Prepare yourself for a chilling exploration of one of America’s most infamous serial killers. We’re stepping into the twisted mind of the BTK killer as we trace the 30-year manhunt from the point of view of former FBI profiler John Douglas. He brings us a gripping firsthand account of the crime scene discoveries and the patterns of this notorious murderer. Brace yourself for a terrifying journey into the world of the gruesome Otero family murders and the intricate, disturbing tale of a killer who thrived on control and dominance.
We’ll take you through the baffling details of the case, unearthing each new layer of complexity with every victim. Feel the shockwaves that ripple through the community as we recount the brutal attack on the Bright siblings in Wichita, Kansas.
As we peel back the layers of this haunting investigation, the real killer emerges from the shadows, stirring up a storm with a chilling letter to the police. You'll gain unprecedented insights into the mind of a serial killer and the tireless investigators who finally brought him to justice. This is a deep-dive into America's most notorious killer and the relentless pursuit of truth, even in the face of unspeakable horror.
Prepare yourself for a chilling exploration of one of America’s most infamous serial killers. We’re stepping into the twisted mind of the BTK killer as we trace the 30-year manhunt from the point of view of former FBI profiler John Douglas. He brings us a gripping firsthand account of the crime scene discoveries and the patterns of this notorious murderer. Brace yourself for a terrifying journey into the world of the gruesome Otero family murders and the intricate, disturbing tale of a killer who thrived on control and dominance.
We’ll take you through the baffling details of the case, unearthing each new layer of complexity with every victim. Feel the shockwaves that ripple through the community as we recount the brutal attack on the Bright siblings in Wichita, Kansas.
As we peel back the layers of this haunting investigation, the real killer emerges from the shadows, stirring up a storm with a chilling letter to the police. You'll gain unprecedented insights into the mind of a serial killer and the tireless investigators who finally brought him to justice. This is a deep-dive into America's most notorious killer and the relentless pursuit of truth, even in the face of unspeakable horror.
Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, cara. And this is part two of the hunt for one of the most prolific civil killers in the United States, who was known famously or infamously as the BTK killer. And we are telling the story from the point of view of one of the men who helped hunt BTK for 30 years, from the point of view of a former FBI profiler, john Douglas. Let's begin.
Speaker 1:It all began on a frigid Tuesday morning around 7.50, january 15, 1974. The residence 803 North Edgemore Street. Around noon the residence sat quiet for over three hours. A furnace rumbled in the basement and the family's German shepherd paced anxiously through the snow in the backyard, letting out an occasional bark. Shortly after 3.30 pm, 15-year-old Charlie Otero and his brother Danny 14, and sister Carmen, june 13, walked home from school and discovered the bodies of their mother and father in their bedroom. Charlie tried calling for help from the bedroom wall foam but he couldn't get a dial tone. So he ran to the house next door shouting that his father was dead. A moment later the neighbors printed back to the family's residence, ranked down the hallway to the master bedroom and poked his head inside. He spotted Julie Otero's body sproot atop the bedroom. On the bed Nearby on the floor lay her husband, joseph, with a butcher knife beside him and his bound ankles propped up on the briefcase. The neighbor had no idea that the knife was there because the Otero children had used it to cut the bindings off their father. So he assumed the worst Joseph had murdered his wife, then killed himself. That was what he told police a few minutes later when he telephoned them from his kitchen.
Speaker 1:By the time Rookie Wichita police department patrolman Robert Bob Buehler arrived at the Otero house. Less than five minutes later this batch had radio him that there was a possible murder-suicide at 803 North Edgemore. Charlie was on the front alone when Buehler pulled his cruiser up to the curb. The TVI teen was desperately yanking on the arms of the ambulance crew who had arrived. A few minutes before patrolman Buehler. Charlie pleaded with the paramedics to go inside to see if they could revive his parents. Patrolman Buehler made his way up the walkway chatting with the ambulance crew for a few moments, as Charlie sent his brother and sister off on a mission to fetch the two youngest members of the family. He believed they were on their way home from elementary school. Being the protective older brother he was, he didn't want them arriving back at the house and having to look at the bloody, swollen bodies of their parents.
Speaker 1:Buehler entered the house and made his way into the master bedroom, where he spotted the bodies of Joseph and Julie. He gently touched their skin with his fingertips, trying to gauge the temperature of their flesh. Their skin was cold and their limbs were already stiff and regard mortis. They had been dead for many hours, he concluded. Joseph lay on his back on the floor. His feet, clad in white socks, were bound tightly together by rope at the ankles. Strips of cord, each tied in complex knots, lay next to the bodies.
Speaker 1:Charlie told officers that he sliced the bindings off of his father after discovering him in the bedroom. Next to Joseph was a plastic bag that had been pulled off his head. Blood was smeared around his mouth and nose. His thick, strong hands were swollen to the size of baseball mitts. Julie's face was so also grossly swollen and dry blood was caked around her nose and mouth. Carmen June had used fingernail clippers to cuck the gag out of her mother's mouth. Along with her many bindings, the white nylon cord that had been snipped away from her body had formed a thin necklace like bruise around her neck. She was barefoot and dressed in her powder blue house coat. Her ankles were still bound by a single loop of white cord. Sitting on a nearby dresser was a framed photo of a pensive, smiling Julie in her wedding gown. Most of the drawers had been pulled open and it appeared someone had to add rifle through the contents.
