Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (5 page)

They called police, then drove Bright to Wesley Medical Center. It was 2:05
PM
. Dispatchers radioed “residence robbery in progress.” Officer Dennis Landon went to the back door. No one answered his knock. Officer Raymond Fletcher went in the front, his .357 drawn. They found a woman bleeding on the living room floor, a phone in her hand. She had crawled out of the bedroom. Her skin felt clammy. Her breathing was shallow, her face gray.

“Hang on,” Fletcher told her. “We’ve got help on the way.”

Landon turned her over.

“What happened?” he asked.

She pulled up her blouse. Landon saw knife wounds, at least three.

“Do you know who did this?”

She shook her head no.

“What is your name?”

“Kathryn Bright.” Her voice was weak.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

They pressed cloth from the kitchen against her wounds and elevated her legs to get what blood she had to her head. Landon saw nylon stockings tied to her wrists. There was a blue scarf and a cord tied around her throat. Her right hand clutched a white rag, and her ankles were bound with a nylon stocking.

“I can’t breathe,” she told Landon. “Please untie my ankles.” Landon pulled a pocket knife and cut the nylon. She was covered in blood: face, hair, hands, stomach. She was bleeding from her left nostril and her face was badly bruised. She was losing consciousness.

They told her an ambulance was on the way, and that she would be all right. But then her face began to turn blue.

She grabbed Fletcher’s arm.

“I can’t breathe,” she said.

“Help me.”

BTK’s strangling cord was still tied around Kevin’s throat when he arrived at Wesley. Kathryn arrived in an ambulance minutes later. Officer Ronald Davenport watched as the medical people turned her over to look at her back. More stab wounds.

“Help me,” she said.

She was too weak to say more. Davenport and other officers asked Kevin what had happened. He tried to talk, but choked up blood. The bullet that hit his upper jaw had knocked out two teeth; officers later found them in his sister’s house. He had powder burns on his face. The other bullet had grazed his forehead. Doctors sent him to intensive care.

Kathryn died four hours later.

Kevin told police later that he lived in Valley Center but had stayed at his sister’s house the night before because it had snowed, and he had not wanted to drive home.

For a small guy, Kevin had put up a big fight. Kevin was nineteen, stood only five feet six, and weighed only 115 pounds, the same as Josie Otero. He’d taken two shots to the head, yet had fought gallantly. Kevin said the killer was much bigger: five feet eleven, about 180 pounds, maybe twenty-eight years old, light complexion, a mustache, dark hair. He wore a black and yellow stocking cap�the colors of Wichita State University�gloves, a windbreaker, and an army coat with fur around the hood. There had been a silver wristwatch on his left arm, an expansion band on the watch.

“And he sweated a lot,” Kevin told them.

The cops worked hard on the case but got nowhere. And with Kevin giving conflicting answers at times, they weren’t sure his description of the attacker was all that solid.

It occurred to some of them that Kathryn Bright’s murder was related to the Oteros’. Kathy and Kevin had worked at Coleman�as had Julie Otero.

But other cops said no. They still believed there was a Latin American drug connection with the Oteros. And there were differences�the Oteros had been strangled and suffocated; the Brights had been strangled, shot, and stabbed.

Rader ran several blocks to his car in his bloodstained shoes. He drove to his parents’ house; they lived near him. In their shed, in an old wooden box filled with sawdust, he hid his weapons. He stripped off his clothes and the bloody shoes, putting them in the chicken coop; he would burn them later. He cleaned up, went home to his wife, and pretended that nothing unusual had happened.

He was sure he would be arrested. But a day passed, then another. He watched television and read the paper. The cops had not figured it out.

He began to write a long document, “An April Death,” he called it; seven pages, single-spaced.

He clipped Kathryn’s picture out of the newspaper. He wondered if he might be too smart to be caught. That gave him another idea.

Why not have some fun with the newspaper? Why not flaunt himself a bit?

On the evening of July 7, 1974, six months after the Otero murders, four people in their early twenties were killed after a dispute over $27.50. Three of the victims died in a duplex at 1117 Dayton Street on the west side of Wichita. The killer and his accomplice drove the fourth victim, a twenty-one-year-old named Beth Kuschnereit, to a rural spot in neighboring Butler County.

The man with the .38 was James Eddy Bell, the big guy with the menacing temper who worried Kenny Landwehr and the other beer drinkers at the Old English Pub.

Kuschnereit pleaded with Bell. He gave her two minutes to pray, then he shot her in the face. As he put it later, he “blew her head off.”

Bell and his accomplice were picked up, tried, and convicted.

It was the second quadruple homicide that year, and it shook up everybody in town. Only seventeen people had been murdered in Wichita the year before, and the cops solved all seventeen.

Landwehr was more disturbed about the Dayton Street killings than he had been about the Oteros. He had known the Dayton Street people, and when he walked to the Pub, which was frequently, his route took him past the duplex where three of them had died. He was still thinking about trying for the FBI after college, but now it didn’t seem as important. The FBI didn’t have a homicide unit.

6

October 1974

The Monster as Muse

Several months after the Otero murders, three talkative men in jail began to imply that they knew details about the crimes. Detectives quickly realized they were blowing smoke, but not before the story got into the
Eagle
.

