Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (2 page)

At five feet four, Josie was already an inch taller than her mom and as tall as her dad. But she worried the worries of a child.

“You don’t love me as much as you love the rest of them,” she had blurted one day to her brother Charlie. At fifteen he was the oldest of the five Otero kids.

“That’s not true,” he said. “I love you as much as I love any of them.”

She felt better; she loved them all, Mom and Dad and Charlie, and Joey, who was nine, and Danny, fourteen, and Carmen, thirteen. She loved the way Joey studied his brothers and tried to be tough like them. He was so cute; the girls at Adams Elementary School adored his brown eyes. This morning he had dressed to draw attention: a long-sleeved shirt pulled over a yellow T-shirt and white undershirt, and purplish trousers with white pockets and white stripes down the back.

It was Tuesday. They would play with the dog, help Mom pack lunches, then Dad would drive Josie and Joey to school as he had done already for Charlie, Danny, and Carmen. Mom had laid their coats on a chair.

Outside, the man hesitated.

In the pockets of his parka he carried rope, venetian blind cord, gags, white adhesive tape, a knife, and plastic bags.

The Oteros had lived in Camden, New Jersey, and then the Panama Canal Zone for seven years, and then their native Puerto Rico with relatives for a few months. They had bought their house in Wichita only ten weeks earlier and were still getting their bearings. Wichita was a big airplane manufacturing center, and this spelled opportunity for Joe. He had retired as a technical sergeant after twenty years in the U.S. Air Force and now worked on airplanes and taught flying at Cook Field, a few miles outside Wichita, the Air Capital of the World. Boeing, Cessna, Beech, and Learjet all had big factories there; the city that once sent sixteen-hundred B-29 Superfortress bombers to war now supplied airlines and movie stars with jets. Julie had taken a job at Coleman, the camping equipment factory, but was laid off a few weeks later in a downsizing.

Charlie, Danny, Joey, Carmen, Josie, Julie, and Joe Otero.

They now lived among the 260,000 people of Wichita, many of whom were ex-farm kids who cherished the trust they felt for their neighbors and left their doors unlocked. The airplane manufacturers had come to Wichita decades earlier in part because they were able to hire young people who had grown up on neighboring farms, learning how to fix tractor engines and carburetors from early childhood, and these workers and their families had brought their farm sensibilities with them to the city. People still left the keys in their cars at night and took casseroles to sick neighbors. This was a culture the Oteros liked, but Joe and Julie had more of a New York attitude about safety. Joe had acquired the dog, Lucky, who hated strangers. Joe had street smarts, and at age thirty-eight he was still wiry and strong. He’d been a champion boxer in Spanish Harlem. Julie, thirty-four, practiced judo and taught it to the children.

Joe was streetwise but playful. At work among Anglo strangers, he made people laugh by mocking his own Puerto Rican accent. He made shopping fun, once dragging the kids around a store on a sled as they laughed. When Joe signed the mortgage for the house (six rooms and an unfinished basement), he joked to the broker, “I hope I’m still alive when this lien is paid off.”

Two months later the Oteros were still unpacking boxes.

One night Joe and Charlie had watched the movie
In Cold Blood,
the story of two losers who in 1959 murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.

How could anybody do that? Charlie asked.

“Be glad nothing like that has ever happened to you,” Joe said.

Dennis Rader had seen the woman and the girl one day while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration; his wife didn’t like driving in snow. On Edgemoor Drive, he saw two dark-skinned females in a station wagon backing onto Murdock Avenue.

After that, he stalked them for weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that they left about 8:45 and that it took Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the husband left for work around 8:00 AM. He did not want to confront the husband, so he timed his own arrival for about 8:20. The husband would be gone. The boy would be there, but he was incidental to the plan. He would kill the boy, but he did not want him. He wanted the girl.

He did not know that the Oteros were down to one car.

Joe had wrecked the other one a few days before, breaking some ribs. To get Carmen, Danny, and Charlie to school before 8:00, Joe had taken the station wagon that Julie usually drove. Charlie had started to close the garage door, but Joe told him to leave it up because he would come back. With his injury, Joe wasn’t able to work.

It was twenty degrees outside, and snow lay frozen on the hard ground.

Rader was twenty-eight; he had dark hair and green eyes that had lately spent a lot of time looking deep into the dark. He liked to look at pornography; he liked to daydream. He had nicknamed his penis Sparky. He fancied himself a secret agent, an assassin, a shadow.

Rader had risen in the dark this morning, packed his coat pockets, parked several blocks from the target house, then walked. The house sat on the northwest corner of Murdock Avenue and Edgemoor Drive in east Wichita. He had arrived as the dim light of dawn obscured the comet Kohoutek that for weeks had hung like a ghost above the southern horizon.

