The grass was damp with evening dew as I walked through the cemetery looking for the grave, clutching my flashlight as though it were a club. A full moon, bright as a medical examiner’s lamp, had just crawled above the hickory and oak trees in the distance, helping illuminate my way. Before climbing out of the car, I had grabbed the sheaf of papers detailing BTK’s next victim—Shirley Vian, murdered in her bedroom as her children, who had been locked away in a bathroom, pleaded with the killer to leave their mother alone. I didn’t know what the hell I intended to do with all those papers, but it seemed only natural to bring them along for my nighttime stroll through the cemetery.
I started coming here months ago, thinking it might provide answers to all the questions my brush with nonexistence had left me. For someone who had surrounded himself with death for most of his career, cemeteries felt like a natural extension of my office. Nevertheless, something about the darkness on this particular night set me on edge. I’d never been here at night. Nor had I ever told a soul about my visits here. Why would I? No one would understand.
The last time I’d come here, I happened upon the grave of a little girl whose brutal homicide I’d once investigated. Although it was sheer coincidence that she’d been buried near my would-be plot, as I stood above her tiny body I felt a flash of panic surge through me. For years, I’d been advising cops to keep their eyes on cemeteries because my research had shown that killers sometimes visit the grave of their victims to get close to their “accomplishments.” In the case of this little girl, police had a viable suspect, but they were never able to link the two-time convicted felon directly to her homicide. And this caused a tiny shiver to run up my spine.
What if the cops have her grave staked out at this very moment? I had thought, peering over my shoulders to determine if I was being observed. They’re probably looking at me right now, thinking they’ve finally nabbed their killer.
But on this night, I cut a beeline straight to my plot and plopped down in the damp grass. I stared at the white headstone that appeared to glow in the darkness. The man who ended up here had served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. So had the men buried on either side of him. Closing my eyes, I sucked the cool evening air up into my nostrils and, before I knew it, caught myself praying, asking God to help me. Balance your life, John, I thought. You’re falling back into your old ways. You’re losing control again. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up here . . .
From somewhere behind me, I heard a twig snap. In a split second, my fingers wrapped around the butt of the revolver that hung in the shoulder holster I wore beneath my suit jacket, then I wheeled around to confront what I imagined to be my assailant. But all I saw was a deer chewing on some dried leaves.
I stood up, fumbled for the flashlight beside me, and hit the animal with a white blast of light. It bolted toward the woods. My heart was pounding as I sat back down in the grass, chuckling over my edginess.
I looked over at the sheaf of papers I’d carried with me and decided that this was as good a place as any to begin boning up on BTK’s next victim. I spread the pages out in front of me and, with the help of the moonlight and my flashlight, began reading again.
It was the early afternoon of March 17, 1977, when Wichita police lieutenant Bernie Drowatzky pulled up to the house at 1311 South Hydraulic Street, located two miles northwest of the Otero residence. The fact that Drowatzky kept showing up at BTK crime scenes was hardly surprising. Bernie was something of a go-to guy with the Wichita Police Department, the type of cop who loved to stick his nose into just about any call from dispatch he heard come over his car radio. All he knew from the radio was that the woman who lived there, twenty-four-year-old Shirley Vian, had been strangled. As he walked up to the front door and stood on the rundown wooden porch, he couldn’t help thinking how much the tired, white wooden siding reminded him of Kathy Bright’s house, yet another murder he’d helped investigate. Drowatzky went inside, and a patrolman who’d arrived earlier gave him a quick tick-tock of the events as told to officers by Vian’s five-year-old son, Steve.
According to the boy, a stranger had entered the house, locked him and his eight-year-old brother, Bud, and four-year-old sister, Stephanie, in the bathroom, then proceeded to murder his mother in the adjacent bedroom. No more than thirty to forty-five minutes had passed between the time the killer walked into the house and departed.
Drowatzky poked around the small, hopelessly cluttered place. Two doors, one from each bedroom, led into the bathroom. To prevent the kids from opening one of the doors, the killer looped a length of new nylon rope to a pipe beneath the sink, then tied it off around the doorknob. The first thing that struck Drowatzky were the knots.
I’ve seen those before. Something about them reminded him of what he’d seen at the Otero murder. It just wasn’t the kind of knot that someone in the Navy or the Boy Scouts would tie. It was like someone had taken a basic clove hitch and kept tying it over and over again until he’d stumbled on this new one.
Shirley’s nude body was laid out in the living room, near the opened sofa bed. Two white adhesive EKG leads were stuck to her chest, left behind by paramedics who initially thought they might be able to revive Vian. Newspapers and shoes littered the floor. A tattered overstuffed chair sat in a corner beside an ashtray heaped with cigarette butts.
Paramedics arrived at the scene a few minutes before 1:00 P.M., not long before police. A neighbor made the call after Vian’s terrified son ran over to her house, screaming that his mother was dead. They found her in the bedroom, tied to the metal bed frame. Nearby, vomit had formed a kidney-shaped puddle on the dirty carpet. Because her body was still warm (police estimated that fifteen minutes had lapsed since the killer had left) and the room was so dark, the EMS technicians cut the white nylon cords looped around her arms and legs, then carried her out into the light, vainly hoping to be able to resuscitate her.
