Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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Without a doubt, BTK was a sadist who inflicted unfathomable horrors upon his victims. Yet he also differed from all the other sexual sadists I’d studied, guys who needed to inflict physical torture in order to be sexually satisfied. He got off by employing a form of torture that was predominantly mental, not physical. Although he seemed obsessed with physical torture, it wasn’t part of what’s referred to as his “signature,” which is what a killer must do to satisfy himself psychologically. BTK’s signature was bondage—not physical torture.
BTK never penetrated any of his victims. It would have been easy to interpret this type of behavior as though he were trying to say You’re not even good enough for me to rape. But I knew better.
His decision to not rape his victims or engage in necrophilia actually told me that despite BTK’s sexual obsessions, deep inside his mind he felt hopelessly inadequate. His opinion of himself was so low—and his fear of women so great—that he could never bring himself to thrust himself so intimately into any of his victims. They were used purely as props. Masturbation was the only sexual activity he enjoyed during his binding, torture, and killing.
When I thought of the UNSUB as a boy, I couldn’t imagine that he had ever raped anyone, which was unlike a lot of sexual predators. I did imagine him learning his craft as a Peeping Tom. If nothing else, this youthful pastime gave him a priceless crash course in surveillance techniques. Monitoring and studying his victims were absolutely crucial to him. He seemed to love the thrill of the hunt probably even more than the actual killing. By the time he actually did strike, he’d spent so much time fantasizing over what he intended to do to his victim that he’d convinced himself that he controlled every aspect of their environment.
As for his victims, he told police in the handful of taunting communiqués he’d sent over the years that he chose them based on both planning and spur-of-the-moment opportunity. His intended victims had to be available when the overpowering urge to kill struck. If they weren’t, he moved on to another target.
There was something else: judging from the way he managed to keep his crime scenes so relatively free of fingerprints and other incriminating evidence, he was an extremely well-organized person, someone fixated on detail. Inwardly he was an insecure, self-hating wreck. Outwardly, however, he exuded a pompous attitude that made it appear as though he possessed a grandiose opinion of himself. It was another one of his crazy, sick paradoxes.
What I also found interesting were those communications he’d sent police over the years, boasting of his prowess as a killer and his ability to elude law enforcement. From the language he used, he was obviously both fascinated by cop subculture and investigative procedure and quite familiar with them. I was convinced that he was either employed in some form of law enforcement, probably low down in rank or status, like a security guard or parking violation officer, or just got off dreaming about the power such a job could bestow on him.
As is often the case with serial killers, his slayings were the most important undertakings of his life, imbuing his otherwise empty existence with meaning. From his letters, it seemed obvious that he was a nobody who, because of his unfathomable savagery, suddenly felt like a celebrity. He’d become addicted to seeing his crimes written about in the newspaper and discussed on TV. I bet that hearing others discuss his killings proved almost as thrilling and satisfying as committing the crimes themselves.
Although he had killed men and children, it seemed obvious that women were his primary targets. Everyone else just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I believed that deep down, he loathed women. Whatever conflicts he’d had with them, as well as with society, were released through the murders he committed. Within his troubled mind, he took no responsibility for his actions. He was clearly in some state of depression, unable to genuinely love or be loved. As a result, his life was one in which he must seek out excitement and drama in order to feel alive. And although he was able to put up a good front to others, the world he lived for—and lived in—had nothing to do with reality. It was based purely on the sadistic fantasies inside his brain.
By his own admission, BTK took trinkets from the homes of his victims. He used them as fuel for his fantasies. I felt confident that they were one of the few things that quieted his head, which is why he needed to collect and preserve the trophies of his conquests, taken from his crime scenes. Having the personal possessions of his victims reminded him of his “glory days.” I imagined that all he needed to do to relive one of his kills was hold his victim’s belongings in his hands. Each homicide brought with it a psychological high that would quickly evaporate, always leaving him alone with his depressed thoughts. His trophies and keepsakes no doubt proved a bit more effective at keeping the depression away. But the peace these ghostly mementos brought never completely removed his feelings of depression and anxiety.
The question that stumped me and everybody else involved in the case was this: Why had so many years lapsed since his last murder? I couldn’t understand it. Every time I pondered the question, I came up with another theory. All of them made sense. None of them I could prove.
Perhaps he’d been picked up on some unrelated charge and was now rotting in a prison cell or mental institution? Or could the police have gotten too close to him during one of the various phases of their investigation? Maybe they even interviewed him as a potential suspect, and the experience might have proved too unnerving for this otherwise unflappable sociopath?
One thing was certain—serial sexual predators don’t wake up one morning, decide to turn over a new leaf, and start their lives over. For all I knew, he could have been killed in a car wreck, although I had a hunch that we weren’t going to get off that easy. Someone as sick and dangerous as BTK will stop killing only when he is killed or gets locked behind bars. My research had proven to me that this is the only way to rein in these guys. Rehabilitation is a fairy tale.
