Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (14 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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This dynamic between organized and disorganized, chaos and order, proved to be a constant source of tension in my life. I was embarrassed to admit it, but I had the unshakeable feeling that the man responsible for these unsolved killings in Wichita could probably teach me a thing or two about organization.
BTK’s murders employed elements that were both uniquely organized and disorganized. He could be sloppy at times, such as when leaving behind biological evidence at his crime scenes. But it was the razor-sharp control that he obviously maintained after his murders that perplexed and astounded me. I wasn’t sure what he did for work or even if he was married, but I felt confident that he never allowed his inner world—which seethed inside him like a bubbling cauldron—to bleed into his outer world.
In the analysis I wrote in 1979, performed on the heels of his two last known murders, I thought we were looking for someone who resembled a monster. But five years had passed, and now I began to glimpse another element of his character.
One of the reasons he was able to place so much time between his kills was because he’d somehow developed the ability to blend in to his environment. It would be far too much to expect him to stand out in his community. The reason we couldn’t see him was that we were looking past him, not at him.
Shortly before lunch, I’d plowed through my paperwork, played Dear Abby to a couple of men in my unit, and was happily back at it up in my quiet corner of the law library, digging and sifting though the stack of reports that detailed BTK’s last known murder, which occurred during the night of December 8, 1977.
Clearly, this was the UNSUB’s most perfect kill, no doubt producing the kind of memories that might just have been tiding him over for these past few years. It began to unfold to the outside world with a phone call to an emergency dispatcher at 8:20 the next morning.
For Wichita firefighter Wayne Davis, it had been shaping up to be a typical morning. Like plenty of his coworkers, he supplemented his income by working side jobs. On this particular chilly morning, he was sent to pick up a truck that was supposedly parked on St. Francis Street and drive it across town. But there was just one problem—Wayne couldn’t find the damn thing. So when he spotted a pay phone outside a market on the corner of St. Francis and Central Streets, he decided to pull over and call the guy who’d hired him. He hopped out of his car, shoved his hand in his pocket, and quickly realized he had no change.
Just my luck,
he shrugged, as he hurried inside the market to break a dollar bill. A man was using the pay phone, speaking quietly into the receiver, but Davis barely noticed him.
he shrugged, as he hurried inside the market to break a dollar bill. A man was using the pay phone, speaking quietly into the receiver, but Davis barely noticed him.
In those few moments that Davis was inside the store, a brief, chilling exchange took place between the caller and two police dispatchers. “You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing,” the man told the dispatcher. “Nancy Fox.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied. “I can’t understand you. What is the address?”
At that point, another dispatcher, who had been monitoring the call, interrupted: “I believe 843 South Pershing.”
“That is correct,” the man said. Then the phone line went quiet.
By the time Davis made it back to the parking lot, the caller had vanished, and the receiver dangled in midair. Davis grabbed it, placed the phone against his ear, and, when he didn’t hear a dial tone, said, “Hello?”
The voice on the other end of the line inquired if he was the same person who she’d just been speaking to. “No,” he replied. “Some other guy was using the phone.”
“Wayne, is that you?” the dispatcher asked, recognizing his voice because emergency calls were often routed through the fire department and the two regularly spoke to one another.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “What’s going on?”
A moment later, Wichita homicide captain Al Thimmesch jumped on the line. The two men and their wives were longtime square dance buddies. “Wayne,” Thimmesch asked, “did you get a look at the guy on the phone?”
“Not really,” he said. “What’s all the fuss about?” Thimmesch quickly filled him in on the details. When it became apparent that Davis could recall precious little about the caller’s appearance, Thimmesch asked if he’d object to undergoing hypnosis at police headquarters.
“No problem,” Davis replied.
But there
was
a problem. The killer had surfaced again. For seven brief seconds and in fifteen words, he’d broken his silence and risked everything to let the local authorities know he’d returned.
was
a problem. The killer had surfaced again. For seven brief seconds and in fifteen words, he’d broken his silence and risked everything to let the local authorities know he’d returned.
Shortly before 8:30, two patrol cars pulled up to the curb beside the pink duplex identified by the caller. The two officers who arrived at the scene quickly surveyed the exterior of the house. A back window had been shattered, they observed, and the phone line leading into the dwelling had been cut. The front door was unlocked. The officers entered the house and were hit by a blast of hot air.
A moment later, twenty-five-year-old Nancy Fox was found lying face down on the neon-blue paisley bedspread, wearing only a pale pink long-sleeved sweater. The tips of her toes, which hung over the edge of the mattress, had turned black. The nails of her long, slender fingers were pink. Something about the way they were positioned—partially extended, partially curled—looked deceivingly peaceful, beatific. Nylon stockings tightly bound her wrists behind her back. Her violet-colored panties had been pulled down around her hips, just above her knees. A cream-colored yellow nightgown had been tied around her ankles.
When police rolled Fox over, they saw that the left side of her face had also turned black. In her mouth was stuffed a gag fashioned out of various colored panty hose, and her dark tongue was swollen to many times its normal size. Wisps of sandy blonde hair covered much of her face, but beneath it smears of blood could be seen caked around her nose and mouth. Another pair of panty hose had been cinched tightly around her neck.
“Whoever did this was a real pervert,” recalled one homicide detective who arrived at the crime scene a few minutes later. “You could just see the sexual perversion all over that poor girl. . . . The whole thing really just aggravated me.”
Dumped on a coffee table were the contents of Nancy Fox’s purse. The killer, it was believed, had taken her driver’s license as a souvenir. On the dresser beside the bed sat a picture of Fox’s bowling team—she and four friends stood there beside their bowling balls, goofy grins plastered on their faces. On either side of the picture, two jewelry boxes appeared to have been rifled through.
