Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (16 page)

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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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Not surprisingly, LaMunyon’s announcement sent a collective shudder through the community, especially when, several days later, an unfounded rumor began sweeping through the city. BTK, it seemed, targeted only the occupants of residences “located on the west side of a north- and south-running street with a house address containing a number
three
within it.” Even if this had been true, I would have written it off to coincidence. Serial killers, I’d learned, are far more interested in finding a victim who—because of his or her various traits and attributes—satisfied them psychologically, rather than one who has a certain number in his or her street address.
 
BTK’s habit of cutting the outside phone lines of his victims was also mentioned in the press conference. That evening, thousands of residents throughout the city began a ritual that would last for years: the first thing they did upon entering their home was check to see if the phone worked. Others made it a habit—before entering their house—to dial their home number from a pay phone, to see if their phone rang.
 
Within days, the sale of guns soared. So did the demand for additional door locks and peepholes and Mace. Because anyone could be the killer, nobody felt safe, and every stranger seemed like a suspect. Paranoia swept through the community like fire through a prairie grassland—which certainly must have sent shivers of ecstasy up the UNSUB’s spine.
 
Because, at its core, BTK’s letter was no different than the ones the Son of Sam used to pen during his one-year killing spree that began in July 1976. Like the Son of Sam, BTK wasn’t seeking notoriety initially, but he soon took that direction when the press began running stories. Both offenders relished the publicity, and each felt good about the terror and fear they were creating and causing to unfold in their respective communities. Both had become the bogeyman, a role to which they quickly became addicted.
 
Police were initially stumped about the way BTK opened his communiqué, complaining about “the newspaper not writing about the poem on Vain.” Of course, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to understand that the killer was referring to Shirley Vian. Within hours of LaMunyon’s press conference, the full answer became apparent when an employee of the
Wichita Eagle
discovered that a three-by-five index card, which arrived in the newsroom on January 31, had mistakenly been routed to the newspaper’s advertising department.
 
Because the cryptic message on the card was printed in children’s block letters from a rubber stamp, whoever first spotted the card believed it to be a personal ad, not a poem based on the murder of Shirley Vian. It was based on an eighteenth-century Mother Goose nursery rhyme, titled “Curley Locks.”
 
 
 
SHIRLEYLOCKS SHIRLEYLOCKS
WILT THOUGH BE MINE
THOU SHALT NOT SCREEM
NOT YET FEEL THE LINE
BUT LAY ON CUSHION
AND THINK OF ME AND DEATH
AND HOW IT IS GOING TO BE.
 
 
At the bottom of the card, he printed the message, POEM FOR FOX NEXT.
 
 
The UNSUB waited fourteen months before surfacing again, although initially police had their doubts that it was actually him. Just after 10 P.M. on the cool spring night of April 28, 1979, a sixty-one-year-old widow named Anna Williams returned home after a night of square dancing. She lived at 615 South Pinecrest, roughly one mile from Nancy Fox’s house. Friends dropped her off at her house and watched as she fumbled for her keys on the front porch. But just before unlocking the door, she decided to reconsider their offer of a cup of coffee at a local café. She dropped her keys in her purse, climbed back in their car, and was whisked away into the night.
 
An hour later, she once again returned home and quickly discovered that one of her basement windows had been shattered. Rope, a broom handle, and several pieces of undergarments were found lying beside a bed in the basement guest room where her granddaughter often slept. Williams walked back upstairs and noticed that several scarves, pieces of jewelry, various articles of clothing, and $35 in cash were missing. A half roll of toilet paper had also been used, she realized. Most frightening of all, when she tried to telephone police, she couldn’t get a dial tone. She hurried next door to a neighbor’s house and phoned police.
 
A few minutes later, a squad car pulled up to the house, and two patrolmen began asking the badly shaken Williams questions. She’d been in poor health ever since the recent death of her husband, and this near disaster seemed on the verge of pushing her over the edge. One of the officers, who poked around the backyard with a flashlight, spotted the reason why her phone was dead—the line had been cut. Burglary investigators combed through the house, searching for fingerprints and traces of semen, but nothing was found. A crime report was taken, but it quickly disappeared into a file cabinet, and, because there was no reason to do so, it was never shared with homicide detectives in the police department’s burglary unit.
 
No mention of the incident appeared in the local newspaper. Williams, however, never believed a random burglar was responsible for the break-in. In her heart, she believed it to be the work of BTK.
 
In his heart, the individual responsible for the break-in couldn’t stand it that news of his most recent surfacing didn’t make headlines. On June 15, a manila envelope, printed in neat block letters, arrived at Williams’s home and was opened by her daughter. It contained her mother’s pilfered scarf and jewelry. Also stuffed inside the envelope was a typed photocopied poem and a drawing of a bound, nude woman lying face down on her bed; a broomstick had been inserted into what appeared to be either her vagina or anus. Williams’s daughter telephoned police without ever showing the letter to Anna.
 
Two days later, the
Wichita Eagle
ran the headline BTK IS BACK; INTENDED VICTIM GETS POEM on the front page. True to his word, BTK had chosen his eighth victim. The only problem was, she never bothered to show up. In his nineteen-line poem titled “Oh Anna, Why Didn’t You Appear?” he aired his frustration at being denied the pleasure of getting to snuff out another life.
 
