Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (9 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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The killer had forced his way into a home—into the one place where people always believed they were safe—then savagely murdered a husband and father, a wife and mother, along with their little boy and little girl. The aftershock of the murders proved disorienting to the city’s collective soul, shaking loose everything Wichita stood for. In one brutal swoop, the UNSUB had managed to turn this law-abiding town upside down, causing nearly everyone to begin asking themselves,
If he could do this to the Otero family, what would stop him from doing it to mine?
If he could do this to the Otero family, what would stop him from doing it to mine?
Despite the presence of Josie hanging from a pipe in the basement, detectives just couldn’t shake the idea that the murders had either been an act of retaliation or—due to the family’s having just moved to the area from Panama—was somehow connected with the narcotics trade. It also seemed possible that the killer had been targeting Julie and her daughter. If that were true, he was undoubtedly surprised to find Joseph at home on that morning, especially because there were no cars parked in the driveway. Little did the killer know that a few weeks earlier, two men had run Joseph off the road. The accident not only caved in the front end of his car, which was now in the shop, but also severely injured his shoulder.
By early February, none of the leads unearthed by detectives had led anywhere. In an effort to dig up some information into Joseph Otero’s background, an investigative trip to Puerto Rico and Panama was undertaken by Floyd Hannon, Wichita chief of police, and Bill Cornwell, chief of homicide. They traveled there to flesh out some of the rumors they’d heard about Joseph Otero.
Could this veteran pilot have been involved in the drug trade? Might this have been a gang hit? Was it possible that the murders were a ritualistic killing performed by some religious group the family belonged to?
Other than getting a suntan and having a few run-ins with the local police, who didn’t like the no-nonsense attitude of these two gringo interlopers, Hannon and Cornwell did little to crack open any new leads. By the time the two cops returned to Wichita, they were no closer to solving the murders than they had been a month before when the bodies of Joseph, Julie, Josie, and Joey Otero were discovered.
4
One down, three to go,” I told myself, sliding the stack of crime reports from the Otero murders back to its original spot on the library table.
Next up was the pile of papers containing every imaginable detail of the April 4, 1974, murder of Kathy Bright, a twenty-one-year-old assembly line worker at the Coleman Company. Owing to the fact that BTK had left behind an adult survivor who could possibly identify him, this was the one homicide for which he never directly claimed responsibility in his taunts to the media up to this point. It wasn’t until almost two years after BTK’s bombshell communiqué in February 1978 in which he informed the city that a serial killer was on the loose that police finally linked Bright’s murder to him.
In the taunting letter, he wrote, “You guess the motive and the victim.” By the winter of 1979, investigators had combed through every unsolved murder between 1974 and 1977 and finally concluded that several elements of Bright’s killing bore a sick resemblance to those found in BTK’s other known kills.
By now it was 3:45 in the afternoon. My legs were cramping up from sitting in this stuffy library for so long. I stood up from the hard wooden straight-backed chair I’d been camped out on for the past three hours and stretched my legs, hoping to clear my head before diving into my next batch of crime reports.
Part of me wanted to take a break, needed to drag some fresh air into my lungs. But as I stood up, I made the mistake of glancing at what lay on the top of the pile—a grainy black-and-white photograph of Kathy Bright’s bedroom. Unable to control myself, I grabbed the picture and sat back down. To hell with stretching my legs, I scolded myself. I’ll take a break later.
In my pocket was a pill bottle containing the blood-thinning medication that I’d come to rely on ever since emerging from my coma. I fished out two capsules and popped them in my mouth. The irony that I was attempting to catch one of the nation’s most elusive serial killers while ingesting a blood-thinning drug that was essentially rat poison was not lost on me.
I began dissecting the photograph, studying the mattress, which had been moved off the metal bed frame; the shoes scattered about the floor; and the comforter, blood smeared on the corner, that lay crumpled in the corner of the room.
