By the time the class was over, the storm was at its height. Altogether, a little over four inches of rain had fallen, most of it in less than an hour. All over the city, motorists’ cars flooded, stranding people. Police and firemen were busy rescuing the distressed, and some parts of the city were under two to three feet of water.
The Sedgwick County Courthouse was similarly inundated.
“We could not cross north from the courthouse to the parking lot without getting water up to our knees,” Beattie recalled. “One of the students—a tall basketball player who owned a truck with big wheels—waded over to the parking garage and then ferried us in his truck in two or three loads over to the parking garage.”
Once the students had left the garage, Beattie stood for a while, watching the rain, thinking about what had just happened.
“I was changed,” Beattie said. “It was like a metamorphosis.” What had begun as a class project at first had turned into what Beattie thought of as “an armchair detective story,” his proposed book. But after hearing from the Fox family, after feeling the intense emotion, Beattie felt suffused with a zeal to do something more.
After a few minutes to himself, Beattie got into his car and tried to drive home. Usually it took only fifteen minutes, but because of the flooding, this time it took nearly three-quarters of an hour. Like everyone else, Beattie drove in the middle part of the street, where the road crown was highest. He passed more than a dozen vehicles that had conked out.
This guy thinks he’s some kind of quasi-cop or James Bond or something, Beattie reasoned, based on what others had told him over the years. This guy thinks he’s a secret agent in enemy territory. And the only reason he hasn’t been caught before now is that he’s hidden this side of his personality and seems perfectly ordinary to everyone who knows him. He thinks of himself as some sort of spy, so it stands to reason he will have a cover. How can I get him to blow his cover?
Beattie by now knew enough about the BTK case and applied psychology to believe that he could provoke the killer into revealing himself—that would be the real purpose of his book, he decided. To jab at the killer—if, that is, he was still around and still alive. To get under his skin, to make him resume communications, and thereby to betray his cover. Beattie had already reached the conclusion, after conducting a number of interviews with former police officials familiar with the case, and by reading various psychological treatises on serial killers, that BTK was consumed with narcissism—that whoever he was, he saw himself as the star of the show, even if he was concealing himself in plain sight.
I’m going to tell this story . . . and he’s not going to be able to take it. Because I’m not a cop, I’m a lawyer. Beattie thought that the killer, whoever he was, would be consumed with jealousy once he discovered that Beattie was going to write “his” book. That was just in the nature of being a narcissist, Beattie knew.
Beattie also knew that this could be a very dangerous game. Who could predict what might happen? What if the killer killed someone else just to spite Beattie? What if, in fact, the killer decided to kill Beattie himself, or his wife, Mary Ann?
Beattie realized that he couldn’t make such a decision alone. When he finally made it home, Mary Ann was asleep. Watching her slumber, Beattie realized that she would understand why it was important to do something about BTK after all these years. If she’d been there when Georgia Mason had been too overcome to speak, he thought, Mary Ann would understand perfectly.
This has been affecting my life, and the people of Wichita, basically my whole adult life, Beattie thought. Since I was 17 years old, when the Oteros were murdered. I want to know—I’m supposed to be this bright guy, who’s been president of the Mensa chapter twice, I’ve got degrees in math and science, and people always expect things of me, and usually I come through. You know, I’ve led men through burning buildings on the fire department and always ended up team captain and president of the club and all that, and the school, and I’ve done some good things in my life, but . . .
But he’d never before set out to trap a serial killer.
The next morning, Mary Ann told her husband that she knew exactly what he meant, and why he had to go forward.
Beattie’s idea of using a book to flush the killer out of hiding was not just an idle conceit. For some years he’d been familiar with some fundamental principles of applied psychology used in human resource management and marketing. After all, he had a degree in human resources management, as well as science and mathematics. And he had practical psychological experience, too—he’d spent a year wrestling mentally disturbed people when he’d worked as a psychiatric orderly. So Beattie was familiar with two broad approaches he thought he might apply to the BTK problem, one of them calculated to predict the unknown killer’s future behavior, and the other intended to provoke him into resuming contact. It was Beattie’s idea that the more the killer communicated, the greater the prospect might be that he’d make some sort of mistake, inadvertently revealing his identity.
Of course, Beattie was well aware that this could all go horribly wrong. But then, he thought, This is a thirty-year-old case. The police haven’t been able to solve it. They’ve been working on it but not getting anywhere. Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied. If this guy is still living, he’s lived his life. And as far as I can see, there’s absolutely no reason not to tell this story.
