Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Read Online Free PDF

things going for it, in a fetishistic way. Lots of bondage. Dude was into rope—exquisite restraint. Military men knew their knots!
    His first kills occurred in a spree: He wiped out most of a family, stringently binding them before asphyxiating them slowly. Found dead were the dad, the mom, and little brother on the main floor, and little sister hanging from the rafters of the basement, her toes only inches above the floor, pants pulled down and smeared with semen. The older siblings came home from school that day and found themselves alone in the world.
    That pervy stuff was one thing, but Stephen Stanko really latched onto him because BTK had literary aspirations. The killer wrote letters and sent creepy drawings. He illustrated one of his crime scenes in a graphic and horribly accurate way—like Zodiac and Son of Sam might’ve if they’d had artistic skills. His most troubling drawing was accurate right down to the placement of the furniture in the victim’s bedroom, to the position of the victim’s eyeglasses on top of her dresser.
    For almost thirty years, no one had a clue who BTK could be. Might be your next-door neighbor. His career was like a movie sequel. He BTK’d a bunch of victims, hibernated for years, and then came back.
    Another reason Stanko liked this case was because it made the straights of Wichita—the cops and the press and the political leaders—seem really stupid. Law enforcement became so desperate, it did silly things.
    Those knuckleheads had heard of subliminal advertising, like when movie theaters had inserted single frames of Coke and popcorn during a movie, and supposedly sales went up. It was supposed to work on the subconscious without the conscious mind even knowing it. Like Keystone Kops, the police rigged a TV show about BTK—they knew BTK would be watching.
    During the program, which would review in detail all of BTK’s kills and communications, they would subliminally insert a symbol the killer used in his letters, sort of a BTK logo that hadn’t been made public. That was accompanied by a photo of a telephone and a drawing of an Indian chief. Out of that, the killer was supposed to subconsciously understand the message: “BTK, call the chief,” as in the chief of police. BTK did not call.
    But he did eventually get caught, a generation later. Dennis Rader did himself in by purposefully leaving clue after clue, until, unaware of the sophistication of cyber sleuthing, his computer gave him up.

    Some days when Stephen Stanko came into the library, he studied not a serial killer but a famous murder, such as the murder of Beth Short in 1947 Hollywood, better known as the “Black Dahlia” murder.
    This was a good one because there were photos. Beth Short was a rather lazy black-haired starlet who came from New England to Hollywood to be a star. Instead, she ended up floating around Southern California, accepting donations from various escorts.
    The last stranger she found herself with tortured her for days, carving her flesh and slicing a Sardonicus-like smile into her cheeks. That brutally inflicted rictus came last, and she drowned in her own blood.
    Her remains were drained of blood by her killer. She was surgically sliced in two at the waist and placed in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles.
    Stanko stared at the photos of the pale and mutilated form lying obscenely like a broken manikin only a few inches from the sidewalk. The photos were in black and white, and you could feel the evil juju coming off them. They hearkened back to the days of film noir, dark movies he’d seen as a kid—all fedoras, bullet bras, and shadow.
    What must it have been like to be there and see that bisected nude body? It was almost too intense to think about.
    The shelves of the library were rich with Black Dahlia books, everybody and their mother thought they knew who had killed the Black Dahlia. At least two unrelated people claimed it was their father. But no one knew who