they entered. The man forced them into a bedroom. Kathryn, twenty-one, was tied up. While Kevin, nineteen, was being bound, he fought back and was shot twice in the head. The man returned to Kathryn, who fought as well, so he gave up on trying to strangle her and instead stabbed her three times. Meanwhile, Kevin, who was not dead after all, ran out into the street and called for help.
The attacker raced from the house. Kathryn died later at the hospital.
That October, a reporter for the Wichita Eagle received a phone call alerting him to a letter that had been left in a textbook at the public library. The police retrieved the letter, which contained details about the Otero family homicides that had never been released to the public. At the letter’s end was this postscript: “P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code word for me will be: Bind them, torture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.”
After the letter, the killer went silent until March 17, 1977, when a five-year-old boy named Steve Relford met a man on the street outside the boy’s home. The man showed him pictures of a woman and a child and asked if Steve knew them. Steve told him he didn’t, then went inside his house. A short while later, the same man knocked on the door. Claiming to be a private detective, he forced his way into the home, which was occupied at the time by Steve and two siblings and their mother, Shirley Vian, twenty-four. The man put the kids in a bathroom, then took Shirley into her bedroom. He intended to rape her, but she was sick that day, and he wound up strangling her and masturbating into her panties. The phone rang before he could kill the children, and he fled the house.
The BTK Killer murdered one more victim, Nancy Fox, in 1977. In 1978 he sent another letter to authorities, admitting to murdering the Oteros, Vian, Fox, and another woman (
presumed to be Kathryn Bright). He suggested then that the initials he had used in the earlier letter be given to him as a name. He seemed aware of his place in the pantheon of serial killers, as indicated here: “The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, Havery Glatman, Boston Strangler, Dr. H. H. Holmes Panty Hose Strangler OF Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of the West Coast and many more infamous character kill.” Finally the police admitted that there was a serial killer in Wichita, and they warned people to be on their guard.
After another pause, the BTK Killer broke into the home of sixty-three-year-old widow Anna Williams in April 1979. He waited, but she came home late, after he had already left. In June, he mailed her a poem titled “Oh Anna Why Didn’t You Appear.”
He went underground again, only to resurface on April 27, 1985. This time he broke into the home of Marine Hedge, fifty-three. After cutting her phone line, he waited in a back bedroom of her house until she came home. When she did, there was a man with her, so the killer hid until the man left, then emerged and strangled Hedge. That wasn’t enough for him, so he put her body in the trunk of her car and drove to his church, where he covered the basement windows with black plastic and spent some time with her, posing her and taking pictures. Finally, he dumped the body and returned the car.
The BTK Killer entered the home of Vicki Wegerle, twenty-eight, on September 16, 1986, by posing as a telephone repairman, complete with hard hat. He strangled her, photographed her death throes, and left in her car. As her husband, Bill, approached their home, he saw his own car driving away. He found his two-year-old son, Brandon, still alive and by himself in the living room, then he found Vicki in the bedroom. The BTK Killer hadn’t been heard from in years, so he wasn’t suspected in the Hedge murder, and now Wegerle was the initial suspect in his wife’s murder.
Dolores Davis, sixty-two, was home alone on January 19, 1991, when she heard the noise of a concrete block crashing through a glass patio door. The killer let himself in, bound and strangled Davis, then drove her body away in her own car and placed it under some trees. He took the car back, got into his own, and returned for her, then he drove her around a while longer and finally dumped her under a bridge.
Again he was gone. FBI profiler John Douglas thought that he either had been arrested or had died. Perhaps the BTK Killer’s photographs, drawings, and memories were now sufficient to complete his fantasy. In January 2004, the Wichita Eagle ran stories about the murders that had begun thirty years before, and a Wichita lawyer wrote a book about the case.
Possibly afraid that others would tell his story and get it wrong, the BTK Killer began communicating again. The BAU provided a strategy to keep him reaching out by issuing press releases, and it worked. He sent multiple letters, some containing souvenirs and copies of photographs he had taken—items that only the real killer could have had. Some of the packages contained dolls that were bound in ways that suggested the deaths of Nancy Fox and Josephine Otero. The BTK Killer asked whether the police would be able to trace a computer floppy disk back to him if he sent one. The police responded in a classified ad that they wouldn’t.
On February 16, 2005, a floppy disk arrived at a TV station. The police checked it out and found traces of software from the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita and the name Dennis. The church’s current president was Dennis Rader. The investigators obtained a DNA specimen from Rader’s daughter, Kerri, and matched it to the DNA found in the semen left at many of the BTK Killer’s scenes. Dennis Rader was their man. He was arrested on February 26, thirty-one years after his first murders.
During the decades in which Dennis Rader was killing, his life appeared, from the outside, to be fairly normal. Born on March 9, 1945, he was twenty-nine when he began to murder. At his arrest he was fifty-nine and still hoping to kill again. Rader was employed by ADT Security Systems from November 1974 until July 1998. He held several positions there, including installation manager—a job that took him into many private homes and taught him how to get around security systems.