Which I suppose was the most unbearable part of being involved in this case—knowing in my gut that that if he were alive, BTK would resume his killing. Somewhere out there, there was a family whose future was on the verge of becoming a living hell. If you’ve ever seen the blank, numb look on the face of someone whose loved one has just been murdered, you know that it stays with you forever. Just as BTK had stayed with me throughout my career at the FBI.
I joined the agency in 1970, four years before the first BTK killings, a twenty-five-year-old rookie agent working the streets of inner-city Detroit. Like most idealistic young agents (and I was one of the youngest ever hired), I’d convinced myself that I was going to make Motor City safer by helping put the bad guys behind bars, a crusade I imagined the citizens would applaud. It didn’t take long before I realized how the residents living in my “beat” felt about my presence in their neighborhood.
The Detroit area had been nearly leveled by the 1967 race riots that left forty-three people dead. When I joined the FBI three years later, the place still exuded the desperate, forgotten aura of a second-generation war zone. Whenever my partner and I drove through the area in our so-called “bucar” (short for bureau car), the locals would flip us off and shout, “DOWN WITH THE PIGS.”
One afternoon in 1971, while en route to stake out a bookie joint, I asked myself, Is this really how you want to spend the next twenty-five years of your career? Before an answer could come to me, an empty bottle bounced off the roof of my car, shattering on the asphalt just outside my open window. I stomped on the accelerator, muttering to myself that the only way I’d ever last in the FBI would be to find some specialty in the science of criminology, then hurl myself into it with everything I had.
By 1972, shortly after the new FBI Academy opened in Quantico, Virginia, I learned about an agent named Howard Teten who was dabbling in criminal profiling, using it to catch violent criminals. And I started on the path that led me to this library, to these stacks of paper that told the story of how seven people in Wichita had come to be murdered.
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Years spent pouring through countless reports just like these had enabled me to develop the ability to transform the facts and images appearing on these pieces of paper into a series of moving pictures loosely resembling a movie. All I needed to do was absorb the information, and, before I knew it, scenes and images were spilling out inside my head. The sensation was similar to watching TV—only most of what I glimpsed was much more violent.
It all began on a frigid Tuesday morning around 7:50 A.M. The date was January 15, 1974. That was the moment the city of Wichita underwent a transformation because of what took place in a white house with black shutters in a lower-middle-class, predominantly white neighborhood in the southeast part of town.
When the man responsible for the event fled the dwelling at 803 North Edgemoor Street around noon, the residence sat quiet for over three hours. A furnace rumbled in the basement, and the family’s German shepherd paced anxiously through the snow in the backyard, letting out an occasional bark.
Shortly after 3:30 P.M, fifteen-year-old Charlie Otero and his brother, Danny, fourteen, and sister, Carmen June, thirteen, walked home from school and discovered the bodies of their mother and father in their bedroom. Charlie tried calling for help from the kitchen wall phone, but he couldn’t get a dial tone. So he ran to the house next door, shouting that his father was dead.
A moment later, the neighbor sprinted back to the family’s residence, ran down the hallway to the master bedroom, and poked his head inside. He spotted Julie Otero’s body sprawled atop the bed. Nearby, on the floor, lay her husband, Joseph, with a butcher knife beside him and his bound ankles propped up on a briefcase. The neighbor had no idea that the knife was there because the Otero children had used it to cut the bindings off their father. So, in a flash, he assumed the worst: Joseph had murdered his wife, then killed himself. That was what he told police a few minutes later when he telephoned them from his kitchen.
By the time rookie Wichita Police Department patrolman Robert “Bob” Bulla arrived at the Otero house less than five minutes later, the three or four inches of snow carpeting the lawn had begun turning to slush. Dispatch had radioed him that there was a possible murder-suicide at 803 North Edgemoor. Charlie was on the front lawn when Bulla pulled his cruiser up to the curb. The teary-eyed teen was desperately yanking on the arms of the ambulance crew who had arrived a few minutes before Bulla. Charlie pleaded with the paramedics to go inside, to see if they could revive his parents, but all they could do was apologize and explain that they had to wait for police to give them the OK.
Bulla made his way up the walkway, chatting with the ambulance crew for a few moments as Charlie sent his brother and sister off on a mission to fetch the two youngest members of the family. He believed they were on their way home from elementary school. Being the protective older brother he was, he didn’t want them arriving back at the house and having to look at the bloody, swollen bodies of their parents.
Bulla entered the house and made his way into the master bedroom, where he spotted the bodies of Joseph and Julie. He gently touched their skin with his fingertips, trying to gauge the temperature of their flesh. Their skin was cold, and their limbs were already stiff from rigor mortis. They’d been dead for many hours, he concluded.
Joseph lay on his back on the floor; his feet, clad in white socks, were bound tightly together by rope at the ankles. Strips of cord, each tied in complex knots, lay next to the bodies. Charlie told officers that he sliced the bindings off of his father after discovering him in the bedroom. Next to Joseph was a plastic bag that had been pulled off his head. Blood was smeared around his mouth and nose. His thick, strong hands were swollen to the size of baseball mitts.
