Inside the Mind of BTK

46 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
By now it was 3:45 in the afternoon. My legs were cramping up
from sitting in this stuffy library for so long. I stood up from the hard
wooden straight-backed chair I’d been camped out on for the past
three hours and stretched my legs, hoping to clear my head before diving
into my next batch of crime reports.
Part of me wanted to take a break, needed to drag some fresh air
into my lungs. But as I stood up, I made the mistake of glancing at
what lay on the top of the pile—a grainy black-and-white photograph
of Kathy Bright’s bedroom. Unable to control myself, I grabbed the
picture and sat back down. To hell with stretching my legs, I scolded
myself. I’ll take a break later.
In my pocket was a pill bottle containing the blood-thinning medication
that I’d come to rely on ever since emerging from my coma. I
fished out two capsules and popped them in my mouth. The irony
that I was attempting to catch one of the nation’s most elusive serial
killers while ingesting a blood-thinning drug that was essentially rat
poison was not lost on me.
I began dissecting the photograph, studying the mattress, which
had been moved off the metal bed frame; the shoes scattered about
the floor; and the comforter, blood smeared on the corner, that lay
crumpled in the corner of the room.
I’d learned long ago that the most important thing to remember
when studying a crime photograph is to resist the urge for your eyes to
be pulled into the center of the picture. Sometimes the thing you need
to find most lies on the periphery of the photo, at the distant edges.
I was once called in to work a homicide where the victim had
been raped, then stabbed ten times in the throat. Local police believed
that the UNSUB had stolen the victim’s engagement ring after abducting
her from a rest stop near Morrilton, Arkansas, while she exercised
her dogs during a cross-country car trip. The fact that her killer might
be the type who collected souvenirs from his victims had spun the
investigation into one dead end after another.
The morning I met with detectives in that Arkansas police station,
the victim’s parents were present in the room, desperate to find the
man who had killed their daughter. The first thing I did was begin
combing through the stack of photos snapped at the crime scene. By
the time I reached the third photograph, I found myself pointing to a
tiny gray object wedged between the carpet and the frame of the passenger
door, situated on the far right side of the picture.
“What’s this?” I asked.