Rader also worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, and he was the compliance director for Park City, Kansas. He married Paula Dietz in 1971 and had two children. Paula was shocked when her husband was arrested; she had no inkling that she might be married to a serial killer who had ten murders to his credit. Neither did the members of his church, who had voted for him as president. Rader had been a Cub Scout leader, and by the time of his arrest, his son had become an Eagle Scout.
On August 18, 2005, Rader was sentenced to ten life sentences, eligible for parole after 175 years.
Rader is brought up in the episodes “Charm and Harm” (120), “Tabula Rasa” (319), “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), and “Omnivore” (418).
THE FIRST TIME that home invasions come into play on Criminal Minds is in the episode “Plain Sight” (104), in which the Tommy Killer enters women’s homes in San Diego, murders them, and glues their eyes open. The name Tommy Killer comes from the line from the Who’s rock opera Tommy, “See me, feel me.”
San Diego dealt with its own rash of home-invasion murders in 1990, when the Clairemont Killer murdered six women in their own homes.
The first victim was Tiffany Schultz, a twenty-one-year-old student and part-time exotic dancer who had been sunbathing on the balcony of her second-floor apartment in San Diego’s Clairemont neighborhood on January 12, 1990. Later that day, her roommate found her. Schultz was wearing just the bikini bottoms and had been stabbed forty-seven times, mostly around her left breast.
Janene Weinhold was next. She lived in a complex across the street from Schultz’s, and the two complexes shared a garage. Weinhold was discovered in her second-floor apartment, naked except for a bra, and stabbed multiple times, centering on her right breast. She had been sexually assaulted, and semen was collected from her body.
On April 3, eighteen-year-old Holly Tarr, visiting from Michigan with her friend Tammy, became the third victim. Holly and Tammy were staying with Holly’s brother in the same complex that Weinhold had lived in. They were at the pool, and when Holly went back to the apartment before Tammy, she was attacked. Tammy returned to the apartment a few minutes later, but the door was locked. Hearing a scream, she cried for help. A maintenance man opened the door, and as he did, an African American man fled with a knife in his hand. Tammy found her friend wearing panties and a bra, with a deep stab wound in her heart.
The man she had seen looked like someone Tammy and Holly had noticed in the complex’s weight room earlier. A check of the weight room’s sign-in log revealed the name Cleophus Prince Jr. The police interrogated Prince, but he denied everything and refused to be fingerprinted. They didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.
The standard rule of criminal profiling is that killers tend to murder within their own race. But Prince was black and all of his victims white. In other ways, however, he fit the profile. The FBI believed that he lived close by and that he was killing within his comfort zone. It turned out that Prince did live in the complex.
After the Tarr murder, Prince moved away from the complex but not out of San Diego. On May 20, thirty-eight-year-old Elissa Keller was found choked, beaten, and with nine stab wounds in her chest. Prince’s next attack was on two women, Pamela Clarkson, forty-two, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Amber. Each had eleven stab wounds in her chest. All three of these victims lived in the area to which Prince had recently moved.
The police tracked him down again and found several knives in his car. They took a blood sample and fingerprints, then released him, and he rushed to his mother’s home in Alabama.
The DNA analysis came back identifying Prince as the killer and rapist. Meanwhile, he was arrested in Alabama, then released on bond while San Diego cops were waiting for DNA results. When the San Diego police asked the Birmingham police to pick him up, the latter called him, and he turned himself in. He was arrested and extradited to California.
The authorities had him cold on the Weinhold case, but they wanted to convict him o
f all six murders. FBI profiler John Douglas and Special Agent Larry Ankrom of the San Diego field office worked together to provide a profile that would definitively link the crimes. They looked at the similarities among the victims, their residences, their proximity to Prince’s residences, and the MO of each murder. Of special note was the killer’s focus on stabbing the women in the breast, a psychosexual disorder called piquerism, in which a knife, a pin, or another sharp object acts as a penis substitute and the stabbing stands for sexual penetration. Prince didn’t glue his victims’ eyes open, but like the Tommy Killer he had a unique signature, and the FBI was able to use it against him.
Over the defense attorney’s objections, the profile was introduced in court, and Prince was convicted on all six counts, as well as for twenty burglaries. He was sentenced to death, but as of this writing he is still on death row at San Quentin.
IN SANTA CRUZ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Ed Kemper and Herb Mullin killing coeds and others, mass murder seemed second only to surfing as a favorite leisure-time activity. In “The Last Word” (209), Spencer Reid points out how rare it is to have two serial killers operating in the same city at the same time. In real life, Santa Cruz not only had two serial killers, it also had home invader and mass murderer John Linley Frazier, who helped to put a community that was already on edge even more so.
Frazier, who lived in a tiny shack in the hills outside town, murdered eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family and his secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader. Frazier had, somewhat halfheartedly, embraced the hippie lifestyle, and he considered the well-to-do Ohta excessively materialistic. At the Ohta home, he shot Victor three times with a .38, then shot Ohta’s wife, Virginia, Ohta’s sons, Derrick and Taggart, and Cadwallader.
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