Free Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer by John Douglas, Johnny Dodd Page A

thighs, and ankles, he pushed her head through the loop in the rope hanging from a water pipe and pulled it 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. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had demanded that Josie talk dirty to him, but my guess was that she was too petrified to play along with his sick game. The one common theme I’d learned from the interviews I’d conducted with sexual offenders was that 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 ruined everything. He’d come to her house to live out a 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’d tied around her ankles. At some point during the ordeal, the killer tugged her blue T-shirt shirt down over her left shoulder, then cut her bra strap with a knife. Before walking back upstairs and switching off the lights to leave Josephine hanging in darkness, the UNSUB 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.
     
    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 papers’ 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. Rumors about the case spread through the city like a flu virus. Not even the investigators working the homicide were immune to the tall tales.
     
     
    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 seminal 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 Josie’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. I was never able to determine what, if anything, the police learned as a result of their unusual offer.
     
    For police, the investigation that ensued over the next few weeks quickly became as convoluted 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, and friends of the family were interviewed. The local newspapers and radio and TV stations carried reports of the killings and the latest developments in the case nonstop.
     
    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