In the taunting letter, he wrote, “You guess the motive and the victim.” By the winter of 1979, investigators had combed through every unsolved murder between 1974 and 1977 and finally concluded that several elements of Bright’s killing bore a sick resemblance to those found in BTK’s other known kills.
By now it was 3:45 in the afternoon. My legs were cramping up from sitting in this stuffy library for so long. I stood up from the hard wooden straight-backed chair I’d been camped out on for the past three hours and stretched my legs, hoping to clear my head before diving into my next batch of crime reports.
Part of me wanted to take a break, needed to drag some fresh air into my lungs. But as I stood up, I made the mistake of glancing at what lay on the top of the pile—a grainy black-and-white photograph of Kathy Bright’s bedroom. Unable to control myself, I grabbed the picture and sat back down. To hell with stretching my legs, I scolded myself. I’ll take a break later.
In my pocket was a pill bottle containing the blood-thinning medication that I’d come to rely on ever since emerging from my coma. I fished out two capsules and popped them in my mouth. The irony that I was attempting to catch one of the nation’s most elusive serial killers while ingesting a blood-thinning drug that was essentially rat poison was not lost on me.
I began dissecting the photograph, studying the mattress, which had been moved off the metal bed frame; the shoes scattered about the floor; and the comforter, blood smeared on the corner, that lay crumpled in the corner of the room.
I’d learned long ago that the most important thing to remember when studying a crime photograph is to resist the urge for your eyes to be pulled into the center of the picture. Sometimes the thing you need to find most lies on the periphery of the photo, at the distant edges.
I was once called in to work a homicide where the victim had been raped, then stabbed ten times in the throat. Local police believed that the UNSUB had stolen the victim’s engagement ring after abducting her from a rest stop near Morrilton, Arkansas, while she exercised her dogs during a cross-country car trip. The fact that her killer might be the type who collected souvenirs from his victims had spun the investigation into one dead end after another.
The morning I met with detectives in that Arkansas police station, the victim’s parents were present in the room, desperate to find the man who had killed their daughter. The first thing I did was begin combing through the stack of photos snapped at the crime scene. By the time I reached the third photograph, I found myself pointing to a tiny gray object wedged between the carpet and the frame of the passenger door, situated on the far right side of the picture.
“What’s this?” I asked.
The victim’s aunt peered at the photo and gasped, “Oh my God—it’s the ring.”
This particular homicide had already been featured on America’s Most Wanted, and the public had been advised that the killer had taken the victim’s ring. That he hadn’t, told me that the murderer wasn’t the type who felt compelled to collect souvenirs or mementos from his victims. This meant that detectives needed to track a killer with a different psychological makeup, which ultimately changed the course of the investigation. The killer was eventually linked through DNA to cases in California and Montana.
Something told me not to expect this sort of lucky break in the BTK case. And as I stood there in that library, thumbing through the various photos snapped in the rented wooden house where Kathy Bright lived with her older sister, along with a few taken in the medical examiner’s office, I saw only one thing: a vibrant, feisty young woman whose life was ripped away too soon. So I settled back into my chair at the table and began immersing myself in the sad, cold facts surrounding her murder.
It was couple minutes shy of 12:30 in the afternoon when the front door of the white clapboard house burst open and nineteen-year-old Kevin Bright flung himself outside, staggered through the ice-crusted snow, and began running down the street. Blood had soaked through his white T-shirt. The sight of this young man stumbling through the streets, waving his arms and screaming something about his sister needing help, caught the eye of a passing driver. He slammed on his brakes. The passenger jumped out, quickly pushed the frantic man into the front seat, then sprinted to a nearby automotive repair shop and told the owner to call the cops.
A few minutes later, as the Good Samaritan drove the dazed, bloody young man to the emergency room, a Wichita police dispatcher put out a call over the radio: “Officers to a robbery at a residence, 3217 East 13th Street North. Suspect still at the scene. Armed and dangerous.” Patrolman Raymond Fletcher was driving through the neighborhood. He arrived at the house three minutes later, scrambled out of his cruiser, and slowly walked up the front steps with his .38-caliber service revolver drawn. The front door was open.
“POLICE OFFICER,” he yelled. “POLICE OFFICER.”
When he poked his head inside, he immediately spotted twenty-one-year-old Kathy Bright lying on her side in a puddle of blood in the wood-paneled front room. Oriental carpets hung on the wall, and beer bottles crowded a makeshift table fashioned out of a cable spool. A telephone lay beside her. “Help me,” she whispered in a faint, raspy voice. “I . . . I can’t breath.”
Fletcher knelt beside her, keeping his eyes peeled for the suspect he believed might be hiding in the house.
“I’m gonna get you a doctor,” he told her. “You just gotta stay calm . . . Can you do that?”
He radioed for an ambulance while kneeling on the floor beside Bright, who appeared to be fighting to keep her eyelids from closing. Her breathing grew shallower with each labored inhalation.