Julie’s face was also grossly swollen, and dried blood was caked around her nose and mouth. Carmen June had used fingernail clippers to cut the gag out of her mother’s mouth, along with her many bindings. The white nylon cord that had been snipped away from her body had formed a thin necklace-like bruise around her neck. She was barefoot and dressed in her powder-blue housecoat. Her ankles were still bound by a single loop of white cord. Sitting on a nearby dresser was a framed photo of a pensive, smiling Julie in her wedding gown. Most of the drawers had been pulled open, and it appeared someone had rifled through the contents.
Additional officers arrived at the home, and before long they discovered the body of Joey, the youngest of the Otero siblings. The boy, who wore maroon corduroy pants and a shirt covered with dragons, lay on his side on the floor of his bedroom, beside the bunk bed he shared with his brother Danny. Next to his head was a Wichita phone book. His ankles were bound by cord. Another cord extended up behind his back and was knotted to his wrists. The cord that bound his hands behind his back was cinched so tight that the boy’s tiny wrists were bruised. Like those of his father, Joey’s hands were engorged with blood and lymph, and had swollen to several times their normal size.
The manner in which he was bound suggested that the UNSUB either tied the boy himself or instructed another family member in how to do it, perhaps trying to create the impression that if everyone would just cooperate with him, he’d take what he needed from the house and be on his way.
A few feet away from the bunk bed sat a wooden chair. The bottom rung of the chair had been broken. Splinters from the shattered piece of wood lay atop the carpet. I glanced at the crime scene photos and imagined the killer sitting there, watching the boy die, and somehow the rung had snapped. The sick image of this killer having the wherewithal to watch Joey suffocate underscored the staggering amount of control he maintained over the Otero family . . . and himself.
The fact that there was so little evidence of a struggle meant two things to me. The first thought was that more than one offender might be involved in the murders. But this possibility had a couple of major flaws. To begin with, I’d never heard of a crime scene where the two offenders had worked together in such perfect synchrony. I’d also never seen a case where two offenders would each have bondage as their signature. Normally, each killer would have his own distinct patterns at the crime scene. More often than not, one offender will be organized and controlling, whereas the other is disorganized, leaving evidence behind. Then there was the fact that the only biological evidence recovered at the scene was semen, later determined to have come from just one person. So if just one person was involved, I believed that he must have relied on a gun, not a knife, to intimidate the members of the Otero family, who—according to police—were well trained in karate. His gun was the equalizer. It leveled the playing field in a way a knife couldn’t.
But most disturbing of all about the scene was that Joey’s head had been encased within a series of hoods—a white T-shirt, a white plastic bag, and a blue T-shirt. Back in 1979 when I’d initially looked at the case, the presence of the bags and shirt over the boy’s head led me to believe that killing Joey was probably the most difficult murder the UNSUB committed that morning. The killer, I theorized, identified with the child. Looking at the young boy, he glimpsed himself. Lying there on the floor, Joey was helpless and hopeless in exactly the same way the killer felt helpless and hopeless in his own life.
Within the mind of the killer, all the other murders were justified—but not Joey’s. I thought that was why whoever had killed him had gone to such lengths to cover his face. He couldn’t bear to look at it.
In 1979, therefore, I advised the police that if they ever tracked down and were interviewing a suspect, they should provide him with a face-saving scenario, focusing only on the young boy, not the other three family members. Tell him something, I had written, like “We know you don’t feel good about the death [not murder] of Joey. It was difficult for you, and you tried to soften the kill.” Even though this might not be 100 percent true, what I wa
nted them to do was place the suspect at the crime scene.
But now, five years later, I learned that the killer had also used hoods on Joey’s father and mother. Unfortunately, the officer who briefed me on the case back in 1979 had somehow omitted this fact. This unintentional oversight reminded me of an adage that has long since become my mantra: profilers are only as good as the information they receive. In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
Shortly after Joey’s body was discovered, Bulla set off to search the remaining rooms in the house to determine if the killer or killers had left behind any other grisly discoveries. Because tornadoes are a fact of life in this part of the country, he knew there was a basement. He just needed to find a way to get down there.
As he walked down the hallway that led into the living room, he spied the contents of Julie’s purse scattered atop the burnt-orange shag carpet. Bulla glanced around the room at the wood carvings hanging from the wall that looked as though they’d been picked up on an overseas trip. A moment later, he spotted a door in the kitchen that led down to the basement. He opened it, but all he saw was blackness, so he had to rely on his flashlight while slowly navigating the carpeted stairs. Near the bottom step, he spotted a pair of shiny black boots that looked as though they might belong to a little girl. Walking slowly across the room, he spotted a squadron of model airplanes in various stages of construction, spread out across a table, along with a rocking chair and TV set.