Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (17 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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But he’d done it before. Besides leaving traces of semen behind in the Oteros’ basement and in Nancy Fox’s bedroom, he’d felt compelled to send his revealing, potentially evidence-laden communiqués to police. But it had been five years since he’d felt the need—and taken the risk—to type out another letter.
Sitting in my file-strewn office one afternoon a few days after my second visit from the Wichita Police Department, I thought back to a case near San Diego that I’d been called in to work on the previous year.
The victim had apparently run out of gas on a fairly busy highway during the early evening. Her nude body was later discovered in some nearby foothills. A dog collar had been cinched tightly around her neck. Shortly before her murder, she’d been raped.
To help the local police find the killer, I tried to imagine how the events leading up to her death had unfolded, picturing the interaction between the killer and his victim. It quickly became obvious that this tragedy was another example of someone’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d run out of gas, but felt safe because of the abundance of traffic. Surely no one would be crazy enough to harm someone in front of so many potential witnesses, she told herself.
The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that the very thing the victim believed would protect her could be used to coax her killer out of hiding and into the investigation—not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to. By walking in the shoes of the UNSUB, I could “see” him driving past the stranded motorist on that busy highway and suddenly realizing that he’d just stumbled on the perfect victim of opportunity. The only glitch was how he could pull it off, especially in the presence of so many possible eyewitnesses.
His answer? He’d approach the victim, exuding every bit of friendliness he could muster, offering her a ride to a nearby service station. But as soon as she sat in his vehicle, he no doubt pulled out a gun and ordered her to lie down on the floorboard. Next, he drove her to an isolated area he was familiar with because he either worked or resided in the immediate vicinity.
With all that in mind, my advice to police was to create three press releases. The first would provide readers and listeners with the basic facts of the case and end with police reaching out for potential witnesses. A day or two later, they’d advise the community about the positive responses they’d received, which were generating some solid investigative leads. The last release would inform the community that they’d developed information about a vehicle observed by several witnesses as well as a description of an individual standing next to the victim.
I suggested that they should say they were uncertain if this person was a suspect or just someone who stopped to lend a helping hand.
A few days later, our “Good Samaritan” took the bait and stopped by police headquarters to inform them that he may have been the person seen by some of the witnesses. And, yes, as a matter of fact, he had stopped by to help the victim, but for some reason she’d declined his assistance. Bingo! Suddenly, the police had someone they could place at the scene, and investigators could go to work doing a thorough background check of the suspect, along with attempting to link him to the crime.
The so-called Good Samaritan was later convicted when police were able to match up hair and fibers on the dog collar, along with biological evidence in the form of sperm.
When it came to the murders in Wichita, we didn’t have a busy highway or a plethora of potential witnesses. But we did have something else. We knew our UNSUB had a weak spot.
In the past, BTK had risked everything for the chance to thumb his nose at police by writing letters, which for all he knew might inadvertently contain a few incriminating scraps of forensic evidence or intimate clues about his psychology. If he was going to slip up again, my hunch was that it might be because of this unquenchable need to communicate, to reach out and share the secret he had to keep locked up inside his brain.
I just had one question:
How do we force his hand?
How do we force his hand?
A few afternoons later I still didn’t have an answer. So I decided to spend my lunch hour going for a mellow jog through the woods that surrounded the FBI Academy. I’d often done this in the past when working on a case. I’d head out onto a trail at a slow ten-minute-a-mile pace, allowing my mind to drift wherever it wanted. The process was similar to what I did at night when I forced myself to dream about a case. My technique led to plenty of heart-stopping nightmares, but the insight I gleaned made it worthwhile. The network of running trails that weave and crisscross their way through the dense woods at Quantico have achieved near mythic lore among agents. Many a promising rookie has emptied the contents of his stomach on these trails as a result of pushing himself past his physical limits. Because it’s so easy to get disoriented on the meandering paths (as I once did for several hours when I first arrived at Quantico), fitness instructors long ago began marking the way with yellow bricks. Ever since, the running course has been known as the Yellow Brick Road. On that warm, hazy autumn afternoon, I soon found myself trotting over a dirt trail that bore the name “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.”
Just a few minutes into my run, the full weight of those five words hit me—this could have been the BTK’s mantra. From what I recalled from a college literature class, Dorothy uttered that famous phrase to Toto in
The Wizard of Oz
for good reason. Kansas was a symbol of Dorothy’s outer world. But thanks to a tornado and a knock on the head, she suddenly embarked on an inner journey to a place she called Oz, a world that dwelled deep within her subconscious.
The Wizard of Oz
for good reason. Kansas was a symbol of Dorothy’s outer world. But thanks to a tornado and a knock on the head, she suddenly embarked on an inner journey to a place she called Oz, a world that dwelled deep within her subconscious.
For Dorothy, Oz was filled with everything from a loveable Cowardly Lion and cute Munchkins to a hideous-looking Wicked Witch and a squeaky Tin Man. My hunch was that years before the UNSUB committed the Otero murders in January 1974, this aspiring killer had begun a similar journey. But for him, Oz was a much more sinister, violent realm, a dark fantasy world where he retreated on a daily basis to relive his kills.
While I was mulling over all this, thinking about how much Dorothy reminded me of Josie Otero, the vision of an ultracool black man in a suede trench coat flashed into my head. The juxtaposition of these disparate, seemingly random images proved jarring.
Where the hell is this going?
I laughed.
Where the hell is this going?
I laughed.
