The more I thought about the Vian case, the more I could sense that the UNSUB was probably kicking himself over how this killing had unfolded. Three years had passed since his botched, haphazard attack on Kathy Bright and her brother. The incident had no doubt spooked him, causing the part of him that hungered to murder to retreat and slink back underground in hiding. For three years, he no doubt plotted and fantasized over taking another victim. After his experience at Bright’s house, I would have expected to see a smarter, savvier killer the next time he surfaced.
But that wasn’t really the case. For the most part, he bulldozed his way into Shirley Vian’s house by fast-talking a five-year-old boy, then got out by the skin of his teeth. He was calculated and determined, but more than anything else, the killer was lucky.
When I tried to imagine what transpired in Shirley Vian’s bedroom on the afternoon the UNSUB stole her life, I caught glimpses of him standing in Shirley’s bedroom over her body, drinking in the image of her wrapped up with all that cord and electrical tape. All the while he was probably attempting to masturbate.
But the children seemed intent on ruining everything with their incessant screaming and their pounding on the bathroom door and shattering of glass. He yearned to kill them, but first he needed to take care of business before the situation completely went south. So he continued masturbating, and when the phone in the front room started ringing, he finally decided he’d had enough and fled. Police were never able to ascertain who had been calling, but whoever placed the call no doubt saved the lives of Vian’s three kids.
What was going through his head, I wondered, as he departed Vian’s house? He’d obviously gone there because his intended target, the one who had consumed so many of his waking hours, wasn’t at home. But the urge to kill was too strong, so he’d changed directions in midstream and struck out at random. Because of his inability to completely control his environment, however, he committed a less-than-perfect crime. What resulted was anything but the fantasy world he’d yearned for, a realm where he called all the shots and yanked all the strings.
Nevertheless, he’d pulled it off and also managed to gather plenty of raw material to feed his ravenous imagination in the months and years that followed. After all, that was one of the real motives behind why these guys kill. From my work spent interviewing these monsters, I’d learned that for many, the act of killing was tantamount to putting money in the bank. They committed their brutal crimes not only to live out their fantasies but also to provide fuel for future fantasies. The more visual memories they could “bank,” the larger the cache they could draw on during those long days and nights when killing someone wasn’t an option.
Despite what I’d learned about this dark netherworld from the serial murderers I’d interviewed, I realized I was just scratching the surface in my understanding of the strange powers this parallel universe held. But whether I understood it or not, there was no denying one thing: for most of these guys, their fantasy world, populated with victims—real, imagined, and of the soon-to-be variety—often felt more real than the world they dwelled in during their waking hours.
Consequently, what’s really important to these guys is that they develop an effective, consistent way to access this inner world. Judging from the precise way the UNSUB described his crime scenes, he seemed to be a very visually oriented person. That told me he would probably be the type to rely on drawings or perhaps photographs snapped at his crime scenes to help open this trap door leading to his dark fantasy realm.
Not all serial killers are visual types. Plenty of these guys make audiotapes of their torture and murder sessions. Afterwards, they listen to the recording of their victims screaming, begging for their lives—and in a few cases pleading to be killed—much like a normal person would listen to a piano concerto by Mozart on their stereo. The sounds transport them to that other world.
I kept several of these cassette tapes in a drawer of my desk. Listening to them never failed to make the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. I’ve sat in a room with hardened veteran homicide detectives who could endure only a few minutes of these recordings before wincing and quickly exiting the room, shaking their head.
I once worked a case involving two truly savage murderers who used sound as a way to relive their killings. Lawrence Bittaker, convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and rapist Roy Norris became pals while incarcerated at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Shortly before their release from prison, they hatched a plan to kill teenage girls, one for every “teen” year from thirteen to nineteen. They yearned to record their crimes on audiotape. By June 1979, they’d purchased an old Ford van, nicknamed “Murder Mack,” and set out to fulfill their dark fantasy.
In quick succession during that summer, they brutally raped, tortured, and killed four young girls. When police finally caught up with them, they quickly discovered the duo’s collection of audiotapes. I’ll never forget the afternoon I listened to one of their cassettes in preparation for an interview that I and a female agent did with Bittaker, who was sentenced to death for his crimes and sent to San Quentin State Prison.
During the recording, his cohort was driving the van while Bittaker—whose nickname was “Pliers” because this was his favorite instrument of torture—scripted the frightened, moaning fourteen-year-old girl, telling her exactly what he wanted her to say as he slowly mutilated her. Just as the BTK posed his victims in order to see their bodies in his imagination, Bittaker needed to hear just the right combination of words in order to keep his victims alive within his head.
The afternoon we finally sat down with this sad excuse for a human being in a San Quentin interview room, he was more than happy to spill his guts to us. The only glitch was that he refused to look at my female colleague when she asked him questions. That was how much he hated women. By the time our session was over, he was sobbing. Of course, his tears were for himself—not his victims.
