Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (3 page)

Bulla felt for pulses, then radioed dispatchers: two possible homicide victims.

Lindeburg and Bulla walked out of the house to the children, who looked frantic. There are two more children, the teens said. They have not come home yet. We can’t let them see this. The family station wagon was missing, they said: a brown 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. The officers made a note.

More officers arrived, then detectives.

Officers questioned the children.

“You think your father could have done this?”

Charlie kept telling the cops to stop Josie and Joey from coming home.

Officers told the children to move away from the house. Detective Ray Floyd pulled Charlie aside.

They had found the two kids in the house, Floyd told him.

They were dead.

The phone on Jack Bruce’s desk rang minutes later.

“We’ve got four dead people in a house on Edgemoor,” the emergency dispatcher said.

“What?”

“Four dead people. On Edgemoor.”

“What do you mean, four
dead
people?”

“They’re dead, and all four are all tied up.”

Bruce, a tall commander with a confident manner, was a lieutenant colonel supervising vice and homicide detectives. He heard other phones ring on other desks now, and he watched detectives bolt out the door. Within minutes, Bruce was talking on two phones at once, trying to keep people from bumping into each other. He made assignments, sent lab people, coordinated shifts. The entire police department mobilized.

Sgt. Joe Thomas arrived minutes after the first call and secured the scene, which meant keeping people from messing up evidence before detectives took charge. Thomas took a quick tour, looking into each room just long enough to get angry. Within minutes, the place filled: detectives, lab people, police brass. Like Thomas, they were shaken by what they saw.

Danny and Carmen Otero enter the roped-off crime scene to talk to police.

Detective Gary Caldwell walked down into the dark basement. He did not have a flashlight. Caldwell felt his way, turned a corner, groped for a switch, and brushed against something hanging from the ceiling.

He found the switch and saw a dead girl, nearly naked, hanging by a rough hemp noose from a sewer pipe. Her dark hair was draped across one cheek, and her tongue protruded past a gag.

Maj. Bill Cornwell ran the homicide unit; he took over. He and Bernie Drowatzky, a craggy-faced veteran detective, noticed that whoever had done this had used a variety of knots to tie wrists, ankles, and throats. They suspected the killer had run out of cord: some of the victims’ wrists had been taped.

The boy had died beside his bunk bed. In the boy’s room, Cornwell saw something that stayed with him for life: chair imprints on the carpet. They looked fresh. Cornwell thought he knew what that meant: the killer, after he tied the boy’s wrists, after he pulled two T-shirts and a plastic bag over the boy’s head, after he pulled the clothesline tight around the boy’s neck, had placed a chair beside the child so he could watch him suffocate.

There were so many ligature marks on the throats of the other Oteros it looked as though the killer had strangled them more than once, letting them have some air, then finishing them.

Keith Sanborn, the crew-cut district attorney for Sedgwick County, took a grim house tour. The detectives told him they had found dried fluid on the girl’s naked thigh, and spots of the same stuff on the floor. Looks like he masturbated on her, they said.

Cornwell’s boss, Lt. Col. Bruce, went in after the bodies were taken away that night, walking past reporters and photographers stamping outside in the cold. They had shot pictures of the surviving children being hustled under the crime scene tape; they had filmed bodies being removed.
This will shake up the city,
Bruce thought.

“Get some rest,” Bruce told his detectives. “Get a night’s sleep so you can come back.” No one listened.

Caldwell and Drowatzky volunteered to stay in the house all night. If the killer came back, they would greet him. Caldwell called his wife and told her; she got upset. Then he and Drowatzky settled in. Sometimes they peeked out the windows; all they saw were photographers and a parade of gawkers.

Back at his office, Cornwell pondered conflicting reports. A neighbor said he had seen a tall white man with a slender build wearing a dark coat outside the Otero house at about 8:45 AM. Other witnesses described a much shorter man�perhaps just five feet two. They said he had bushy black hair and a dark complexion. Police Chief Floyd Hannon told reporters the suspect might be Middle Eastern. But in the sketch artist’s composite drawing, the man looked Hispanic. In fact, the man looked a lot like Joe Otero with a thin mustache. Someone else said he had seen a dark-haired man driving the Oteros’ station wagon at about 10:30 that morning.

A detective had found the Oteros’ car parked at the Dillons grocery store at Central and Oliver, a half mile away. The position of the seat showed that the driver might be short.

Cornwell stayed in his office all night, taking calls, pitching ideas, taking catnaps in a chair. He and other detectives did not go home for three days; they had sandwiches brought in. For ten days, seventy-five officers and detectives worked eighteen hours a day.

The killer had tied a dizzying variety of knots: clove hitches, half hitches, slipknots, square knots, overhand knots, blood knots. There were so many knots that one detective photocopied the names, drawings, and descriptions of knots from an encyclopedia published by the Naval Institute Press. Maybe the killer was a sailor, Bruce thought.

Detectives studied the autopsy reports. The coroner found bruising on Julie’s face; she had been beaten before she died. There were deep indentations around Joe’s wrists; he had fought to break his bonds. There were ligature marks and broken capillaries on Joey’s neck and face; he had died of strangulation and suffocation.

The autopsy showed that Josie had weighed only 115 pounds and that she had died in a hangman’s noose with her hands tied behind her back. She was bound at the ankles and knees with cord that snaked up to her waist. The killer had cut her bra in the front and pulled her cotton panties down to her ankles.

The lab people had scraped dried fluid from her thigh. When they put the scrapings under a microscope, they saw sperm.

At the end of the first week, sleep-deprived detectives began to run out of energy and ideas.

