Not surprisingly, LaMunyon’s announcement sent a collective shudder through the community, especially when, several days later, an unfounded rumor began sweeping through the city. BTK, it seemed, targeted only the occupants of residences “located on the west side of a north- and south-running street with a house address containing a number three within it.” Even if this had been true, I would have written it off to coincidence. Serial killers, I’d learned, are far more interested in finding a victim who—because of his or her various traits and attributes—satisfied them psychologically, rather than one who has a certain number in his or her street address.
BTK’s habit of cutting the outside phone lines of his victims was also mentioned in the press conference. That evening, thousands of residents throughout the city began a ritual that would last for years: the first thing they did upon entering their home was check to see if the phone worked. Others made it a habit—before entering their house—to dial their home number from a pay phone, to see if their phone rang.
Within days, the sale of guns soared. So did the demand for additional door locks and peepholes and Mace. Because anyone could be the killer, nobody felt safe, and every stranger seemed like a suspect. Paranoia swept through the community like fire through a prairie grassland—which certainly must have sent shivers of ecstasy up the UNSUB’s spine.
Because, at its core, BTK’s letter was no different than the ones the Son of Sam used to pen during his one-year killing spree that began in July 1976. Like the Son of Sam, BTK wasn’t seeking notoriety initially, but he soon took that direction when the press began running stories. Both offenders relished the publicity, and each felt good about the terror and fear they were creating and causing to unfold in their respective communities. Both had become the bogeyman, a role to which they quickly became addicted.
Police were initially stumped about the way BTK opened his communiqué, complaining about “the newspaper not writing about the poem on Vain.” Of course, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to understand that the killer was referring to Shirley Vian. Within hours of LaMunyon’s press conference, the full answer became apparent when an employee of the Wichita Eagle discovered that a three-by-five index card, which arrived in the newsroom on January 31, had mistakenly been routed to the newspaper’s advertising department.
Because the cryptic message on the card was printed in children’s block letters from a rubber stamp, whoever first spotted the card believed it to be a personal ad, not a poem based on the murder of Shirley Vian. It was based on an eighteenth-century Mother Goose nursery rhyme, titled “Curley Locks.”
SHIRLEYLOCKS SHIRLEYLOCKS
WILT THOUGH BE MINE
THOU SHALT NOT SCREEM
NOT YET FEEL THE LINE
BUT LAY ON CUSHION
AND THINK OF ME AND DEATH
AND HOW IT IS GOING TO BE.
At the bottom of the card, he printed the message, POEM FOR FOX NEXT.
The UNSUB waited fourteen months before surfacing again, although initially police had their doubts that it was actually him. Just after 10 P.M. on the cool spring night of April 28, 1979, a sixty-one-year-old widow named Anna Williams returned home after a night of square dancing. She lived at 615 South Pinecrest, roughly one mile from Nancy Fox’s house. Friends dropped her off at her house and watched as she fumbled for her keys on the front porch. But just before unlocking the door, she decided to reconsider their offer of a cup of coffee at a local café. She dropped her keys in her purse, climbed back in their car, and was whisked away into the night.
An hour later, she once again returned home and quickly discovered that one of her basement windows had been shattered. Rope, a broom handle, and several pieces of undergarments were found lying beside a bed in the basement guest room where her granddaughter often slept. Williams walked back upstairs and noticed that several scarves, pieces of jewelry, various articles of clothing, and $35 in cash were missing. A half roll of toilet paper had also been used, she realized. Most frightening of all, when she tried to telephone police, she couldn’t get a dial tone. She hurried next door to a neighbor’s house and phoned police.
A few minutes later, a squad car pulled up to the house, and two patrolmen began asking the badly shaken Williams questions. She’d been in poor health ever since the recent death of her husband, and this near disaster seemed on the verge of pushing her over the edge. One of the officers, who poked around the backyard with a flashlight, spotted the reason why her phone was dead—the line had been cut. Burglary investigators combed through the house, searching for fingerprints and traces of semen, but nothing was found. A crime report was taken, but it quickly disappeared into a file cabinet, and, because there was no reason to do so, it was never shared with homicide detectives in the police department’s burglary unit.
No mention of the incident appeared in the local newspaper. Williams, however, never believed a random burglar was responsible for the break-in. In her heart, she believed it to be the work of BTK.
In his heart, the individual responsible for the break-in couldn’t stand it that news of his most recent surfacing didn’t make headlines. On June 15, a manila envelope, printed in neat block letters, arrived at Williams’s home and was opened by her daughter. It contained her mother’s pilfered scarf and jewelry. Also stuffed inside the envelope was a typed photocopied poem and a drawing of a bound, nude woman lying face down on her bed; a broomstick had been inserted into what appeared to be either her vagina or anus. Williams’s daughter telephoned police without ever showing the letter to Anna.
