Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

by Douglas, John

  “His car will probably be a nondescript type of vehicle,” I said. “Perhaps a sedan that will smack of law enforcement. He might have even purchased it at an auction from law enforcement. He’s image conscious, so there would antennas on the car, along with a scanner and a CB.”

  As I spoke, Walker stared out the massive glass windows at the far end of the room. He appeared transfixed by the trees and freshly-trimmed grass that stretched off into the distance. “I think he’s apt to be an underachiever—that’s what his supervisors will say,” Walker blurted out. “They’ll tell you he’s a smart guy who has the ability to do better than he’s doing. But he refuses to work up to his potential on the job. The reason is that he probably feels he’s better, more intelligent than his supervisors. Why should he bust his ass when he’s smarter than his boss? He’s egotistical with an exaggerated sense of self-importance.”

  I sat there listening to Walker, thinking about how fascinated BTK was with the world of law enforcement, telling myself that if he ever did become a police officer, he would have been one of those heavy-handed cops who carried a service revolver, along with another handgun in an ankle holster. Then, just to play it safe, he’d also stash a couple of knives in his various pockets. He’d be the type of cop who would have racked up a file cabinet full of complaints from those he came in contact with while performing his duties.

  “I think our UNSUB would have been openly critical of the investigation,” Hazelwood said. “Not openly so, but more in terms of his saying, ‘Those damn cops, they don’t know what they’re doing.’ He holds the police in disdain because they’ve been unable to solve the case, in spite of the tremendous amount of clues he believes he left them, clues they should have been able to pick up on. He tells himself that if he were a cop working the case, he would have picked up on these clues. I’d say there’s a good chance he’s already been interviewed by police and found to be cooperative. He may have even phoned in with additional information, perhaps telling detectives about something he ‘just remembered.’”

  “I keep thinking that early on he might have been married to someone who would have allowed him to get away with some of the stuff he enjoys—bondage and sexual exploration,” I said. “But now at his age, I’m wondering if maybe he’s divorced.”

  Hazelwood shook his head. “When they’re married, sexual sadists will act out their fantasies on their spouses,” he said. “They can’t control it. They have to be in control. When they’re dating, they’re often very charming, manipulative, and very attentive. When having sex, they may act out superficially, asking things like, ‘Can I hold your arms? Do you mind if I tie you down?’ But after they get married, they get into it heavily. One option might be to take the list of suspects and find out who is divorced. Then interview the ex-wives to find out about their ex’s sexual sadistic activities during their marriage.”

  Ex-wives, I’d learned long ago, could provide a wealth of information for investigators with the right touch. “You might also ask these exes if they were ever the recipients of souvenirs or other items taken from victims,” I said. “Ask them if, when they were together, did the suspect ever give them gifts of used jewelry or other items missing from our crime scenes. Ask them if he ever spoke about BTK or his kills? Did he ever take them to where the murders had occurred or to the cemeteries where his victims were buried? And, if so, did he act strange when he got there? You might even release information to the media that serial killers often become obsessed with coverage of their crimes and intensely follow them. This information might prompt a spouse or former spouse to come forward.”

  “Ex-wives could prove very important to police,” continued Hazelwood. “They could tell us if their ex-husbands had more than a normal interest in the media coverage of the killings. They could also detail their interest in pornography, detective magazines, and bondage restraints like blindfolds, gags, and hoods. I’d expect someone like this to be an outdoorsman, a gun and knife collector. He might own a large dog like a Doberman and have a pseudo-mercenary soldier-of-fortune type of mentality.”

  I decided to shift gears just a bit and focus more on how this guy went about killing. “It’s not important to us if killed before in another community,” I said. “What’s important to us is those first one or two kills in Wichita. That’s why Otero and Bright are important. In that first kill, he selects an area where he feels a great deal of comfort. He knows deep down that he can get away with his crime there. To do what he has to do, he needs a great amount of time and to do that he must feel safe. I think there’s a strong possibility he knew his first victims at least casually or had observed them. Although now, ten years later, I believe he’s no doubt changing his MO.”

  “All it might take for him to feel comfortable about a certain area,” said Hazelwood, “is to drive through it a sufficient number of times.”

  “With the breaking-and-entering type of mentality, they select an area where they always feel in control,” I added. “I still think it’s significant that he ventured into the Otero’s basement on his first kill.”

  “The reason he was so successful with the Oteros is that he’d played out these bondage fantasies before, most likely with prostitutes,” Walker said. “He’s got a very rigid, methodical personality. It’s possible that the Oteros were his first nonconsenting victims. But he’d already played those acts out in his mind over and over again. So when he walked into that house, he knew exactly what he was going to do. He’d planned on his victims being passive. The mere threat of a weapon, he believed, may have been enough to overcome victim resistance. If the Oteros were his first kill, look at Bright and determine if that was out of character from his other cases. He may have felt so successful on his first murder that he was surprised when confronted with resistance on his second one.”

