It wasn’t until October 8 that police received what they cautiously believed might be the biggest break in the case. Gary Sebring, a local resident with a lengthy history of deviant behavior that included an arrest for having sex with a duck in Riverside Park, was picked up for molesting a five-year-old girl behind a public library. While being questioned about the incident at the police station, Sebring made an off-the-cuff comment about the Otero homicides that proved to be the equivalent of dropping a lit match into a gas tank.
“He said, ‘If I was doing the Oteros, this is how I would have done it,’” recalls one officer who worked the case.“‘I would have been with my brother, and we would have tied them all up and my buddy Thomas Meyers would have been with us.’”
Anyone looking at their individual rap sheets could tell that Gary Sebring and his brother, Ernest, had serious mental problems. So did Meyers. If somebody was going to give false confessions to a quadruple homicide, they were the perfect candidates. But the heat to crack the Otero murders was getting intense, and because the three had a history of sex offenses, the decision was quickly made to bring them in for questioning. Although this was five years before I first got involved with the case, if I’d been working on it, I would have told the cops not to bother. From a profiling standpoint, the Oteros’ killer was far too sophisticated and careful to have a history of bestiality and attempted molestation of a juvenile on his rap sheet. It just didn’t fit.
Meyers couldn’t be found. But on October 9, Sebring’s older brother was taken in and grilled. Instead of being booked in jail, the Sebrings were taken to a local mental hospital for evaluation. On October 18, Meyers was located after he tried committing suicide and paramedics were called to the scene. Eventually he was placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital.
Despite Gary’s rambling statement about his involvement in the murders, police quickly realized they’d opened a Pandora’s box due to the threesome’s mental instability. Years before, my Behavioral Science Unit worked on a case with similar dynamics, involving two homicides that had occurred nearly a decade apart in northern Virginia. After reviewing the murders, we concluded that the same offender was responsible for both crimes. There was just one problem. A mentally challenged man was currently sitting in jail for the first homicide at the time the second murder had occurred. We eventually discovered that police interrogators had convinced the suspect to confess to the killing, telling him it was the only way to avoid the death penalty if convicted. The real killer, it turned out, was a career burglar who committed the murders during his probationary stints in half-way houses. He was later found guilty of the killings, and the governor exonerated the first man and ordered him released from prison.
None of the three men in Wichita were ever charged with any crime, but media coverage of these new unnamed suspects in the Otero case evidently began to annoy the real killer. The fact that three poseurs were getting ink and airtime for what he considered to be the crowning achievement of his life proved more than he could bear.
Late in the morning on October 22, he telephoned the Otero murder hotline set up by one of the city’s two daily newspapers—the Wichita Eagle and Beacon. When columnist Don Granger picked up the phone, the voice at the other end of the line got right to the point.
“Listen and listen good because I’m not going to repeat it,” he growled, explaining that the man who killed the Oteros had stuck a letter inside a mechanical engineering textbook on the second floor of the Wichita Public Library.
That was all he said. Then he hung up, as if really annoyed.
Granger immediately telephoned Floyd Hannon, the chief of police, and told him the news. Within minutes, Detective Drowatzky was combing through the aisles of the library, located across the street from police headquarters, searching for the book. He eventually found a white envelope with the name Bill Thomas Killman, which police would eventually realize was an acronym for BTK, typed in the upper left-hand portion of the envelope.
Drowatzky’s first impression upon reading it was, “It was jumbled up to make everyone think he was an idiot, which he was. But it also became apparent that he had a certain sick intelligence to him.”
The letter had been typed and was laced with butchered syntax and numerous misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and misconjugated verbs. Of the detectives who poured over it, no one was quite sure whether the errors were unintentional or added simply to fool police into believing they were dealing with an imbecile.
It had been my experience that offenders who communicated with police generally attempted to disguise their writing and throw investigators off by purposely misspelling words or by using improper grammar. But one thing was clear: whoever created this one-page letter didn’t seem concerned about sending police the original rather than a photocopy. He had to know that forensic specialists would comb through every square inch of the letter with a microscope. He had to know there was a good chance that it contained a crucial piece of physical evidence that might allow investigators to trace the letter back to him. It was also risky because it provided investigators with their first real glimpse into his cold, savage mind. Even if everything he wrote was a lie, from that point onward he was no longer an invisible phantom. His image, albeit still terribly murky, had begun to take some semblance of shape and form. And he was OK with that. His ego obviously allowed him to believe the risk to be worth it.
