Criminal Minds (34 page)

Upstairs, Nancy, sixteen, heard strangers in the house. Worried about thieves, she hid her most valuable possession, a watch that her father had given her, in a shoe. But the intruders heard her moving about, and they forced Herb to lead them back upstairs and show them where the other family members were. Herb pointed out the doors to Nancy’s and Kenyon’s rooms, then took them into Bonnie’s room. Bonnie was an invalid, thin and frail.

The intruders consulted briefly, then took Bonnie into the bathroom adjoining her bedroom, put a chair in it so she could sit, and locked her in. Next they went into fifteen-year-old Kenyon’s room, and the taller man punched Kenyon. The boy was then taken into another bathroom and locked inside. Nancy came out into the hall, and they grabbed her and put her in the bathroom with Kenyon.

Deciding that their captives should be bound, the two men tied Herb’s hands, and the smaller man took him down to the furnace room in the basement. Seeing a cardboard mattress box leaning against a wall, he moved it so that Herb could lie on it and wouldn’t have to lie on the cold floor. He tied Herb’s feet and lashed his hands and feet together. Then he brought Kenyon down and bound him to a couch in the basement’s other room, a playroom, and put a pillow under his head. The man went back upstairs, tied Bonnie up in the bathroom, tucked Nancy into her own bed, and tied her up there. The two men taped everybody’s mouth except Nancy’s.

The intruders discussed their options again, but the plan had been set long before they ever got to the farm. The shorter man started to cut Herb’s throat, then handed his partner the knife and told him to finish the job. The partner failed, and Herb fought back. Finally, the short man had his partner hold the flashlight on Herb while he shot him with the 12-gauge shotgun they had brought with them.

The two went back into the playroom and shot Kenyon, then headed upstairs to finish off Nancy and Bonnie.

In “The Slave of Duty,” while Agent Hotchner takes a leave of absence from the BAU after his wife’s murder, the team must regroup to solve a home invasion case.

That done, they hurried from the house, toting their proceeds for the night’s work: between forty and fifty dollars in cash, a portable radio, and a pair of binoculars.

In the morning, a family friend who always went to church with the Clutters came to the house. She couldn’t rouse anyone, so her father drove her to a neighboring farm, but the neighbor didn’t know where the Clutters might be. They telephoned the family, but no one answered. Together, they returned to River Valley Farm and let themselves in through the never-locked kitchen door.

The police came out in force. Assistant Police Chief Rich Rohleder was a strong believer in the use of scientific techniques for crime busting. He had built his own crime-scene kit, complete with handmade fingerprint brushes, and he carried that and his camera to the Clutter house. Rohleder found two boot prints that belonged to two different men but not to any of the Clutters. He also hatched a theory that almost no one else went along with at first: that robbery had been the motive for the murders.

By the end of the week, almost everyone in the country had heard about the vicious crime. Mass media in the United States were just becoming truly “mass,” with the rapidly increasing presence of televisions in every home. The radio carried the same information from coast to coast. The nation’s first truly notorious murder spree, that of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, was still fresh in the public consciousness, especially in the Midwest, since that spree had begun in Nebraska. The Clutter murders were on a similar level, in terms of their sensational nature.

Even in the nation’s prisons, the story played on the radio. One of the people who heard it was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary named Floyd Wells. Wells knew the Clutters. He had worked at the River Valley Farm a decade earlier. Arranging to see the warden, he told a disturbing story.

After convicts Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had been in a cell together for two weeks, Smith had been paroled with instructions not to return to Kansas. Hickock’s new cell mate was Floyd Wells. Cell mates talk, and one of the things Wells had talked about was Herb Clutter, the wealthy farmer who kept plenty of cash in the safe of his old house—at least ten thousand dollars, Wells had insisted.

Hickock, an athletic man with a face left deformed by an automobile accident, had been impressed by these stories and had come up with the idea of teaming up with his paroled pal Perry Smith to rob the house, take the cash from the safe, and then kill everyone in the house so there couldn’t be any witnesses. Wells hadn’t thought that Hickock would go through with it—he put it down to jailhouse boasting and forgot about it. Now he was convinced that Hickock and Smith had done it.

This fit Rohleder’s theory to a T. An all-points bulletin was put out for the arrest of Hickock and Smith.

After the murders, Hickock and Smith had gone to Mexico for a while, stopped in Florida, and then returned to Kansas, paying their way with robberies and bad checks. Finally, at the end of 1959, they were in Las Vegas. On December 30, a couple of patrol officers ran an out-of-state license plate, and the information came back that the plate number belonged to a car that had been stolen in Kansas. The officers watched the car and saw Hickock and Smith return to it. They had mug shots of the Clutter family’s killers, and the pictures matched the men. They moved in and arrested the suspects.

Back in Kansas, Hickock and Smith confessed. Initially Smith blamed Hickock for two of the killings, then later changed his story and took credit for all four. It didn’t matter—they had acted together, making both equally responsible under the law. They were found guilty and sentenced to hang, and on April 14, 1965, the mismatched killers took their final walk together to the gallows.