Walking back to my car through the moonbeam-lit cemetery, I caught myself thinking about the letter BTK sent to police in October 1974. In it, he wrote, “Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine.”
I could only assume that he’d written this out of ignorance, because every criminal justice student with even the slightest bit of frontal lobe activity knows that killers do change their MO. It is their most malleable and fluid quality, a skill that is constantly evolving and changing to the point of perfection.
BTK’s method of killing appeared to be evolving. Instead of becoming more cautious, as one might have expected, he was taking more chances. His crime scenes revealed a high degree of organization, and he still seemed to be planning out his murders, but he’d begun developing a new skill. He now appeared comfortable with the idea of improvising when one of his victims didn’t show up, which is what led to Shirley Vian’s death. What I couldn’t explain was the source of this impulsiveness. Was it born out of an inability to control his homicidal urges, of grandiose thinking, or of just plain carelessness?
Then again, was it something else, something none of us in the criminology business had encountered before? My twenty-minute-old sense of calmness and composure began to evaporate. There was just so much I didn’t know, so many unanswered questions. What on earth could have compelled the UNSUB to tackle such high-risk targets in the middle of the day? It didn’t make sense.
Yet.
6
The next morning, I awoke at 5:15 and got dressed for work. Pam was breathing softly, her head buried in her pillow. I watched her in the mirror while knotting my tie, thinking about how her stillness resembled that of a corpse. My job was devouring me, the violence was eating a dark hole inside me, and there seemed little I could do to escape it.
A few days before, I had taken my two daughters—Erika, eight, and Lauren, four—to a wooded park near our house, but found myself constantly peering off into the brush, looking for the body of a murder victim that I tried to convi
nce myself had been dumped there, then covered over by leaves. Two weeks before that, while making love to Pam, a flashback had washed over me, and I suddenly found myself staring into the dying face that belonged to a woman whose torture slaying I was trying to help solve.
On my way out of the bedroom, I bent down and brushed my lips across Pam’s forehead, then walked downstairs and crept into my little girls’ room and stood there, listening to the faint sound of their breathing, held spellbound by the way their tiny faces quivered as they slept.
I was back at the office by 6:15. This was the only way I could ever get any work done, especially now that I was still having problems getting my post-coma brain to resume firing on all eight cylinders. I told myself I’d get to the next installment of BTK’s homicides—this one involving what the killer surely must have considered to be his most satisfying murder—later in the afternoon. In the meantime, piles of file folders that desperately needed my attention were spread across my desk.
This dynamic between organized and disorganized, chaos and order, proved to be a constant source of tension in my life. I was embarrassed to admit it, but I had the unshakeable feeling that the man responsible for these unsolved killings in Wichita could probably teach me a thing or two about organization.
BTK’s murders employed elements that were both uniquely organized and disorganized. He could be sloppy at times, such as when leaving behind biological evidence at his crime scenes. But it was the razor-sharp control that he obviously maintained after his murders that perplexed and astounded me. I wasn’t sure what he did for work or even if he was married, but I felt confident that he never allowed his inner world—which seethed inside him like a bubbling cauldron—to bleed into his outer world.
In the analysis I wrote in 1979, performed on the heels of his two last known murders, I thought we were looking for someone who resembled a monster. But five years had passed, and now I began to glimpse another element of his character.
One of the reasons he was able to place so much time between his kills was because he’d somehow developed the ability to blend in to his environment. It would be far too much to expect him to stand out in his community. The reason we couldn’t see him was that we were looking past him, not at him.
Shortly before lunch, I’d plowed through my paperwork, played Dear Abby to a couple of men in my unit, and was happily back at it up in my quiet corner of the law library, digging and sifting though the stack of reports that detailed BTK’s last known murder, which occurred during the night of December 8, 1977.
Clearly, this was the UNSUB’s most perfect kill, no doubt producing the kind of memories that might just have been tiding him over for these past few years. It began to unfold to the outside world with a phone call to an emergency dispatcher at 8:20 the next morning.
For Wichita firefighter Wayne Davis, it had been shaping up to be a typical morning. Like plenty of his coworkers, he supplemented his income by working side jobs. On this particular chilly morning, he was sent to pick up a truck that was supposedly parked on St. Francis Street and drive it across town. But there was just one problem—Wayne couldn’t find the damn thing. So when he spotted a pay phone outside a market on the corner of St. Francis and Central Streets, he decided to pull over and call the guy who’d hired him. He hopped out of his car, shoved his hand in his pocket, and quickly realized he had no change.
Just my luck, he shrugged, as he hurried inside the market to break a dollar bill. A man was using the pay phone, speaking quietly into the receiver, but Davis barely noticed him.