Speaker 1:Additional officers arrived at the home and before long they discovered the body of Joey, the youngest of the Otero siblings. The boy, who wore maroon corduroy pants and a shirt covered with dragons, lay on his side on the floor of his bedroom. Besides the bunk bed he shared with his brother Danny, next to his head was a wishy-tuff phone book. His ankles were bound by a cord. Another cord extended up behind his back and was knotted to his wrists. The cord that bound his hands behind his back was cinched so tight that the boy's tiny wrists were bruised Like those of his father. Joey's hands were engorged with blood and lymph and had swollen to several times their no more size. The manner in which he was bound suggested that the unsub either tied the boy himself or instructed another family member in how to do it, perhaps trying to create the impression that if everyone would just cooperate with him. He would take what he needed from the house and be on his way. A few feet away from the bunk bed sat a wooden chair. The bottom rung on the chair had been broken. Splinters from the shattered piece of wood lay atop the carpet.
Speaker 1:According to John Douglas, when he saw these pictures he said that he could imagine the killer sitting there watching the boy die and somehow the wrong had snapped. The fact that there was so little evidence of a struggle meant two things to Mr Douglas. The first thought was that more than one offender might be involved in the murders. But this possibility had a couple of major flaws, because, to begin with, he had never heard of a crime scene where the two offenders had worked together in such perfect synchrony, and he had never seen a case where two offenders would each have bondage as their signature. Normally, each killer would have its own distinct patterns at the crime scene and more often than not one offender would be organized and controlling and the other would be organized, leaving evidence behind. And then there was the fact that the only biological evidence recovered at the scene was semen later determined to have come from just one person. So if just one person was involved. He believed that he must have relied on a gun, not a knife, to intimidate the members of the Otero family who, according to police, were well trained and karate. His gun was the equalizer. It leveled the playing field in a way a knife could not.
Speaker 1:The most disturbing of all about the scene was Joey's head had been cased within a series of hoods a white t-shirt, a white plastic bag, a blue t-shirt. Back in 1979, when John Douglas initially looked at the case, the presence of the bags and shirt over the boy's head led him to believe that killing Joey was probably the most difficult murder that the suspect committed. That morning. The killer this is what he theorized at the time identified with the child. Looking at the young boy, he glimpsed himself Lying there on the floor. Joey was helpless and hopeless. In exactly the same way, the killer felt helpless and hopeless in his own life. Within the mind of the killer, all the other murders were justified, but not Joey's. So he thought that whoever had killed him had gone to such length to cover his face and he couldn't bear to look at it. Five years later, douglas learned that the killer had also used hoods on Joey's father and mother. Unfortunately, the officer who briefed Douglas on the case in 1979, had somehow omitted the fact, and this unintentional oversight reminded him of an adage that has long since become his mantra Profilers are only as good as the information they receive. In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 1:So shortly after Joey's body was discovered, patron Manbola set off to search the remaining rooms in the house to determine if the killer or killers had left behind any other grisly discoveries. So he knew there was a basement. He just needed to find a way to get down there. As he walked down the hallway that led into the living room, he spied the contents of Joey's purse. They were scattered atop the burnt orange shack carpet. Patron Manbola glanced around the room at the wood carvings hanging from the wall that looked as though they had been picked up on an overseas trip, and he spotted the door in the kitchen that led down to the basement. He opened it, but all he saw was blackness. So he had to rely on his flashlight while slowly navigating the carpeted stairs. Near the bottom step, he spotted a pair of shiny black boots that looked as though they might belong to a little girl. Walking slowly across the room, he spotted a squadron of model airplanes in various stages of construction spread out across a table, along with a rocking chair and a TV set. In an adjacent corner, a door led to a small room containing the family's washer and dryer, in a wall filled with wooden storage cabinets.
Speaker 1:Patron Manbola walked through the doorway into the darkened room, but before he could locate a light switch, his shoulder bumped into something solid that gave way when he made contact with it. He stumbled back, aimed the white beam after his flashlight onto the object and instantly he jumped back in shock. What he had bumped into was the stiff body of Josephine, 11 years old, dangling from a pipe. A noose fashioned from the same type of cord used on the others bit a deep hemorrhage groove into her neck. Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. Her mouth had been gagged with a strip of towel and made her tongue bulge out. Above the top of the gag. It was swollen and very purple.
Speaker 1:Josie wore a pale blue t-shirt and nothing else. Her panties had been pulled down to her ankles, just above her saggy royal blue socks. The back strap of her bra appeared to have been sliced with a knife. Around Josephine's body was wrapped a web of cord, and this reinforced the belief that the unsub had arrived at the home with a large length of this cord in his murder kit. Like some Boy Scouts gone bad, he had come prepared. Her wrists were tied together behind her back and bound to a rope encircling her waist. Another length of cord had been wrapped around her knees, followed by yet another around her ankles. The tips of her toes almost touched the concrete floor. On her leg was a milky, gelatinous substance that appeared to be semen. It had run down her leg over her sock and formed a tiny puddle on the floor. So the patrolman Bula took a deep breath, shook his head, headed back upstairs and he announced to the officers and detectives who had just arrived at the scene and were going through the house and he said we got another body in the basement Before the discovery of Josie's body.