I’d learned long ago that the most important thing to remember when studying a crime photograph is to resist the urge for your eyes to be pulled into the center of the picture. Sometimes the thing you need to find most lies on the periphery of the photo, at the distant edges.
I was once called in to work a homicide where the victim had been raped, then stabbed ten times in the throat. Local police believed that the UNSUB had stolen the victim’s engagement ring after abducting her from a rest stop near Morrilton, Arkansas, while she exercised her dogs during a cross-country car trip. The fact that her killer might be the type who collected souvenirs from his victims had spun the investigation into one dead end after another.
The morning I met with detectives in that Arkansas police station, the victim’s parents were present in the room, desperate to find the man who had killed their daughter. The first thing I did was begin combing through the stack of photos snapped at the crime scene. By the time I reached the third photograph, I found myself pointing to a tiny gray object wedged between the carpet and the frame of the passenger door, situated on the far right side of the picture.
“What’s this?” I asked.
The victim’s aunt peered at the photo and gasped, “Oh my God—it’s the ring.”
This particular homicide had already been featured on
America’s Most Wanted,
and the public had been advised that the killer had taken the victim’s ring. That he hadn’t, told me that the murderer wasn’t the type who felt compelled to collect souvenirs or mementos from his victims. This meant that detectives needed to track a killer with a different psychological makeup, which ultimately changed the course of the investigation. The killer was eventually linked through DNA to cases in California and Montana.
America’s Most Wanted,
and the public had been advised that the killer had taken the victim’s ring. That he hadn’t, told me that the murderer wasn’t the type who felt compelled to collect souvenirs or mementos from his victims. This meant that detectives needed to track a killer with a different psychological makeup, which ultimately changed the course of the investigation. The killer was eventually linked through DNA to cases in California and Montana.
Something told me not to expect this sort of lucky break in the BTK case. And as I stood there in that library, thumbing through the various photos snapped in the rented wooden house where Kathy Bright lived with her older sister, along with a few taken in the medical examiner’s office, I saw only one thing: a vibrant, feisty young woman whose life was ripped away too soon. So I settled back into my chair at the table and began immersing myself in the sad, cold facts surrounding her murder.
It was couple minutes shy of 12:30 in the afternoon when the front door of the white clapboard house burst open and nineteen-year-old Kevin Bright flung himself outside, staggered through the ice-crusted snow, and began running down the street. Blood had soaked through his white T-shirt. The sight of this young man stumbling through the streets, waving his arms and screaming something about his sister needing help, caught the eye of a passing driver. He slammed on his brakes. The passenger jumped out, quickly pushed the frantic man into the front seat, then sprinted to a nearby automotive repair shop and told the owner to call the cops.
A few minutes later, as the Good Samaritan drove the dazed, bloody young man to the emergency room, a Wichita police dispatcher put out a call over the radio: “Officers to a robbery at a residence, 3217 East 13th Street North. Suspect still at the scene. Armed and dangerous.” Patrolman Raymond Fletcher was driving through the neighborhood. He arrived at the house three minutes later, scrambled out of his cruiser, and slowly walked up the front steps with his .38-caliber service revolver drawn. The front door was open.
“POLICE OFFICER,” he yelled. “POLICE OFFICER.”
When he poked his head inside, he immediately spotted twenty-one-year-old Kathy Bright lying on her side in a puddle of blood in the wood-paneled front room. Oriental carpets hung on the wall, and beer bottles crowded a makeshift table fashioned out of a cable spool. A telephone lay beside her. “Help me,” she whispered in a faint, raspy voice. “I . . . I can’t breath.”
Fletcher knelt beside her, keeping his eyes peeled for the suspect he believed might be hiding in the house.
“I’m gonna get you a doctor,” he told her. “You just gotta stay calm . . . Can you do that?”
He radioed for an ambulance while kneeling on the floor beside Bright, who appeared to be fighting to keep her eyelids from closing. Her breathing grew shallower with each labored inhalation.
“Do you know who did this to you?” Fletcher asked, stroking her head. The poor woman was in bad shape, he thought. She could barely make any sound come out of her throat, so she just shook her head back and forth. The last words she uttered were “Help me.”