Here was what the letter said:
OTERO CASE
I write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer as well as your time. Those three dudes you have in custody are just talking to get publicity for the Otero murders. They know nothing at all. I did it by myself and no ones help. There has been no talk either. Lets put it straight . . .
Joe:
Position: Southwest bedroom, feet tie to the bed. Head pointed in a southerly direction.
Bondage: Window blind cord.
Garrote: Blind cord, brown belt.
Death: The old bag trick and strangulation with clothesline rope.
Clothed: White sweatshirt, green pants.
Comments: He threw up at one time. Had rib injury from wreck few week before. Laying on coat.
Julie:
Position: Laying on her back crosswise on the bed pointed in southwestern direction. Face cover with a pillow.
Bondage: Blind cord.
Garrote: Clothes line cord tie in a clove hitch.
Death: Strangulation twice.
Clothes: Blue housecoat, black slack, white sock.
Comments: Blood on face from too much pressure on the neck, bed unmade.
Josephine:
Position: Hanging by the neck in the northwest part of the basement.
Dryer or freezer north of her body.
Bondage: Hand tie with blind cord. Feet and lower knees, upper knees and waist with clothes line cord. All one length.
Garrote: Rough hemp rope 1/4 dia., noose with four or five turns.
Clothes: Dark bra cut in the middle, sock. [For some reason BTK left out the pale blue T-shirt and panties pulled down to her socks.]
Death: Strangulation once, hung.
Comments: Most of her clothes at the bottom of the stairs, green pants, and panties. Her glasses in the southwest bedroom.
Joseph:
Position: In the east bedroom laying on his back pointed in eastern direction.
Bondage: Blind cord.
Garrote: Three hoods; white T-shirt, white plastic bag, another T-shirt, Clothes line cord with clove-hitch.
Death: Suffocation once, stranglation-suffocation with the old bag trick.
Clothes: Brown pants, yellow-brown stripe T-shirt.
Comments: His radio is blaring.
All victims had their hands tie behind their backs. Gags of pillow case material. Slip knotts on Joe and Joseph neck to hold leg down or was at one time. Purse contents south of the table. Spilled drink in that area also, kids making lunches. Door shade in red chair in the living room. Otero’s
watch missing. I needed one so I took it. Runsgood. Themostat turn down. Car was dirty inside, out of gas.
I’m sorry this happen to society. They are the ones who suffer the most. It hard to control myself. You probably call me “psychotic with sexual perversion hang-up” When this monster enter my brain I will never know. But, it here to stay. How does one cure himself? If you ask for help, that you have killed four people they will laugh or hit the panic button and call the cops.
I can’t stop it so the monster goes on, and hurt me as well as society. Society can be thankful that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victims being torture and being mine. It a big compicated game my friend of the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting . . . the pressure is great and sometimes some times he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has aready chosen his next victim or victims. I don’t who they are yet. The next day after I read the paper, I will know, but it to late. Good luck hunting.
YOURS, TRULY GUILTILY
P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be . . . Bind them, toture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.
There was no signature on the bottom of the letter. Instead, whoever penned it drew a cryptic symbol created from the letters BTK.
Judging from the way he described his crime scenes—with the attention to detail of a detective—whoever wrote the letter was clearly a wannabe cop. But he obviously needed to bone up on his Criminology 101, because plenty of criminals do change their MOs. Decades later, investigators would learn that BTK changed his modus operandi when he removed the bodies of his last two victims from their homes. What doesn’t change is the killer’s signature, which is something the offender does to fulfill himself emotionally, but that isn’t necessarily needed to accomplish the crime.
In the Otero murders—and, we would later learn, in the Bright case—BTK’s signature was the use of bindings and gags, along with a form of psychological torture wherein he denied his victims the courtesy of a quick death.
Not surprisingly, detectives pounced on the letter almost as soon as it landed on Chief Hannon’s desk and began picking it apart, examining it for hair, fiber, and fingerprints, then sifting through every single misspelling and word usage, looking for any clue they could unearth.
The first thing that jumped off the page was the fact that whoever sent it had—when discussing the suspects being looked at by police—crossed out the word “two” and replaced it with “three.” He evidently had written the letter before October 18, when Thomas Meyers was finally located. But, for some reason, he had opted to sit on his communiqué for several days before sending it. Clearly the UNSUB didn’t want someone else getting credit for what he considered to be his Mona Lisa.
But there was another reason. He appeared to be enjoying how he was making the Wichita police resemble the Keystone Kops. The last thing he wanted was for his local law enforcement agency to garner any positive accolades from the media or the community for possibly solving the Otero murders.