Besides, he thought: what if “the guy,” as the police were wont to call him—if he really existed—were dead, as so many of experts had insisted in recent years? Putting out many of the details about the crimes might jog someone’s memory; it might even lead a son or a daughter to look at some supposed “keepsake” in a new light.
Only a year or so earlier, in fact, Beattie had handled a legal matter in which the son of a World War II U.S. Army intelligence officer, who had died some years before, came in with a shoebox filled with dogtags that had once belonged to Japanese soldiers, along with photographs from what appeared to be a prisoner-of-war camp. The son had asked Beattie: should his father have had this stuff, even innocently? Should he? And what should be done to give it back? So Beattie knew it was possible that the killer’s family, previously oblivious to everything, might stumble across something incriminating, something they had never before dreamed existed in the life of their loved one, and, with a jab from Beattie’s book, might end up turning in something that might tie back to the murders.
For one of his two broad approaches to the problem of BTK, Beattie had familiarity and practical experience with the work of three researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Peter Schulman, Camilo Castellon, and Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. Called Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations, or CAVE, this system provided a scoring mechanism to assess optimism or pessimism on the part of a speaker or writer, which in turn had meaning in the treatment of depression, among other uses.
Studies have shown that optimism and pessimism correlate to success or failure, happiness and unhappiness, and even physical health. An athlete, for example, might remark that there was no way he could beat his previous best time in a sprint; chances are then quite good that he wouldn’t. Alternatively, another runner might say she knew she was going to get better times in each succeeding race, and the chances are, she would.
The beauty of the CAVE approach, Seligman and his colleagues contended, was that it could be used when there was no other way to gauge a test subject’s internal attitude, since it could be applied retroactively to both oral and written statements. At the same time, it cut two ways—it could also be applied to statements intended to stimulate future actions by others.
Life insurance companies, for instance, used it to determine whether to hire salesmen—they wanted people who didn’t get discouraged by “no.”
“It’s widely used in personnel evaluations,” Beattie said later. “It is used now in evaluating written statements for application to graduate school, to the military academies. Professional sports teams use it for draft picks.” The CAVE scoring system for words and contexts used by a writer or speaker could be employed to determine the level of inner confidence of a communicator, and his or her persistence.
One of the most common fields where the CAVE technique has been used in recent years is in the field of politics. President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about “a national malaise” in 1979 probably cost him his reelection in 1980; people began to see him as a pessimist, and voters don’t like to vote for pessimists. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, easily won reelection in 1984 with the slogan “morning in America,” which stimulated a positive, upbeat reaction in voters. Since the 1980s, in fact, almost all political advertising has been CAVEd for its potential effect on voters.
Beattie thought he could apply the CAVE system to BTK’s old communications, those that had come to public attention back in the 1970s, and thereby come to some sort of judgment about the prospect of being able to manipulate “the guy” into resuming his communications after almost two decades.
And as a second approach, Beattie recalled the research of a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, Dr. Daniel Kahneman. Working with psychologist Amos Tversky, Kahneman had won the Nobel in 2002 for something they called “Prospect Theory Framing.”
“Dr. Kahneman demonstrated the importance of how a subject perceived the risk of gain or loss in each stage of any process that led to a desired outcome,” Beattie recalled. “In aggregate, human beings are loss averse. We are much more likely to act to avoid a loss than we are to seek a gain. Additionally, we create ‘mental accounts’ for each activity and struggle to keep these accounts ‘in the black.’ ”
Beattie remembered that BTK’s first communication had come in October of 1974, almost ten months after the Otero family had been murdered. The letter, he recalled, had been sent after police had arrested three people in connection with the murders. It appeared that the killer didn’t want the three arrested men to get the “credit” for the murders, so he had sent the communication, in the form of a letter that provided a detailed account of what the crime scene had looked like to prove his validity.
From this, Beattie concluded two things: first, that the BTK killer craved public recognition—a conclusion that was buttressed by the killer’s additional communications more than three years later, in 1978, demanding more publicity and threatening to kill more people if he didn’t get it; and second, that if he thought someone else was now going to get credit for anything to do with “his” murders, he would soon communicate once more—if he were still alive.
Beattie later tried to explain this to skeptical police, and to several reporters. He made a simple analogy to illustrate Kahneman’s theory: “You don’t like to lose stuff you’ve already got,” he said. “If you drop your five-dollar bill, you may step into the mud to get it back. But if you see a five-dollar bill flying by, you may not run into the mud to get it. But if it’s your five-dollar bill, you may.