  Hazelwood nodded his head in agreement. “This guy has been fantasizing about sadistic acts since he was a young child,” he said. “He had fun at the Oteros and the reason he didn’t shoot anyone is that he likes to have hands-on kills where he can choke, suffocate, and strangle. He used a weapon just to control the Otero family, not to kill them.”

  “If we want to see what happened to the Otero household, just look at the victims at the Bright residence,” Walker said. “That’s what happened at the Oteros. He would have said the same things, using his gun, but also reassuring his victims. That’s his method of control—reassurance and a gun. Mr. Otero wasn’t going to resist because he probably was afraid of what would happen to his children if he had.”

  “Or maybe he used a different ruse,” I said. “He went in and grabbed a young child and held a gun on them. That would cause Mr. Otero to comply, to not resist. The daughter was the main attraction and her brother was the main distraction. Everyone else at the scene, except for the girl, were secondary victims.”

  As I spoke, I was reminded of something else. “A long rope is his fantasy,” I said. “It’s his imagery. He talks about this in his letters. He’s a writer. But he can also draw his fantasies. Look at his doodling. Part of his trophies is in the form of images he takes from his scenes. It’s what helps him relive his kills. I still think he photographed his scenes.”

  Hazelwood nodded in agreement, so I continued: “Since we know he rifles through the drawers and purses of his victims, but doesn’t seem to be taking monies or property, I think that’s indicative of not needing money. So he must have an income to sustain himself.”

  “Going through drawers is a sophisticated, extended means of voyeurism,” said Walker. “You can bet that as a juvenile he had a voyeuristic history.”

  “In his late teens he might have hung or strangled feminine animals like cats or cows,” said Hazelwood. “He would have done this close to his home, so he could watch how the people around him reacted. The police might go back and check if they ever had any reports of that sort of thing.”

  “I see this guy as being in the lower-middle class,” I said. “He’s not going to have much
cash. Because of that, I don’t think he’d have the income to pay a mortgage. So I’d expect he’d be living in a rental property.”

  “Yeah,” said Walker. “He’d have a lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar. But he’s a quasi-professional. Not poor, but not middle class either.”

  Hazelwood didn’t buy this. “I see him differently,” he said. “He’s middle class, intelligent, articulate, but he’s also an underachiever. He selects victims he feels superior to, so I’d expect him to be killing victims in a class just below him.”

  The smell of gunpowder, no doubt the result of some forensic experiment gone awry in a nearby lab down the hall, seeped into the conference room. For some reason at that moment, the odor triggered a memory of my days spent in basic training, back in the Air Force. And this reminded me of another thought I’d had a few days earlier, something I couldn’t shake.

  “He’s connected with the military,” I said. “Possibly the Air Force. I know there’s an Air Force base near Wichita. Maybe he worked security there. If he’s still in Wichita, that could be the reason. Maybe he was recently discharged and stuck around for a while. Perhaps he was taking college courses in criminology at Wichita State University in 1974, using the GI Bill to foot the bill. There’s a professor out there who might have known him. When he was a student, he probably talked to him, even borrowed books from him to write a term paper. I can see him working on one that dealt with famous people who have killed. This is a guy who really wants to be in law enforcement, but maybe he can’t make the grade because of some physical handicap, speech impediment, or bad eyes. But his application should be on file with the local police, reserve police, perhaps even as an emergency room ambulance driver.”

  Hazelwood interrupted my reverie to bring us back to what he felt was important about the UNSUB’s relationship to his victims. “He’s angry at women, but not angry at the people he killed,” he said. “He’s unemotional and detached from them. They are nothing but props. He feels emotionally and intellectually above them.”

  Walker nodded as Hazelwood spoke, but he seemed interested in following the thread I’d begun to weave regarding BTK’s possible military background. “The Air Force seems logical to me because of that base in Wichita,” he said. “He probably enlisted to avoid the Vietnam draft out of high school. This guy is basically a coward. He won’t be the type to project a macho image and definitely not the Marine Corps type. I could see him using the two Otero kids as a shield. He threatened to harm the children if the parents didn’t cooperate. When he was in the service, he’d be seen as a nondescript underachiever. His performance rating would be average. His officers would say he completes a task when it’s given to him, but he could have done a better job. He’s probably a little lazy and somewhat rebellious. Those who came in contact with him in the military or college might say they remember him, but didn’t really know much about him.”