They tried one nutty idea: Caldwell and Drowatzky stayed all night in the house again, this time with a psychic. She claimed that she had once helped solve a crime by leading police to a body in a trunk. The two cops sat in silence as the psychic scribbled her impressions. Nothing came of it.

There had been one major foul-up. Someone lost most of the autopsy photos and several crime scene photos. The chief blew his stack.

Still, there was a pile of photographs to study. Among them was a curiosity�a picture of an ice tray in the kitchen with ice still in it. The killer had struck before 9:00 AM and turned up the heat before leaving the house. Witnesses saw the Oteros’ Vista Cruiser on the street at about 10:30 AM. The crime scene photographer arrived six hours later. And the photo showed ice. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure this out: Someone from the police who had surveyed the dead then opened the Oteros’ freezer and made himself something to drink.

Chief Hannon held press conferences at least twice a day, disclosing specifics, speculating about motives and suspects. The morning
Wichita Eagle
and afternoon
Beacon
covered every development. Readers learned that Josie and Joey were model students; that Joe and Julie Otero had taken out a $16,850 mortgage on their “junior ranch” home, that the killings indicated “some kind of fetish.” The coverage included a forensics photo of a knotted cord that the killer had used, front-page diagrams by newspaper cartoonist Jerry Bittle showing where in the home the bodies were found, and a sketch of Josie hanging from the pipe.

None of this made a lasting impression on Kenny Landwehr, the west-side kid. The Otero murders occurred on the east side. Wichita in 1974 was a socially divided city, the boundary clearly drawn by the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers that converge downtown. These were broad stereotypes, but the west side was more blue-collar, the east side more elite. Landwehr’s parents, Lee and Irene, read about the killings with dismay, but their son paid scant attention, even though he’d daydreamed about joining the FBI.

The inspiration for this was Irene’s brother, Ernie Halsig, an FBI agent. “If you apply to the FBI, they’ll want you to have some accounting,” Uncle Ernie said. So Landwehr, majoring in history at Wichita State University, added accounting to his schedule.

To make a little money, he worked as a salesman at Beuttel’s Clothing Company in Wichita’s industrial north end.

He did not feel strongly about the FBI. He had other preoccupations: girls, golf, beer�sometimes a lot of beer. He played pool and foosball at a west-side lounge called the Old English Pub.

He didn’t dwell on the Otero murders; the Pub seemed dangerous enough. There was this guy who hung out there…Bell…James Eddy Bell. He was an asshole, a big and ugly bully. In the Pub, Landwehr gave Bell plenty of space and spoke politely around him.

That was hard. Landwehr had a smart mouth.

3

January–April 1974

Fear and Possibilities

The Oteros were buried in Puerto Rico. The surviving children left Wichita for good; they found a home with a family in Albuquerque.

Charlie Otero’s future would include depression, anger, a rift with his siblings, and prison time for domestic assault. He would forsake God, as he believed God had forsaken his family. He had no answers for the questions that troubled him:

Why had someone attacked his family?

How did he get past the dog? How could he talk a boxer like Dad into putting his fists behind his back?

There must have been more than one killer, Charlie thought.

Charlie wanted to kill them all.

Police started with four possibilities:

• 1. Was the killer somebody within the family?
  They quickly ruled out that idea.
  
• 2. Was there a drug connection?
  In the air force, Joseph Otero had served in Latin America. After his discharge, Joe took a job that gave him access to private airplanes. This intrigued detectives. Maybe a big overseas drug deal had gone sour, and Joe lost his life and family in a revenge killing.
  Cornwell and Hannon flew to Panama and Puerto Rico to chase this idea. Bruce was dubious�the cops had not found so much as a single aspirin in the house, let alone illegal drugs.
  
• 3. Was someone out to get Julie?
  She had worked at Coleman. Did she have a jealous boyfriend there? Her former supervisor had been shot and wounded just days before she died. Was there a connection?
  
• 4. Was the killer a thief who killed to cover his tracks?
  Detectives looked at known burglars, though the only things missing were Joe’s watch, Joey’s radio, and a set of keys.
  Four ideas, four wild goose chases.
  

Dennis Rader had spent two hours with the Oteros, then he had slid into their Vista Cruiser and driven to the Dillons grocery store. He just made it�the Oteros had run the tank nearly dry. On the way, he kept the hood of his parka up to hide his face. Before he got out, he adjusted the seat forward to disguise his height. He walked to his own car, a white 1962 Impala coupe. There he took an inventory of everything he had brought that morning, then realized, with a sick feeling, that he had left his knife at the Otero house.

He drove back to the house on North Edgemoor, pulled into the garage, walked to the back door, and picked up the knife. Then he drove home, his head pounding. He took two Tylenol, then drove to some woods he’d played in as a boy, along the Little Arkansas River north of Wichita. There he burned sketches he had made during the planning, along with things he had used to kill the family. He hurried. His wife would be getting off work, and he wanted to be home.

After the murders, Wichitans who had never locked their doors did so. Some bought guns and alarm systems. Kids like Steve and Rebecca Macy came home from high school every day with a new routine: Rebecca would sit in the car. Steve would carry a baseball bat into the house and check every room and closet�and the phone�before letting his sister in.

Younger children like Tim Relph, a seventh grader, lived with fear for years, wondering whether their families might be attacked. The route his parents drove to get him and his siblings to school took them along the same streets the Oteros used.

Homicide captain Charlie Stewart began to sleep near his front door.

Lindy Kelly, a former homicide detective, was so angry about what he’d heard from his best friend, Sgt. Joe Thomas, that he violated his rule about never scaring his children with stories about work. He told his thirteen-year-old daughter, Laura, about the chair imprints in the carpet. The guy had sat and watched the little boy struggle, Kelly said.