Then suddenly I remembered the night before when Pam and I were channel surfing. After a few minutes, she stumbled on a rerun of an early 1970s flick, starring Richard Roundtree, about a no-nonsense, ass-kicking inner-city black detective named John Shaft. The movie’s theme song thundered out of the tiny speaker in our TV set.
“Oh, I remember this movie,” she said, flipping to another channel.
“Turn it back,” I pleaded. “I gotta watch this.”
Pam moaned, switched back to the movie, then snuggled up next to me. “OK, you win,” she said. “But if you start sobbing over this the way you did over that Lassie movie two weeks ago, I’m turning off the TV.”
She had a point. Ever since emerging from my coma ten months before, I’d been an emotional basket case, bursting into tears at the strangest moments—commercials for used cars, sunsets, even a
Lassie
rerun.
Lassie
rerun.
“I think I can handle this,” I replied.
For the next ninety minutes I stared into the flickering TV screen, not exactly sure why I was so mesmerized by the movie. But somewhere in the back of my head, a voice told me to sit back, pay attention, and enjoy the show. I liked Shaft. He kicked a lot of butt, bedded a bunch of women, and still managed to look like a million bucks the whole time. Something about his no-holds-barred approach to cracking that kidnapping case so crucial to the movie’s plot felt strangely inspiring.
“I bet
he
could catch BTK,” I mumbled. “Maybe I oughta call up the task force in Wichita and tell them that what they really need is Shaft, super-detective.”
he
could catch BTK,” I mumbled. “Maybe I oughta call up the task force in Wichita and tell them that what they really need is Shaft, super-detective.”
The sheer absurdity of Richard Roundtree running around the streets of Wichita trying to crack a serial murder case made me smile.
Maybe the idea wasn’t so absurd. The local police didn’t need a super-detective. What they really needed was a
super-cop,
someone who could crawl inside our UNSUB’s mind and gently steer him in the direction we wanted him to go.
super-cop,
someone who could crawl inside our UNSUB’s mind and gently steer him in the direction we wanted him to go.
What I began to envision was a John Wayne-like twist on the standard concept of a police spokesman, typically used to brief the media during ongoing high-profile cases. That individual’s job is to stand up in front of the cameras and microphones and update reporters on the status of the investigation. Sometimes they even give descriptions of the suspect or suspects. It’s hardly cutting-edge criminology. Police agencies around the nation have been using spokespeople for decades. Sometimes the person tapped for the role is the chief or the sheriff. Other times, a lead detective on the case is used. More often than not, the honors go to one of the department’s public information officers.
But now, out here on that running trail, an idea took shape and began to unroll itself inside my head like thread off a spool. We’d tweak the standard-issue police spokesperson concept just a bit. We’d turbocharge this otherwise predicable symbol of law and order, and transform it into a psychological crime-fighting tool who would be the perfect counterpart of BTK’s grandiose vision of himself. How would we do this? For starters, it was obvious that part of the UNSUB’s motive was a desire to thumb his nose at police. He wanted the world to know that he was smarter than the cops trying to catch him. At the same time, his detailed descriptions of his crime scenes told me that he was also a wannabe cop, someone who would have probably given anything to have a job in law enforcement. I wondered if he’d ever applied for a job with police and been turned away. Or yearned to apply, but knew that if they ran a fingerprint check on him they might stumble on a print he’d left behind at one of his crime scenes, which police had collected but never made public.
David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) had a bit of this same type of confused love-hate relationship with police festering inside him. On April 17, 1977, after shooting ten people and killing five, he pumped four .44-caliber bullets into two Bronx teenagers necking in a Mercury Montego. The event marked the latest chapter in his pathetic, senseless murder spree. But what made this one different was that before fleeing the scene, he left a note behind, marking the first time he’d felt compelled finally to reach out to the world and explain who he was. The note was addressed to Joseph Borrelli, the Bronx police captain who had been investigating Berkowitz’s earlier homicides.
In the note, which has become one of the most infamous examples of the workings of a deranged homicidal mind, he wrote, “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a woman hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ . . . When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up in the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. ‘Go out and kill,’ commands Father Sam.”
BTK penned loosely similar-sounding rants to police, hinting at the dark, unstoppable forces that dwelled within him. But the more I thought about it, I realized that part of the key to influencing his behavior was getting a better understanding of whom he was really thumbing his nose at when he wrote his communiqués. Was he directing his taunts at a specific officer whose identity only he knew? Or were the police merely some ambiguous, fuzzy concept inside his troubled mind, a collection of faceless, nameless men in blue? If the latter were the case, I wondered why we couldn’t provide him with a single image he could latch on to. Because if we could begin to control the mental picture he maintained of the police, we might just have a chance of controlling him.
Which is exactly where our so-called super-cop would enter the picture. He would become the face that the UNSUB would picture whenever he thought of the police. He would become, in a sense, BTK’s partner in crime, the devoted acolyte who tracked every move the killer made. The trick, of course, would be to locate someone whom BTK could not only identify with but also feel comfortable opening up to, the kind of law enforcement professional who could begin to harness BTK’s self-inflated sense of his own importance, power, and intelligence that covered up his deep-seated feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. This meant that our super-cop couldn’t be just anyone. That he might be a detective working the case or some high-ranking officer in the department wouldn’t be good enough. What mattered most was that they be made of the kind of stuff that we could mold into the proper façade. Image would be everything.
Our super-cop would have to mouth words that sounded something like this: “If it takes me my whole career or even my lifetime, I will solve this case. I will look and search in every corner, every dark alley, and every crack in the sidewalk until I can identify the individual responsible for these homicides—and that’s a promise to you.”
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