Inside the Mind of BTK
The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
By John Douglas Johnny Dodd
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2007
John Douglas
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-8484-7
Chapter One
My Lifelong Hunt
for BTK
Somewhere inside my head, the murder played itself
out the way it always did in my dreams. His hands were wrapped
around her throat-patiently, relentlessly squeezing the life away from
her. Blood vessels in the whites of her eyes ruptured from the pressure
building up inside her head, creating hemorrhages that resembled
faint red and yellow flowers.
She never thought it would end like this. But then who really
does? And still he continued to squeeze. His hands and fingers were
powerful enough to prevent the blood from flowing through the
carotid arteries that snaked up either side of her neck. But to compress
the vertebral arteries that allowed the blood to drain from her brain,
he needed to twist her head at just the correct angle. So he lifted her
torso a few inches off the mattress and went about his business. It was
almost over-even amid the chaos, she could sense this. So she used
what remained of her strength to try to claw his face. But he'd already
considered that option and had tied her arms and legs to the wooden
bedposts. She never laid a finger on him.
After a few more moments, her hyoid bone cracked. The sound
was similar to that of a twig snapping. It was only a matter of time
now. A spasm-like shudder rippled through her nude body, followed
by a trickle of blood dripping from her nostrils ...
"Jesus," I muttered, sitting up in bed, wiping the sweat from my
eyes. "I gotta get a grip."
My heart was pounding, thumping madly. For a moment, I wondered
if I was having a heart attack, but the vision of the strangled
woman's face quickly returned. Just another god-awful nightmare.
That face-I'd been seeing that face and hundreds like it for the
past couple years now. Almost every night they came to visit me when
I fell asleep. Each was in the midst of being brutally murdered-strangled,
stabbed, shot, beaten, poisoned. All of them were people I'd come
to know only after they'd been killed.
Welcome to my life, circa October 1984. For the past five years
I'd worked myself to the point of physical and mental exhaustion
while helping create the FBI's elite criminal profiling unit. Back when
I started with the bureau in 1970, criminal profiling was seen as a
bunch of snake oil, something spoken about only in whispers. But
over the course of the next decade and a half, I and a few other
visionary, bullheaded souls like Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood had
worked tirelessly to prove that criminal personality profiling could
provide a legitimate, effective crime-fighting tool. Investigators from
police departments around the globe turned to me and my unit after
they'd hit a brick wall. We examined crime scenes and created profiles
of the perpetrators, describing their habits and predicting their
next moves.
I was addicted to my job as the leader of the FBI's Investigative
Support Unit (ISU) and over the years had immersed myself in thousands
of the nation's most grisly homicides and other violent interpersonal
crime cases. I'd poured over mountains of crime scene
reports and scrutinized stacks of photos that sometimes made me
physically ill. I hunted some of the most sadistic and notorious criminals
in the nation-the Trailside Killer in San Francisco, the Atlanta
child murderer, the Tylenol poisoner, and the man who hunted prostitutes
for sport in the Alaskan wilderness.
In an effort to understand the motives and motivation of the
killers we were trying to catch, I-along with my colleagues-met
face-to-face with dozens of serial murderers and assassins, including
Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremmer, Richard Speck, John
Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), and James Earl Ray. The
findings of these interviews became part of a landmark study into
what makes serial killers tick and, in 1988, it was published as a book:
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives.
Up until then, no one had ever thought to undertake this type of
research from an investigative perspective. It had always been done by
psychologists, psychiatrists, or parole officers. But I was convinced that
those of us with a police background had the ability to understand the
mind of an incarcerated felon far better than any psychologist or psychiatrist.
We possess a type of street smarts that can't be learned out
of a book or a classroom. We can listen to a suspect's words, but we
also know how the mind of the criminal works.
I worked much like a physician-only all my patients had usually
either been murdered or raped by the time I got to them. And instead
of studying their medical history in an effort to cure their disease, I
reviewed crime scenes, forensic evidence, and the victim's background
(this work is known as victimology), trying to better understand what
kind of person could have committed a particular crime. It was only
after we answered those questions that we could prescribe a course of
action that investigators should take.
Over the years, our work helped police crack plenty of cases and
put countless sick, dangerous people behind bars. But it wasn't without
a heavy price. I could never turn down any request for help on an
investigation. My caseload quickly became so overwhelming that I
worked myself past the point of exhaustion.
In early December 1983, while in the Seattle area trying to come
up with a profile of the so-called Green River serial murderer, I collapsed
in my hotel room from viral encephalitis. For three days, unbeknownst
to anyone, I lay on the floor in a coma, my body racked by a
105-degree fever with a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on my door.