In those few moments that Davis was inside the store, a brief, chilling exchange took place between the caller and two police dispatchers. “You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing,” the man told the dispatcher. “Nancy Fox.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied. “I can’t understand you. What is the address?”
At that point, another dispatcher, who had been monitoring the call, interrupted: “I believe 843 South Pershing.”
“That is correct,” the man said. Then the phone line went quiet.
By the time Davis made it back to the parking lot, the caller had vanished, and the receiver dangled in midair. Davis grabbed it, placed the phone against his ear, and, when he didn’t hear a dial tone, said, “Hello?”
The voice on the other end of the line inquired if he was the same person who she’d just been speaking to. “No,” he replied. “Some other guy was using the phone.”
“Wayne, is that you?” the dispatcher asked, recognizing his voice because emergency calls were often routed through the fire department and the two regularly spoke to one another.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “What’s going on?”
A moment later, Wichita homicide captain Al Thimmesch jumped on the line. The two men and their wives were longtime square dance buddies. “Wayne,” Thimmesch asked, “did you get a look at the guy on the phone?”
“Not really,” he said. “What’s all the fuss about?” Thimmesch quickly filled him in on the details. When it became apparent that Davis could recall precious little about the caller’s appearance, Thimmesch asked if he’d object to undergoing hypnosis at police headquarters.
“No problem,” Davis replied.
But there was a problem. The killer had surfaced again. For seven brief seconds and in fifteen words, he’d broken his silence and risked everything to let the local authorities know he’d returned.
Shortly before 8:30, two patrol cars pulled up to the curb beside the pink duplex identified by the caller. The two officers who arrived at the scene quickly surveyed the exterior of the house. A back window had been shattered, they observed, and the phone line leading into the dwelling had been cut. The front door was unlocked. The officers entered the house and were hit by a blast of hot air.
A moment later, twenty-five-year-old Nancy Fox was found lying face down on the neon-blue paisley bedspread, wearing only a pale pink long-sleeved sweater. The tips of her toes, which hung over the edge of the mattress, had turned black. The nails of her long, slender fingers were pink. Something about the way they were positioned—partially extended, partially curled—looked deceivingly peaceful, beatific. Nylon stockings tightly bound her wrists behind her back. Her violet-colored panties had been pulled down around her hips, just above her knees. A cream-colored yellow nightgown had been tied around her ankles.
When police rolled Fox over, they saw that the left side of her face had also turned black. In her mouth was stuffed a gag fashioned out of various colored panty hose, and her dark tongue was swollen to many times its normal size. Wisps of sandy blonde hair covered much of her face, but beneath it smears of blood could be seen caked around her nose and mouth. Another pair of panty hose had been cinched tightly around her neck.
“Whoever did this was a real pervert,” recalled one homicide detective who arrived at the crime scene a few minutes later. “You could just see the sexual perversion all over that poor girl. . . . The whole thing really just aggravated me.”
Dumped on a coffee table were the contents of Nancy Fox’s purse. The killer, it was believed, had taken her driver’s license as a souvenir. On the dresser beside the bed sat a picture of Fox’s bowling team—she and four friends stood there beside their bowling balls, goofy grins plastered on their faces. On either side of the picture, two jewelry boxes appeared to have been rifled through.
On the bed next to Fox’s body, the contents of her lingerie drawer had been dumped. Police speculated that the killer had been searching for suitable bindings and gags. They also theorized that he’d turned up the thermostat in order to compensate for the cold air that had entered the dwelling through the window he’d shattered.
Semen was found at the scene in a blue nightgown, left at the head of the bed. Crime scene technicians were able to retrieve enough of a sample to send it quickly to the state crime lab in Topeka and have it analyzed. This was a decade before the advent of DNA testing, and the only thing police could hope to g
lean from the sperm sample was the blood type of the person it came from.
What they learned did little to help investigators focus their efforts, for the sperm had come from someone classified as a PGM-1 non-secretor. In layman’s terms, this meant that the UNSUB had just hit the genetic jackpot. Because if you were going to leave sperm behind at a crime scene, you could only hope to be a PGM-1 non-secretor, as this made trying to pinpoint your blood type physically impossible.
The search for other types of evidence also proved less than fruitful. In an effort to determine if the killer left behind any fingerprints on Fox’s body, investigators employed what was, at the time, considered to be a newfangled forensic technique.
A week before the murder, the department’s fingerprint technician had just attended a seminar on “fuming,” which involved erecting a makeshift plastic tent over the bed and pouring a chemical known as cyanoacrylate (commonly referred to as super-glue) into a ceramic bowl, then heating it at a low temperature. Over the next two hours, the chemicals vaporized inside the tent and adhered to any of the oils left behind by fingerprints, which were visible when viewed under a black light. When the process was finished, a portion of several fingerprints and part of a palm print were detected on Fox’s body, but they weren’t sufficient in helping police locate any suspects.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 10