Free Bind, Torture, Kill by Roy Wenzl Page B

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.

    Eagle reporter Ken Stephens became so obsessed with covering the story that some people came to think that he was BTK.
    Part of that story�unknown to all but a handful of Eagle staffers�was the uncommonly close relationship that quickly developed between the newspaper and the police chief.
    Ken Stephens, Casey Scott, or Craig Stock talked to LaMunyon every day, not for publication. He gave them status reports on the investigation and confided that he wasn’t sleeping much and that his wife was “extremely worried” about becoming the killer’s next victim.
    From the beginning, according to an internal memo in Stephens’s file, there was “much debate