After they found me, I hovered in that strange purgatory between
life and death. The right side of my brain had ruptured and hemorrhaged.
I wouldn't survive the high fever raging within my body, the
specialists explained to my wife.
A grave was reserved for me at Quantico National Cemetery. A
priest administered my last rites. But I somehow managed to hold on
to life. My family, along with friends and fellow agents, kept a week-long
vigil in my hospital room, occasionally encircling my bed and
holding hands while praying for me.
After I emerged from my coma, the left side of my face drooped,
my speech was horribly slurred, and blood clots formed in my lungs
and legs. In an effort to control my seizures, I was given phobarital,
then Dilantin. After I left the hospital and returned home to Virginia,
my body slowly went to work mending itself.
Yet before long I began to sense that something was different
about me; something seemed amiss. I'd awoken from my coma a different
man. I found myself looking at the world in a new way. It
wasn't obvious to anyone but me. It was so subtle at first that I barely
realized what was happening.
I'd begun to identify with the victim. I still wanted to catch the
monsters and slap them behind bars. But it was my newfound
propensity to identify with the victim of violent crimes that began
changing the way I looked at the world. I started seeing things
through the eyes of those who, for whatever reason, had their lives
stolen away from them by another. It wasn't long before I began to
understand-viscerally, from the inside-the horror that comes with
being murdered, beaten, or raped.
This newfound shift in perspective hardly came as a surprise. In
my own way, I'd become a victim of my own obsessive-compulsive
way of doing my job. Weeks after arriving home from the hospital, I
still felt vulnerable, weak, and overwrought with emotion that something
like this could happen to
John Douglas. A few months before, I
was at the top of my game-thirty-eight years old, strong as an ox,
focused, motivated, and driven. I had a beautiful wife and two
adorable little girls, and I felt blessed to be forging a name for myself
in a career I loved. Nothing could stop me. Or so I thought. On that
cool autumn night in October 1984 when I woke from my nightmare,
I was on the mend. After a few unstable months, I could now walk,
run, and lift weights.
My mind, however, was another story. As much as I hated to
admit it, I was a psychological wreck. A few weeks before, I'd begun
driving out to Quantico National Cemetery to sit by the grave where
I was supposed to have been buried, wondering who had taken my
spot in the ground. Try as I might, I couldn't shake my anger at the
FBI for not giving me the support I'd needed to perform my job, for
fostering a work environment where you had to literally drop from
exhaustion before anyone would ever step forward to help you.
I pushed myself up from the bed, shoved my feet into a pair of
slippers, plodded downstairs into my study, and closed the doors
behind me. It had been a long day, and it was turning out to be another
long, sleepless night. I collapsed into my leather chair and polished off
what remained in the wine glass on my desk. I'd returned to my job
at Quantico the previous April, but I was still a raw nerve, still trying
to come to grips with the inescapable fact that my brain couldn't work
the way it used to.
Earlier that afternoon, two detectives from the Wichita Police
Department arrived at FBI headquarters, hoping I might have some
answers for them. They'd read my 1979 analysis of the BTK case and
wanted to discuss the latest developments in my research that would
allow them to finally nab this heinous killer. We sat down in a conference
room, and they walked me through a case that had stumped their
department for the past decade. Almost seven years had passed since
his last known murder.
As I listened, I felt my focus and confidence return. For the next
eight hours, my brain ran on autopilot, soaking up every fact and bit
of data the two detectives tossed at me. The sensation wouldn't last,
I knew. But it was nice, all the same-it reminded me of who I used
to be.
Despite my having recently returned to work after months of
being on sick leave, I already had an enormous caseload. So did the
six wannabe profilers assigned to me, whom I'd handpicked because
of their impeccable reputations as investigators. But I could sense how
much pressure the Wichita police were under from their community
to take this killer off the street, so I decided we owed it to them to
carve out some time in our overcrowded schedules to see how we
could help.
The facts behind BTK's killings went like this:
In January 1974, he strangled Joseph Otero, thirty-eight; his wife,
Julie, thirty-four; and son Joey, nine. The partially nude body of
Josephine, eleven, was discovered hanging from a water pipe in the
basement. A large amount of semen was found on her leg.