Two days later, the Wichita Eagle ran the headline BTK IS BACK; INTENDED VICTIM GETS POEM on the front page. True to his word, BTK had chosen his eighth victim. The only problem was, she never bothered to show up. In his nineteen-line poem titled “Oh Anna, Why Didn’t You Appear?” he aired his frustration at being denied the pleasure of getting to snuff out another life.
T’was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season
Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement, like new vines at night
Oh, Anna, Why Didn’t You Appear
Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness to scent to lofty fever that burns within,
In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desparation, the game we play, fall on devil ears
Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments across most private thought
Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes so deep and clear.
Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why for number eight was not.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
Although the UNSUB possessed the poetic sensibility of a love-drunk college freshman, his communiqués reinforced my belief that he possessed an eye for detail. I couldn’t shake the idea that he’d snapped photographs of his victims, crime scenes, and—in Anna Williams’s case—his intended crime scene. Either that or he had a photographic memory, which seemed unlikely.
His sketches, moreover, weren’t half bad—detailed and reasonably well drawn. They weren’t Michelangelo, but he drew a helluva lot better than I did. Although his subject matter was a bit limited, I sensed that he’d honed his ability to draw gagged, scantily clad women bound up in rope by staring at the pages of pulp detective magazines sold up through the mid-1970s in almost every mom-and-pop convenience store around the nation.
We in the criminal profiling business referred to the violent offenders who read these magazines as “collectors.” These glossy publications, which usually bore a cover photo of a hog-tied, frightened woman with a gun or knife pressed against her breast or temple, served as virtual textbooks for budding killers. Crimin
ologists like myself had long suspected that killers studied the exploits of those savages who’d come before them, soaking up every detail of true or fictional crimes wherever they could find it—magazines, books, movies, and TV. Long before any of these animals ever claimed their first victim, they’d spent a lifetime nurturing the dark dreams festering inside their heads by devouring publications with names like Master Detective, Official Police Detective, Front Page Detective, and Startling Detective.
Do the words and images contained in the pages of these magazines create violent criminals? Certainly not. But clearly they fuel their sick fantasies. The way I see it, precious few people who read true (or fictional) crime books harbor some latent desire to go out and kill someone. People read them for the same reason they rubberneck when driving past a bloody automobile accident. They want a glimpse of horror, but they don’t want to get too close to the blood and gore. Others consume these books and magazines in order to understand a violent offender’s background, to grasp what makes him so different than the rest of us—particularly when they seem to so closely resemble us.
Did BTK read these magazines? I would have bet my FBI pension on it. The one thing that this violent media didn’t do, however, was cause these individuals to become killers—it only fueled their already deeply embedded fantasies and provided literal models of horrible acts in vivid detail.
For me, the killer who drove home the idea that violent offenders learn the tools of their trade from their elders was a balding, gaunt serial killer named Joseph Fischer. On the evening I showed up at Attica State Prison to speak with him, back in 1981, it was hard to imagine how this former transient could have killed six women during his wanderings across the nation. Yet Fischer, who insisted that he’d actually murdered thirty-two people, put this killer-nurturing-killer concept into perspective for me in a way that none of the other murderers I’d interviewed before had.
“It’s kinda like guys who follow baseball or football,” he told me in that dimly lit prison interrogation room. “They know all the bat-ting averages, yards per game, interceptions versus touchdowns, where the players went to high school. They know every stat about all their favorite players.”
Fischer took a deep breath and began tracing an imaginary circle into the top of the table that separated the two of us.
“Well, those other guys got their games, and guys like me, we got our games. I didn’t grow up wanting to hit home runs. I grew up wanting to kill people. And I used to soak up every bit of information I could find on the guys who were good at playing my kind of game.”
It always made me sick to my stomach when guys like Fischer referred to their habit of killing innocent people as a game. But clearly that’s what it had become for BTK—a deadly game that nobody had yet been able to stop. And by the summer of 1979, when the locals in Wichita learned that the serial killer living in their midst wasn’t going away, BTK finally graduated from rookie player to coach, from pupil to teacher. He’d finally achieved what he craved most—the chance to be somebody.
These last communications had revealed that in his mind, he’d transcended to the next level, in terms of his ability and proficiency as a killer. And now he yearned for some degree of recognition for his “accomplishments.”
The buzz from all the mayhem he created must have been intense, but it wouldn’t last forever. That giddy sensation of self-worth would eventually fade, just as everything else that sustained him did. And when that emptiness and self-loathing returned and grew too intense, we’d hear from him again.
The only question was when.
