Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (13 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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So how was the killer able to subdue Shirley?
Police reasoned that he convinced her to allow him to tie her up, promising her that if she did, he wouldn’t hurt her children. After making her remove all her clothes, the killer placed her nightgown over her head, then slipped a bag over that. If the UNSUB did ejaculate while at the house, police speculated he might have done so in a pair of Shirley’s panties, then taken them with him when he fled.
In between telling the detective who interviewed them about the songs their mother would sing to them when they couldn’t sleep, the children did their best to describe the killer. They insisted he was a dark-haired man in his late thirties or forties with a heavy build and a “paunch.” Police, however, placed little faith in the information Vian’s kids provided—especially their description of the suspect.
Because the $40 in money orders that Steve picked up at the grocery had been taken from the house, investigators believed robbery may have been the initial motive for the crime. Nevertheless, the murder was classified as a sex crime. Police didn’t believe at first that there was enough evidence to connect Vian’s homicide to the Otero murders. The reason? The phone line hadn’t been cut, the killer didn’t appear to have masturbated at the scene, the victimology was different, and none of Shirley’s children were harmed. That the paramedics had disturbed the crime scene, removing Vian’s various bindings, meant that police had nothing to visually link the two killings. They had to rely on the memories of Vian’s kids and the emergency medical technicians to reconstruct the scene.
Still, according to Drowatzky, there were a few detectives on the force who whispered about possible parallels between the homicides. That they even toyed with a connection between the two murders spoke volumes about just how deeply the Oteros’ killer had wormed his way into the consciousness of the Wichita police force. But their suspicions never amounted to anything other than a collective gut hunch, certainly nothing anyone could prove—at least not until the killer penned his next letter, claiming responsibility for the killing. Over the next few weeks, nearly fifty people were interviewed by police. Because of the puzzling randomness of the murder, however, the hunt for a viable suspect quickly turned cold, and the case was put on the back burner.
Yet despite the lack of anything resembling a lead, investigators had a strong hunch that the photograph the killer displayed to Vian’s son Steve was a snapshot of Cheryl Gilmore and her son. Gilmore was the neighbor on whose front door Steve saw the killer knock earlier that morning while walking home from the store.
Detectives believed that Gilmore might have been the killer’s intended target. She lived alone with her son and regularly came home for lunch from her job at a nearby optometrist’s office. The only reason she wasn’t home when the UNSUB knocked on her door was that she had to take her son to a medical appointment.
Gilmore learned about the murders after returning home from work that afternoon. Her street was swarming with police and TV crews. The thought that she narrowly missed meeting the grisly fate suffered by Shirley spooked her horribly. But because she couldn’t afford to move away from the area, she remained living in her house. Each night for the next year, she lay in bed with an unloaded shotgun, telling herself she’d use it as a club should the killer ever return.
I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if five-year-old Steve hadn’t bumped into that stranger roaming his neighborhood on that morning. The killer was obviously pumped up to murder someone, consumed with the need to control and devour another human being. When Gilmore wasn’t home, I surmised, he remembered the boy he’d just spoken to and decided to see if there was anyone home at his house who might make a worthwhile victim. It was a bold, stupid maneuver that could have gotten him caught, but he somehow pulled it off.
It was close to midnight when I finally decided to pack up my paperwork and head home from the cemetery. The moon shone bright, but the beam of my flashlight had turned a weak yellow. I felt a bit calmer, more in control.
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.
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 convince 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.
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