Speaker 1:The killings had all the makings of a revenge or retaliation style homicide, but now the case had taken on a cop darker twist. It now seemed to wreak of a homicide that had sexual underpinnings. This meant that police were dealing with a much more sinister, complex type of killer. When the course about the oteros came over the radio Detective Bernie Drowoski, who have been driving through the Northeast part of town looking for heroin dealers. He heard about the possible murder of suicide at 803 North Edgemore. So he went there and upon arriving he quickly learned that police had discovered four bodies, including two children, and what all the detectives and the crime scene technicians were moving through the house.
Speaker 1:Detective Drowoski, he decided to fan out across the neighborhood with several officers and they interviewed residents about anything that they might have seen happen outside the Otero house that morning. Eventually he located a witness who had caught a glimpse of the Otero's family's 10-color Osmovio Vista cruiser station wagon backing out of the garage at approximately 10 30 am. The driver, according to his this neighbor was a short man with a Middle Eastern complexion. Another neighbor also reported seeing a dark-haired stranger quickly back out of the family's driveway. Whoever was driving the car wasn't such a rush that yet another neighbor had to slam on his brakes to avoid plowing into him as the neighbor backed onto Marduk Street A few hours later the car was located in the parking lot of Dylan's grocery. A witness at the scene told police that the driver exiting the car looked terribly nervous. His whole body appeared to be shaking.
Speaker 1:It was hours past sunset when Charlie Storre's, the lead detective working the case broke the news to the three surviving Otero children that the two youngest siblings were not going to be coming home from school, and Storre learned from Charlie Otero, the 15-year-old, that the family had moved to Wichita in the fall of 1973 from the Panama Canal Zone where Joseph 38, have served the last stretch of his 20-year hitch in the Air Force. An aviation fanatic with a pension for bongo playing and practical jokes, he decided to move his family to Wichita, known as the air capital of the world, in order to pursue a career in flying. For the past couple of months, joseph, who had a commercial pilot's license, worked as a mechanic and flight instructor at a local airport. Like his wife, julie 34, to whom he had been married for the past 16 years, joseph was born in Puerto Rico. The couple's five kids, ages 9 through 15, were all well-mannered and studious and seemed to adore their parents. The only other member of the family was the often unpredictable gentleman-shipper mix Lucky, a trained military guard dog the Oteros had brought with them when they moved from Panama. The dog was pacing around the backyard when the police arrived, something that perplexed detectives when they spotted boot prints near the spot where the suspect had caught the family's phone line. Why, they wonder, had not the foul temper? Lucky started barking to sound the alarm.
Speaker 1:After speaking with the children, a picture of the family's morning routine began to come into focus, along with some rough details about why may have happened over the course of the morning. From the looks of things, it looks like the kids were in the midst of preparing their lunches when the killer, or killers, entered. The three older Otero siblings had already departed for school. Josephine had just finished fixing a sandwich that consisted of a smear of potted meat between two pieces of white bread. She wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in a lunchbox covered with flowers. Left sitting on the stove, joey stood at the kitchen table beside his father spreading meat on a piece of bread. His open lunchbox with pictures of policemen on it sat on the table beside him. Joseph was hunched over the table eating pears from an open can. Steward and other detectives figured that it must have been just around this moment that Joseph asked one of the children to take out the garbage and place it in the trash. In the trash can sitting back behind the house.
Speaker 1:Two theories emerge over what happened next. In the first scenario, josie, who had finished with her lunch making duties, pulled on her white mittens, grabbed the garbage pail, walked out the back door, and it was at this moment that the intruder grabbed her and forced her back into the kitchen where he confronted the rest of the family. Police, retrieved her mitten, which might had falling off when she was jumped by the attacker on the concrete stoop just outside the back door. In the second possible scenario, joey was the one who was dispatched on garbage duty. The fact that he had not finished making his lunch probably would have faced his father, who had the reputation for being a taskmaster. Joseph might have been giggling over the fact that her brother might not get to finish making his sandwich before heading off to school. So, in the spirit of brotherly retaliation, joey grabbed her glove lovingly, caressed the trash bucket with them, then headed outside, where he was quickly overtaken by the suspect.
Speaker 1:Exactly what happened next also proved difficult for detectives to determine with any certainty, although there were a couple of facts that seemed cleared, it didn't appear that anything had been taken from the house which ruled out the chance of the attacks being a botch burglary. It also didn't seem likely that this was the work of two intruders, and because the interior of the house didn't indicate that a struggle had taken place. It seemed unlikely that the killer entered the house brandishing only a knife. To maintain the kind of control that it appeared he must have had, he in all likelihood used a gun. The prevalence of ropes, medical tape and other bindings signified to detectives that the killer had arrived prepared. Police speculated that after the attacker somehow managed to subdue the family and tie them up, he quickly decided to get rid of Joseph. With this wall card out of the picture, the killer could continue his work at a more leisurely pace. Exactly what Joseph must have been thinking during those final moments. No one would ever know, but this one-time champion boxer, who was also a black belt and karate, surely must have been cursing himself for not putting up more of a fight when he had the chance before allowing himself to be tied up.