 
 
T’was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season
 
Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement, like new vines at night
 
Oh, Anna, Why Didn’t You Appear
 
Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness to scent to lofty fever that burns within,
 
In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desparation, the game we play, fall on devil ears
 
Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.
 
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
 
Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments across most private thought
 
Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes so deep and clear.
 
Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why for number eight was not.
 
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
 
 
Although the UNSUB possessed the poetic sensibility of a love-drunk college freshman, his communiqués reinforced my belief that he possessed an eye for detail. I couldn’t shake the idea that he’d snapped photographs of his victims, crime scenes, and—in Anna Williams’s case—his intended crime scene. Either that or he had a photographic memory, which seemed unlikely.
 
His sketches, moreover, weren’t half bad—detailed and reasonably well drawn. They weren’t Michelangelo, but he drew a helluva lot better than I did. Although his subject matter was a bit limited, I sensed that he’d honed his ability to draw gagged, scantily clad women bound up in rope by staring at the pages of pulp detective magazines sold up through the mid-1970s in almost every mom-and-pop convenience store around the nation.
 
We in the criminal profiling business referred to the violent offenders who read these magazines as “collectors.” These glossy publications, which usually bore a cover photo of a hog-tied, frightened woman with a gun or knife pressed against her breast or temple, served as virtual textbooks for budding killers. Criminologists like myself had long suspected that killers studied the exploits of those savages who’d come before them, soaking up every detail of true or fictional crimes wherever they could find it—magazines, books, movies, and TV. Long before any of these animals ever claimed their first victim, they’d spent a lifetime nurturing the dark dreams festering inside their heads by devouring publications with names like
Master Detective, Official Police Detective, Front Page Detective,
and
Startling Detective.
 
Do the words and images contained in the pages of these magazines create violent criminals? Certainly not. But clearly they fuel their sick fantasies. The way I see it, precious few people who read true (or fictional) crime books harbor some latent desire to go out and kill someone. People read them for the same reason they rubberneck when driving past a bloody automobile accident. They want a glimpse of horror, but they don’t want to get too close to the blood and gore. Others consume these books and magazines in order to understand a violent offender’s background, to grasp what makes him so different than the rest of us—particularly when they seem to so closely resemble us.
 
Did BTK read these magazines? I would have bet my FBI pension on it. The one thing that this violent media didn’t do, however, was cause these individuals to become killers—it only fueled their already deeply embedded fantasies and provided literal models of horrible acts in vivid detail.
 
For me, the killer who drove home the idea that violent offenders learn the tools of their trade from their elders was a balding, gaunt serial killer named Joseph Fischer. On the evening I showed up at Attica State Prison to speak with him, back in 1981, it was hard to imagine how this former transient could have killed six women during his wanderings across the nation. Yet Fischer, who insisted that he’d actually murdered thirty-two people, put this killer-nurturing-killer concept into perspective for me in a way that none of the other murderers I’d interviewed before had.
 
“It’s kinda like guys who follow baseball or football,” he told me in that dimly lit prison interrogation room. “They know all the bat-ting averages, yards per game, interceptions versus touchdowns, where the players went to high school. They know every stat about all their favorite players.”
 
Fischer took a deep breath and began tracing an imaginary circle into the top of the table that separated the two of us.
 
“Well, those other guys got their games, and guys like me, we got our games. I didn’t grow up wanting to hit home runs. I grew up wanting to kill people. And I used to soak up every bit of information I could find on the guys who were good at playing my kind of game.”
 
It always made me sick to my stomach when guys like Fischer referred to their habit of killing innocent people as a game. But clearly that’s what it had become for BTK—a deadly game that nobody had yet been able to stop. And by the summer of 1979, when the locals in Wichita learned that the serial killer living in their midst wasn’t going away, BTK finally graduated from rookie player to coach, from pupil to teacher. He’d finally achieved what he craved most—the chance to be somebody.
 
These last communications had revealed that in his mind, he’d transcended to the next level, in terms of his ability and proficiency as a killer. And now he yearned for some degree of recognition for his “accomplishments.”
 
The buzz from all the mayhem he created must have been intense, but it wouldn’t last forever. That giddy sensation of self-worth would eventually fade, just as everything else that sustained him did. And when that emptiness and self-loathing returned and grew too intense, we’d hear from him again.
 
The only question was when.
 
7
 
How do you trap a shadow? Where do you even start? You can’t shine a light on it. Shadows dwell in darkness. They disappear in the presence of light. The police in Wichita had thrown plenty of light in the direction of the UNSUB, but had found nothing. He’d remained hidden, revealing himself only to his victims, then vanishing.
 
If the authorities had managed to get close to him, he’d never let on. Now it was 1984, and ten years had passed since what he claimed were his first grisly series of murders.
 
After combing through hundreds of pages of crime reports, photos, and other documents detailing his murders, I’d slowly come to the conclusion that perhaps the only way to catch this killer was to let him catch himself. That was really all I had to offer. The UNSUB seemed to hold all the cards—a fact that both he and the police were well aware of. This meant we might have to wait years before he let his guard down enough to slip up.

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