Dennis Rader, while he was in the air force in the 1960s.

He thought of the girl with long, dark hair and glasses. She looked like she was made for SBT, his abbreviation for “Sparky Big Time.”

But now, in the backyard, he hesitated.

Where was the dog?

Over the next thirty-one years, Rader would write many words about this day, some lies, some true:

He selected the family because Hispanic women turned him on.

He fantasized about sex, trained himself how to kill. He tied nooses, and hanged dogs and cats in barns. As a teen and then later in the air force, he peered through blinds to watch women undress. He broke into homes to steal panties.

He stalked women as they shopped alone in grocery stores. He planned to hide in the backseat of their cars and kidnap them at gunpoint. He would take them to places where he and Sparky could play: bind, torture, kill.

He had always chickened out.

But not this time.

He crept from the garage to the back door.

He reached out to open it.

Locked.

He pulled a hunting knife and severed the telephone line, which was tacked to the white clapboard wall.

He suddenly heard the back door opening. He pulled his gun and found himself staring into the face of the little boy. And finally he saw the dog, standing beside the boy. The dog began to bark.

Quickly now, as the sweat began to flow, Rader hustled the child into the kitchen�and came face-to-face with another surprise. The man was home.

The dog barked and barked.

Rader towered seven inches over the smaller man, but he felt quaking fear now. He pointed his gun.

This is a stickup, he said.

The girl began to cry.

Don’t be alarmed, he told them.

Across town several miles to the west lived a college kid who had no clue how the events of this day would shape his life.

He was something of a character, or so his mother thought. He could never sit still; he always had to be doing something with his hands. He was a smart aleck. As a little boy playing cops and robbers, he always played the cop. When the other boys pressed him to be the bad guy, he walked away.

He seemed the straight arrow, but he was not. He got into fights, like a lot of other boys growing up on the rough blue-collar west side of Wichita, but learned to avoid them. He won debate championships in high school but hid his partying from his mother. He played the beagle Snoopy in a high school production of
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
He made Eagle Scout in 1971, the year before he graduated, but drank to excess on Fridays. He liked school. He liked mysteries, especially the stories about Sherlock Holmes.

Kenny Landwehr was still a teenager, not yet a deeply reflective soul, but he knew why he liked those stories: Holmes solved murders, the hardest crime to solve because the best possible witness was dead.

Kenny Landwehr, Eagle Scout.

2

January 15, 1974, 3:30
PM

All Tied Up

The afternoon paper landed on Wichita’s porches between 3:00 and 4:00
PM
, with the headline T
APE
E
RASED
, J
UDGE
T
OLD
on the front page. Judge John Sirica in Washington, D.C., was furious about an eighteen-minute gap in a recording of one of President Nixon’s private conversations about the Watergate burglary. That was the national news at the moment Carmen and Danny Otero arrived home, walking up Murdock Avenue from Robinson Junior High.

They saw several odd things: the station wagon was gone, the garage door up. The back door was locked. Lucky was staring at them from the backyard. That got their attention, because their parents never left him out�he barked at strangers. When they got the front door open, they found their mother’s purse on the living room floor, its contents scattered.

They saw Josie’s little white purse in the kitchen and their father’s wallet with its cards and papers strewn across the stove top. Potted meat containers and a package of bread, still open, sat on the table.

Danny and Carmen ran for their parents’ room. There they found them, their hands tied behind their backs, their bodies stiff and cold.

Charlie at that moment was walking home along Edgemoor, still keyed up from final-exam day at Southeast High. On the street, he picked up a religious pamphlet off the sidewalk.

“You need God for your life,” it said. He dropped it. Mom had taught them about God.

When Charlie saw Lucky standing outside, when he saw the garage door up, he decided he would tease his mom for being forgetful. Then he walked inside and heard Danny and Carmen yelling from his parents’ room.

What he saw there sent him running for the kitchen, where he grabbed a knife. “Whoever is in this house, you’re dead!” he yelled. No one answered.

He picked up a yardstick and whacked it around until it shattered.

The phone was dead. Charlie ran outside and banged on a neighbor’s door.

Officers Robert Bulla and Jim Lindeburg reached 803 North Edgemoor at 3:42
PM
. A teenage boy ran to them, looking wild and unstrung. He said his name was Charlie. He told the officers what they would find in the house.

Stay outside, they told Charlie and the two children with him. Bulla and Lindeburg walked in, saw the purse, walked deeper inside the house, and pushed on the door to the master bedroom. A man lay tied up on the floor; a woman lay on the bed, bare legs bent and hanging over the edge, her faced streaked with dried blood from her nose. The rope around her neck had been cut. The cops learned later that Carmen had nipped at it with toenail clippers, trying frantically to revive her mother.