Speaker 1:Time was another factor. Even after he managed to kill Joseph, the suspect would have been constantly watching the clock. He knew he had to work quickly. With that many people living at the residence, the odds were good that somebody one of the other Otero siblings, a classmate, another parent or a neighbor might show up at the house. Yet he still wanted to savor the sick thrill of what he was doing, reminding himself that he couldn't spend much time with Julie, joseph and Joey. He had not come for them. From what the detectives could put together, they were just appetizers. It seemed obvious that he had been watching the family and what he really longed for was the main course and the dessert all rolled into one 11-year-old Josephine.
Speaker 1:Judging from the abrasions on the upper portion of Julie's neck, just below her ears, she had been strangled from behind while she lay on her stomach. The killer had evidentially straddled her, lifting her torso off the bed while choking her. Beside her. Traces of semen were found on the sheets and pillow. These were eventually determined to have come from her husband. The presence of Josephine's glasses to her parents' bedroom led detectives to believe that the killer had purposely left them there to confuse investigations.
Speaker 1:Another bit of evidence that puzzled detectives was the chair with a broken rung found in the boy's bedroom. In her interview with police, carmen June claimed that the chair came from the bedroom that she shared with Josephine. Upon learning that, detectives began to suspect that the killer had moved the chair into the boy's bedroom, then held Josephine in his lap, forcing her to watch her brother suffocate. The wooden rung could have been cracked while he struggled to hold the squirming child, who probably would have fought to keep from watching Joey die, even though traces of bruising could be seen encircling his neck. Joey was the only member of the family to die from asphyxiation, not strangulation. With a plastic bag over his head, along with the two t-shirts, the boy probably took four to five minutes to expire.
Speaker 1:The killer's decision to take Josie down into the basement indicated just how badly he wanted her and to what lengths he had traveled to act out the fantasies riding inside his head. He no doubt knew that such a move would have been incredibly risky. The presence of the gag in her mouth provided another window into the mind of her killer. There was really no need to gag her because the others were all dead and, due to her location in the far corner of the basement, neighbors would not be able to hear her scream. No, was there any reason to hang her to a pipe or to tie her up at all if all the suspect wanted to do was rape her? What he did was all about his need to script, direct and produce a crime to fulfill his fantasies of dominance and control. She was no longer human, merely a prop. After binding her wrists, thighs and ankles, he pushed her head through the loop in the rope hanging from a water pipe and pulled her tight, careful to make sure it lifted her body just high enough so that the tips of her toes barely touched the cold cement floor. In order to prevent the rope from biting into her neck, she would have had to strain to push against the floor with all her strength.
Speaker 1:So one thing that John Douglas said was that he would not have been surprised if he had demanded that Josie talk dirty to him, but his guess was that she was too petrified to play along with his sick game. And he says this because, according to a lot of the interviews that he has done with sexual offenders, they would script their victims, even if they were juveniles, and coerce them to talk in such a way that it sounded as though they wanted to be sexually assaulted. Perhaps Josephine was so terrified and confused about the horrible events that had just unfolded in front of her that all she could do was whimper and plead for her life. And that was the last thing the killer wanted to hear. It would ruin everything. He would come to her house to live out of fantasy. There was no telling how long she fought to stay conscious. Her underwear had nearly been pulled down to her feet, just below the white rope he had tied around her ankles. At some point during the ordeal, the killer talked her blue t-shirt shirt down over her left shoulder, then cut her bra strapped with a knife. Before walking back upstairs and switching off the lights to leave Josephine hanging in darkness, the suspect masturbated, ejaculating onto his victim's right leg. By the time police arrived at the scene, the semen had dripped onto the floor, forming a sickening milky puddle.
Speaker 1:Within days of the killings, one of the city's two daily newspapers created a secret witness program, hoping to coax locals into phoning one of the paper's columnists to feed them tips on the case. The reward money donated by one of the newspapers for anyone who provided information that led to the killer's conviction eventually climbed to $7,500. Some of the detectives were perplexed by the seemingly large amount of semen left on the floor in the Otero's basement. Exactly how much semen or fluid was present at the scene was never established due to the fact that it had begun to dry and spread out by the time Joseph's body was discovered. If it could be proven that the volume was too great to have come from a single individual, it could help substantiate claims that more than one killer was involved. But first detectives needed to determine just how much semen was discharged during a typical ejaculation. To do that, police reportedly approached a cash-strapped Wichita State University upperclassman with an overdue parking ticket and made him a proposition that involved an empty test tube. And when Douglas profiler Douglas learned about this, he was never able to determine what, if anything, the police learned as a result of their unusual offer.
Speaker 1:So for police, the investigation that ensued over the next few weeks became as covalent and complex as those knots found in the Otero home. Nobody could remember a case quite like this. Over a thousand neighbors, coworkers, ex-cons, friends of the family. They were interviewed. 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, this killer had managed to turn this low-abiding town upside down, causing nearly everyone to begin asking themselves if he could do this to the Otero family, while would stop him from doing it to mine.
Speaker 1: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 families 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 on Earth by detectives had led anywhere.
