Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 41
Police speculated that after the attacker somehow managed to
subdue the family and tie them up, he quickly decided to get rid of
Joseph. With this one wild card out of the picture, the killer could continue
his work at a more leisurely pace. Exactly what Joseph must have
been thinking during those final moments, no one will ever know. But
this one-time champion boxer, who was also a black belt in karate,
surely must have been cursing himself for not putting up more of a
fight when he had the chance, before allowing himself to be tied up.
Time was another factor. Even after he managed to kill Joseph, the
UNSUB would have been constantly watching the clock. He knew he
had to work quickly. With that many people living at the residence,
the odds were good that somebody—one of the other Otero siblings,
a classmate, another parent or a neighbor—might show up at the
house. Yet he still wanted to savor the sick thrill of what he was doing,
reminding himself that he couldn’t spend much time with Julie,
Joseph, and Joey. He hadn’t come for them. From what I could see,
they were just appetizers. It seemed obvious that he’d been watching
the family, and what he really longed for was the main course and the
dessert, all rolled into one—eleven-year-old Josephine.
Judging from the abrasions on the upper portion of Julie’s neck,
just below her ears, she had been strangled from behind while she lay
on her stomach. The killer had evidentially straddled her, lifting her
torso up off the bed while choking her. Beside her, traces of semen
were found on the sheets and pillow; these were eventually determined
to have come from her husband. The presence of Josephine’s glasses
in her parents’ bedroom led detectives to believe that the killer had
purposely left them there to confuse investigators.
Another bit of evidence that puzzled detectives was the chair with
a broken rung found in the boys’ bedroom. In her interview with
police, Carmen June claimed that the chair came from the bedroom
she shared with Josephine. Upon learning that, detectives began to
suspect that the killer had moved the chair into the boys’ bedroom,
then held Josephine in his lap, forcing her to watch her brother suffocate.
The wooden rung could have been cracked while he struggled to
hold the squirming child, who probably would have fought to keep
from watching Joey die. Even though traces of bruising could be seen
encircling his neck, Joey was the only member of the family to die
from asphyxiation, not strangulation. With a plastic bag over his head,
along with the two T-shirts, the boy probably took four to five minutes
to expire.