Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (10 page)
Authors: John Douglas,Johnny Dodd
BOOK: Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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The force of a slug hitting his skull and the sheer shock of being shot knocked Kevin backward, and he quickly crumpled onto the floor, unconscious. When he came to a few moments later, the man had disappeared into the bedroom with his sister, obviously satisfied that he’d taken care of Kevin.
“You shot my brother,” Kathy was shouting. “You shot my brother.”
Kevin sat up on the floor and listened as the stranger tried to calm her. “Relax,” he said. “I only wounded him. He’s gonna be OK.”
Kevin attempted to stagger to his feet, but the noise he made must have reached their attacker. The man walked back into the room, where Kevin had just managed to untie his legs. In a flash, Kevin remembered seeing the grip of a pistol tucked into the waistband of the man’s pants, lunged at him, grabbed the gun, and managed to shove it into the man’s chest. He squeezed the trigger, but before the hammer could slam down on the back of a round in the chamber, the attacker wedged his fingers beneath the hammer, preventing the gun from discharging. The two wrestled for control of the pistol, and Kevin managed to squeeze the trigger one more time, but once again the gun didn’t fire.
The man finally wrenched the weapon free, quickly took aim at Kevin’s head and fired, but missed. He pulled the trigger again, and the bullet hit Kevin in the mouth, tearing through his upper lip, turning Kevin’s face into an even bloodier mess than it already was. What the gunman didn’t know, however, was that Kevin’s front teeth deflected the slug. Kevin crumpled to the ground once again, and the gunman jumped on top of him in a flash, then wrapped a rope around his neck and yanked it tight.
Upon hearing the pistol shots, Kathy began screaming, and the man ran back into the other bedroom where she was still tied to a chair. Kevin blacked out for an unknown amount of time, probably just a few minutes. When he came to and stumbled to his feet, his sister was still screaming. He made a split-second decision that sent him running out the front door. The best thing he could do for Kathy, he decided, was to run and get help. Fifteen minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up in front of Bright’s house.
The detectives listened as Kevin whispered his story to them, amazed at his indestructibility and moved by his devotion to his older sister. Despite his injuries, he practically had to be tied down in the hospital bed to prevent him from fleeing the hospital and hitting the street to search for Kathy’s killer.
Before leaving his hospital room, one of the detectives opened up an Identi-Kit, used by police to create composite sketches of an unknown suspect. Over the next forty-five minutes, Kevin poured through the seemingly infinite number of combinations in the book and reconstructed what he could recall from his assailant’s face.
He told officers that the man was a stocky twenty-five-year-old Caucasian with dark hair and a thick dark mustache. He stood about five-foot-ten, had a black stocking cap pulled over his head, which he later removed, and wore a uniform that consisted of an orange shirt and jacket. The completed picture was immediately put on the wire and distributed to law enforcement agencies in the western states, where it was believed the assailant had come from.
Despite the fact that police suddenly had what could be a good description of the Brights’ attacker, the composite caused a fair bit of dissension among several of the detectives assigned to the case. A few believed that the likeness might actually help them nab Kathy’s murderer, whereas others doubted that Kevin, who many suspected had suffered a concussion, could be expected to recall much of value about the suspect.
In all my years working these sorts of cases, I’d rarely heard of a witness involved in a violent crime being able to create a composite drawing that turned out to resemble the perpetrator. That’s why detectives and prosecutors know that they had better have more than just eyewitness testimony to tie a suspect to a crime. Many an investigation has been sent down a dead-end road for this very reason. Nevertheless, in the absence of anything else to work with, the Wichita police quickly put out an all points bulletin, using the details Kevin provided, along with the sketch he helped create.
Other than the clothes and nylons that had been used to tie up the Brights, detectives found precious little evidence in the house. The only set of latent fingerprints that police were unable to identify was found on the back door, but these turned out to belong to Bright’s landlord and he was quickly eliminated as a suspect.
Police knocked on every front door in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where the sisters lived, asking if anyone could remember seeing a suspicious-looking character shortly after the attack, but no one reported seeing anyone out of the ordinary. A bloody white nylon rope was discovered under a tarp in the bed of Kevin’s rusted, decrepit Ford truck, parked on Holyoke Street. Police surmised that the killer might have tossed them in there when fleeing the scene.
About the only thing detectives had to work with was a small amount of marijuana they discovered in the house, leading them to wonder if maybe the attack had something to do with a drug deal gone awry. But then Karen Bright admitted that she and her sister were recreational pot smokers, something the cops had no problem believing because the amount found was so minuscule.
Although police weren’t ruling out the possibility that a local resident could be responsible for the brutal slaying and shooting, they reached out to California authorities, trying to determine if the description given by Kevin matched any fugitives they were currently pursuing. Before long, what few leads they had to work with had grown ice cold.
Although there were a few whispers among detectives that Bright’s killer might be the same individual responsible for the Otero murders, nobody wasted much time trying to link the two cases. And why would they? There appeared to be so many differences—Bright’s killer didn’t cut the phone line, and he’d used both a knife and a gun on his victims. Even his knots, which had been tied from jeans and nylons (as opposed to the venetian blind cord used at the Otero crime scene) were different. Kathy had been tied with granny knots, whereas the Oteros had been bound with both clove hitches and half hitches.