  I liked where Walker was heading and decided to see what I’d find if I began to move my thoughts in that direction. “He’s always going to be frustrated because he’s not in the position that he thinks he should be in,” I said. “That could have caused problems with his superiors and it would have affected his promotions. At tops, when this guy got out of the Air Force, he would have had an E-4 rating. His lackadaisical attitude might have led to him getting the boot from the service. He’s not a team player. He’s definitely got that lone-wolf mentality.”

  “He’s a now person,” added Hazelwood. “He wants instant gratification. He has short-lived interests. He’ll pursue a hobby, but then lose interest. Like a small child, he needs constant gratification.”

  “His downfall will be ego,” I said. “If he’s incarcerated, he’ll tell his cellmates about the case. He won’t say he did it, but he’ll talk about it in the third person, bragging about the person who did it, how they’re beating the inept cops.”

  Something else just occurred to me, something I’d thought about before, but hadn’t paid much attention to until now. “This guy is into autoerotic asphyxiation,” I said. “We found evidence of that in the Otero basement when he hung Josephine. Police need to be on the lookout for any accidental cases where someone died while doing this. If they searched the scene, they might find materials at the location that would have identified him as BTK. These would include writings, photos, and sketches. It would be in an area that was easily accessible to him—a footlocker or a drawer. He would never destroy these things, even if he felt the police were moving in. What he’d do is hide it.”

  “His spouse might have stumbled onto this material,” said Hazelwood. “She might have stumbled onto one of his trophies. But he would have explained it away. Reminds me of that deputy sheriff down in Florida, who killed all those women. Happened a few years back. His wife found the driver’s license of one of his victims at their house and when she asked him about it he told her, ‘Oh, I kept it by mistake. Thanks for finding that. I gotta return it to our files at the office.’ Three days later, she found the license again and told him she’d take it back to the office for him. ‘No,’ he said, snatching it away from her. ‘I’ll do it.’ Not long after that, he showed her a box filled with used jewelry and asked her to toss it in a swamp not far from their house. She did and didn’t come forward about it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Marriage isn’t going to stop this guy—even if he has the most willing, pliable mate in the world. It’s not going to be enough for him. He needs to be taking all the time. He has to always be in complete and absolute control. . . . But why has he stopped? If he has stopped. If he left town and is still killing, he probably has modified his MO. He won’t use the BTK handle or correspondence anymore, but his kills would still include some sort of element of bondage.”

  Walker slapped his hand down on the table. “The NYPD got some guy about six months ago,” he said. “He strangled a bunch of prostitutes, then bound them up in rope.”

  Hazelwood and I both nodded. Probably worth following up, we both thought. I glanced across the table and saw one of the detectives scribbling a note to himself on the legal pad in front of him.

  “In all probability, this guy isn’t dead, unless it was from some accident or he was killed while committing a burglary,” I said. “He might be in jail in connection with a burglary, one where he was picked up with a weapon on him. Burglaries are often a major first step when a perp is planning an indoor rape or a homicide.”

  “This guy will not stop killing,” Hazelwood said. “He’s either still killing or is stuck somewhere where he can’t kill.”

  “He’s emulating other crimes he’s read about in detective magazines,” I said. “He cut phone lines because he read about that somewhere. He’s adding bits and pieces of other crimes into his crimes. . . . When I listen to his voice on that tape, when he called in to report the Nancy Fox murder, I can’t get over how controlled and cryptic his words were. He gave just enough information to get his point across. The phrases he used reminded me of conversations you hear when dispatchers speak among themselves. He sounded like he had some experience talking on the radio.”

  Keep things moving, I told myself. But stay alert. The one thing I’d learned about these skull sessions was that I couldn’t allow my mind to drift. Not even for a second. Do that and I’d miss something crucial. And at that point in our session what was crucial was to steer straight toward the last element on our agenda. Namely, how could police—after pinpointing a credible suspect—cause him to crack.

  “You need to break him down during that first interview you’ll get with him, the first time you bring him in,” I said. “You need to disrupt his life and make him lose sleep. Make sure he notices you in his neighborhood, so he’ll begin to see you even when you’re not there. When he starts to look disheveled, when you realize he’s starting to turn to drink and soft drugs to cope with the pressure, when you can tell he’s starting to lose sleep, then yank him in. Don’t give him time to prepare. Bring him in when he’s
not ready.

  “A night-time interview would be best, between the hours of eight or nine, in a confined area. Make sure the place where you hold the interview is stacked high with mounds of information in order to project your extreme level of thoroughness. The best place would be in the task force offices. Let him see a bunch of flow charts in the background and a file drawer with his name on it. Have some of the evidence present, items that could link him to the crime, something significant that he’ll react to. But don’t show him any crime scene photos. Because of what he’s written in his communiqués about being controlled by evil forces, he’s no doubt layered a strategy for the insanity defense. Show him those photos and his defense attorney will say he’s unstable and only offered up what he saw in the pictures.