Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Read Free Book Online Page B

stops. The bodies of ten victims, many of them prostitutes, were dumped near a river, creek, or around bridges in four states between 1999 and 2004. 25
    As this book went to press in the spring of 2004, Kansas suddenly became the nation’s serial murder hotspot. In Witchita, after a silence of twenty-five years an unidentified serial killer known as the “BTK Strangler” suddenly contacted authorities by mailing them identification of one of his previous victims and photographs of her corpse. The killer had murdered at least eight people between 1974 and 1986, including a family of four, while taunting police with letters and phone calls. He frequently entered the victims’ homes, sometimes during the day, cutting their phone line before proceeding to torture and strangle them. He wrote in one letter [spelling as in original]:
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 he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has aready chosen his next victimor 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. 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.
    Then suddenly, in 1979, the BTK strangler broke off contact and except for the 1986 murder of Vickie Wegerle, which was not at first linked to him, he appeared to have stopped killing. By 1987, the special BTK task force was disbanded.
    In January 2004, Kansas newspapers marked the thirtieth anniversary of the BTK killer’s first murders—the strangulation of the Otero family. Six weeks later, police announced that photos of Vickie Wegerle’s body taken by the killer had been mailed in to a Wichita paper. Police are now combing prison records in the hope that perhaps the BTK strangler has been incarcerated on other charges during the last two decades and can be identified.
    Meanwhile, in Kansas City, police announced in April that they had charged a suspect in a series of twelve rape strangulation murders of women between 1977 and 1993. The accused is a forty-three-year-old married supervisor in a Kansas trash-collecting company who was linked by DNA traces to the victims: nine white and three black women ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-six. Eleven of the victims, according to police, were prostitutes, while the twelfth was a mentally ill woman known to wander the streets and accept rides from strangers. *
    In Canada, police have spent $25 million so far investigating farmer Robert Pickton, who is suspected in the disappearances of some sixty Vancouver women, many of them down-on-their-luck street hookers and drug addicts. Investigators have been sifting the grounds of his pig farm for eighteen months, recovering the remains of twenty-two bodies and DNA traces linked to some of the missing women. Pickton is currently charged with fifteen counts of first-degree murder, but in January 2004, police announced that they discovered the remains of an additional nine women on the pig farm. Six of the nine were identified through DNA testing.Prosecutors informed the courts that they would be charging Pickton with additional counts of murder. His trial is scheduled to begin in 2005. 26
    In China, in April 2004, police dug up more bodies on the property of Huang Yong, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a pig farmer. He had already confessed to killing seventeen high school boys he lured