That story upset the one man who knew the truth. And he wanted credit.

A few days after the story appeared,
Eagle
columnist Don Granger got a phone call.

“Listen and listen good,” a harsh voice said. “I’m only gonna say this once.” The man sounded Midwestern, his tone hard and aggressive, as though he liked giving orders. “There is a letter about the Otero case in a book in the public library,” he said. He told Granger which book, then hung up.

Granger knew why the call came to him. Months earlier, the
Eagle
had offered five thousand dollars to anyone providing useful information about the Otero case. Granger had volunteered to take the calls.

This caller had not asked for a reward, though.

The
Eagle
had made an arrangement with the cops that reflected what editors thought was best for the community at the time: it would set up a “Secret Witness” program to solicit and pass along information it received about the Oteros’ killer. Abiding by that agreement, Granger called the cops right after he took that strange call. Years later, some reporters and editors would grouse about this, saying Granger should have found the letter first and copied it for the newspaper, but in the 1970s the
Eagle
’s management thought helping the cops catch the killer was more important than getting a scoop�or challenging the investigative tactics.

Bernie Drowatzky found the letter right where the caller had told Granger it would be, inside the book
Applied Engineering Mechanics.
Drowatzky took the letter to Chief Hannon. The letter contained so many misspellings that some cops thought the writer had a disability or was disguising his writing voice.

I write this letter to you for the sake of the tax payer as well as your time. Those three dude you have in custody are just talking to get publicity for the Otero murders. They know nothing at all. I did it by myself and with no oneshelp. There has been no talk either.

Let’s put it straight…..

The letter then accurately described the positions of all four Otero bodies and named the rope, cord, and knots that bound them. The letter’s notations about Josie Otero, for example, read:

Josephine:

Position: Hanging by the neck in the northwest part of the basement. Dryer or freezer north of her body.

Bondage: Hand tie ith blind cord. Feet and lower knees, upper knees and waist with clothes line cord. All one lenght.

Garrotte: Rough hemp rope ¼ dia., noose with four or five turns. New.

Clothes: Dark, bra cut in the middle, sock.

Death: Strangulation once, hung.

Comments: Rest of her clothes t the bottom of the stairs, green pants, and panties. Her glasses in the southwest bedroom.

The letter contained details only cops and the killer knew. The writer seemed to confirm Cornwell’s suspicion that the killer had tortured the Oteros: He said he strangled Julie Otero twice.

I’m sorry this happen to the society. They are the ones who suffer the most. It hard to control myself. You probably call me “psychotic with sexual perversion hang-up.” Where this monster enter my brain I will never know. But, it here to stay. How does one cure himself? If you ask for help, that you have killed four people, they will laugh or hit the panic button and call the cops.

I can’t stop it so, the monster goes on, and hurt me as wall as society. Society can be thankfull that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victim being tortore and being mine. It a big compicated game my friend of the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting….. the pressure is great and somt-times he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t.

He has areadly chosen his next victim or victims I don’t know who they are yet. The next day after I read the paper, I will Know, but it to late. Good luck hunting.

YOURS, TRULY GUILTILY

The letter gave detectives a sick feeling. They had failed to catch the killer for nine months, and now he said he would kill again. He was even giving himself a name, as though he were another Boston Strangler or Jack the Ripper.

P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be…bind them, toture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.

The letter was a lead, but Hannon�who had talked to reporters twice a day with updates on the case in January�kept it secret for now. He thought publicizing the letter might panic people and provide details for copycats. And he worried that publicity would prompt BTK to kill again.

Some cops suggested BTK’s evident ego could be turned against him. They called editors at the
Eagle
.

A few days later, the
Eagle
began running a personal ad:
B.T.K.

Help is available.

The ad provided a phone number�and for the sake of convenience asked that BTK call before 10:00
PM
.

The cops also talked to Granger.

A few days later, on Halloween morning, the
Eagle
ran a column by Granger, buried back on page 8D, which became the first mention in the news of “BTK.” In it, Granger did not mention that he had received a call or that police had a letter. The newspaper knew more about this case than it let on, but it kept the police department’s secret, a decision later reporters would criticize. Granger merely asked BTK to call him:

For the past week Wichita police have tried to get in touch with a man
who has important information on the Otero murder case�a man who needs help badly.

You may have noticed the classified ad that ran at the top of our “Personal” column Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday…

There really is a “B.T.K.” Police can’t say how they know, but they’re convinced B.T.K. has information about the murder of Joseph Otero, his wife and two of his children…

Granger said the phone number in the ad was being monitored “by officers ready to help B.T.K.”

There was an alternative, Granger noted. The columnist was willing to talk with BTK himself, and he helpfully provided his office and home phone numbers.

This may expose me to a certain amount of crank, prank calls, but the nuisance is worth the trouble if we can only provide help for a troubled man.

BTK did not respond. Rader was busier than ever. A few days after Granger’s column ran, BTK went to work for the security alarm company ADT.

After the Otero and Bright murders, ADT had done booming business installing alarms in homes. The new job put BTK inside homes as an installer.

Rader enjoyed the irony.