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 Page A

looking for semen stains. He did not find any, but he called dispatch.

    Stephanie Relford was found crying in the living room when the police arrived.
    “It looks like the same thing as the Otero case.”
     
    A lot of cops who showed up at Shirley Vian’s house thought the same thing. Bob Cocking, the sergeant assigned to secure the crime scene, said it out loud to detectives when they arrived. They whirled around and told him he did not know what he was talking about. Cocking, feeling insulted, walked away.
    But it wasn’t just detectives arguing with officers. They argued with each other. Supervisors told them to stop guessing and work the evidence. If BTK had killed Shirley Vian, it meant he was a serial killer, and the brass didn’t want to leap to that conclusion or set off a panic.
    Some of the cops were already leaking information that would get into the next day’s newspaper. Their supervisors then stepped outside and said the evidence of a link was unclear.
    The Eagle ’s new police reporter, Ken Stephens, didn’t buy that and wrote a story that noted similarities in the Otero and Vian crimes.

    The plastic bag and rope Rader used to kill Shirley Vian on her bed.
    Bill Cornwell, head of the homicide detectives, had visited the Vian scene “just to make sure it wasn’t the Otero killer again.” He privately noted a number of differences between the cases: there was no semen and no cut phone line at Shirley’s house. The Otero children died; Shirley’s children survived. But his gut told him it might be the same guy.
    Cornwell and LaMunyon also briefly considered whether this case might be linked not only to the Oteros but to the unsolved murder of Kathryn Bright. Most detectives still thought someone else killed Bright. So did Fletcher, a first responder at the Bright and Vian crime scenes.
     
    Shirley’s children tried to help the cops.
    Steven, the six-year-old, broke down and cried and told them everything he had seen. He had gone for soup, talked to man with a briefcase about a photograph, then let the man in. He blamed himself for that. He had let in the man who killed his mother. He said the man was dressed real nice. He described a man who was in his thirties or forties and had dark hair and a paunch. But as the boy talked, a uniformed officer walked up.

    Shirley Vian’s body is taken to be autopsied.
    The boy pointed.
    The bad guy looked like that man, the boy said.
    The detectives looked at the officer: tall, in his twenties, with a trim, athletic body. No paunch. The detectives glanced at each other and closed their notebooks. The boy’s description was useless.
     
    By this time, investigators, including Cornwell, had rejected a theory they had clung to for a long time: that the Oteros died in a drug-related revenge killing.
    Bernie Drowatzky, one of Cornwell’s better detectives, had been proposing another idea. Some of his bosses didn’t think much of it, but Drowatzky was saying that maybe they were dealing with a sex pervert who chose his victims at random. And if the guy who killed the Oteros had now killed Shirley Vian, that meant he was a serial killer.
    No, no, other cops said. The FBI said serial killers were incredibly rare.
    LaMunyon was not a detective, but instinct told him it was the same guy. It seemed obvious. But saying this publicly might cause a panic. If the evidence was there, he would stand before the notepads and TV cameras and say it. It would be embarrassing to admit he could not protect people, but if that was the truth, then he needed to warn people.

    Bernie Drowatzky, one of the primary detectives during the early years of the BTK investigation.
    In the days that followed Shirley’s murder, LaMunyon and the detectives reviewed every similarity and difference. The Otero killer had boldly walked in on them. This killer had walked in on Shirley and her children. The Otero killer had tied hands behind backs; so had this guy. The Otero killer had tied Joe