Read Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer for Free Online Page A

was working on. More often than not, in the middle of the night, still half asleep, I’d open my eyes, fumble for a pen, and scribble cryptic notes on the pad, clues culled from the depths of my subconscious. My wife, Pam, hated this habit of mine because it always woke her up.
     
    But on this chilly fall morning, the top page appeared blank. I switched on a lamp, just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Pam moaned. I turned off the light, got dressed in the darkness, and drove the winding twenty-one miles to my office at Quantico, located on the main floor of the agency’s forensic science building. The location was a definite upgrade from the previous home of the Behavioral Science Unit—in the basement beneath the FBI Academy’s library. But the downside was that my office was constantly awash with nauseous, chemical fumes from the various laboratories in the building. On any given day, researchers attempting to develop more reliable, valid methods for testing crime evidence would tinker with various types of acid, iodine fumes, and gunpowder. Explosions and eye-burning smoke were commonplace. So were clanging fire alarms and evacuations of our building.
     
     
    I was the first guy in the office as usual, making it to my desk by 6:30 A.M. The first thing I did was close my office door so that no one would think I was there. I lived for the cases and loathed the unavoidable administrative duties that came with running a unit that was on the verge of mushrooming to forty-three people, including twelve FBI agents and twenty-one support personnel. I was constantly at odds with the paper-pushers above me, but the men and women of my unit knew I’d do anything for them. In between hopping from one brush fire to the next, I often spent hours each day either helping them with their work or providing a shoulder to cry on.
     
    It was nearly noon by the time I began rifling through my filing cabinets, trying to locate the profile I’d written on BTK back in 1979. As I dug through my files, I thought back to that day in fall 1974 when I first heard about BTK from a couple of veteran homicide detectives who worked for the Milwaukee PD. Although it wasn’t part of my job description, I was itching to gain experience in the science of murder investigation. That night in 1974, I dug up what I could find on this unknown killer in Wichita at the public library. I was amazed that news of his murders hadn’t received more play in newspapers outside of Kansas and noticed that the local cops appeared to be keeping a tight lid on information about the case.
     
    A few months afterwards, I wrote about BTK in a research paper for one of my graduate courses in abnormal psychology. In it, I noted that other mass murder cases, such as Charles Whitman (the Texas Tower sniper in Austin) and Richard Speck in Chicago, garnered national headlines, whereas the Otero family homicides received precious little play. I found myself seeing parallels to professional sports and how the athletes all want to play in the big media venues like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I wondered if BTK felt slighted by the lack of attention his killings were receiving and frustrated that he lived in such a backwater media market.
     
    I eventually unearthed my BTK file from beneath a sheaf of similar profiles penned over the past few years. Three pages long, with a cover sheet stapled on top, it read, “The attached analysis is only as good as the information that has been provided. In addition, it may be necessary to totally change or modify this analysis if new information is developed—such as additional victims, more forensic evidence, or new information obtained from research.”
     
    I rolled my chair up tight against my desk and laid the pages down on top of the clutter. As I began reading the words I’d typed years before, I felt it all coming back to me:
     
     
    MULTIPLE HOMICIDES. WICHITA. The murders of the BTK Strangler are the