7
How do you trap a shadow? Where do you even start? You can’t shine a light on it. Shadows dwell in darkness. They disappear in the presence of light. The police in Wichita had thrown plenty of light in the direction of the UNSUB, but had found nothing. He’d remained hidden, revealing himself only to his victims, then vanishing.
If the authorities had managed to get close to him, he’d never let on. Now it was 1984, and ten years had passed since what he claimed were his first grisly series of murders.
After combing through hundreds of pages of crime reports, photos, and other documents detailing his murders, I’d slowly come to the conclusion that perhaps the only way to catch this killer was to let him catch himself. That was really all I had to offer. The UNSUB seemed to hold all the cards—a fact that both he and the police were well aware of. This meant we might have to wait years before he let his guard down enough to slip up.
But he’d done it before. Besides leaving traces of semen behind in the Oteros’ basement and in Nancy Fox’s bedroom, he’d felt compelled to send his revealing, potentially evidence-laden communiqués to police. But it had been five years since he’d felt the need—and taken the risk—to type out another letter.
Sitting in my file-strewn office one afternoon a few days after my second visit from the Wichita Police Department, I thought back to a case near San Diego that I’d been called in to work on the previous year.
The victim had apparently run out of gas on a fairly busy highway during the early evening. Her nude body was later discovered in some nearby foothills. A dog collar had been cinched tightly around her neck. Shortly before her murder, she’d been raped.
To help the local police find the killer, I tried to imagine how the events leading up to her death had unfolded, picturing the interaction between the killer and his victim. It quickly became obvious that this tragedy was another example of someone’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d run out of gas, but felt safe because of the abundance of traffic. Surely no one would be crazy enough to harm someone in front of so many potential witnesses, she told herself.
The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that the very thing the victim believed would protect her could be used to coax her killer out of hiding and into the investigation—not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to. By walking in the shoes of the UNSUB, I could “see” him driving past the stranded motorist on that busy highway and suddenly realizing that he’d just stumbled on the perfect victim of opportunity. The only glitch was how he could pull it off, especially in the presence of so many possible eyewitnesses.
His answer? He’d approach the victim, exuding every bit of friendliness he could muster, offering her a ride to a nearby service station. But as soon as she sat in his vehicle, he no doubt pulled out a gun and ordered her to lie down on the floorboard. Next, he drove her to an isolated area he was familiar with because he either worked or resided in the immediate vicinity.
With all that in mind, my advice to police was to create three press releases. The first would provide readers and listeners with the basic facts of the case and end with police reaching out for potential witnesses. A day or two later, they’d advise the community about the positive responses they’d received, which were generating some solid investigative leads. The last release would inform the community that they’d developed information about a vehicle observed by several witnesses as well as a description of an individual standing next to the victim.
I suggested that they should say they were uncertain if this person was a suspect or just someone who stopped to lend a helping hand.
A few days later, our “Good Samaritan” took the bait and stopped by police headquarters to inform them that he may have been the person seen by some of the witnesses. And, yes, as a matter of fact, he had stopped by to help the victim, but for some reason she’d declined his assistance. Bingo! Suddenly, the police had someone they could place at the scene, and investigators could go to work doing a thorough background check of the suspect, along with attempting to link him to the crime.
The so-called Good Samaritan was later convicted when police were able to match up hair and fibers on the dog collar, along with biological evidence in the form of sperm.
When it came to the murders in Wichita, we didn’t have a busy highway or a plethora of potential witnesses. But we did have something else. We knew our U
NSUB had a weak spot.
In the past, BTK had risked everything for the chance to thumb his nose at police by writing letters, which for all he knew might inadvertently contain a few incriminating scraps of forensic evidence or intimate clues about his psychology. If he was going to slip up again, my hunch was that it might be because of this unquenchable need to communicate, to reach out and share the secret he had to keep locked up inside his brain.
I just had one question: How do we force his hand?
A few afternoons later I still didn’t have an answer. So I decided to spend my lunch hour going for a mellow jog through the woods that surrounded the FBI Academy. I’d often done this in the past when working on a case. I’d head out onto a trail at a slow ten-minute-a-mile pace, allowing my mind to drift wherever it wanted. The process was similar to what I did at night when I forced myself to dream about a case. My technique led to plenty of heart-stopping nightmares, but the insight I gleaned made it worthwhile. The network of running trails that weave and crisscross their way through the dense woods at Quantico have achieved near mythic lore among agents. Many a promising rookie has emptied the contents of his stomach on these trails as a result of pushing himself past his physical limits. Because it’s so easy to get disoriented on the meandering paths (as I once did for several hours when I first arrived at Quantico), fitness instructors long ago began marking the way with yellow bricks. Ever since, the running course has been known as the Yellow Brick Road. On that warm, hazy autumn afternoon, I soon found myself trotting over a dirt trail that bore the name “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.”
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 12