Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (10 page)

Five minutes passed, then ten. Loewen fidgeted.

LaMunyon came back in.

Is it from BTK? Loewen asked.

Yes, it is, LaMunyon said. And I want to talk to you.

This is where they try to tell us not to air the story,
Loewen thought.

I’ll tell you the whole story, LaMunyon said. I’ll tell you everything.

The chief looked relieved, as though he had reached a difficult decision.

We believe we have a serial killer, LaMunyon began. We believe he’s killed seven. We have not made it public. We’ve known about this guy for a while, knew he probably killed the Oteros, and the others, and the only reason we didn’t tell the public was that some of our people thought going public might make him want to kill again.

Loewen braced himself:
This is where the arguing begins,
he thought.

We know now it’s time to talk, LaMunyon said. For the good of everybody, it’s time we tell what we know. We’ve got to warn people.

Loewen sank back in relief; LaMunyon wanted the secret revealed.

Loewen told him KAKE would broadcast the story on the 6:00
PM
newscast. He asked LaMunyon to show up at KAKE to give an exclusive live interview. LaMunyon agreed but said he would also call a news conference afterward and tell the other media.

Loewen told him he intended to go on the air himself to tell the BTK story. He worried that BTK would stalk whoever broadcast the story, and he did not want to ask anyone else to face that. He did not have a family; he had less to risk. Maybe BTK was already stalking KAKE people, Loewen said. LaMunyon agreed that was a possibility. BTK stalked women, and might stalk KAKE’s female anchors.

As Loewen and Hatteberg left, Cornwell handed Loewen a police revolver and bullets and told him to keep them in his glove compartment.

Back at KAKE, Loewen tried to write the story himself. But this was a crazy day; he was talking to his station manager about the story, talking with the police, trying to run the rest of the newsroom. He struggled to write it. Finally, Hatteberg did it for him.

KAKE’s evening co-anchors were Jack Hicks and Cindy Martin. Loewen called Martin, and told her to come in early�“now.”

Wichita police chief Richard LaMunyon, announcing the presence of a serial killer in the community.

When she did, he told her she was off the air that night and why. He and Hicks would deliver the news. Martin was furious; Loewen was firm. BTK’s interest in women and in KAKE prompted LaMunyon to order police protection for Martin, weekend anchor Rose, Stanley, and Loewen, even though BTK had made no threats against them. Police followed Martin home that afternoon and checked to see whether BTK had already been there.

Six o’clock came quickly. Loewen sat in one of the two anchor chairs, looked into the camera, and began to report matter-of-factly that a serial killer was stalking people in the city. Loewen looked nervous on the air, and with good reason: LaMunyon was supposed to be sitting beside him, but LaMunyon was late. Loewen had already read several sentences of the script on the air when LaMunyon walked into the studio. The KAKE staffer who was turning the wheel of the TelePrompTer, distracted by LaMunyon’s entrance, stopped. Loewen stopped talking in mid-sentence. He had forgotten that he had a second copy of Hatteberg’s script in his hands. He sat frozen for several moments, apologized, and told his audience he would start the story from the beginning. And he did.

LaMunyon, sitting beside him now, looked calm and resolved. When Loewen asked about BTK, LaMunyon bluntly told viewers that police did not know who the killer was or how to stop him.

A little later, LaMunyon called a news conference and made his own announcement. Shocked reporters raced back to the newspaper office and to television stations and began to type out stories.

Police followed Loewen home that night, as they would for the next month. Alone in his apartment, Loewen looked at the gun Cornwell had loaned him.

I’m such a fool,
Loewen thought.
I’ll accidentally shoot myself in the dark.
He unloaded the gun and hid it.

Martin went back to work the next day. For weeks afterward, when she arrived home from anchoring the 10:00
PM
news, she saw a patrol car parked behind her apartment building. When she walked from her car, the officer turned the headlights on and off,
flick-flick,
as though saying good night.

14

1978

Fear and Frustration

LaMunyon had decided the moment he saw the KAKE letter that he had to publicly announce BTK. But in those few moments after Loewen handed him the letter, LaMunyon made a couple of quick phone calls to psychologists. He asked them whether going public about BTK might entice him to communicate more, given that he already seemed inclined to talk to the media.

Nothing the psychologists said dissuaded him. So LaMunyon began to plan his news conference, began to plan how to tell a half million people in and around Wichita that a serial killer lived among them.

He would not release the contents of the typo-filled letter, because he didn’t want to encourage copycats, but he would say that BTK probably looked not like a monster but like one of us. BTK himself had said he was hiding in plain sight.

I don’t lose any sleep over it. After a thing like Fox I ccome home and gp about life like anyone else.

It would be embarrassing to admit the police were helpless, but LaMunyon had to tell people to watch their backs. Some of his commanders still advised against this, but BTK had pointed out the obvious.

Golly-gee, yes the M.O. is different in each, but look a pattern is developing The victims are tie up-most have been women-phone cut-bring some bondage mater sadist tendenices-no stuggle, outside the death spot-no wintness except the Vain’s Kids. They were very lucky; phone call save them.

LaMunyon studied the BTK letter for a long time, trying to discern who the police were hunting.

BTK seemed meticulous. The drawing of Nancy Fox on the bed was fairly accurate. LaMunyon wondered if BTK took Polaroids and drew from them. He wondered why BTK decided not to name the fifth of his seven victims. He was probably creating puzzles for the police, playing games. LaMunyon guessed the unknown victim was Kathryn Bright, though there were two or three other contenders.

