Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door Read Online Free PDF

he hid his weapons. He stripped off his clothes and the bloody shoes, putting them in the chicken coop; he would burn them later. He cleaned up, went home to his wife, and pretended that nothing unusual had happened.
    He was sure he would be arrested. But a day passed, then another. He watched television and read the paper. The cops had not figured it out.
    He began to write a long document, “An April Death,” he called it; seven pages, single-spaced.
    He clipped Kathryn’s picture out of the newspaper. He wondered if he might be too smart to be caught. That gave him another idea.
    Why not have some fun with the newspaper? Why not flaunt himself a bit?
     
    On the evening of July 7, 1974, six months after the Otero murders, four people in their early twenties were killed after a dispute over $27.50. Three of the victims died in a duplex at 1117 Dayton Street on the west side of Wichita. The killer and his accomplice drove the fourth victim, a twenty-one-year-old named Beth Kuschnereit, to a rural spot in neighboring Butler County.
    The man with the .38 was James Eddy Bell, the big guy with the menacing temper who worried Kenny Landwehr and the other beer drinkers at the Old English Pub.
    Kuschnereit pleaded with Bell. He gave her two minutes to pray, then he shot her in the face. As he put it later, he “blew her head off.”
    Bell and his accomplice were picked up, tried, and convicted.
    It was the second quadruple homicide that year, and it shook up everybody in town. Only seventeen people had been murdered in Wichita the year before, and the cops solved all seventeen.
    Landwehr was more disturbed about the Dayton Street killings than he had been about the Oteros. He had known the Dayton Street people, and when he walked to the Pub, which was frequently, his route took him past the duplex where three of them had died. He was still thinking about trying for the FBI after college, but now it didn’t seem as important. The FBI didn’t have a homicide unit.

6
    October 1974
    The Monster as Muse
    Several months after the Otero murders, three talkative men in jail began to imply that they knew details about the crimes. Detectives quickly realized they were blowing smoke, but not before the story got into the Eagle .
    That story upset the one man who knew the truth. And he wanted credit.
     
    A few days after the story appeared, Eagle columnist Don Granger got a phone call.
    “Listen and listen good,” a harsh voice said. “I’m only gonna say this once.” The man sounded Midwestern, his tone hard and aggressive, as though he liked giving orders. “There is a letter about the Otero case in a book in the public library,” he said. He told Granger which book, then hung up.
    Granger knew why the call came to him. Months earlier, the Eagle had offered five thousand dollars to anyone providing useful information about the Otero case. Granger had volunteered to take the calls.
    This caller had not asked for a reward, though.
     
    The Eagle had made an arrangement with the cops that reflected what editors thought was best for the community at the time: it would set up a “Secret Witness” program to solicit and pass along information it received about the Oteros’ killer. Abiding by that agreement, Granger called the cops right after he took that strange call. Years later, some reporters and editors would grouse about this, saying Granger should have found the letter first and copied it for the newspaper, but in the 1970s the Eagle ’s management thought helping the cops catch the killer was more important than getting a scoop�or challenging the investigative tactics.
    Bernie Drowatzky found the letter right where the caller had told Granger it would be, inside the book Applied Engineering Mechanics. Drowatzky took the letter to Chief Hannon. The letter contained so many misspellings that some cops thought the writer had a disability or was disguising his writing voice.
    I write this letter to you for the sake of the