Speaker 1:In an effort to dig up some information into Joseph Otero's background, an investigative trip to Puerto Rico in Panama was undertaken by Floyd Hannon Wichita, chief of Police, and Bill Cornwell, chief of Homicide. They travel there to flesh out some of the rumors they have 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 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. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:On April 4, 1974, the murder of Kathy Bright, a 21-year assembly line worker at the Coleman Company, happened All into 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 his point. It wasn't until almost two years after BTK's bombshell communique 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 the following quote you guess the motive and the victim end quote 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 sick resemblance to those found in BTK's other known kills.
Speaker 1:So when profiler Douglas started looking at this case file, he started looking at the photographs first and he started studying the mattress which had been moved off, the metal bed frame, the shoes scattered about the floor and the comfort or blood smear on the corner that lay crumpled in the corner of the room. And he always said that when studying a crime photograph, one thing that you have to do or to remember is to resist the earth for your eyes to be pulled into the center of the picture, because sometimes the thing you need to find most lies on the periphery of the photo, at the distant edges. He was called into looking at this second case and it reminded him of one that he had worked before in Arkansas and looking at the picture. That's how he decided to analyze this picture and make sure that he was not looking at the center but at the periphery. So in this case it was a couple minutes shy of 12.30 in the afternoon when suddenly the front door of the white clubboard house burst open and 19-year-old Kevin Bright flung outside himself, staggered through the ice-crusted snow, and he began running down the street. Blood had sucked through his white t-shirt. The sight of this young man stumbling through the streets waving his arms, screaming something about his sister needing help caught the eye of a passing driver. He slammed on his brakes. The passenger jumped out. He quickly pushed the frantic man into the front seat and sprinted to a nearby automobile or automotive repair shop and he told the owners you need to call the cops.
Speaker 1:A few minutes later, as the Good Samaritan drove the day's 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 at 3217 East 13th Street North. Suspects still at the scene, arm and dangers. So patrolman Raymond Fletcher, who was driving through the neighborhood, arrived at the house. Three minutes later. He scrambled out of his cruiser. He slowly walked up the front steps with his 38 caliber service revolving drone and he saw that the front door was open. So he announced himself police officer, police officer.
Speaker 1:When he poke his head inside, he immediately spotted 21 year old Kathy Bright lying on her side in a puddle of blood in the wood paneled front room. The Oriental carpets hung on the wall and beer bottles crowded and makeshift table fashion out of the of a cable spoon Telephone lay beside her and she whispered in a very faint, raspy voice help me, I can't breathe. Fletcher knelt beside her, keeping his eyes peeled for the suspect he believed might be hiding in the house, and he told her I'm going to get you a doctor. You just got to stay calm, can you do that? So he radio for an ambulance while kneeling on the floor beside Bright, who appeared to be fighting to keep her eyelids from closing, and her breathing grew shallower with each labored inhalation. And Fletcher asked do you know who did this to you? But the poor woman wasn't that shape so she could barely make any sound come out of her throat. So she just shook her head back and forth and the last words she uttered were help me.
Speaker 1:What Fletcher didn't know at that moment was that Bright had been stabbed 11 times in her torso and was bleeding from nearly every major organ of her body. Two of the knife wounds have 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 went 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 as 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 Show. Casings from an automatic pistol that would later be identified as a woodsman, called 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 20 minutes earlier. She died on the operating table five hours later. She lost so much blood she really never had a chance. Not far from where Kathy died, her brother lay in the hospital bed.
Speaker 1:Kevin was skinny as a real 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 in to Wichita from his parents' house in nearby valley center the previous night and crashed at a 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. 19-year-old Kevin Found an invention he wanted to turn into a business. Kevin 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 recall, 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 and the men told them stop, hold it right there. The intruder announced that he was on the land from police in California and trying to get to New York. He said I need your car keys and a hundred dollars. Kathy told him to take a hike.
Speaker 1:The men forced the two into a back bedroom at gunpoint. In the middle of the room he positioned a chair On a nearby bed. He laid out various ligatures and bindings made out of rope and nines he 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 a 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.
Speaker 1:Kevin couldn't quite figure out what this guy, who was both forceful and almost gentle, only wanted with the two of them. Before long, he could hear him opening drawers and slamming doors. After a few minutes, the men 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 nines or a rope around his neck and then pulled it tight. The force jumped Kevin up off the floor. When Kevin suddenly realized that the intruder intended to do to him, he began squirming and twisting his hands and arms back and forth. Within seconds, the wary youth managed to wedge his hands loose from their bindings and he jumped up into his feet. In a flash, the man pulled out the pistol with which he had been threatening the bright minutes earlier and pointed it at Kevin's forehead and he pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1:One of Kathy's neighbors reported here in the shot, which wasn't surprising. The force of a slug hitting his skull and the sheer shock of being shot knocked Kevin backward and he quickly crumpled onto the floor, unconscious. When he came to a few minutes later, the man had disappeared to the bedroom with his sister obviously satisfied that he had taken care of Kevin. Like Kathy was shouting you shot my brother, you shot my brother. Kevin sat up on the floor and listened as the stranger tried to calm her and he said relax, I only wounded him, he's gonna be okay. Kevin attempted to stagger to his feet, but the noise he made must have reached their attacker. The man walked back into the room where Kevin had just managed to untie his legs In a flash.
