Inside the Mind of BTK

86 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
an employee of the Wichita Eagle discovered that a three-by-five index
card, which arrived in the newsroom on January 31, had mistakenly
been routed to the newspaper’s advertising department.
Because the cryptic message on the card was printed in children’s
block letters from a rubber stamp, whoever first spotted the card
believed it to be a personal ad, not a poem based on the murder of
Shirley Vian. It was based on an eighteenth-century Mother Goose
nursery rhyme, titled “Curley Locks.”
SHIRLEYLOCKS SHIRLEYLOCKS
WILT THOUGH BE MINE
THOU SHALT NOT SCREEM
NOT YET FEEL THE LINE
BUT LAY ON CUSHION
AND THINK OF ME AND DEATH
AND HOW IT IS GOING TO BE.
At the bottom of the card, he printed the message, POEM FOR
FOX NEXT.
The UNSUB waited fourteen months before surfacing again,
although initially police had their doubts that it was actually him. Just
after 10 P.M. on the cool spring night of April 28, 1979, a sixty-oneyear-old
widow named Anna Williams returned home after a night of
square dancing. She lived at 615 South Pinecrest, roughly one mile
from Nancy Fox’s house. Friends dropped her off at her house and
watched as she fumbled for her keys on the front porch. But just
before unlocking the door, she decided to reconsider their offer of a
cup of coffee at a local café. She dropped her keys in her purse,
climbed back in their car, and was whisked away into the night.
An hour later, she once again returned home and quickly discovered
that one of her basement windows had been shattered. Rope, a
broom handle, and several pieces of undergarments were found lying
beside a bed in the basement guest room where her granddaughter
often slept. Williams walked back upstairs and noticed that several
scarves, pieces of jewelry, various articles of clothing, and $35 in cash
were missing. A half roll of toilet paper had also been used, she realized.
Most frightening of all, when she tried to telephone police, she
couldn’t get a dial tone. She hurried next door to a neighbor’s house
and phoned police.