Inside the Mind of BTK

88 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at
the end.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments
across most private thought
Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control,
warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes
so deep and clear.
Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why
for number eight was not.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
Although the UNSUB possessed the poetic sensibility of a lovedrunk
college freshman, his communiqués reinforced my belief that
he possessed an eye for detail. I couldn’t shake the idea that he’d
snapped photographs of his victims, crime scenes, and—in Anna
Williams’s case—his intended crime scene. Either that or he had a
photographic memory, which seemed unlikely.
His sketches, moreover, weren’t half bad—detailed and reasonably
well drawn. They weren’t Michelangelo, but he drew a helluva lot
better than I did. Although his subject matter was a bit limited, I
sensed that he’d honed his ability to draw gagged, scantily clad women
bound up in rope by staring at the pages of pulp detective magazines
sold up through the mid-1970s in almost every mom-and-pop convenience
store around the nation.
We in the criminal profiling business referred to the violent
offenders who read these magazines as “collectors.” These glossy publications,
which usually bore a cover photo of a hog-tied, frightened
woman with a gun or knife pressed against her breast or temple,
served as virtual textbooks for budding killers. Criminologists like
myself had long suspected that killers studied the exploits of those
savages who’d come before them, soaking up every detail of true or
fictional crimes wherever they could find it—magazines, books,
movies, and TV. Long before any of these animals ever claimed their
first victim, they’d spent a lifetime nurturing the dark dreams festering
inside their heads by devouring publications with names like
Master Detective, Official Police Detective, Front Page Detective, and
Startling Detective.
Do the words and images contained in the pages of these magazines
create violent criminals? Certainly not. But clearly they fuel their