Speaker 1:Kevin remembers seeing the grip of a pistol tucked into the waistband of the man's pants. Lunch on him grabbed the gun and managed to shove it into the man's chest. He squeezed the trigger, but before the hammer could slam down on the back of around in the chamber, the attacker wedged his fingers beneath the hammer, preventing the gun from discharging. The two wrestled for control of the pistol and Kevin managed to squeeze the trigger one more time, but once again the gun didn't fire. The man finally wrenched the weapon free quickly, took aim at Kevin's head and fired, but missed. He pulled the trigger again and the bullet hit Kevin in the mouth, tearing through his upper lip, turning Kevin's face into an even bloodier mess that it already was. What the gunman didn't know, however, was that Kevin's front teeth deflected the slug. Kevin crumpled to the ground once again and the gunman jumped on top of him in a flash, then wrapped a rope around his neck and jank it tight.
Speaker 1:Upon hearing the pistol shots, kathy began screaming and the man ran back into the other bedroom where she was still tied to a chair. Kevin blacked out for an unknown amount of time, probably just a few minutes. When he came to and stumbled to his feet, his sister was still screaming. He made a split decision that sent him running out the front door. The best thing he could do for Kathy, he decided, was to run and help. Fifteen minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up in front of Bright's house. Despite his injuries, he practically had to be tied down in the hospital bed to prevent him from fleeing the hospital and hitting the street to search for Kathy's killer.
Speaker 1:Before leaving the hospital room, one of the detectives opened up an identity kit used by police to create a composite sketches of an unknown suspect. Over the next 45 minutes, kevin poured through the seemingly infinite number of combinations in the book and reconstructed what he could recall from his assailants face. He too, officers, dared. The man was a stocky, 25 year old Caucasian with dark hair and thick, dark mustache. He stood about 5'10", had a black stocking cap pulled over his head, which he later removed, and wore a uniform that consisted of an orange shirt and jacket. The completed picture was immediately put on the wire and distributed to law enforcement agencies in the western states, where it was believed the assailant had come from.
Speaker 1:The composite caused a fair bit of dissension among several of the detectives assigned to the case. A few believed that the likeness might actually help them nab Kathy's murderer, whereas others doubted that Kevin, who many suspected had suffered a concussion, could be expected to recall much of value about the suspect, and one thing that profiler John Douglas says is that he rarely heard of a witness involved in a violent crime being able to create a composite drawing that turned out to resemble the perpetrator. Other than the clothes and nylons that had been used to tie up the brides, detectives from precious little evidence in the house. The only set of latent fingerprints that police were unable to identify was found on the back door, but these turned out to belong to Bright's landlord and was quickly eliminated as a suspect. Police knocked on every front door in the lower middle class neighborhood where the sisters lived, asking if anyone could remember seeing a suspicious looking character shortly after the attack, but no one reported seeing anyone out of the ordinary. A bloody white nylon rope was discovered under a tarp in the bed of Kevin's rusted, decrepit four truck parking on the street, and police termized that the killer might have tossed them in there. When fleeing the scene, the only thing detectives had to work with was a small man of marijuana that they discovered the house, leading them to wonder if maybe the attack had something to do with a drug deal going to ride. But then Kevin Bright admitted she and her sister were recreational pot smokers, something the cops had no problem believing because the amount found was so minuscule it was very tiny.
Speaker 1:All the police were not ruling out the possibility that a local resident could be responsible for the brutal slaying and shooting. They reached out to California authorities trying to determine if the description given by Kevin Match and if he was a fugitive they were currently pursuing, and before long, what few leads they had to work with had grown ice cold. Although there were few whispers among detectives that Brights Killer might be the same individual responsible for the Otero murders, nobody wasted much time trying to link the two cases and what would they? Because they appear to be so many differences. Brights Killer didn't cut the phone line and he had used both a knife and a gun on his victims. Even his knots, which had been tied from jeans and nylons, as opposed to the Venetian blind cord used at the Otero crime scene, were different. Kathy had been tied with granny knots, whereas the Oteros had been bound with both clove hitches and half hitches.
Speaker 1:By the end of April, something else was clear 1974 was turning out to be one of the bloodiest in recent memory. Six months after the discovery of those four bodies in the Otero house, another quadruple homicide rock Ritchita. Those murders, however, were quickly revealed to be the result of a drug rip-off. But the Otero and Brights murders were different. Every homicide detective knows that through victimology, which quite simply is the study of the victim of a particular offender, can help crack cases. The problem with your Otero and the Brights murders was that all these victims were low risk, meaning that there was no single clue to indicate why they were destined to die a violent death. None of them have engaged in any personal criminal activities that might explain the fate they met. They were just regular people living and working in a community where the overall crime rate was remarkably low. The fact that none of the victims had probably ever laid eyes on their killer before he struck was another reason why police was having such a rough time on her thing, and it solidly leads there were a few detectives and homicides who believed that the same killer might be responsible for all five murders.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until October 8 that police received what they cautiously believed might be the biggest break in the case. Javi Sebring, a local resident with a lengthy history of deviant behavior that included in arrest for having sex with a duck in Riverside Park, was picked up for molesting a five year old girl behind a public library. While being questioned about the incident at the police station, sebring made an off the cuff comment about the Otero homicides. That proved to be the equivalent of dropping a lit match into a gas tank. He said, quote if I was doing the Oteros, this is how I would have done it. I would have been with my brother and we would have tied them all up, and my buddy, thomas Myers, would have been with us.
