Inside the Mind of BTK

54 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
the threesome’s mental instability. Years before, my Behavioral Science
Unit worked on a case with similar dynamics, involving two homicides
that had occurred nearly a decade apart in northern Virginia.
After reviewing the murders, we concluded that the same offender was
responsible for both crimes. There was just one problem. A mentally
challenged man was currently sitting in jail for the first homicide at
the time the second murder had occurred. We eventually discovered
that police interrogators had convinced the suspect to confess to the
killing, telling him it was the only way to avoid the death penalty if
convicted. The real killer, it turned out, was a career burglar who committed
the murders during his probationary stints in half-way houses.
He was later found guilty of the killings, and the governor exonerated
the first man and ordered him released from prison.
None of the three men in Wichita were ever charged with any
crime, but media coverage of these new unnamed suspects in the
Otero case evidently began to annoy the real killer. The fact that three
poseurs were getting ink and airtime for what he considered to be the
crowning achievement of his life proved more than he could bear.
Late in the morning on October 22, he telephoned the Otero murder
hotline set up by one of the city’s two daily newspapers—the
Wichita Eagle and Beacon. When columnist Don Granger picked up
the phone, the voice at the other end of the line got right to the point.
“Listen and listen good because I’m not going to repeat it,” he
growled, explaining that the man who killed the Oteros had stuck a
letter inside a mechanical engineering textbook on the second floor
of the Wichita Public Library.
That was all he said. Then he hung up, as if really annoyed.
Granger immediately telephoned Floyd Hannon, the chief of
police, and told him the news. Within minutes, Detective Drowatzky
was combing through the aisles of the library, located across the street
from police headquarters, searching for the book. He eventually found
a white envelope with the name Bill Thomas Killman, which police
would eventually realize was an acronym for BTK, typed in the upper
left-hand portion of the envelope.
Drowatzky’s first impression upon reading it was, “It was jumbled
up to make everyone think he was an idiot, which he was. But it also
became apparent that he had a certain sick intelligence to him.”
The letter had been typed and was laced with butchered syntax
and numerous misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and misconjugated
verbs. Of the detectives who poured over it, no one was quite sure