Inside the Mind of BTK

196 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
that he was the man who killed the Otero family, along with several
other women in Wichita. He then informed her that “she was next.”
Despite nearly being choked to death moments before, Fox was
conscious enough to quickly realize that she was in terrible trouble.
Once again, she struggled as best she could against her attacker, but it
was no use. Rader pulled on the belt with all his strength. After a few
minutes, Nancy Fox was dead.
He looked down at her body and masturbated into her nightgown.
Afterwards he loosened the belt, then tied several pair of panty
hose around the young woman’s neck. Then he unlocked the handcuffs
and bound her wrists with red panty hose. He got dressed, tidied
up the apartment, and rummaged through her possessions, looking
for some suitable mementos, finally settling on her driver’s license and
several pieces of her lingerie and jewelry.
The last thing he did before leaving was to crank up the thermostat
again in the belief that it would cause Fox’s body to decay at a
faster rate, no doubt making her autopsy more difficult. Rader probably
learned about this in one of his criminal justice classes at WSU.
He’d been told that one of the ways to determine a victim’s time of
death is to take his or her temperature with a rectal thermometer, then
check the degree of rigor mortis in the body. Room temperature does
have an effect on the rate of decomposition, but in many ways this
didn’t matter because Rader had no real link to the victim. Instead,
this sort of measure would ordinarily be an act for a killer who knew
the deceased and wished to alter the estimated time of death in order
to establish an alibi.
By the next morning, the suspense was killing him. When the hell
were the cops going to find her? When was the news of his latest kill
going to hit the media? He hadn’t slept much the night before, and the
moment he awoke he grabbed that morning’s issue of the Wichita
Eagle and scanned it for some mention of Nancy Fox. His scrapbooks
were stuffed full of articles he’d torn out of the local papers, discussing
his previous three murders, and he no doubt was looking forward to
adding to his collection. But he could find nothing about the murder
in the Eagle. Suddenly it dawned on him that even if the cops had discovered
her body some time in the night, it probably would have happened
far too late to make the deadline for the morning paper.
He got dressed and drove to his job at ADT. At the time, he was
working as a crew chief, overseeing the installation of a fire alarm in
a large building in downtown Wichita. On the way there, he stopped