The UNSUB didn’t claim responsibility for Bright’s murder for the simple reason that he’d left behind a living witness—her brother. Police wouldn’t make that connection until the waning months of 1979. But now that I’d learned he’d been responsible for Kathy’s botched, bumbling, albeit lethal attack four months earlier, it seemed quite possible that he also typed his letter to police in order to remind himself—and them—of exactly what he was capable of when he was at the top of his game. After all, here was a killer who, in the Otero case, was able to overpower and con a family of four into submission.
What was certain, however, was that his letter contained a level of detail that only the Oteros’ killer could have known. It went far beyond anything that had appeared in the media after the homicides occurred. It read like a police crime report. His descriptions were so exact that I was left wondering if he’d photographed the crime scene before fleeing. How could he remember all those details if he hadn’t brought a camera, or perhaps discovered one at the house and used that?
Yet for all the precise, accurate information he included in his letter, there was also something peculiar. A few of the descriptions were so off the mark that detectives were a bit stumped. For instance, at the crime scene, Joseph didn’t have a bag on his head, and Julie’s face wasn’t covered by a pillow. The reason, police eventually learned, was that the Otero children had removed them while trying to revive their parents. Also, BTK never mentioned the pale blue T-shirt that Josephine was still wearing after her death.
In the end, however, these inaccuracies actually did more to prove that whoever penned the letter actually was the Oteros’ killer. After all, he would not have known that the crime scene had been disturbed. He would have expected it to look exactly the way it did when he fled the house. Another factual error was the writer’s claim that he’d used five turns of his rope to create Josephine’s noose. In reality, he’d only used three. Detectives wrote off this mistake as a case of inattention due to the excitement he must have been experiencing prior to killing his eleven-year-old victim. Another perplexing aspect of the letter was the writer’s reference to Josephine’s glasses being left in the bedroom. Why would the killer have gone to the trouble of placing them there? Was it simply some weird way to taunt police? The answer turned out to be much more mundane, although decades would pass before investigators learned the real reason.
Over the next couple of weeks, nearly two dozen psychologists and psychiatrists were shown the contents of the letter and asked to compile a personality profile of the individual they believed might have written it. The doctors were divided over whether or not it should be released to the public, something police were hesitant to do out of fear that they’d be inundated by an avalanche of false leads they knew they didn’t have the manpower to investigate.
We now know that there was an issue far more important than whether or not the department needed additional personnel to chase down leads. My belief is that police might have been more effective in their efforts if they’d been more forthcoming with the release of information to the public. Because when provided with useful behavioral characteristics of an UNSUB, the community can begin acting as a powerful tool for investigators, serving as their eyes, ears, and a type of collective data bank. Surely somebody, somewhere, may have seen something around the time of the murders, some odd bit of behavior in a friend, coworker, or relative. But until people are given some clue as to what they’re supposed to have seen, they can’t help connect the dots for police.
The specialists were unanimous in their assessment: the writer was “a very sick man . . . who had a fetish for bondage. His reaction, sexually, is to be bound, to bind other people,” Chief Hannon eventually told reporters.
At the request of police, Granger placed a classified ad in the newspaper, which ran from October 24 to October 27, urging the killer to contact him. It read:
B.T.K. Help is available. Call 684-6321 before 10 P.M.
Granger never received any response from the ad. A few days later, he wrote a column in the newspaper, explaining that police were searching for “a man who needs help badly,” who had information about the Otero murders. The intrepid columnist went so far as to ask the man to call him at home, but the call never came. The killer was no longer in a talkative mood. He obviously had other things on his mind.
5
It was getting late. When I looked up from the stack of pages detailing the Kathy Bright homicide, the sun had vanished, and a coating of darkness had descended on the world outside.
I decided that maybe it was time to pack it in and head home for the night. I was tired. I gathered up my stacks of crime reports, wrapping rubber bands around each individual pile, tossed them into a bag, and trudged out into the darkness to my car
. A few minutes into my half-hour drive home, I realized exactly what I needed to do. It was something I hadn’t done in nearly a month. So I turned the car around and steered north, toward Quantico National Cemetery, to visit the grave that had been intended for me.
Months earlier when it was assumed that I’d probably never pull out of my coma, some bureaucrat in the Veteran’s Administration reserved a plot for me in this newly opened cemetery that had once served as a blockade point for Confederate troops during the Civil War. When I refused to die, my plot was given to someone else. But I knew its location and felt a kind of strange attachment to the place. There but for the grace of God, I often thought to myself.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 8