What Fletcher didn’t know at that moment was that Bright had been stabbed eleven times in her torso and was bleeding from nearly every major organ of her body. Two of the knife wounds had sliced through a portion of her lung, causing her to slowly suffocate. Her larynx had been also crushed.
Moments later, several more patrolmen and detectives arrived on the scene. The back two bedrooms of the house were in shambles. Smears of blood could be seen on the floor. From the looks of things, Kathy had been tied to a chair with a pair of nylons, but had somehow broken free and crawled out to the phone. Because this was in the days before 911, she dialed the operator, but her assailant had crushed her larynx, so she was unable to utter anything besides a horrible raspy howl.
Shell casings from an automatic pistol that would later be identified as a Woodsman Colt .22 were found in the other bedroom. A nearby bathroom door had a hole blasted in it. A .22 slug belonging to the same pistol was soon dug out from the bathroom wall. In the kitchen, the back-door window had been shattered and the glass swept neatly into a pile.
An ambulance took Kathy to Wesley Medical Center, the same hospital to which her brother had been whisked twenty minutes earlier. She died on the operating table five hours later.
“She lost so much blood, she really never had a chance,” recalls a detective who worked the case.
Not far from where Kathy died, her brother lay in a hospital bed. Kevin was skinny as a rail, but tough as boot leather. Despite being shot twice in the head, he was eager shortly after emerging from surgery to tell detectives everything he could remember. The men pulled up chairs beside his bed and asked him questions.
Kevin had driven into Wichita from his parent’s house in nearby Valley Center the previous night and crashed at the rental house where his two sisters—Kathy and Karen—lived. Earlier that morning, Kevin and Kathy had gone to a local bank to see about getting a loan to help nineteen-year-old Kevin fund an invention he wanted to turn into a business. Karen was off working the first shift at Coleman. It didn’t take long for the loan officer to nix his request, so they returned to Kathy’s house and had just walked through the front door when—as Kevin recalled—a dark-haired man with a slight pot belly, standing about five feet, ten inches tall, wearing a stocking cap, gloves, a white T-shirt, and a green parka, stood waiting for them in the living room. He was holding a pistol.
“Stop,” the man told them. “Hold it right there.”
The intruder announced that he was on the lam from police in California and trying to get to New York. “I need your car keys and a hundred dollars,” he said.
Kathy told him to take a hike. The man forced the two into a back bedroom at gunpoint. In the middle of the room, he’d positioned a chair. On a nearby bed he’d laid out various ligatures and bindings made out of rope and nylons he’d apparently found in the house.
Kevin was ordered to tie his sister to a chair. Then the intruder instructed Kevin to lie on the floor, and he bound Kevin’s arms and legs with pair of jeans and stockings. He placed a pillow beneath Kevin’s head, then told Kathy to walk to an adjoining bedroom, which she was somehow able to do, despite being tied to a chair. The stranger darted out of the room and disappeared into another part of the house.
Kevin couldn’t quite figure out what this guy, who was both forceful and almost gentle, really wanted with the two of them. Before long, he could hear him opening drawers and slamming doors.
After a few minutes, the man appeared back in the bedroom, walked directly over to Kevin, and, without a moment’s hesitation, kneeled beside him and wrapped what was either a pair of nylons or a rope around his neck, then pulled it tight. The force yanked Kevin up off the floor. When Kevin suddenly realized what the intruder intended to do to him, he began squirming and twisting his hands and arms back and forth. Within seconds, the wiry youth managed to wedge his hands loose from their bindings, and he jumped up onto his feet. In a flash, the man pulled out the pistol with which he’d been threatening the Brights minutes earlier and pointed it at Kevin’s forehead. He pulled the trigger. None of Kathy’s neighbors reported hearing the shot—which wasn’t surprising. I’d lost count of the number of homicides I’d worked involving a firearm that neighbors never heard go off.
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