Although there had been a safe in the Clutters’ old house—the house Wells had been to—the house that Hickock and Smith had invaded was new. Herb Clutter, a college-educated businessman, did most of his business by check and had seen no need to put a safe in the new house. When the killers demanded to be shown the safe, he answered truthfully. He no longer kept large amounts of cash on hand, and he and his family were murdered for pocket money.

The case became famous as the basis for Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel”
In Cold Blood
. Capote underplayed the contributions of Rohleder and combined him and other officers into a composite character based on Alvin Dewey, a detective with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Dewey was the bureau’s lead investigator on the case and was certainly deeply involved in the manhunt for Hickock and Smith, but in overemphasizing Dewey’s role, and in certain other aspects of the story, Capote took creative liberties. Still, his version of the facts is widely considered the truth, and it’s because of his book (and the movie adapted from it) that the Clutter home invasion still carries such emotional heft half a century later. The crime is also mentioned in the episode “The Big Game” (214) when Jason Gideon discusses why serial killers kill.

 

 

FIFTEEN YEARS
after Hickock and Smith murdered the Clutters, another home invasion in Kansas made the news.

Charlie Otero, fifteen, returned to his Wichita home after school on January 15, 1974, to find his parents, Joseph and Julie, dead in their bedroom. Joseph was on the floor, bound at the wrists and ankles; he had been strangled. The same was true for Julie, but she had also been gagged. Joseph Jr., Charlie’s nine-year-old brother, was in his room, at the foot of his bed, strangled and with his head covered by a hood. Downstairs, Charlie’s eleven-year-old sister, Josephine, was hanging by the neck from a pipe, partly nude. Two other siblings, Daniel and Carmen, weren’t home from school yet.

The police found semen throughout the house. The killer had not sexually assaulted his victims, but he appeared to have masturbated on some of them. The police were at a loss for clues, and the case went unsolved.

On April 4 of the same year, brother and sister Kevin and Kathryn Bright came home to their Wichita house to find a man pointing a gun at them as they entered. The man forced them into a bedroom. Kathryn, twenty-one, was tied up. While Kevin, nineteen, was being bound, he fought back and was shot twice in the head. The man returned to Kathryn, who fought as well, so he gave up on trying to strangle her and instead stabbed her three times. Meanwhile, Kevin, who was not dead after all, ran out into the street and called for help.

The attacker raced from the house. Kathryn died later at the hospital.

That October, a reporter for the
Wichita Eagle
received a phone call alerting him to a letter that had been left in a textbook at the public library. The police retrieved the letter, which contained details about the Otero family homicides that had never been released to the public. At the letter’s end was this postscript: “P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code word for me will be: Bind them, torture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.”

After the letter, the killer went silent until March 17, 1977, when a five-year-old boy named Steve Relford met a man on the street outside the boy’s home. The man showed him pictures of a woman and a child and asked if Steve knew them. Steve told him he didn’t, then went inside his house. A short while later, the same man knocked on the door. Claiming to be a private detective, he forced his way into the home, which was occupied at the time by Steve and two siblings and their mother, Shirley Vian, twenty-four. The man put the kids in a bathroom, then took Shirley into her bedroom. He intended to rape her, but she was sick that day, and he wound up strangling her and masturbating into her panties. The phone rang before he could kill the children, and he fled the house.

The BTK Killer murdered one more victim, Nancy Fox, in 1977. In 1978 he sent another letter to authorities, admitting to murdering the Oteros, Vian, Fox, and another woman (presumed to be Kathryn Bright). He suggested then that the initials he had used in the earlier letter be given to him as a name. He seemed aware of his place in the pantheon of serial killers, as indicated here: “The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, Havery Glatman, Boston Strangler, Dr. H. H. Holmes Panty Hose Strangler OF Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of the West Coast and many more infamous character kill.” Finally the police admitted that there was a serial killer in Wichita, and they warned people to be on their guard.

After another pause, the BTK Killer broke into the home of sixty-three-year-old widow Anna Williams in April 1979. He waited, but she came home late, after he had already left. In June, he mailed her a poem titled “Oh Anna Why Didn’t You Appear.”

He went underground again, only to resurface on April 27, 1985. This time he broke into the home of Marine Hedge, fifty-three. After cutting her phone line, he waited in a back bedroom of her house until she came home. When she did, there was a man with her, so the killer hid until the man left, then emerged and strangled Hedge. That wasn’t enough for him, so he put her body in the trunk of her car and drove to his church, where he covered the basement windows with black plastic and spent some time with her, posing her and taking pictures. Finally, he dumped the body and returned the car.

The BTK Killer entered the home of Vicki Wegerle, twenty-eight, on September 16, 1986, by posing as a telephone repairman, complete with hard hat. He strangled her, photographed her death throes, and left in her car. As her husband, Bill, approached their home, he saw his own car driving away. He found his two-year-old son, Brandon, still alive and by himself in the living room, then he found Vicki in the bedroom. The BTK Killer hadn’t been heard from in years, so he wasn’t suspected in the Hedge murder, and now Wegerle was the initial suspect in his wife’s murder.

Dolores Davis, sixty-two, was home alone on January 19, 1991, when she heard the noise of a concrete block crashing through a glass patio door. The killer let himself in, bound and strangled Davis, then drove her body away in her own car and placed it under some trees. He took the car back, got into his own, and returned for her, then he drove her around a while longer and finally dumped her under a bridge.