"BTK" Killer to strike again: FBI

[emad]

From UK's Times:

A memo from the BTK Strangler: I bind, torture, kill. And 25 years on, I'm back
Barry Wigmore

A serial killer murdered eight people in the 1970s then disappeared. Now he has sent a series of chilling notes to newspapers — and FBI profilers fear he may be preparing to strike again


Snip:
THE LETTER that dropped on the desk of Hurst Laviana, a crime reporter on The Wichita Eagle, was like many others. Another nut, thought Laviana. He hardly bothered to look at it, but photocopied it and passed it on to the captain of detectives at the police department. Just in case. Captain Daryl Haines was busy that Friday last March, and didn’t pay much attention to the letter either. It lay on his desk over the weekend. On Monday morning, however, the scrappy slip of paper had everyone’s attention.

It was a photocopied sheet of A4. Laid out neatly across it were three photos of the same dead woman. In each, her clothes were arranged slightly differently. The fourth image was of a driver’s licence, and the name on it instantly rang bells: Vicki Wegerle. It was the first time detectives had seen photos of the murder scene. Back in September 1986, when Wegerle was killed, ambulance men had rushed her to hospital before police arrived at her home. These Polaroids must have been taken by her killer. It was the first police had seen of her licence, too. That had been stolen by the murderer.

Suddenly the BTK Strangler, a serial killer, was back after 25 years of silence. Back to taunt the police — and, belatedly claim victim No 8. From 1974 to 1979 the monster stalked the remote prairie city of Wichita, Kansas. Armed with a .22 pistol and a knife, he followed his victims to learn their habits, broke into their homes when they were out, cut the phone line and lay in wait in a wardrobe. He murdered a family of four, including two children, and three other young women, and in letters to the paper, he gave himself the BTK nickname for his favoured method of murder: bind, torture, kill. Each note had the same motif on it that has never been revealed.

Then, in 1979, everything went quiet. Was BTK in jail for something else? In a mental institution? Had he died? Police kept searching. Two detective teams were set up to continue the investigation. The Hot Dog Squad from 1979 to 1981; the Ghostbusters from 1984 to 1986. They checked blood, fingerprints, copying machines and suspects across the country. Both teams drew a blank. Now it seems that BTK was sitting watching, waiting. Maybe he went on killing. But without shouting about it. Then, in March, on the 30th anniversary of his first murders, The Wichita Eagle ran a feature article by Laviana about the serial killer, and the monster emerged. There have since been three more notes from BTK. May, June, July. One a month. Each marked with the secret motif, and more angry than the previous. The last, left at the public library, may have contained photos of another victim. Police won’t reveal its contents, but it probably also contained a threat to kill again.
More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1220362,00.html

And previously on DU:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1306369

[THUNDER HANDS]

1. woah

first I've ever heard of this guy. Freaky.

[sniffa]

2. a good read on the guy

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/unsolved/btk/index_1.html?sect=4

[emad]

3. More more more:

So Wichita is a town on edge, wondering what will happen this month when the temperature, and tempers, soar. Gun shops, burglar-alarm companies, shooting ranges and self-defence schools are doing a roaring trade. At the university women students have forsaken individual digs to sleep in communal rooms. Two psychologists who have worked on the case for years say that BTK is going to strike again. Wichita is a working-class city, population 350,000, that grew up as a trading post for cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail. Dustbowl storms of the 1930s put it at the centre of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It has wide roads and an uneasy architectural mix of square, flat-roofed buildings, and ornate granite edifices. One of the big employers today is a cotton seed oil crushing factory.

For small town America, it has also had some pretty big murders. Four years ago two gunmen gatecrashed a party and forced five young professionals — teachers, lawyers, a doctor — into a sex orgy. They were then taken to cash machines to empty their accounts, and naked, to a local park where they were executed, the snow stained red with their blood. But nothing comes close to BTK. His first letter to the police, via The Wichita Eagle, in October 1974, set the scene. It arrived nine months after he had strangled Joseph Otero, 38, his wife Julie, 34, and their children, Josephine, 11, and 9-year-old Joseph Jr. BTK wrote (sic): “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. “I can’t stop it so, the monster goes on, and hurt me as well as society. Society can be thankfull that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victim being torture and being mine. It a big complicated 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 areadly chosen his next victim or victims. I don’t know, but it to late. Good luck hunting.”

