Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 51
running out the front door. The best thing he could do for Kathy, he
decided, was to run and get help. Fifteen minutes later, a police cruiser
pulled up in front of Bright’s house.
The detectives listened as Kevin whispered his story to them,
amazed at his indestructibility and moved by his devotion to his older
sister. Despite his injuries, he practically had to be tied down in the
hospital bed to prevent him from fleeing the hospital and hitting the
street to search for Kathy’s killer.
Before leaving his hospital room, one of the detectives opened up
an Identi-Kit, used by police to create composite sketches of an
unknown suspect. Over the next forty-five minutes, Kevin poured
through the seemingly infinite number of combinations in the book
and reconstructed what he could recall from his assailant’s face.
He told officers that the man was a stocky twenty-five-year-old
Caucasian with dark hair and a thick dark mustache. He stood about
five-foot-ten, had a black stocking cap pulled over his head, which he
later removed, and wore a uniform that consisted of an orange shirt
and jacket. The completed picture was immediately put on the wire
and distributed to law enforcement agencies in the western states,
where it was believed the assailant had come from.
Despite the fact that police suddenly had what could be a good
description of the Brights’ attacker, the composite caused a fair bit of
dissension among several of the detectives assigned to the case. A few
believed that the likeness might actually help them nab Kathy’s murderer,
whereas others doubted that Kevin, who many suspected had
suffered a concussion, could be expected to recall much of value about
the suspect.
In all my years working these sorts of cases, I’d rarely heard of a
witness involved in a violent crime being able to create a composite
drawing that turned out to resemble the perpetrator. That’s why detectives
and prosecutors know that they had better have more than just
eyewitness testimony to tie a suspect to a crime. Many an investigation
has been sent down a dead-end road for this very reason. Nevertheless,
in the absence of anything else to work with, the Wichita police
quickly put out an all points bulletin, using the details Kevin provided,
along with the sketch he helped create.
Other than the clothes and nylons that had been used to tie up the
Brights, detectives found precious little evidence in the house. The
only set of latent fingerprints that police were unable to identify was