Her face was a mess, splotchy red from cyanosis and hemorrhaging, with a haze of blue. Dried blood and vomit was caked around her nose and mouth. The rope around her neck had left a hideous rust-colored abrasion on much of her throat.
Two years after her murder, when detectives from Wichita first showed up at FBI headquarters wondering if my unit could provide any help on the case, I nearly gasped upon looking at the photos of Shirley’s body. Even after the years I’ve spent viewing crime scene photos, she had the kind of corpse you don’t forget, the kind that occasionally came back to haunt me in my dreams. That’s because one of the things I do as a profiler is take that expression frozen on the face of a murder victim and work backwards. I have to place myself inside the head of both the offender and the victim at the time of the crime.
Her lips, along with much of her face, exuded a dull, cold bluish tint. Her last thoughts, I felt sure, were about her children. She’d cooperated with the intruder because he’d no doubt promised her that he wouldn’t harm her three kids. But the moment she felt that rope tighten around her neck, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Like Joseph Otero, she lay there wracked with guilt, totally helpless, praying that the stranger who seemed so intent on killing her would leave her daughter and two sons alone, hoping that when it was all over they wouldn’t be the ones to find her.
Reading between the lines of the crime reports, I sensed that Shirley was forever trying to straighten up her sad life, but never quite could. By the age of twenty-four, she’d been married twice and had three kids, all of whom lived with her. She raised them the best she could, and, just like the Otero parents, she was adored by her kids.
Her oldest boy, Bud, was thought to have a cognitive impairment. His sister, Stephanie, suffered from various learning disabilities. Steve, at five, appeared to be the only member of the family without some kind of learning or intellectual deficit. Shirley now lived with her husband, Rick Vian, who was away at his job at a construction site when the murder occurred. Her kids were frequently absent from school, and, on that particular morning, they’d stayed home b
ecause their mother had stomach flu and didn’t feel up to getting them ready for class.
Earlier that morning, she’d sent Steve to a nearby grocery to fetch some chicken noodle soup and 7-Up for her queasy stomach. At the time, it wasn’t that odd for a five-year-old to run an errand like that in Wichita. Vian phoned ahead and told the storekeeper to keep a lookout for her boy. She also asked Steve to pick up two money orders totaling $40. As Steve returned home, a stranger stopped him on the sidewalk not far from his house, pulled out his billfold, and showed him a photograph. He asked the boy if he’d seen either of the people in the picture. Steve told him no.
The man, who was carrying some sort of a bag, continued to question him about the identity of the two people in the photograph, but Steve insisted he had no idea who they were. Eventually, the stranger allowed the boy to pass. But as Steve walked off, he turned to watch the man continue up the street, then stop at the home of his neighbors and knock on their door.
The boy had been home about ten minutes and was mesmerized by a cartoon show on TV when someone knocked on his door. He opened it and saw that the same man who he’d talked to out on the sidewalk was now standing on his front step.
“Excuse me, son,” the man said. “I’ve lost my dog. Have you seen any lost dogs around here?”
“No, sir,” Steve replied, as the man peered into the house.
“Is your mother home?” he asked. “Let’s ask her. Maybe she can help me find my lost dog.”
Steve stood there with Bud by his side as the man pushed past them and walked over and turned off the TV, which Stephanie was glued to. Next, he pulled the shades down over the two front windows. The front room instantly went dark.
The kids were confused, not quite sure what to make of this strange man who barged into their home as though he lived there. When he noticed the children staring at him, he pulled a pistol out of the shoulder holster hidden beneath his jacket and pointed it at them.
“Where’s your mother?” he demanded.
“She’s in there,” the siblings shouted in unison.
But by then, Shirley had heard all the commotion going on in the front room. She had been lying in bed in her room, but managed to drag herself out into the front room when she heard the stranger’s voice.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. “Who the hell are you?”
The man walked over toward her, brandishing his pistol. “Shut up,” he snapped, pointing toward the bedroom. “And get in there.”
The telephone rang before she could move. Steve stared at it, but the intruder said, “Leave it alone.”
Next, he glanced around the house and ordered Shirley to gather up a blanket and some toys, then instructed her to spread everything out on the bathroom floor. After hustling the kids inside, he pulled some rope out of his pocket and went to work looping it around the doorknob, then tying it to a drainpipe beneath the sink. He exited through the other door and soon could be heard sliding a bed against it, effectively sealing the kids inside. A defiant Steve threatened to untie the rope, but the man quickly made him reconsider.
“You better not or I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he shouted. Shirley pleaded with her headstrong son to do as the man said.
From inside the bathroom, the children heard the sound of adhesive tape being torn from a roll. Steve pushed open the door with the bed shoved up against it and peeked out. The image he saw was of his mother, lying face down on the bed, naked. Her hands had been taped behind her back, a rope tied around her neck, and a plastic bag pulled over her head.