“Do you know who did this to you?” Fletcher asked, stroking her head. The poor woman was in bad shape, he thought. She could barely make any sound come out of her throat, so she just shook her head back and forth. The last words she uttered were “Help me.”
What Fletcher didn’t know at that moment was that Bright had been stabbed eleven times in her torso and was bleeding from nearly every major organ of her body. Two of the knife wounds had sliced through a portion of her lung, causing her to slowly suffocate. Her larynx had been also crushed.
Moments later, several more patrolmen and detectives arrived on the scene. The back two bedrooms of the house were in shambles. Smears of blood could be seen on the floor. From the looks of things, Kathy had been tied to a chair with a pair of nylons, but had somehow broken free and crawled out to the phone. Because this was in the days before 911, she dialed the operator, but her assailant had crushed her larynx, so she was unable to utter anything besides a horrible raspy howl.
Shell casings from an automatic pistol that would later be identified as a Woodsman Colt .22 were found in the other bedroom. A nearby bathroom door had a hole blasted in it. A .22 slug belonging to the same pistol was soon dug out from the bathroom wall. In the kitchen, the back-door window had been shattered and the glass swept neatly into a pile.
An ambulance took Kathy to Wesley Medical Center, the same hospital to which her brother had been whisked twenty minutes earlier. She died on the operating table five hours later.
“She lost so much blood, she really never had a chance,” recalls a detective who worked the case.
Not far from where Kathy died, her brother lay in a hospital bed. Kevin was skinny as a rail, but tough as boot leather. Despite being shot twice in the head, he was eager shortly after emerging from surgery to tell detectives everything he could remember. The men pulled up chairs beside his bed and asked him questions.
Kevin had driven into Wichita from his parent’s house in nearby Valley Center the previous night and crashed at the rental house where his two sisters—Kathy and Karen—lived. Earlier that morning, Kevin and Kathy had gone to a local bank to see about getting a loan to help nineteen-year-old Kevin fund an invention he wanted to turn into a business. Karen was off working the first shift at Coleman. It didn’t take long for the loan officer to nix his request, so they returned to Kathy’s house and had just walked
through the front door when—as Kevin recalled—a dark-haired man with a slight pot belly, standing about five feet, ten inches tall, wearing a stocking cap, gloves, a white T-shirt, and a green parka, stood waiting for them in the living room. He was holding a pistol.
“Stop,” the man told them. “Hold it right there.”
The intruder announced that he was on the lam from police in California and trying to get to New York. “I need your car keys and a hundred dollars,” he said.
Kathy told him to take a hike. The man forced the two into a back bedroom at gunpoint. In the middle of the room, he’d positioned a chair. On a nearby bed he’d laid out various ligatures and bindings made out of rope and nylons he’d apparently found in the house.
Kevin was ordered to tie his sister to a chair. Then the intruder instructed Kevin to lie on the floor, and he bound Kevin’s arms and legs with pair of jeans and stockings. He placed a pillow beneath Kevin’s head, then told Kathy to walk to an adjoining bedroom, which she was somehow able to do, despite being tied to a chair. The stranger darted out of the room and disappeared into another part of the house.
Kevin couldn’t quite figure out what this guy, who was both forceful and almost gentle, really wanted with the two of them. Before long, he could hear him opening drawers and slamming doors.
After a few minutes, the man appeared back in the bedroom, walked directly over to Kevin, and, without a moment’s hesitation, kneeled beside him and wrapped what was either a pair of nylons or a rope around his neck, then pulled it tight. The force yanked Kevin up off the floor. When Kevin suddenly realized what the intruder intended to do to him, he began squirming and twisting his hands and arms back and forth. Within seconds, the wiry youth managed to wedge his hands loose from their bindings, and he jumped up onto his feet. In a flash, the man pulled out the pistol with which he’d been threatening the Brights minutes earlier and pointed it at Kevin’s forehead. He pulled the trigger. None of Kathy’s neighbors reported hearing the shot—which wasn’t surprising. I’d lost count of the number of homicides I’d worked involving a firearm that neighbors never heard go off.
The force of a slug hitting his skull and the sheer shock of being shot knocked Kevin backward, and he quickly crumpled onto the floor, unconscious. When he came to a few moments later, the man had disappeared into the bedroom with his sister, obviously satisfied that he’d taken care of Kevin.
“You shot my brother,” Kathy was shouting. “You shot my brother.”
Kevin sat up on the floor and listened as the stranger tried to calm her. “Relax,” he said. “I only wounded him. He’s gonna be OK.”
Kevin attempted to stagger to his feet, but the noise he made must have reached their attacker. The man walked back into the room, where Kevin had just managed to untie his legs. In a flash, Kevin remembered seeing the grip of a pistol tucked into the waistband of the man’s pants, lunged at him, grabbed the gun, and managed to shove it into the man’s chest. He squeezed the trigger, but before the hammer could slam down on the back of a round in the chamber, the attacker wedged his fingers beneath the hammer, preventing the gun from discharging. The two wrestled for control of the pistol, and Kevin managed to squeeze the trigger one more time, but once again the gun didn’t fire.