“I had absolutely no doubt, whoever BTK was, if he was still alive . . . he’s going to see me as stealing from him. In his mind, this is his story. And me telling it, not him, would be a loss, and he might act by coming out of hiding.”
That meant Beattie had to get publicity for his mock grand jury, and for his plan to write a book about the case. The more publicity, the greater the chance was that the BTK, if he was still alive, would see it. And if he saw it, as Beattie conceived it, he would be unable to resist resuming his communications. He wouldn’t want Beattie to make off with his five-dollar bill.
A week or so after the mock grand jury, Beattie suggested that one of his students write an article on the BTK exercise for the student newspaper.
“I was trying to shake the tree with publicity,” Beattie said. Something to engage the killer’s attention. Unfortunately, the student newspaper wasn’t interested in publishing a story on the mock grand jury, or in fact, anything about BTK. Beattie called the editors of the student paper himself, but no one ever returned his calls.
A day or so later, the same student—who worked in the Newman University library—emailed Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana, trying to interest him in writing a story about the grand jury exercise, while Beattie himself emailed another Eagle reporter, Roy Wenzl. Wenzl had written articles a few years earlier about Beattie’s adventure with Charlie Manson.
The next day, Laviana responded to Beattie’s attempt to drum up publicity by emailing back to him.
“I’ve written about BTK in the past and was surprised to hear that relatives of Nancy Fox are still around and talking about the case,” Laviana wrote to Beattie. After briefly referring to the ill-fated television “investigation” of 2002—the so-called “4 Pi” theory—as the work of a crackpot, Laviana expressed mild curiosity about Beattie’s mock grand jury.
“Anyhow, I am just curious about what you’ve been up to and what you have found,” Laviana wrote. “I’ve been told that the handful of officers who reopened the BTK case in the 1980s each came away with a different conclusion as to who the killer was.”
Beattie and Laviana next had a couple of brief telephone conversations; Laviana suggested that Beattie might want to review the newspaper’s “scrapbook” on the BTK case, since it included copies of the supposed communications. This is exactly what Beattie wanted to do to assist his CAVE project, of course. Laviana said he didn’t think there was anything new about the BTK case that was worth writing about
A few days later, Beattie sent Laviana an email.
“If the police had one suspect, that would be interesting,” Beattie told Laviana. “But, as far as I can tell, each officer that has any prime suspect has his own prime suspect, which is not the same as any other officer’s prime suspect. And almost every officer seems quick to criticize other officers who have concluded that BTK is someone other than their favorite suspect.”
Beattie was teasing Laviana with the possible germ of a story idea—police dissension—that Laviana might use as a hook for a story that would also say Beattie intended to write a book about the case. That, after all, was Beattie’s objective—to use the newspaper to make the killer aware that someone else was going to “steal” his thunder.
“Different officers tell me different things,” Beattie continued in this message to Laviana. “One insists that BTK is tall and one insists that BTK is short. Depending on whom I have spoken with, BTK is tall or short; thin or stocky; blonde or dark haired; works alone or has always worked with a partner, and that partner is either a man or a woman; and BTK has not been caught, not because he is smart, but because he is lucky, or because he is smart, uncannily smart.
“That narrows it down,” Beattie concluded, wryly. “Who do I see at the Eagle’s library about the BTK scrapbook?”
Over the next week, Beattie spent several days at the library of The Wichita Eagle, perusing the “scrapbook,” which included copies of the various communications thought to have been sent by the murderer over the years.
Reviewing the content of the old letters using the CAVE system convinced Beattie that the person who had written them was “realistically pessimistic” about his ability to continue killing without being caught. That was probably why, Beattie concluded, the murders appeared to have stopped years before. But, Beattie also determined, the killer was “unrealistically over-optimistic about his ability to continue to communicate” without being apprehended.
“They never got close to him from that,” Beattie said. “He thought he could continue to communicate, and that’s what I wanted him to do.” The killer’s egomania was his Achilles’ heel, Beattie realized.
If the killer could somehow be convinced that he had less to lose by communicating than by remaining silent, the chances were that he would send more messages. The more messages the killer sent, the greater the likelihood that he would make a mistake, thereby leading to his identification. So Beattie had to find a way to suggest, as publicly as possible, that the killer was safe in making new communications, while at the same time goading him into claiming “credit” for the crimes by the threat to usurp his notoriety—in other words, to take his five-dollar bill.
But first Beattie had to get the publicity.
