OTERO CASE
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 ones help. There has been no talk either. Lets put it straight . . .
Joe:
Position: Southwest bedroom, feet tie to the bed. Head pointed in a southerly direction.
Bondage: Window blind cord.
Garrote: Blind cord, brown belt.
Death: The old bag trick and strangulation with clothesline rope.
Clothed: White sweatshirt, green pants.
Comments: He threw up at one time. Had rib injury from wreck few week before. Laying on coat.
Julie:
Position: Laying on her back crosswise on the bed pointed in southwestern direction. Face cover with a pillow.
Bondage: Blind cord.
Garrote: Clothes line cord tie in a clove hitch.
Death: Strangulation twice.
Clothes: Blue housecoat, black slack, white sock.
Comments: Blood on face from too much pressure on the neck, bed unmade.
Josephine:
Position: Hanging by the neck in the northwest part of the basement.
Dryer or freezer north of her body.
Bondage: Hand tie with blind cord. Feet and lower knees, upper knees and waist with clothes line cord. All one length.
Garrote: Rough hemp rope 1/4 dia., noose with four or five turns.
Clothes: Dark bra cut in the middle, sock.
[For some reason BTK left out the pale blue T-shirt and panties pulled down to her socks.]
Death: Strangulation once, hung.
Comments: Most of her clothes at the bottom of the stairs, green pants, and panties. Her glasses in the southwest bedroom.
Joseph:
Position: In the east bedroom laying on his back pointed in eastern direction.
Bondage: Blind cord.
Garrote: Three hoods; white T-shirt, white plastic bag, another T-shirt, Clothes line cord with clove-hitch.
Death: Suffocation once, stranglation-suffocation with the old bag trick.
Clothes: Brown pants, yellow-brown stripe T-shirt.
Comments: His radio is blaring.
All victims had their hands tie behind their backs. Gags of pillow case material. Slip knotts on Joe and Joseph neck to hold leg down or was at one time. Purse contents south of the table. Spilled drink in that area also, kids making lunches. Door shade in red chair in the living room. Otero’s watch missing. I needed one so I took it. Runsgood. Themostat turn down. Car was dirty inside, out of gas.
I’m sorry this happen to society. They are the ones who suffer the most. It hard to control myself. You probably call me “psychotic with sexual perversion hang-up” When this monster enter my brain I will never
know. But, it 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 it so the monster goes on, and hurt me as well as society. Society can be thankful that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victims being torture and being mine. It a big compicated game my friend of the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting . . . the pressure is great and sometimes some times he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has aready chosen his next victim or victims. I don’t who they are yet. The next day after I read the paper, I will know, but it to late. Good luck hunting.
YOURS, TRULY GUILTILY
P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be . . . Bind them, toture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.
There was no signature on the bottom of the letter. Instead, whoever penned it drew a cryptic symbol created from the letters BTK.
Judging from the way he described his crime scenes—with the 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 do change their MOs. Decades later, investigators would learn that BTK changed his modus operandi 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 isn’t necessarily needed to accomplish the crime.
In the Otero murders—and, we would later learn, in the Bright case—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 Hannon’s desk and began picking it apart, examining it for hair, fiber, and fingerprints, then sifting through every single misspelling and word usage, looking for any clue they could unearth.
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 18, when Thomas Meyers was finally located. But, for some reason, he had opted to sit on his communiqué for several days before sending it. Clearly the UNSUB didn’t want someone else getting credit for what he considered to be his
Mona Lisa.
But there was another reason. He appeared to be enjoying how he was making the Wichita police resemble the Keystone Kops. The last thing he wanted was for his local law enforcement agency to garner any positive accolades from the media or the community for possibly solving the Otero murders.
The UNSUB didn’t claim responsibility for Bright’s murder for the simple reason that he’d left behind a living witness—her brother. Police wouldn’t make that connection until the waning months of 1979. But now that I’d learned he’d been responsible for Kathy’s botched, bumbling, albeit lethal attack four months earlier, it seemed quite possible that he also typed his letter to police in order to remind himself—and them—of exactly what he was capable of when he was at the top of his game. After all, here was a killer who, in the Otero case, was able to overpower and con a family of four into submission.
