Just a few minutes into my run, the full weight of those five words hit me—this could have been the BTK’s mantra. From what I recalled from a college literature class, Dorothy uttered that famous phrase to Toto in The Wizard of Oz for good reason. Kansas was a symbol of Dorothy’s outer world. But thanks to a tornado and a knock on the head, she suddenly embarked on an inner journey to a place she called Oz, a world that dwelled deep within her subconscious.
For Dorothy, Oz was filled with everything from a loveable Cowardly Lion and cute Munchkins to a hideous-looking Wicked Witch and a squeaky Tin Man. My hunch was that years before the UNSUB committed the Otero murders in January 1974, this aspiring killer had begun a similar journey. But for him, Oz was a much more sinister, violent realm, a dark fantasy world where he retreated on a daily basis to relive his kills.
While I was mulling over all this, thinking about how much Dorothy reminded me of Josie Otero, the vision of an ultracool black man in a suede trench coat flashed into my head. The juxtaposition of these disparate, seemingly random images proved jarring. Where the hell is this going? I laughed.
Then suddenly I remembered the night before when Pam and I were channel surfing. After a few minutes, she stumbled on a rerun of an early 1970s flick, starring Richard Roundtree, about a no-nonsense, ass-kicking inner-city black detective named John Shaft. The movie’s theme song thundered out of the tiny speaker in our TV set.
“Oh, I remember this movie,” she said, flipping to another channel.
“Turn it back,” I pleaded. “I gotta watch this.”
Pam moaned, switched back to the movie, then snuggled up next to me. “OK, you win,” she said. “But if you start sobbing over this the way you did over that Lassie movie two weeks ago, I’m turning off the TV.”
She had a point. Ever since emerging from my coma ten months before, I’d been an emotional basket case, bursting into tears at the strangest moments—commercials for used cars, sunsets, even a Lassie rerun.
“I think I can handle this,” I replied.
For the next ninety minutes I stared into the flickering TV screen, not exactly sure why I was so mesmerized by the movie. But somewhere in the back of my head, a voice told me to sit back, pay attention, and enjoy the show. I liked Shaft. He kicked a lot of butt, bedded a bunch of women, and still managed to look like a million bucks the whole time. Something about his no-holds-barred approach to cracking that kidnapping case so crucial to the movie’s plot felt strangely inspiring.
“I bet he could catch BTK,” I mumbled. “Maybe I oughta call up the task force in Wichita and tell them that what they really need is Shaft, super-detective.”
The sheer absurdity of Richard Roundtree running around the streets of Wichita trying to crack a serial murder case made me smile.
Maybe the idea wasn’t so absurd. The local police didn’t need a super-detective. What they really needed was a super-cop, someone who could crawl inside our UNSUB’s mind and gently steer him in the direction we wanted him to go.
What I began to envision was a John Wayne-like twist on the standard concept of a police spokesman, typically used to brief the media during ongoing high-profile cases. That individual’s job is to stand up in front of the cameras and microphones and update reporters on the status of the investigation. Sometimes they even give descriptions of the suspect or suspects. It’s hardly cutting-edge criminology. Police agencies around the nation have been using spokespeople for decades. Sometimes the person tapped for the role is the chief or the sheriff. Other times, a lead detective on the case is used. More often than not, the honors go to one of the department’s public information officers.
But now, out here on that running trail, an idea took shape and began to unroll itself inside my head like thread off a spool. We’d tweak the standard-issue police spokesperson concept just a bit. We’d turbocharge this otherwise predicable symbol of law and order, and transform it into a psychological crime-fighting tool who would be the perfect counterpart of BTK’s grandiose vision of himself. How would we do this? For starters, it was obvious that part of the UNSUB’s motive was a desire to thumb his nose at police. He wanted the world to know that he was smarter than the cops trying to catch him. At the same time, his detailed descriptions of his crime scenes told me that he was also a wannabe cop, someone who would have probably given anything to have a job in law enforcement. I wondered if he’d ever applied for a job with police and been turned away. Or yearned to apply, but knew that if they ran a fingerprint check on him they might stumble on a print he’d left behind at one of his crime scenes, which police had collected but never made public.
David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) had a bit of this same type of confused love-hate relationship with police festering inside him. On April 17, 1977, after shooting ten people and killing five, he pumped four .44-caliber bullets into two Bronx teenagers necking in a Mercury Montego. The event marked the latest chapter in his pathetic, senseless murder spree. But what made this one different was that before fleeing the scene, he left a note behind, marking the first time he’d felt compelled finally to reach out to the world and explain who he was. The note was addressed to Joseph Borrelli, the Bronx police captain who had been investigating Berkowitz’s earlier homicides.