BTK added: “PS: 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.” Police think the poor English may be intentional to throw them off. He sent the letter, which included crime-scene details only the killer could have known, because he was angry that a psychiatric-hospital patient had confessed to the Otero killings. More killings followed: April 4, 1974: Kathryn Bright, 21, stabbed. Her brother, shot twice in the head, survived. March 17, 1977: Shirley Vian, 24, tied up and strangled. December 8, 1977: Nancy Fox, 25, tied up and strangled. This time BTK himself called police minutes after leaving Fox’s home. At 8.30am on December 9, the police dispatcher got a call from a payphone: “Yes. You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing. Nancy Fox.” The phone was found off the hook. The victims were not sexually assaulted, but semen was found at several crime scenes.

On January 31, 1978, a poem written on an index card with a child’s printing set arrived at The Wichita Eagle. Based on the Curly Locks nursery rhyme, it referred to Shirley Vian’s murder. The first line said: “Shirley Locks, Shirley Locks, wilt thou be mine?”
Someone at the paper thought the card was a Valentine and forwarded it to classified ads, where it languished in the in-tray. Furious, BTK fired off a two-page, single spaced letter to the local KAKE TV station on February 10, 1978. “How many people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” he asked before promising to kill again. Another poem, Oh Death to Nancy, followed, based on an old folk tale. With it was a letter explicitly detailing the brutal murders of Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox. Until now, fearing that publicity would fuel BTK’s blood-lust, police had kept quiet about a serial killer being loose in the town. But realising that his strategy had failed, the police chief, Richard LaMunyon, hastily called a news conference to announce the full horror. On April 28, 1979, BTK waited in the home of a 63-year-old woman in the same area of single-storey clapboard homes as his previous strikes. She stayed with friends that night. It saved her life. On June 15, 1979, BTK sent a letter telling the woman he’d been there. Police believe his target was her daughter, who had been there on holiday. That was his last letter. Until now. Probably in his late fifties or early sixties, he is taunting the police again. But new techniques have allowed them to lift DNA from at least one of the old envelopes that he licked to seal. It matches the DNA of the semen from the crime scenes. They have run old fingerprints against a national database. FBI profilers are studying the old files and have managed to eliminate all old suspects. If they have any new ones, they are keeping quiet about it. Robert Beattie, a lawyer who has just finished a book on BTK and probably knows more about him than anyone outside the police, says: “The police just cannot believe they can’t catch this guy. Now most of the old guys I’ve spoken to think they were never even close.” Like many experts, Dr Howard Brodsky, a psychologist who was consulted about BTK in the 1980s, is astonished at the length of time BTK has kept his trophies. “This case is unique unto itself,” he says. “Jack the Ripper didn’t go on for 30 years. Can you imagine this guy suddenly popping up to say ‘Hey, I’m very much alive and you still can’t catch me’. It’s hard to believe he goes about his daily life all this time, then reads about the 30th anniversary in the newspaper and thinks ‘Oh yeah. That was me. I almost forgot’.

[TheRovingGourmet]

7. This would not be a good town to practice a burglary career.

[Mizmoon]

4. Talk about a lucky break

It says, " ... the last confirmed BTK incident took place on April 28, 1979, when he waited inside a house in the 600 block of South Pinecrest for the 63-year-old owner to come home. When she did not show up, BTK became angry and sent the woman a note along with one of her scarves. "Be glad you weren't here," he wrote, "because I was." Investigators believe that the killer was targeting the owner's daughter, whom he had perhaps seen entering the house on an earlier occasion."

Wow.

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5. More on psycho:

Something has changed in his life and jerked him back into action. Maybe he’s terminally ill. I don’t think he warms to people, so I doubt he has ever been married, but maybe some kind of relationship has broken down. Perhaps his mother has died.“He is being very clever because he’s telling us quite a lot without giving away so much that he reveals his identity.”

Dr Tony Ruark, another psychologist who worked on the case, agrees. “He loves to play God. He is really enjoying himself now. But we won’t know the full story until he is caught. And then we’ll think ‘Oh, yes, it was right in front of us all the time’.”

[RandomKoolzip]

6. Lots of similarities with the unsolved Zodiac Killer's crimes....

In fact, Tom Voigt, the webmaster of zodiackiller.com, also has a BTK site.

If this BTK guy strikes your interest chord, check out the Zodiac; VERY weird case, and unsolved to this day. (The Zodiac Killer is one of my hobbies; I've got all the books on him and visit the site daily to get whatever updates I can. It's an obsession.)

[gratuitous]

8. I read a book on Zodiac several years ago

The author did a good job of recounting the killings and the investigation (I can't remember the title or the author, unfortunately), but he also indicated very strongly that a likely suspect had been identified but the police didn't have sufficient evidence to really tie their candidate to the murders. As I recall, the author spent a few paragraphs where he watched the guy for a day or two, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary about him.

I wonder why some of us are so fascinated by such things?