On the bed next to Fox’s body, the contents of her lingerie drawer had been dumped. Police speculated that the killer had been searching for suitable bindings and gags. They also theorized that he’d turned up the thermostat in order to compensate for the cold air that had entered the dwelling through the window he’d shattered.
Semen was found at the scene in a blue nightgown, left at the head of the bed. Crime scene technicians were able to retrieve enough of a sample to send it quickly to the state crime lab in Topeka and have it analyzed. This was a decade before the advent of DNA testing, and the only thing police could hope to glean from the sperm sample was the blood type of the person it came from.
What they learned did little to help investigators focus their efforts, for the sperm had come from someone classified as a PGM-1 non-secretor. In layman’s terms, this meant that the UNSUB had just hit the genetic jackpot. Because if you were going to leave sperm behind at a crime scene, you could only hope to be a PGM-1 non-secretor, as this made trying to pinpoint your blood type physically impossible.
The search for other types of evidence also proved less than fruitful. In an effort to determine if the killer left behind any fingerprints on Fox’s body, investigators employed what was, at the time, considered to be a newfangled forensic technique.
A week before the murder, the department’s fingerprint technician had just attended a seminar on “fuming,” which involved erecting a makeshift plastic tent over the bed and pouring a chemical known as cyanoacrylate (commonly referred to as super-glue) into a ceramic bowl, then heating it at a low temperature. Over the next two hours, the chemicals vaporized inside the tent and adhered to any of the oils left behind by fingerprints, which were visible when viewed under a black light. When the process was finished, a portion of several fingerprints and part of a palm print were detected on Fox’s body, but they weren’t sufficient in helping police locate any suspects.
By late that afternoon, Fox’s body was wheeled out on a gurney and driven to St. Francis Hospital, four miles way. An autopsy determined that she died from strangulation. Yet the coroner found that despite partially undressing his victim and binding her, the killer had not raped or penetrated her.
As a battery of tests were being run on Fox’s body, detectives were busy interviewing her friends, family, and coworkers, enabling them to reconstruct her final hours.
They learned that shortly after 9:00 P.M., Nancy Fox left her job at Helzberg’s Jewelry Store at the Wichita Mall, where she worked as an assistant manager. On her way home, she grabbed a burger at a drive-thru fast-food joint, then continued back to the duplex where she lived alone in a quiet, relatively crime-free lower-middle-class neighborhood. Detectives postulated that once inside, Fox had had a smoke, downed a glass of water, then undressed for bed, neatly folding her tan skirt over a wooden chair. It was at this point, police believed, that the killer, who had been hiding in Fox’s bedroom closet, appeared and forced her onto the bed.
Although I had no way of proving it, I speculated that the killer masturbated into Fox’s nightgown only after his victim had died. His inability to rape or penetrate any of his victims told me that he was so fearful of women that a woman’s lifeless but partially naked body would represent the ultimate sexual turn-on.
Once dead, she became the perfect object, nonthreatening, no longer human, nothing more than a flesh-covered mannequin—all the things he dreamed about. Which was why the man responsible for Fox’s death went to such lengths to pose the body of his victim, much the way a painter or sculptor might pose a model. Everything about her positioning on the bed, the tilt of her head, the way her panties were pulled down to her knees, her various bindings and gags fashioned from panty hose, revealed to me that the killer wasn’t posing his victim merely as a way to shock police who arrived at the scene.
Just as he did with the body of Shirley Vian, the UNSUB posed Fox because he had to. The images he created at his crime scenes were similar to a cache of food. He needed to pose Fox in order to take mental “snapshots” of her body, then use that memory to get him through those long, lean periods when killing wouldn’t be an option.
Harvey Glatman, billed as the nation’s first modern serial killer, went to similar lengths when displaying the bodies of his victims. A hardcore bondage freak, he documented his many kills in diaries and with countless photographs he snapped and later developed in his darkroom. But Glatman wasn’t content merely to take pictures of his victims’ bodies after murdering them. He used his camera to chronicle his killings, capturing the look of terror on the faces of his victims before garroting them with a piece of rope. More than anything else, Glatman got off on preserving in a photograph that empty, glazed look of primal fear and hopelessness in the eyes of those he killed.
I often wondered what sort of a role model this sick man had been for BTK—they were both consumed by bondage, and, because of his detailed crime scene descriptions, I believed BTK was also photographing his victims.
As a child, Glatman possessed an insatiable obsession with bondage and ropes. In his early teens, he’d spent hours masturbating in the attic, hanging himself from the rafters in an effort to heighten his orgasms. A family doctor told his concerned parents to ignore their son’s strange hobby because he’d one day outgrow it.
By the time Glatman turned sixteen, he used a cap gun to force a girl to undress. He was quickly arrested and, upon being released on bail, traveled to New York. Not long afterward, he was arrested for robbery and sent to jail for five years. After his release in 1951, Glatman moved to Los Angeles and opened a TV repair shop. To the outside world, he lived a fairly quiet life and did his best to keep away from women.
Then, one sweltering afternoon in July 1957, the dam broke, and Glatman’s self-imposed exile from the opposite sex ended. An avid amateur shutterbug, he convinced a nineteen-year-old model he met while on a TV repair job to pose for him, telling her he made extra cash shooting pictures for detective magazines. She showed up at his house a few days later, eager to pocket the $50 he promised her for the photo shoot. Within minutes of her arrival, he raped her at gunpoint, then drove her out to a remote expanse of desert outside Los Angeles. He stripped the hysterical woman to her underwear and, before strangling her, shot pictures of her pleading for her life. Over the next year, he killed two other women using his photography ruse in order to win them over.
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