Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Read Online Free PDF

sent his intended target a letter, informing her that he’d chosen her as his next victim, but had opted not to kill her after growing tired of waiting for her to arrive home.
     
    The local cops had exhausted all their leads. But in the five years since I’d last reviewed the case, investigators had managed to link another homicide to him. In April 1974, three months after the Otero killings, Kathryn Bright, a twenty-one-year-old assembly line worker, was stabbed to death in her home. Despite being shot twice in the head, her nineteen-year-old brother survived the attack. The detectives briefing me believed that having another case to link to BTK, especially one with a survivor, might help shed some new light on the UNSUB responsible for the murders.
     
    From my knowledge of the case and of the Wichita Police Department, widely regarded in law enforcement circles as one of the most progressive in the nation, I was confident that the police hadn’t botched this investigation. Yet the killer was still on the loose, and this worried everybody.
     
    Why, everyone wondered, had he stopped killing? What had happened to him? I sensed he was still out there. But he’d become a ghost, which was why the task force created by Wichita police a few months before, in July 1984, had been named the Ghostbusters. I had a hunch that the only way we could catch this ghost would be to find some way to flush him out, to develop some sort of a strategy to force him out into the light where we could finally see him.
     
     
    I rummaged through a few drawers in my hopelessly messy desk, looking for the criminal profile I’d written for police back in 1979, but I couldn’t locate it.
     
    “Probably back at the office,” I mumbled to myself.
     
     
    And then it suddenly came rushing back to me—the memory of that night three years ago in 1981, when I used BTK to help pry information out of the head of one of the nation’s most notorious serial killers. It happened in a pale green interrogation room deep inside the Attica Correctional Facility, with fellow FBI profiler Bob Ressler.
     
    It was evening, the loneliest time inside a prison. We’d arrived unannounced, on a fishing expedition of sorts, hoping to convince David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, to help us with our criminal profiling study, which involved a fifty-seven-page interview questionnaire. We wanted answers to such questions as What was his motive? Was there a trigger that set him off on his murderous spree? What was his early childhood like? How did he select his victims? Did he ever visit the grave sites of his victims? How closely did he follow the press coverage of his crimes? His answers would help us better understand the killers we were hunting.
     
    Berkowitz was three years into his 365-year prison term after trying unsuccessfully to convince a jury that his neighbor’s Labrador retriever had commanded him to gun down his six victims. He looked surprised to see us when the guards led him into the tiny interrogation room.
     
    “Who are you guys?” he asked the moment he spotted us seated at the far end of the only piece of furniture in the room—a linoleum-covered table. As planned, the guards had quickly exited before Berkowitz had a chance to tell us to take a hike.
     
    “We’re FBI agents, David,” I told him. “We’d like to talk to you. We’re hoping you might be able to help us.” Berkowitz wheeled around toward where he expected the guards to be, but because they were no longer there, he begrudgingly took a seat.
     
    “It’s like I always say,” I explained, “if you want to learn how to paint, you don’t read about it in a book. You go straight to the artist. And that’s what you are, David. You’re the artist.”
     
    I was laying it on, but, I hoped, not too thick. Berkowitz stared at me with his aquamarine eyes. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even blink. Inside his head, he was trying to figure out some way to get something in return