Inside the Mind of BTK

78 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
drive-thru fast-food joint, then continued back to the duplex where
she lived alone in a quiet, relatively crime-free lower-middle-class
neighborhood. Detectives postulated that once inside, Fox had had a
smoke, downed a glass of water, then undressed for bed, neatly folding
her tan skirt over a wooden chair. It was at this point, police
believed, that the killer, who had been hiding in Fox’s bedroom closet,
appeared and forced her onto the bed.
Although I had no way of proving it, I speculated that the killer
masturbated into Fox’s nightgown only after his victim had died. His
inability to rape or penetrate any of his victims told me that he was so
fearful of women that a woman’s lifeless but partially naked body
would represent the ultimate sexual turn-on.
Once dead, she became the perfect object, nonthreatening, no
longer human, nothing more than a flesh-covered mannequin—all
the things he dreamed about. Which was why the man responsible for
Fox’s death went to such lengths to pose the body of his victim, much
the way a painter or sculptor might pose a model. Everything about
her positioning on the bed, the tilt of her head, the way her panties
were pulled down to her knees, her various bindings and gags fashioned
from panty hose, revealed to me that the killer wasn’t posing his
victim merely as a way to shock police who arrived at the scene.
Just as he did with the body of Shirley Vian, the UNSUB posed
Fox because he had to. The images he created at his crime scenes were
similar to a cache of food. He needed to pose Fox in order to take
mental “snapshots” of her body, then use that memory to get him
through those long, lean periods when killing wouldn’t be an option.
Harvey Glatman, billed as the nation’s first modern serial killer,
went to similar lengths when displaying the bodies of his victims. A
hardcore bondage freak, he documented his many kills in diaries and
with countless photographs he snapped and later developed in his
darkroom. But Glatman wasn’t content merely to take pictures of
his victims’ bodies after murdering them. He used his camera to chronicle
his killings, capturing the look of terror on the faces of his victims
before garroting them with a piece of rope. More than anything else,
Glatman got off on preserving in a photograph that empty, glazed look
of primal fear and hopelessness in the eyes of those he killed.
I often wondered what sort of a role model this sick man had been
for BTK—they were both consumed by bondage, and, because of his
detailed crime scene descriptions, I believed BTK was also photographing
his victims.