The children had no idea how long they were stuck in that bathroom, but reported that it felt like an eternity. Then the telephone began ringing again, and Bud somehow managed to climb up on the sink and break out a tiny bathroom window with his fists. Blood quickly began streaming out from the cuts in his hand, as he screamed for help through the window. Stephanie joined him. By this point, Steve used all his strength to kick through the bottom panel of the door that the killer had tied to the sink. The boy was so angry at the man who he’d seen hurting his mother that he ran into the bedroom with his fists balled up, ready to fight. But the man had vanished.
Steve glanced at his mother, still lying on her stomach on the bed. She didn’t move. He sprinted outside and was standing on his neighbor’s porch a few seconds later, pounding on their door.
“MY MOM IS DEAD,” he screamed. “CALL THE COPS.”
The neighbor rushed over to Steve’s house and found Bud and Stephanie sitting beside their mother’s body, sobbing.
Paramedics were moving Vian into the front room of the house as police arrived, forcing detectives to rely on the children’s memories to piece together a clearer, more detailed picture of the crime scene. Although much of it had been removed by emergency medical personnel, white nylon cord appeared to have been used to bind Vian’s wrists and ankles, along with electrical tape that ascended up her legs in a pattern reminiscent of Roman army sandals. Investigators were never able to trace where the rope came from.
An autopsy revealed that she had not been sexually assaulted, nor did her hands bear the traces of any defensive wounds that she might have received trying to defend herself.
So how was the killer able to subdue Shirley?
Police reasoned that he convinced her to allow him to tie her up, promising her that if she did, he wouldn’t hurt her children. After making her remove all her clothes, the killer placed her nightgown over her head, then slipped a bag over that. If the UNSUB did ejaculate while at the house, police speculated he might have done so in a pair of Shirley’s panties, then taken them with him when he fled.
In between telling the detective who interviewed them about the songs their mother would sing to them when they couldn’t sleep, the children did their best to describe the killer. They insisted he was a dark-haired man in his late thirties or forties with a heavy build and a “paunch.” Police, however, placed little faith in the information Vian’s kids provided—especially their description of the suspect.
Because the $40 in money orders that Steve picked up at the grocery had been taken from the house, investigators believed robbery may have been the initial motive for the crime. Nevertheless, the murder was classified as a sex crime. Police didn’t believe at first that there was enough evidence to connect Vian’s homicide to the Otero murders. The reason? The phone line hadn’t been cut, the killer didn’t appear to have masturbated at the scene, the victimology was different, and none of Shirley’s children were harmed. That the paramedics had disturbed the crime scene, removing Vian’s various bindings, meant that police had nothing to visually link the two killings. They had to rely on the memories of Vian’s kids and the emergency medical technicians to reconstruct the scene.
Still, according to Drowatzky, there were a few detectives on the force who whispered about possible parallels between the homicides. That they even toyed with a connection between the two murders spoke volumes about just how deeply the Oteros’ killer had wormed his way into the consciousness of the Wichita police force. But their suspicions never amounted to anything other than a collective gut hunch, certainly nothing anyone could prove—at least not until the killer penned his next letter, claiming responsibility for the killing. Over the next few weeks, nearly fifty people were interviewed by police. Because of the puzzling randomness of the murder, however, the hunt for a viable suspect quickly turned cold, and the case was put on the back burner.
Yet despite the lack of anything resembling a lead, investigators had a strong hunch that the photograph the killer displayed to Vian’s son Steve was a snapshot of Cheryl Gilmore and her son. Gilmore was the neighbor on whose front door Steve saw the killer knock earlier that morning while walking home from the store.
Detectives believed that Gilmore might have been the killer’s intended target. She lived alone with her son and regularly came home for lunch from her job at a nearby optometrist’s office. The only reason she wasn’t home when the UNSUB kn
ocked on her door was that she had to take her son to a medical appointment.
Gilmore learned about the murders after returning home from work that afternoon. Her street was swarming with police and TV crews. The thought that she narrowly missed meeting the grisly fate suffered by Shirley spooked her horribly. But because she couldn’t afford to move away from the area, she remained living in her house. Each night for the next year, she lay in bed with an unloaded shotgun, telling herself she’d use it as a club should the killer ever return.
I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if five-year-old Steve hadn’t bumped into that stranger roaming his neighborhood on that morning. The killer was obviously pumped up to murder someone, consumed with the need to control and devour another human being. When Gilmore wasn’t home, I surmised, he remembered the boy he’d just spoken to and decided to see if there was anyone home at his house who might make a worthwhile victim. It was a bold, stupid maneuver that could have gotten him caught, but he somehow pulled it off.
It was close to midnight when I finally decided to pack up my paperwork and head home from the cemetery. The moon shone bright, but the beam of my flashlight had turned a weak yellow. I felt a bit calmer, more in control.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 9