Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (9 page)

December 9, 1977

“You Will Find a Homicide”

The next morning Rader was still so elated about what he’d done that he wanted to tell someone. On a coffee break, he drove the ADT van to Organ’s Market downtown and stepped to a pay phone outside the door. At 8:18 AM, a Sedgwick County emergency dispatcher took the call.

“You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing. Nancy Fox.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the dispatcher answered. “I can’t understand you. What is the address?”

Another dispatcher, listening in, spoke up: “I believe 843 South Pershing.”

“That is correct,” the man said.

Dispatchers tried to ask the man more, but he had dropped the receiver. The dispatchers listened to silence, trying to make sense of what they had just heard. Forty-seven seconds later, someone else picked up the phone. The dispatchers were still on the line.

Who are you? The dispatchers asked.

The man said he was a Wichita firefighter, off duty. He just wanted to use the phone.

Who was using the telephone just before you? the dispatchers asked.

A man who left the phone dangling, he told them.

Officer John Di Pietra reached 843 South Pershing minutes later, at 8:22 AM. No one answered his knock and the door was locked. At the back, he saw a cut phone line waggling in the breeze. The storm window had been removed, the interior window broken. He could not see through the drapes.

“Is anyone home?”

Di Pietra pushed back the drapes and saw a half-clothed woman lying motionless, facedown on a bed, her ankles tied with a piece of yellow cloth. She was wearing a pink sweater.

After they kicked in the front door, Di Pietra and Det. Louis Brown stepped into what Di Pietra later said was the tidiest home he had ever seen. But then he noticed disarray: there was a half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray beside a chair. A purse had been emptied onto the kitchen table. The phone receiver lay on the floor. Jewelry boxes had been dumped out on the bedroom dresser.

The officers saw a blue nightgown lying on the bed, beside the woman’s head. There were stains.

It was a dumb move, making that phone call, and Rader knew it. For weeks afterward he thought he’d be arrested. They had his voice on tape now, they knew which pay phone he had used; someone might remember seeing him drop the phone and get into the ADT van.

But he had felt so happy. Of all his murders, he liked this one most�the only one that ever went according to script. After Nancy died he took off the cuffs, tied her wrists with nylon stockings, took his belt off her throat, and tied another stocking in its place. He stole Nancy’s driver’s license, some lingerie�nice silky stuff. He liked to play with women’s clothing.

When he took Nancy’s pearl necklace, he thought he might give it to his wife.

Nancy’s mother, Georgia Mason, supervised the cafeteria at St. Joseph Hospital, not far from Nancy’s apartment. About 10:30 AM on December 9, she was getting ready to open the cafeteria when she got a call from a security officer.

At the security office, she saw two Wichita police detectives, two security officers, her ex-husband�Nancy’s father, Dale Fox�and a chaplain. We have some bad news, someone said. Georgia thought something had happened to Kevin, her youngest, who was sixteen. He had been skipping school.

It isn’t Kevin, someone said.

It’s Nancy.

Georgia, all five feet of her, beat her fists on the chest of a security officer, then collapsed on a couch.

The detectives showed Chief LaMunyon the crime scene photos and the videotape they took inside the duplex. Strangulation, phone line cut, semen on the nightgown�LaMunyon was sure this was BTK. He saw that Nancy’s eyeglasses had been placed neatly on the dresser beside her bed.

LaMunyon had to decide again whether to announce BTK publicly. He leaned toward doing it. They were not protecting anyone by keeping BTK a secret.

Some detectives remained unconvinced this was BTK. So what if the phone line was cut? Some burglars do that. So what if the guy left semen? Other killers had done the same.

They listened to the tape of the call to dispatchers.

The caller’s diction was staccato and slow. When he said, “You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing,” he pronounced homicide “
home
-eh-side,” as though he didn’t know how to say it right. Was he a foreigner?

The detectives had talked to the firefighter who picked up the dangling phone receiver. He told them he did not get a good look at the previous caller. He thought the guy was about six feet tall, that he wore a kind of gray industrial suit, that he drove a van with a painted sign on it. He thought the guy had blond hair.

Nancy’s mother went to St. Francis to identify her daughter’s body. A staff member pulled down a sheet. Nancy’s face looked as though the ordeal had aged her. The staff member asked if this was the body of Nancy Jo Fox.

“Yes,” Georgia said. Then she ran from the room.

Georgia helped arrange the funeral. Nancy had been baptized at Parkview Baptist and had sung in the choir. Now the church filled with mourners. A line of cars snaked down the road to Harper’s town cemetery.

Beverly Plapp took a leave from her nursing job to collect her sister’s belongings from the duplex. Georgia couldn’t bear to go there.

LaMunyon turned again to the FBI. Should he tell the public about BTK? LaMunyon thought so, but some detectives warned that this might encourage him to kill again. Should they try to communicate with BTK? The commanders were divided. The FBI guys could not decide. Behavioral science was new, they said. They had not collected or interpreted enough data. They took no position. LaMunyon hesitated�it seemed as though people would die whatever he decided. He decided again to wait.

He did not have to wait long.

Nancy’s youngest brother seemed to take her death the hardest. Nancy had liked to take Kevin out for hamburgers; she had let him drive her car. He never went back to school. It would be twenty-seven years before he could talk about her death.

Georgia’s doctor did not let her go back to work for three months. When she did, hospital coworkers came to her one by one. She had spent her life holding in feelings, but when they hugged her she would start crying. Her doctor had told her to go ahead and cry.