Speaker 1:Anyone looking at their individual rap sheets could tell that Javi Sebring and his brother Ernest had serious mental problems. So did Myers. If somebody was going to give false confessions to a crowd-rupled homicide, they were the perfect candidates. But the heat to crack the Otero murders was getting intense and because the three had a history of sex offenses, the decision was quickly made to bring them in for questioning, although this was five years before the profiler Douglas got involved in the case. If he had been working on it he would have told them that the cops not to bother because from a profiling standpoint the Oteros killer was far too sophisticated and careful to have a history of bestiality and attempted molestation of a juvenile on his rap sheet. It just didn't fit. Myers couldn't be found. But on October 9th Sebring's older brother was taken in and grilled and instead of being booked in jail, the Sebrings were taken to a local mental hospital for evaluation. On October 18, myers was located after he tried committing suicide and paramedics were called to the scene. Eventually he was placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital. So despite Gary's rambling statement about his involvement in the murders, police quickly realized they have opened a Pandora's box. Due to the threesome's mental instability. None of the three men in Wichita were ever charged with any crime.
Speaker 1:But media coverage of these new unnamed suspects in the Otero case evidently began to annoy the real killer. The fact that three posers were getting ink and airtime for what he considered to be the crowning achievement of his life proved more than he could bear. Late in the morning on October 22, he telephoned the Otero murder hotline set up by one of the city's two newspapers, the Wichita Eagle and Beacon. When District Dung Ranger picked up the phone, the voice at the other end of the line got right to the point and said quote, listen and listen. Good, because I'm not going to repeat it. And he explained that the man who killed the Oteros had stuck a letter inside a mechanical engineering textbook on the second floor of the Wichita Public Library. That was all he said. Then he hung up. As if really annoyed.
Speaker 1:Ranger immediately telephoned Floyd Hannon, the chief of police, and told him the news. Within minutes, detective Joratsky were calming, I should say. Through the aisles of the library located across the street from police headquarters, searching for the book, he eventually found a white envelope with the name Bill Thomas Killman, which police would eventually realize was the acronym for BTK, typed in the upper left hand portion of the envelope. Duwaski's first impression upon reading it was he was jumbled up to make everything think he was an idiot, which he was. But it also became apparent that he had a certain sick intelligence to him.
Speaker 1:The letter had been typed and was laced with butchered syntax and numerous misspellings, grammatical mistakes and misconstrucated verbs. Of the detectives who poured over it, no one was quite sure whether the errors were unintentional or added simply to folk police into believing they were dealing with an imbecile. Profiler Douglas said that in his experience, offenders who communicated with police generally attempted to disguise their writing and throw investigators off by purposely misspelling words or by using improper grammar. But one thing was clear whoever created this one page letter didn't seem concerned about sending police the original rather than a photocopy. His ego obviously allowed him to believe the risk to be worth it, and this is what the letter says.
Speaker 1:It says Otero Case Quote I write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer as well as your time. Those three dudes 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 no one's help. There has been no talk either. Let's put it straight.
Speaker 1:It says Joe Position, southwest bedroom. Feet tied to the bed, head pointed in a southerly direction. Bondage Window blind cord. Garrette. Blind cord round belt Death the old back trick and strangulation with clothesline rope. Clothes White sweatshirt, green pants. Comments he threw up at one time had rib injury From wreck Few weeks before Laying uncooked.
Speaker 1:Julie Position Laying on her back Crosswise on the bed, pointing in southwestern direction, face cover with a pillow. Bondage Blind cord Garrette. Clothesline cord Tie in a cloth hitch Death Strangulation twice. Clothes Blue house coat Black slack, white sock. Comments Blood unfazed from too much pressure on the neck, bit unmade. Josephine Position Hanging by the neck in the northwest part of the basement Dryer of research north of her body Bondage Hand tied with blind cord. Feet and lower knees, upper knees and waist with clothesline cord All one length. Garrette Rough hemp rope One quarter diameter News with four or five turns. Clothes Dark, broad cut in the middle, sock For some reason BTK left out the pale blue t-shirt and PNT's Pulled down to her socks and then says death Strangulation once Hung.
Speaker 1:Comments Most of her clothes at the bottom of the stairs, green pants and PNT's, her glass in the southwest bedroom. Joseph Position In the east bedroom laying on his back Pointing in eastern direction Bondage, blind cord, garrette, three hoods. White t-shirt, white plastic bag, another t-shirt. Clothes Lined cord with cloth hitch. Death Suffocation once Strangulation. Suffocation with the old bag trick Clothes Brump hands Yellow, brown t-shirt. Comments His radio is blaring. All victims had their hands tied behind their backs, gags of pillowcase material Slipped, knots on Joe and Joseph's neck to hold leg down.
Speaker 1:All was at one time. First content south of the table Spill drink in that area also Kids making lunches, door trade in red Chair in the living room. Orterus watch missing. I needed one, so I took it. Termos that turned down. Car was dirty inside, out of gas.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry this happened to society. They are the ones who suffer the most. It's hard to control myself. You probably call me psychotic with sexual prevention hang up. When this monster enter my brain I will never know, but it's 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. So the monster goes on and hurt me as well as society. Society can be thankful that they are always for people like me to relieve myself at a time by daydreams of some victims being tortured and being mine.