It was clear from this note and the 1974 letter that BTK craved attention and wanted fame, like serial killers of the past.

You don’t understand these things because your not under the influence of factor x). 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. Which seem s senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure, except death or being caught and put away…

How about some name for me, it’s time: 7 down and many moreto go. I Like the following. How about you?

“THE B.T.K. STRANGLER”, WICHITA STRANGLER”, “POETIC STRANGLER”, “THE BON DAGE STRANGLER”….

LaMunyon held a news conference at city hall after he left KAKE. His commanders had worried aloud: “If we tell people, how do we do it? Stand at a podium and say, ‘There’s this guy out there who says he’s going to kill again and we can’t stop him’?”

“Yeah,” LaMunyon replied. “That’s pretty much what we say.”

His announcement was the shocker LaMunyon knew it would be. The next day’s headline in the
Eagle
read: C
ITY
’
S
‘BTK S
TRANGLER
’ C
LAIMS
H
E’S
K
ILLED
7. If reporter Casey Scott’s opening paragraph sounded a little sensational, it was also true:

A killer claiming responsibility for seven Wichita murders�at least six of them strangulations�still is in the area and has threatened to strike again, Police Chief Richard LaMunyon warned in a terse, bombshell announcement Friday.

“I know it is difficult to ask people to remain calm, but we are asking exactly this,” LaMunyon said. “When a person of this type is at large in our community it requires special precautions and special awareness by everyone.”

It was the most disturbing news people in Wichita had ever heard. Someone was hunting women and children in their city and strangling them. Parents all over Wichita had to decide whether to tell their children.

Nola Tedesco, a twenty-six-year-old rookie prosecutor in the Sedgwick County district attorney’s office, one day found herself examining a copy of the drawing BTK had made of Nancy Fox. Tedesco prosecuted sex crimes, so she’d become accustomed to looking at material like this, but the drawing and the idea that someone in town was stalking young women creeped her out. At night, some of her friends in the office�Richard Ballinger, Steve Osborn, and others�would walk her to her car. When she got home, she would check her phone.

Laura Kelly, now a senior known as “L.” at East High School, was asked by her best friend to come over and spend the night. They slept in shifts, like two soldiers on patrol in a combat zone. The friend was too terrified to sleep alone. She had figured out that the roofline of her home would make it easy for BTK to enter her second-floor bedroom window. No amount of reasoning would calm her.

Pranksters heightened the fear by calling women and saying: “This is BTK. You’re next.” Kelly’s mother, Barbara, was home alone when she got such a call.
What if it wasn’t a hoax?
She immediately dialed the BTK hot line to report it. As a detective began to talk with her, the phone went dead. Everyone in Wichita knew that BTK cut phone lines. In her panic, she ran between the front and back doors, unsure which exit to take. In desperation, she grabbed the phone again�and heard a dial tone. Shaking, she redialed the hot line number. The detective apologized�he had fumbled the phone and cut her off. Still, she demanded that someone come search the house. The officer who arrived helpfully pointed out that closing shower curtains and closet doors would give BTK places to hide. The fear of BTK warped her emotions so badly that for years she made others, including her teenage daughter, search the house before she could work up the courage to go inside herself.

But if many civilians felt unnerved, it was a now a different story with the cops. Clarity had finally come, and there were no more debates about whether BTK was a serial killer. They knew now that he was.

And they knew now that he was going to be much harder to catch than most killers. Most murderers killed people they knew, for motives as old as Cain and Abel: anger, jealousy, revenge, greed. “Smoking gun” murders, the cops called them; not always easy to solve, but they followed an internal logic. Cain killed Abel because he got jealous. Macbeth killed Duncan to take his throne. Booth shot Lincoln to strike a blow for the South.

But serial killers follow no logic; there are few dots to connect. BTK killed strangers, at random, probably outside his neighborhood. He planned things, cleaned up, wore gloves.

The FBI was only beginning to study serial killers intensely, but its experts were saying that a serial killer was much harder to catch. Most of the time you have to wait for him to kill again and hope he makes a mistake.

BTK had killed five people in 1974�the four Oteros and Kathy Bright. Then he stopped because he got busier at work and school, and then his wife got pregnant with his firstborn.

He had killed again in 1977: Shirley Vian, then Nancy Fox.

Now he had stopped again. For years afterward, the cops wondered why.

His daughter, Kerri, was born in June.

15

1978

Getting Focused

The opening sentence of the letter to KAKE�
“I find the newspaper not wirting about the poem on Vain unamusing”
�prompted the cops to call the
Eagle
. Someone in classified advertising soon located BTK’s “Shirley Locks” poem in the newspaper’s dead-letter file. They gave it to police without making a copy for the newsroom.

This was the second time the
Eagle
had muffed a chance to study an original BTK communication. BTK had called the newspaper first in 1974, when he left his letter about the Oteros in a book at the library.

One of the police reporters, Ken Stephens, was tired of the
Eagle
getting beat on a story he said the newspaper should have owned. He began to keep permanent files instead of throwing away notes and news releases. He wrote background memos, told other police reporters to do the same, and collected all the autopsy reports on BTK’s known victims. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, the
Eagle
’s editor, had suggested some of this file building. Someday soon the cops will catch this guy, Merritt said, and the paper should be ready to tell the story behind the story.