After Nancy died, Georgia would look out the window on Sundays, wishing Nancy would drive up in her Opel. It would be a long time before Georgia could fry chicken again.

At the family Christmas gathering, one of the presents opened was a Tonka truck, for little Thomas. Nancy had hidden it under the bed where she died.

No one came to arrest Rader, to his surprise.

He got cocky again.

Rader wrote out a poem about Shirley Vian on an index card one night, but as he was scribbling, his wife came home, and he quickly stuck the card in the folds of his chair. Then he forgot to retrieve the card and hide it.

His wife found it a few days later.

What’s this?

Well, he said. Yeah, I wrote that, but at WSU we’re working on some things, writing things about the BTK murders in my criminology class.

Paula bought the lie.

Later, he reworked the poem and printed it on an index card with a child’s rubber-stamping set. On January 31, 1978, he dropped it in the mail.

The index card arrived at
The Wichita Eagle
a day later.

SHIRLEY LOCKS! SHIRLEY LOCKS

WILT THOU BE MINE?

THOU SHALT NOT SCREEM

NOR YET FEE THE LINE

BUT LAY ON CUSHION

AND THINK OF ME AND DEATH

AND HOW ITS GOING TO BE.

B.T.K.

POEM FOR FOX NEXT

This poem was sent to the
Eagle,
but was not immediately recognized as being from BTK.

No one handling the
Eagle
’s mail that day gave it more than a glance. It looked like a message for a special Valentine’s Day section in the classifieds�the holiday was two weeks away. The card never made it to the newsroom. It was forwarded to the
Eagle
’s classified advertising department. There was no money with the card, so the classified people put it in a dead-letter file. Days passed; the
Eagle
published nothing. The poem’s author grew irritated.

What do I have to do, draw them a picture?

13

February 10, 1978

Big News

The letter came through KAKE-TV’s front door like an angry dog, with its teeth bared. When the receptionist opened the envelope she found a poem titled “OH! DEATH TO NANCY.” To the left of the poem the sender had typed “B.T.K.” four times, and beside each, he added tiny hangman’s nooses. There was a pencil drawing of a woman bound and gagged, and a two-page note with hundreds of words, many of them misspelled.

I find the newspaper not wirting about the poem on Vain unamusing
.
A little paragraph would have enought. Iknom it not the news media fault. The Police Cheif he keep things quiet, and doesn’t let the pubbic know there a psycho running lose strangling mostly women, there 7 in the ground; who will be next?

How many do I have to Kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention. Do the cop think that all those deaths are not related?

Larry Hatteberg, a KAKE photojournalist, called his news director at home a few minutes later. Ron Loewen was sleeping hard; there was a downtown bar called the Looking Glass, where journalists drank after work, and he’d spent a lot of time there the night before.

You need to come in now, Hatteberg said.

Why?

We have a letter.

Why is it important?

It looks like it could be from BTK.

Loewen hurried to KAKE, his clothes still smelling of stale beer. He had skipped taking a shower.

The woman in the drawing was lying facedown on a double bed, gagged, ankles and thighs bound, hands bound behind her.

Loewen knew who BTK was: the guy who claimed to have murdered the Oteros. But Loewen was relatively new to Wichita, so parts of the letter mystified him. Who is Nancy? he asked. Who is “Vain”? Hatteberg said they were Nancy Fox and Shirley Vian, two murder victims from the previous year.

Had anyone ever connected the Otero killer to the Fox and Vian homicides? Loewen asked. Hatteberg said no.

Loewen realized, as his hands began to tremble, that if the letter was authentic, if BTK had killed Nancy Fox and Shirley Vian, that made BTK a serial killer. That was something the public had not heard before.

He read more:

Josephine, when I hung her really turn me on; her pleading for mercy then the rope took whole, she helpless; staring at me with wide terror fill eyes the rope getting tighter-tighter.

Loewen was only thirty. He had never faced a story this big. He felt sick and alone, as though he’d just been transported to the far side of the moon. What should he do about this letter? He read more, about Shirley Vian’s kids:

They were very lucky; phone call save them. I was go-ng to tape the boys and put plastics bag over there head like I did Joseph, and Shirley. And then hang the girl. God-oh God what a beautiful sexual relief tha would been.

In the letter, BTK claimed another victim�#5�whom he did not name.

7 down and many moreto go.

BTK was threatening to kill again. He underscored that point, saying that he would leave a note with the letters “BTK” on his next victim.

We need to call the cops, Loewen said. He picked up the phone.

He wondered whether the cops knew BTK was a serial killer and had covered it up. He wondered whether BTK had been stalking KAKE’s female anchors.

Hatteberg and Loewen drove to city hall as Loewen fretted out loud:

What if it really is BTK, but LaMunyon blows us off and refuses to say? How do we confirm it’s really BTK?

Hatteberg did not know what to advise.

What if the letter is real but there is a cover-up? Loewen asked. All they have to do is deny the letter is authentic. Or worse, they could stall…tell us that they have to test the letter…show it to experts…meanwhile there’s a killer at large who has pledged to kill again….

Hatteberg said they had to run a story no matter what, to warn people.

Oh, we’re going to air the story, Loewen said. No matter what LaMunyon says.

LaMunyon and Deputy Chief Cornwell read the letter slowly, sitting side by side, turning pages. They had said hardly a word since Loewen and Hatteberg arrived.

LaMunyon stood up.

Would you excuse us for a few minutes? he asked. We need to talk about this in private.