Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 63
From somewhere behind me, I heard a twig snap. In a split second,
my fingers wrapped around the butt of the revolver that hung in
the shoulder holster I wore beneath my suit jacket, then I wheeled
around to confront what I imagined to be my assailant. But all I saw
was a deer chewing on some dried leaves.
I stood up, fumbled for the flashlight beside me, and hit the animal
with a white blast of light. It bolted toward the woods. My heart was
pounding as I sat back down in the grass, chuckling over my edginess.
I looked over at the sheaf of papers I’d carried with me and
decided that this was as good a place as any to begin boning up on
BTK’s next victim. I spread the pages out in front of me and, with the
help of the moonlight and my flashlight, began reading again.
It was the early afternoon of March 17, 1977, when Wichita police
lieutenant Bernie Drowatzky pulled up to the house at 1311 South
Hydraulic Street, located two miles northwest of the Otero residence.
The fact that Drowatzky kept showing up at BTK crime scenes was
hardly surprising. Bernie was something of a go-to guy with the
Wichita Police Department, the type of cop who loved to stick his nose
into just about any call from dispatch he heard come over his car
radio. All he knew from the radio was that the woman who lived there,
twenty-four-year-old Shirley Vian, had been strangled. As he walked
up to the front door and stood on the rundown wooden porch, he
couldn’t help thinking how much the tired, white wooden siding
reminded him of Kathy Bright’s house, yet another murder he’d
helped investigate. Drowatzky went inside, and a patrolman who’d
arrived earlier gave him a quick tick-tock of the events as told to officers
by Vian’s five-year-old son, Steve.
According to the boy, a stranger had entered the house, locked
him and his eight-year-old brother, Bud, and four-year-old sister,
Stephanie, in the bathroom, then proceeded to murder his mother in
the adjacent bedroom. No more than thirty to forty-five minutes had
passed between the time the killer walked into the house and departed.
Drowatzky poked around the small, hopelessly cluttered place.
Two doors, one from each bedroom, led into the bathroom. To prevent
the kids from opening one of the doors, the killer looped a length
of new nylon rope to a pipe beneath the sink, then tied it off around
the doorknob. The first thing that struck Drowatzky were the knots.
I’ve seen those before. Something about them reminded him of
what he’d seen at the Otero murder. It just wasn’t the kind of knot that