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attacker senseless. Doctors reattached Lamunyon’s fingers, but they remained stiff for life.
     
    One of the first things the new chief did was study the BTK files. The case had to be a top priority, he decided.
    He never got the sight of Josie Otero out of his head.
     
    March 1977 arrived with the birds and buds of spring. There had been no letters from BTK since the message in October 1974, when he threatened to kill again. But he had not killed.
    Rader was installing home alarms for ADT and attending WSU. He was intensely busy at home. His wife had given birth to a son about nine months after he wrote the letter about killing the Oteros. They named him Brian.
    Rader had married in 1971, two years and eight months before he killed the Oteros, and while he was taking classes at Butler Community College twenty-five miles away in El Dorado. His bride, Paula Dietz, worked then as a secretary for the American Legion. For the ceremony at Christ Lutheran Church, two of his three younger brothers stood up with him.
    He appeared to adore Paula; people noticed that his voice and posture grew softer when he spoke of her.
    Years later, in a self-regarding tone, Rader would complain that family got in the way: I had a wife, I had to work, you know, I can’t go out. When you live at home with a wife, you can’t go out and prowl around till three or four in the morning without your wife being suspicious.
    He had never stopped trolling and stalking, though.

8
March 17, 1977
    Toys for the Kids
    It was Saint Patrick’s Day. Rader would later recall there was a parade downtown. His wife was at work; he was on spring break from Wichita State.
    He put on dress shoes, nice slacks, and a tweed sports jacket. He thought he looked spiffy, like James Bond. He carried a briefcase with his tools�tape, cord, gun, plastic bags. He also carried a photograph. It was a tool too�he would show it to make people think he was a detective searching for a lost boy.
    He had trolled, picked out targets, then backed off. Serial killing was like fishing, he would later confide: sometimes you’re unlucky. Or you get tangled up with chores, work, school.
    His primary target this day lived at 1207 South Greenwood. If that target didn’t work out, he had a backup just a block to the east at 1243 South Hydraulic. There was an alley behind that address, a place to hide. And if those targets didn’t work out, he had another backup, and yet another. He had stalked multiple women, switching surveillance from one to another for weeks, taking notes, pondering escape routes. His, not theirs.

    Shirley Vian.
    He knew that one of the three young women at the house on Hydraulic was named Cheryl. She was a loose woman, in his opinion; he had watched her drink and party at the Blackout, a college bar. He had followed her home, spied on her and her roommates for weeks. Project Blackout, he called her.
     
    Cheryl Gilmour lived with a roommate, Judy Clark. The third “woman” Rader had noticed was Judy’s sixteen-year-old sister, Karin, who frequently stayed at the house.
    Two doors down, at 1311 South Hydraulic, there was another woman, with three kids. Rader had not targeted her. She just lived in the neighborhood. Her name was Shirley Vian, and she and her kids all had the flu. When the kids got hungry at lunchtime, she called the Dillons grocery store a block away to tell them that she was sending one of her little boys for food.
    Steven, age six, bought soup and walked back home, where his mother told him it was the wrong kind.
    He walked back to the Dillons and got the soup she wanted. Just before he got back home, a tall man with a briefcase stopped him and asked him a question.

    Shirley Vian’s son Steven Relford
    The primary target at 1207 South Greenwood had not worked out; no one answered Rader’s knock. He stood for a moment, holding his briefcase. He thought about breaking in, as he had done at the Bright house, but decided he did not want to risk