Inside the Mind of BTK

64 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
someone in the Navy or the Boy Scouts would tie. It was like someone
had taken a basic clove hitch and kept tying it over and over again
until he’d stumbled on this new one.
Shirley’s nude body was laid out in the living room, near the
opened sofa bed. Two white adhesive EKG leads were stuck to her
chest, left behind by paramedics who initially thought they might be
able to revive Vian. Newspapers and shoes littered the floor. A tattered
overstuffed chair sat in a corner beside an ashtray heaped with cigarette
butts.
Paramedics arrived at the scene a few minutes before 1:00 P.M., not
long before police. A neighbor made the call after Vian’s terrified son
ran over to her house, screaming that his mother was dead. They found
her in the bedroom, tied to the metal bed frame. Nearby, vomit had
formed a kidney-shaped puddle on the dirty carpet. Because her body
was still warm (police estimated that fifteen minutes had lapsed since
the killer had left) and the room was so dark, the EMS technicians cut
the white nylon cords looped around her arms and legs, then carried
her out into the light, vainly hoping to be able to resuscitate her.
Her face was a mess, splotchy red from cyanosis and hemorrhaging,
with a haze of blue. Dried blood and vomit was caked around her
nose and mouth. The rope around her neck had left a hideous rustcolored
abrasion on much of her throat.
Two years after her murder, when detectives from Wichita first
showed up at FBI headquarters wondering if my unit could provide
any help on the case, I nearly gasped upon looking at the photos of
Shirley’s body. Even after the years I’ve spent viewing crime scene photos,
she had the kind of corpse you don’t forget, the kind that occasionally
came back to haunt me in my dreams. That’s because one of
the things I do as a profiler is take that expression frozen on the face
of a murder victim and work backwards. I have to place myself inside
the head of both the offender and the victim at the time of the crime.
Her lips, along with much of her face, exuded a dull, cold bluish
tint. Her last thoughts, I felt sure, were about her children. She’d cooperated
with the intruder because he’d no doubt promised her that he
wouldn’t harm her three kids. But the moment she felt that rope
tighten around her neck, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Like
Joseph Otero, she lay there wracked with guilt, totally helpless, praying
that the stranger who seemed so intent on killing her would leave
her daughter and two sons alone, hoping that when it was all over they
wouldn’t be the ones to find her.