Speaker 1:If a big, complicated game my friend of the monster play, putting victims down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting. The pressure is great and sometimes he runs the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can't. He has already chosen his next victim of victims. I don't who they are yet the next day, after I read the paper, I will know. But if I am alive is to lay good luck hunting Yours truly guilty PS.
Speaker 1:Since sex crimes do not change their animal or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code word for me will be bind. Bind them, torture them, kill them. Btk. You see he added again. They will be on the next victim. There was no signature on the bottom of the letter. Instead, whoever painted, drew a cryptic symbol created from the letters. Btk, judging from the way he described this crime scenes with attention to detail of a detective whoever wrote the letter was clearly a wannabe cop, but he obviously needed to bone up on his criminology 101, because plenty of criminals to change their MO's, they get slated. Investigators would learn that BTK changed into changes models when he removed the bodies of his last two victims from their homes. What doesn't change is the killer's signature, which is something the offender does to fulfill himself emotionally, but that doesn't necessarily needed to obtain or accomplish the crime. In the title murders, and then we will later learn.
Speaker 1:In the bright case, the BTK's signature was the use of bindings and gags, along with a form of psychological torture wherein he denied his victims the courtesy of a quick death. Not surprisingly, detectives pounced on the letter almost as soon as it landed on Chief Hinn's desk and began picking it apart, examining it for hair, for fiber, for fingerprints, and sitting through every single misspelling and word usage, looking for any clue that could on earth. The first thing that jumped off the page was the fact that whoever sent it had, when discussing the suspects being looked at by police, crossed out the word two and replaced it with three. He evidently had written the letter before October 18th when Thomas Myers was finally located. For some reason he had opted to sit on his communique for several days before sending it. And there was another reason he appeared to be enjoying how he was making the Wichita police resemble the Keystone cops. The last thing he wanted was for his local law enforcement agency to garner any positive accolades from the media or the community for possibility solving the Otero murders. This suspected and claimed responsibility for Bright's murder for the simple reason they have left behind a living witness, her brother. Police could not make that connection until the waiting months of 1979, but now that at that point profiler Douglas learned that he had been responsible for Kathy's budgling about the lethal attack four months earlier, it seemed quite possible that he also typed this letter to police in order to remind himself and them.
Speaker 1:What was certain, however, was that his letter contained a level of detail that only the Otero's killer could have known. It went from beyond anything that had appeared in the media after the homicide occurred. It read like a police crime report. His descriptions were so exactly that he was left wondering if he would photograph the crime scene before fleeing. How could he remember all those details if he had not brought a camera or perhaps discovered one at the house and used that? So there was also something peculiar. A few of the descriptions were so off the mark that detectives were a bit stopped. For instance, at the crime scene, joseph didn't have a bag on his head. Julie's face wasn't covered by a pillow. The recent police eventually learned was that the Otero children had me roof them while trying to revive the parents. Also, btk never mentioned the pale blue t-shirt that Josephine was still wearing after her death. We'll be right back In the end.
Speaker 1:However, these inaccuracies actually did more to prove that whoever penned the letter actually was the Otero's killer. After all, he would not have known that the crime scene had been disturbed. He would have expected it to look exactly the way it did when he fled the house. Another factual error was the writer's claim that he had used five turns of his rope to create Josephine's news. In reality, he only used three. Detectives wrote of this mistake as a case of inattention, due to the excitement he must have been experiencing prior to killing his 11 year old victim. Another aspect of the letter was the writer's reference to Josephine's glasses being left in the bedroom. So why would the killer not have gone to the trouble of placing them there? Was it simply some weird way to taunt police? The answer turned out to be much more mundane, although decades would pass before investigators learned the real reason.
Speaker 1:Over the next couple of weeks, nearly two dozen psychologists and psychiatrists were shown the content of the letter as to compile a personality profile of the individual they believed might have written it. So we know now that there was an issue far more than whether or not the department needed additional personnel to chase down the leads. The belief and this came from John Douglas was that the police might have been more effective in the efforts if they have been more forthcoming with the release of information to the public, because when provided with useful behavioral characteristics of a suspect, the community can begin acting as a powerful tool for investigators, serving asterisizing their ears and a type of collective data bank. Surely somebody, somewhere, may have seen something around the time of the murders, some odd bit of behavior in a friend, co-workers or relatives, but until people are given some clue as to what they are supposed to have seen, they can help connect the dots for police. The specialists were anonymous in their assessment, the writer was a very sick man who had fetish for bondage.
Speaker 1:In other words, his reaction sexually is to be bound or to bind other people, and this is according to chief Hannon. Now, at the request of the police, granger placed a classified ad in the newspaper, which ran from October 24th to October 27, urging the killer to contact him, and it read BTK help us available, call and then they provide a phone number before 10 pm. Granger never received any response from the ad. A few days later, he wrote a column in the newspaper explaining that police were searching for a man who needs help badly, who had information about the terrible murders. The intrepid column columnist went so far as to ask the man to call him at home, but the call never came. The killer was no longer in a talkative mode and he obviously had other things in his mind. Thank you for listening to the murder book. Have a great week.