Inside the Mind of BTK

52 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
found on the back door, but these turned out to belong to Bright’s
landlord and he was quickly eliminated as a suspect.
Police knocked on every front door in the lower-middle-class
neighborhood where the sisters lived, asking if anyone could remember
seeing a suspicious-looking character shortly after the attack, but
no one reported seeing anyone out of the ordinary. A bloody white
nylon rope was discovered under a tarp in the bed of Kevin’s rusted,
decrepit Ford truck, parked on Holyoke Street. Police surmised that
the killer might have tossed them in there when fleeing the scene.
About the only thing detectives had to work with was a small
amount of marijuana they discovered in the house, leading them to
wonder if maybe the attack had something to do with a drug deal
gone awry. But then Karen Bright admitted that she and her sister were
recreational pot smokers, something the cops had no problem believing
because the amount found was so minuscule.
Although police weren’t ruling out the possibility that a local resident
could be responsible for the brutal slaying and shooting, they
reached out to California authorities, trying to determine if the
description given by Kevin matched any fugitives they were currently
pursuing. Before long, what few leads they had to work with had
grown ice cold.
Although there were a few whispers among detectives that Bright’s
killer might be the same individual responsible for the Otero murders,
nobody wasted much time trying to link the two cases. And why
would they? There appeared to be so many differences—Bright’s killer
didn’t cut the phone line, and he’d used both a knife and a gun on his
victims. Even his knots, which had been tied from jeans and nylons
(as opposed to the venetian blind cord used at the Otero crime scene)
were different. Kathy had been tied with granny knots, whereas the
Oteros had been bound with both clove hitches and half hitches.
By the end of April, something else was clear: 1974 was turning
out to be one of the bloodiest in recent memory. Six months after the
discovery of those four bodies in the Otero house, another quadruple
homicide rocked Wichita. Those murders, however, were quickly
revealed to be the result of a drug rip-off.
But the Otero and Bright murders were different. Every homicide
detective knows that good, thorough victimology—which, quite simply,
is the study of the victim of a particular offender—can help crack cases.
The problem with the Otero and Bright murders was that all these vic-