In October, the local paper received a detailed letter from someone
claiming to have killed the Otero family. In March 1977, Shirley
Vian, twenty-four, was found strangled, with her hands and feet
bound. The killer had locked her children in the bathroom. In all likelihood
he would have killed them, but was scared away by a ringing
telephone. In December 1977, BTK telephoned a police dispatcher to
inform police about his latest murder-twenty-five-year-old Nancy
Fox, whose body was found strangled on her bed. The next month,
the killer sent a letter about the killing to the local paper-although
it wasn't discovered for almost two weeks. In February 1978, he sent
another letter to a local TV station, gloating over his killing of Vian
and Fox, along with another unnamed victim.
In April 1979, he waited inside the home of a sixty-three-year-old
woman, but eventually left before she returned home. Not long afterwards,
he sent his intended target a letter, informing her that he'd chosen
her as his next victim, but had opted not to kill her after growing
tired of waiting for her to arrive home.
The local cops had exhausted all their leads. But in the five years
since I'd last reviewed the case, investigators had managed to link
another homicide to him. In April 1974, three months after the Otero
killings, Kathryn Bright, a twenty-one-year-old assembly line worker,
was stabbed to death in her home. Despite being shot twice in the
head, her nineteen-year-old brother survived the attack. The detectives
briefing me believed that having another case to link to BTK,
especially one with a survivor, might help shed some new light on the
UNSUB responsible for the murders.
From my knowledge of the case and of the Wichita Police Department,
widely regarded in law enforcement circles as one of the most
progressive in the nation, I was confident that the police hadn't
botched this investigation. Yet the killer was still on the loose, and this
worried everybody.
Why, everyone wondered, had he stopped killing? What had happened
to him? I sensed he was still out there. But he'd become a ghost,
which was why the task force created by Wichita police a few months
before, in July 1984, had been named the Ghostbusters. I had a hunch
that the only way we could catch this ghost would be to find some way
to flush him out, to develop some sort of a strategy to force him out
into the light where we could finally see him.
I rummaged through a few drawers in my hopelessly messy desk,
looking for the criminal profile I'd written for police back in 1979, but
I couldn't locate it.
"Probably back at the office," I mumbled to myself.
And then it suddenly came rushing back to me-the memory of
that night three years ago in 1981, when I used BTK to help pry information
out of the head of one of the nation's most notorious serial
killers. It happened in a pale green interrogation room deep inside the
Attica Correctional Facility, with fellow FBI profiler Bob Ressler.
It was evening, the loneliest time inside a prison. We'd arrived unannounced,
on a fishing expedition of sorts, hoping to convince David
Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, to help us with our criminal profiling
study, which involved a fifty-seven-page interview questionnaire. We
wanted answers to such questions as
What was his motive? Was there a
trigger that set him off on his murderous spree? What was his early childhood
like? How did he select his victims? Did he ever visit the grave sites of
his victims? How closely did he follow the press coverage of his crimes? His
answers would help us better understand the killers we were hunting.
Berkowitz was three years into his 365-year prison term after trying
unsuccessfully to convince a jury that his neighbor's Labrador
retriever had commanded him to gun down his six victims. He looked
surprised to see us when the guards led him into the tiny interrogation
room.
"Who are you guys?" he asked the moment he spotted us seated
at the far end of the only piece of furniture in the room-a linoleum-covered
table. As planned, the guards had quickly exited before
Berkowitz had a chance to tell us to take a hike.
"We're FBI agents, David," I told him. "We'd like to talk to you.
We're hoping you might be able to help us." Berkowitz wheeled
around toward where he expected the guards to be, but because they
were no longer there, he begrudgingly took a seat.
"It's like I always say," I explained, "if you want to learn how to
paint, you don't read about it in a book. You go straight to the artist.
And that's what you are, David. You're the artist."
I was laying it on, but, I hoped, not too thick. Berkowitz stared at
me with his aquamarine eyes. He didn't smile. He didn't even blink.
Inside his head, he was trying to figure out some way to get something
in return for talking to us.
"I'll speak to the warden," I said, trying to head off his question.
"I can't make any promises. But if you agree to talk to us, I'll tell him
how helpful you've been."
He nodded slightly, looking past us at the cinder-block wall
behind our backs. I didn't have much time. He seemed about thirty
seconds away from shouting out to the guards to get back in here and
take him back to his cell.
"Why me?" he asked. "I ain't no artist."
"What in the hell are you talking about?" I laughed. "You're
famous. You're huge. You had all of New York City scared shitless. In
a hundred years, no one will remember my name. But everybody will
still know who the Son of Sam was." Berkowitz listened, but he didn't
seem all that impressed with the bullshit I was spoon-feeding him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inside the Mind of BTK
by John Douglas Johnny Dodd
Copyright © 2007 by John Douglas.
Excerpted by permission.
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