By the end of April, something else was clear: 1974 was turning out to be one of the bloodiest in recent memory. Six months after the discovery of those four bodies in the Otero house, another quadruple homicide rocked Wichita. Those murders, however, were quickly revealed to be the result of a drug rip-off.
But the Otero and Bright murders were different. Every homicide detective knows that good, thorough victimology—which, quite simply, is the study of the victim of a particular offender—can help crack cases. The problem with the Otero and Bright murders was that all these victims were “low risk,” meaning that there was no single clue to indicate why they were destined to die a violent death. None had engaged in any personal or criminal activities that might explain the fate they met. They were all just regular people, living and working in a community where the overall crime rate was remarkably low. The fact that none of the victims had probably ever laid eyes on their killer before he struck was another reason why police were having such a rough time unearthing any solid leads. Yet there were a few detectives in homicide who believed that the same killer might be responsible for all five murders.
It wasn’t until October 8 that police received what they cautiously believed might be the biggest break in the case. Gary Sebring, a local resident with a lengthy history of deviant behavior that included an arrest for having sex with a duck in Riverside Park, was picked up for molesting a five-year-old girl behind a public library. While being questioned about the incident at the police station, Sebring made an off-the-cuff comment about the Otero homicides that proved to be the equivalent of dropping a lit match into a gas tank.
“He said, ‘If I was doing the Oteros, this is how I would have done it,’” recalls one officer who worked the case.“‘I would have been with my brother, and we would have tied them all up and my buddy Thomas Meyers would have been with us.’”
Anyone looking at their individual rap sheets could tell that Gary Sebring and his brother, Ernest, had serious mental problems. So did Meyers. If somebody was going to give false confessions to a quadruple homicide, they were the perfect candidates. But the heat to crack the Otero murders was getting intense, and because the three had a history of sex offenses, the decision was quickly made to bring them in for questioning. Although this was five years before I first got involved with the case, if I’d been working on it, I would have told the cops not to bother. From a profiling standpoint, the Oteros’ killer was far too sophisticated and careful to have a history of bestiality and attempted molestation of a juvenile on his rap sheet. It just didn’t fit.
Meyers couldn’t be found. But on October 9, Sebring’s older brother was taken in and grilled. Instead of being booked in jail, the Sebrings were taken to a local mental hospital for evaluation. On October 18, Meyers was located after he tried committing suicide and paramedics were called to the scene. Eventually he was placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital.
Despite Gary’s rambling statement about his involvement in the murders, police quickly realized they’d opened a Pandora’s box due to the threesome’s mental instability. Years before, my Behavioral Science Unit worked on a case with similar dynamics, involving two homicides that had occurred nearly a decade apart in northern Virginia. After reviewing the murders, we concluded that the same offender was responsible for both crimes. There was just one problem. A mentally challenged man was currently sitting in jail for the first homicide at the time the second murder had occurred. We eventually discovered that police interrogators had convinced the suspect to confess to the killing, telling him it was the only way to avoid the death penalty if convicted. The real killer, it turned out, was a career burglar who committed the murders during his probationary stints in half-way houses. He was later found guilty of the killings, and the governor exonerated the first man and ordered him released from prison.
None of the three men in Wichita were ever charged with any crime, but media coverage of these new unnamed suspects in the Otero case evidently began to annoy the real killer. The fact that three poseurs were getting ink and airtime for what he considered to be the crowning achievement of his life proved more than he could bear.
Late in the morning on October 22, he telephoned the Otero murder hotline set up by one of the city’s two daily newspapers—the
Wichita Eagle
and
Beacon.
When columnist Don Granger picked up the phone, the voice at the other end of the line got right to the point.
Wichita Eagle
and
Beacon.
When columnist Don Granger picked up the phone, the voice at the other end of the line got right to the point.
“Listen and listen good because I’m not going to repeat it,” he growled, explaining that the man who killed the Oteros had stuck a letter inside a mechanical engineering textbook on the second floor of the Wichita Public Library.
That was all he said. Then he hung up, as if really annoyed.
Granger immediately telephoned Floyd Hannon, the chief of police, and told him the news. Within minutes, Detective Drowatzky was combing through the aisles of the library, located across the street from police headquarters, searching for the book. He eventually found a white envelope with the name Bill Thomas Killman, which police would eventually realize was an acronym for BTK, typed in the upper left-hand portion of the envelope.
Drowatzky’s first impression upon reading it was, “It was jumbled up to make everyone think he was an idiot, which he was. But it also became apparent that he had a certain sick intelligence to him.”
The letter had been typed and was laced with butchered syntax and numerous misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and misconjugated verbs. Of the detectives who poured over it, no one was quite sure whether the errors were unintentional or added simply to fool police into believing they were dealing with an imbecile.
It had been my experience that offenders who communicated with police generally attempted to disguise their writing and throw investigators off by purposely misspelling words or by using improper grammar. But one thing was clear: whoever created this one-page letter didn’t seem concerned about sending police the original rather than a photocopy. He had to know that forensic specialists would comb through every square inch of the letter with a microscope. He had to know there was a good chance that it contained a crucial piece of physical evidence that might allow investigators to trace the letter back to him. It was also risky because it provided investigators with their first real glimpse into his cold, savage mind. Even if everything he wrote was a lie, from that point onward he was no longer an invisible phantom. His image, albeit still terribly murky, had begun to take some semblance of shape and form. And he was OK with that. His ego obviously allowed him to believe the risk to be worth it.
Here was what the letter said:
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