Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, Hurst Laviana Read Free Book Online

want to, Rader shouted back. I’ll blow your head off!
    With the shades drawn, it was dark in the bedroom at midday. He made the woman lie facedown on the bed, her head at the foot of it. He tied her feet to the metal head rail, and ran a long cord to her throat.
    She threw up on the floor.
    Oh, well , he thought. She said she was sick . And he had said this would not be pleasant. Not for her, anyway.
    He walked into the kitchen and fetched her a glass of water, to comfort her, or so he said later. He considered himself a nice guy. When Julie Otero had complained that her hands were going numb from her bindings, he had adjusted them. When Joe had said his chest hurt from lying on the floor with broken ribs, he had fetched Joe a coat to rest on. Now, in the darkened bedroom of the house on Hydraulic, he gave the sick woman a sip of water.
    Then he took a plastic bag out of his hit kit and pulled it over her head. He took the cord that was tied to the bed and wrapped the far end of it around her throat four or five times, along with her pink nightie.
    And he pulled. He had rigged the cord so that it tightened as she struggled. The kids screamed louder and hammered their hands on the wooden door as their mother died.
    He stood up, disappointed.
    He wanted to do more�suffocate the boys, hang the girl. But the phone call worried him.
    Before he walked out, he stole two pairs of the woman’s underpants.

9
    March 1977
    A Vigorous Debate
    Bud, the eight-year-old, picked up something hard and shattered the bottom pane of the bathroom window. They were all still screaming, and Steven now worried that Bud would get in trouble for breaking the window. But after Bud crawled out, Steven followed, dropping to the ground. They ran to the front door, then into their mother’s bedroom.
    They found the man gone, their mother tied up, a bag over her head. She was not moving.
     
    At 1:00 PM a police dispatcher radioed a cryptic message to Officer Raymond Fletcher: “Call me back on a telephone.” Dispatchers asked for a telephone call when they wanted to have a private conversation not broadcast on police scanners. When Fletcher called, the dispatcher gave him an address and said there was a report of a homicide.
    On South Hydraulic, James Burnett waved Fletcher down and said that two neighbor children had come screaming to his house. His wife, Sharon, had run to the boys’ home. In the living room, she saw a little girl sitting on the floor, sobbing. In the bedroom, Sharon Burnett found their dead mother.

    Bud Relford broke the bathroom window and escaped to alert the neighbors.
    James Burnett led Fletcher to Shirley Vian’s house. An ambulance was on the way. Fletcher, a former emergency medical technician, searched for a pulse as soon as he saw her, just as he had when he was one of the first two officers to walk into Kathryn Bright’s house. He felt a twitch under his fingertips, not a pulse but something faint. Fletcher yanked off the cord and nightie, but took care to leave the knots intact. He began CPR, pushing on the woman’s chest. Firefighters were coming in. He told them to preserve the knots�they were evidence.
    It was so dark with the blinds drawn that they could barely see. They carried the woman to the living room and restarted CPR.
    It was too late.
    Fletcher radioed dispatch. Send detectives, he said. It’s a homicide.
    In the living room, Fletcher saw the girl sitting on a couch, still crying.
    He carefully laid the knots aside and studied the rooms and the body. It did not occur to him that this murder could have been committed by the same guy who had killed Kathryn Bright. Aside from a trickle coming from Shirley’s ear, there was no blood. But something about this scene rang bells with him: the knots and multiple bindings, the bag over the woman’s head. He had seen things like this written about in the Otero reports. He remembered that Josie Otero had been sexually defiled. Fletcher searched the house,