In the note, which has become one of the most infamous examples of the workings of a deranged homicidal mind, he wrote, “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a woman hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ . . . When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up in the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. ‘Go out and kill,’ commands Father Sam.”
BTK penned loosely similar-sounding rants to police, hinting at the dark, unstoppable forces that dwelled within him. But the more I thought about it, I realized that part of the key to influencing his behavior was getting a better understanding of whom he was really thumbing his nose at when he wrote his communiqués. Was he directing his taunts at a specific officer whose identity only he knew? Or were the police merely some ambiguous, fuzzy concept inside his troubled mind, a collection of faceless, nameless men in blue? If the latter were the case, I wondered why we couldn’t provide him with a single image he could latch on to. Because if we could begin to control the mental picture he maintained of the police, we might just have a chance of controlling him.
Which is exactly where our so-called super-cop would enter the picture. He would become the face that the UNSUB would picture whenever he thought of the police. He would become, in a sense, BTK’s partner in crime, the devoted acolyte who tracked every move the killer made. The trick, of course, would be to locate someone whom BTK could not only identify with but also feel comfortable opening up to, the kind of law enforcement professional who could begin to harness BTK’s self-inflated sense of his own importance, power, and intelligence that covered up his deep-seated feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. This meant that our super-cop couldn’t be just anyone. That he might be a detective working the case or some high-ranking officer in the department wouldn’t be good enough. What mattered most was that they be made of the kind of stuff that we could mold into the proper façade. Image would be everything.
Our super-cop would have to mouth words that sounded something like this: “If it takes me my whole career or even my lifetime, I will solve this case. I will look and search in every corner, every dark alley, and every crack in the sidewalk until I can identify the individual responsible for these homicides—and that’s a promise to you.”
Would it work? Could my idea help nab a killer as elusive as BTK? It seemed worth a try.
A few afternoons later I was seated in a first floor conference room in the FBI’s forensic science building, not far from my office. With me at that massive rectangular oak table were two other agents, along with the two detectives from Wichita who had traveled to Quantico looking for answers. Behind us were a handful of rubber-neckers, camped out in the back of the room to
catch a glimpse of what was about to unfold during the next few hours.
We were going to toss out ideas about what sort of person might be responsible for those seven unsolved murders in Kansas, how police might track him down, and ways they could get him to crack once they had a possible suspect.
To my left sat Roy Hazelwood, a rail thin, chain-smoking forty-seven-year-old FBI instructor, widely regarded as one of finest minds in the study of interpersonal violence. A truly brilliant researcher and homicide investigator, Hazelwood was a former Army major who was first introduced to detective work while serving in the military police. Beside him sat Ron Walker, a clean-cut thirty-five-year-old former FBI field agent from Colorado, brought into my unit shortly after my collapse from viral encephalitis. A veteran Air Force pilot, Walker was whip smart, highly organized, and in the midst of learning the ropes of profiling from me. He was proving to be an exceptionally quick study.
In many ways, our goal here felt similar to what musicians do when they get together and jam. Only instead of sound, we were bouncing our thoughts off one another, working with ideas based on clues BTK had left us at his murders and in his letters. Sometimes we chased a thread spooled out by someone else. At other moments, one of us would dart off in a fresh, new direction, watching to see if anyone followed. Much of what we would offer up would be insightful, some of it not so. We didn’t always agree with what the others said, yet we were smart enough to know that this was part of the process, part of the journey.
The objective of our session was to keep moving forward until we ran out of juice, until we were tapped out. It was up to the two detectives from Wichita to take notes, jotting down whatever elements they found helpful. Whether anything we came up with at this table would ever get implemented was up to the task force. Our unit’s caseload was far too crowded to allow the luxury of monitoring how our ideas were used in a particular investigation.
I decided to kick off the discussion by spending a few minutes rehashing the case for those present, hoping to refresh everyone’s memories.
“Here’s where I’m at with this guy,” I said, pulling off my suit jacket and draping it over my chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid- to late twenties. It’s now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid- to late thirties.”
“How’d you come up with that figure?” Walker asked.
“I started with the age of twenty-five because that’s what our research is finding to be the median age when most of these guys start killing,” I said. “Then I tacked on a few more years because of the level of criminal sophistication evident in the Otero murders and his apparent knowledge of police and criminology.”
Walker nodded.
I turned toward the two detectives seated at the far end of the table. “If you haven’t already, you guys should check and see if Nancy Fox’s driver’s license had her picture on it,” I said. “If it did, it seems logical to assume that he took it as a type of trophy to help him relive her kill later. If not, perhaps he removed it in order to have enough facts on hand so he’d have something to read to the police dispatcher.”