What was certain, however, was that his letter contained a level of detail that only the Oteros’ killer could have known. It went far beyond anything that had appeared in the media after the homicides occurred. It read like a police crime report. His descriptions were so exact that I was left wondering if he’d photographed the crime scene before fleeing. How could he remember all those details if he hadn’t brought a camera, or perhaps discovered one at the house and used that?
Yet for all the precise, accurate information he included in his letter, there was also something peculiar. A few of the descriptions were so off the mark that detectives were a bit stumped. For instance, at the crime scene, Joseph didn’t have a bag on his head, and Julie’s face wasn’t covered by a pillow. The reason, police eventually learned, was that the Otero children had removed them while trying to revive their parents. Also, BTK never mentioned the pale blue T-shirt that Josephine was still wearing after her death.
In the end, however, these inaccuracies actually did more to prove that whoever penned the letter actually was the Oteros’ 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’d used five turns of his rope to create Josephine’s noose. In reality, he’d only used three. Detectives wrote off this mistake as a case of inattention due to the excitement he must have been experiencing prior to killing his eleven-year-old victim. Another perplexing aspect of the letter was the writer’s reference to Josephine’s glasses being left in the bedroom. Why would the killer 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.
Over the next couple of weeks, nearly two dozen psychologists and psychiatrists were shown the contents of the letter and asked to compile a personality profile of the individual they believed might have written it. The doctors were divided over whether or not it should be released to the public, something police were hesitant to do out of fear that they’d be inundated by an avalanche of false leads they knew they didn’t have the manpower to investigate.
We now know that there was an issue far more important than whether or not the department needed additional personnel to chase down leads. My belief is that police might have been more effective in their efforts if they’d been more forthcoming with the release of information to the public. Because when provided with useful behavioral characteristics of an UNSUB, the community can begin acting as a powerful tool for investigators, serving as their eyes, 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, coworker, or relative. But until people are given some clue as to what they’re supposed to have seen, they can’t help connect the dots for police.
The specialists were unanimous in their assessment: the writer was “a very sick man . . . who had a fetish for bondage. His reaction, sexually, is to be bound, to bind other people,” Chief Hannon eventually told reporters.
At the request of police, Granger placed a classified ad in the newspaper, which ran from October 24 to October 27, urging the killer to contact him. It read:
B.T.K. Help is available. Call 684-6321 before 10 P.M.
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 Otero murders. The intrepid 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 mood. He obviously had other things on his mind.
5
It was getting late. When I looked up from the stack of pages detailing the Kathy Bright homicide, the sun had vanished, and a coating of darkness had descended on the world outside.
I decided that maybe it was time to pack it in and head home for the night. I was tired. I gathered up my stacks of crime reports, wrapping rubber bands around each individual pile, tossed them into a bag, and trudged out into the darkness to my car. A few minutes into my half-hour drive home, I realized exactly what I needed to do. It was something I hadn’t done in nearly a month. So I turned the car around and steered north, toward Quantico National Cemetery, to visit the grave that had been intended for me.
Months earlier when it was assumed that I’d probably never pull out of my coma, some bureaucrat in the Veteran’s Administration reserved a plot for me in this newly opened cemetery that had once served as a blockade point for Confederate troops during the Civil War. When I refused to die, my plot was given to someone else. But I knew its location and felt a kind of strange attachment to the place. There but for the grace of God, I often thought to myself.
The grass was damp with evening dew as I walked through the cemetery looking for the grave, clutching my flashlight as though it were a club. A full moon, bright as a medical examiner’s lamp, had just crawled above the hickory and oak trees in the distance, helping illuminate my way. Before climbing out of the car, I had grabbed the sheaf of papers detailing BTK’s next victim—Shirley Vian, murdered in her bedroom as her children, who had been locked away in a bathroom, pleaded with the killer to leave their mother alone. I didn’t know what the hell I intended to do with all those papers, but it seemed only natural to bring them along for my nighttime stroll through the cemetery.