The man finally wrenched the weapon free, quickly took aim at Kevin’s head and fired, but missed. He pulled the trigger again, and the bullet hit Kevin in the mouth, tearing through his upper lip, turning Kevin’s face into an even bloodier mess than it already was. What the gunman didn’t know, however, was that Kevin’s front teeth deflected the slug. Kevin crumpled to the ground once again, and the gunman jumped on top of him in a flash, then wrapped a rope around his neck and yanked it tight.
Upon hearing the pistol shots, Kathy began screaming, and the man ran back into the other bedroom where she was still tied to a chair. Kevin blacked out for an unknown amount of time, probably just a few minutes. When he came to and stumbled to his feet, his sister was still screaming. He made a split-second decision that sent him running out the front door. The best thing he could do for Kathy, he decided, was to run and get help. Fifteen minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up in front of Bright’s house.
The detectives listened as Kevin whispered his story to them, amazed at his indestructibility and moved by his devotion to his older sister. Despite his injuries, he practically had to be tied down in the hospital bed to prevent him from fleeing the hospital and hitting the street to search for Kathy’s killer.
Before leaving his hospital room, one of the detectives opened up an Identi-Kit, used by police to create composite sketches of an unknown suspect. Over the next forty-five minutes, Kevin poured through the seemingly infinite number of combinations in the book and reconstructed what he could recall from his assailant’s face.
He told officers that the man was a stocky twenty-five-year-old Caucasian with dark hair and a thick dark mustache. He stood about five-foot-ten, had a black stocking cap pulled over his head, which he later removed, and wore a uniform that consisted of an orange shirt and jacket. The completed picture was immediately put on the wire and distributed to law enforcement agencies in the western states, where it was believed the assailant had come from.
Despite the fact that police suddenly had what could be a good description of the Brights’ attacker, the composite caused a fair bit of dissension among several of the detectives assigned to the case. A few believed that the likeness might actually help them nab Kathy’s murderer, whereas others doubted that Kevin, who many suspected had suffered a concussion, could be expected to recall much of value about the suspect.
In all my years working these sorts of cases, I’d rarely heard of a witness involved in a violent crime being able to create a composite drawing that turned out to resemble the perpetrator. That’s why detectives and prosecutors know that they had better have more than just eyewitness testimony to tie a suspect to a crime. Many an investigation has been sent down a dead-end road for this very reason. Nevertheless, in the absence of anything else to work with, the Wichita police quickly put out an all points bulletin, using the details Kevin provided, along with the sketch he helped create.
Other than the clothes and nylons that had been used to tie up the Brights, detectives found precious little evidence in the house. The only set of latent fingerprints that police were unable to identify was found on the back door, but these turned out to belong to Bright’s landlord and he was quickly eliminated as a suspect.
Police knocked on every front door in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where the sisters lived, asking if anyone could remember seeing a suspicious-looking character shortly after the attack, but no one reported seeing anyone out of the ordinary. A bloody white nylon rope was discovered under a tarp in the bed of Kevin’s rusted, decrepit Ford truck, parked on Holyoke Street. Police surmised that the killer might have tossed them in there when fleeing the scene.
About the only thing detectives had to work with was a small amount of marijuana they discovered in the house, leading them to wonder if maybe the attack had something to do with a drug deal gone awry. But then Karen Bright admitted that she and her sister were recreational pot smokers, something the cops had no problem believing because the amount found was so minuscule.
Although police weren’t ruling out the possibility that a local resident could be responsible for the brutal slaying and shooting, they reached out to California authorities, trying to determine if the description given by Kevin matched any fugitives they were currently pursuing. Before long, what few leads they had to work with had grown ice cold.
Although there were a few whispers among detectives that Bright’s killer might be the same individual responsible for the Otero murders, nobody wasted much time trying to link the two cases. And why would they? There appeared to be so many differences—Bright’s killer didn’t cut the phone line, and he’d used both a knife and a gun on his victims. Even his knots, which had been tied from jeans and nylons (as opposed to
the venetian blind cord used at the Otero crime scene) were different. Kathy had been tied with granny knots, whereas the Oteros had been bound with both clove hitches and half hitches.
By the end of April, something else was clear: 1974 was turning out to be one of the bloodiest in recent memory. Six months after the discovery of those four bodies in the Otero house, another quadruple homicide rocked Wichita. Those murders, however, were quickly revealed to be the result of a drug rip-off.
But the Otero and Bright murders were different. Every homicide detective knows that good, thorough victimology—which, quite simply, is the study of the victim of a particular offender—can help crack cases. The problem with the Otero and Bright murders was that all these victims were “low risk,” meaning that there was no single clue to indicate why they were destined to die a violent death. None had engaged in any personal or criminal activities that might explain the fate they met. They were all just regular people, living and working in a community where the overall crime rate was remarkably low. The fact that none of the victims had probably ever laid eyes on their killer before he struck was another reason why police were having such a rough time unearthing any solid leads. Yet there were a few detectives in homicide who believed that the same killer might be responsible for all five murders.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 7