I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. Since nobody opened his mouth, I continued. “If this is all a game to him, he’s doing it to fulfill his ego,” I said. “It’s a challenge thrown at police. His victims are all so different. He may have a preferential victim, but when it’s time to go on the hunt, the person he hits is the first one to come into his sights. The significance for him is his ability to get away with the crime and flaunt his skills. The only torture I’m seeing with his kills is psychological torture.”
Hazelwood, a serious caffeine addict, polished off what was left of his coffee and then said, “But in his mind, he is torturing his victims. That’s why he uses the bags. He wants to see the terror in their eyes as he places it over their heads.”
Hazelwood stopped talking, but Walker and I knew better than to speak—he was just getting started. “He’s definitely a sexual bondage practitioner and a collector of bondage magazines and detective magazines. He’s also got an interest in criminology or psychology. He’s probably pretty well known to adult book store operators in the area.”
“Yeah,” said Walker. “This guy is definitely into psychological torture. That indicates a higher level of sophistication and a higher level of intelligence than the average Joe on the street. The more physical the torture, the more primal and reactive the person inflicting it is. Not much intelligent thought goes into physical torture.”
All of our heads nodded in unison.
“What we’re finding from our research is that most of these guys have an IQ range between 105 and 145,” I said. “The average falls between 115 and 120. Average for the normal population is 100. What this is showing us is that most of these guys are able to move around in society fairly easily. We catch the dumb ones quickly. The smarter ones take longer. . . . And so do the lucky ones.
“I think it’s pretty clear that this guy is able to spend a bit of time at his crime scenes. This is something that appears important to him. He seems to want to have some kind of dialogue with his victims. It isn’t a blitz-type scenario. As we learned from the Bright murder, he attempted to diffuse the situation and make everyone feel that if they’d just cooperate with him, he’d leave. They had no way of knowing that this was part of his MO. So he’s capable of maintaining that type of control relationship. In a group kill, he’s smart enough to go after strength first. He uses the stronger victim to tie up the others. Then he gets rid of that strong figure and, as he said in one of his letters, he saves the best for last.”
As I spoke, I rubbed the tip of my index finger over the raised monogram on one of my gold cufflinks. “I’ve often wondered if the reason he took eleven-year-old Josie Otero to the basement was that she’d begun to get hysterical and loud after seeing her family killed,” I said. “He was taking a chance by forcing her down there, but he may have been losing control of her at that moment and was concerned about the neighbors hearing her. It was a chance he was willing to take. And the way he tied her up with all those bindings felt like he was attempting to make his crime scene appear more complex than it really was. It was his way of turning it into an Ellery Queen mystery, forcing detectives to waste their time and scratch their heads, asking, ‘Why would he do this?’”
Walker seemed to think he knew one of the reasons why. “The fact that we didn’t see any signs of penetration, or any clear sign of fondling, says we’re looking at a guy who has an inadequate, immature sexual history,” he said. “Her bra was probably cut in order to expose the breasts for voyeuristic kicks rather than touching. There’s just so much emphasis on substitute sex with this guy. I think we should be looking at a lone-wolf type of personality. But he’s not alone because he’s shunned by others—it’s because he chooses to be alone. His social and sexual life will reflect this. He wants to be alone. He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he’d feel very inadequate with a peer group female.”
Hazelwood sensed something else. “This guy is a sexual sadist,” he said. “He’s sexually inadequate, but he will have relationships with women. To a sexual sadist, the act of sex isn’t important. What is important are the acts and activities leading up to the sexual act. That’s why we haven’t seen any penetration of his victims. He’s the type who is heavily into masturbation, having oral sex performed on him, ejaculating onto his partners, tying them up, blindfolding them, or choking them. Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.”
I listened to what Hazelwood was saying and decided to follow his lead. Unlike Walker, I believed our killer had managed to rack up a bit of sexual experience in his troubled lifetime. But I sensed his partners were probably the type whom he could easily manipulate and control.
“The women he’s been with are either many years
younger, very naïve, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” I said. “Therefore, even if she suspected something about him, she’d put up with his imperfections because she needs him in order to survive. Bondage is very important to him and I’d think there’s a good chance he may have tried to get a prostitute to allow him to bind her up. But most would be afraid. The police might get a lead by checking with prostitutes to see if anyone has come into contact with a guy who’s heavily into bondage.” Hazelwood drummed his fingers on the side of his empty coffee cup. “He definitely will like older women because he can manipulate them in exchange for their affection,” he said. “I also think he’ll have the ability to interact with others on a peripheral level. He’s got what I’d call a ‘service personality.’ People will know him, but they don’t really know him. The idea of him being a lone wolf is a good description. In terms of employment, I think we’ll find he does well in his job, but doesn’t like to stay in any one position for very long. He doesn’t like anyone being over him. I also think he’d love to drive and would probably have a fairly decent automobile. In fact, people would associate him with driving.”
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 13