As it turned out, that took longer and was a bit harder than he had anticipated. And there was one thing Beattie could not tell anyone: that he had CAVEd BTK’s letters, and that his plan was to goad the killer into surfacing once more. If BTK knew that, it would defeat the whole purpose, Beattie knew. It was a bit like telling the subject of a medical treatment experiment that he was getting a placebo—if the patient knew the medicine was fake, the experiment would be ruined.
As the fall of 2003 ended and winter arrived, Beattie was assailed by doubts. He interviewed two of the Wichita Police Department’s top officials from the 1970s, retired former chief Floyd Hannon, and former deputy chief Jack Bruce. Both men insisted to him that there was no such person as BTK. In fact, Hannon said, the original “BTK” letter was so detailed in its description of the crime scene that the only reasonable conclusion was that it had to be some not-very-funny inside joke by some member of the Wichita Police Department. Bruce told Beattie that he’d always suspected that the original letter was the work of two pranksters assigned to the department’s crime lab, although they had steadfastly denied it.
Maybe I’m a fool, Beattie mused. Maybe Hannon and Bruce are right, there is no BTK. Maybe this is some sort of quixotic quest, battling a mere windmill I’ve mistaken for a monster . . .
But the more Beattie studied the letters, the more he inquired of other retired cops, the more he was convinced that BTK did exist, or at least had at one time. If Beattie could only get a message out, he thought, they had a chance of getting one back in.
Then, on January 14, the day before the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero murders, Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana received the email from his old partner, Bill Hirschman, asking if the paper planned to write anything about the thirtieth anniversary of the old murder case. Laviana had his short, tepid conversation with Rogers. That was when reporter Wenzl happened by and asked, in effect: “What about Bob?”
That same afternoon, Laviana, now thinking that perhaps Beattie’s proposed book on BTK would make a good peg for an anniversary story, emailed Beattie:
“Bob, is there a number where you can be reached this afternoon?” Laviana wrote. “I’m trying to put together something on the Otero 30-year anniversary and remembered that Roy said you were working on a book about BTK.”
Beattie spoke with Laviana for about an hour that same afternoon. By this point, Beattie had already conducted about sixty interviews for his book, including many with retired police officers who had worked on the case. After Beattie explained much of what he had done (although not the CAVEing or his concept of trying to filch the killer’s symbolic five-dollar bill), Laviana was suitably impressed.
“You really are writing a book,” he told Beattie.
Three days later, Laviana and the Eagle published a front-page story about Beattie and his proposed book. A large photograph of Beattie holding a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the case illustrated the story.
In his article, Laviana established several facts that Beattie hoped would get under BTK’s skin, although Laviana wasn’t actually aware of this. The first was that Beattie was cutting down on his law practice to research “a book about the man considered by many police officers as the city’s most notorious killer.”
This, he hoped, would accomplish two purposes: to stimulate the sick ego of the killer by emphasizing his notoriety, and to convince him, along with everyone else, that Beattie was committed to actually writing the book.
“I did want people to know that I was serious enough about this book that I was cutting back my law practice,” Beattie recalled. “If BTK was out there, then he would know this. I also wanted the cops to know that I was serious.” That could only help him in future interviews, Beattie thought.
At another point in the story, Laviana quoted Beattie about the amount of money that had been spent on the case over the years, to no avail. This, Beattie hoped, would once again puff up BTK’s sense of pride in his crimes. “If BTK was out there, I thought his ego would be stroked by knowing that a lot of money was spent to catch him, but that he was ‘too clever to be caught,’ ” Beattie said later.
Then Beattie, through Laviana, dealt a sharp blow to the killer’s ego, and simultaneously challenged him to resurface: “Although the killings remain firmly implanted in the minds of those who lived through them, Beattie said many Wichitans probably have never heard of BTK,” Laviana wrote.
“Probably never heard of BTK”—that was a direct prick of the killer’s balloon, essentially saying no one cared about him anymore. Beattie hoped this would motivate the killer to remind everyone of who he was.
Remembering his client with the shoebox full of Japanese dogtags, Beattie also told Laviana that he hoped some relative of BTK might read the book, or even hear about it, and think again about any odd mementos a deceased loved one might have left behind.
“I’m hoping someone will read the book and come forward with some information—a driver’s license, a watch, some car keys,” Laviana quoted Beattie. “If he has died, maybe some family members who have those items will realize their significance . . . But I do not think we’ll be contacted by BTK.”
Beattie hadn’t meant this last line as a general statement, only that he did not believe either he or Mary Ann would be contacted directly by the killer. But the communal “we” could be read by the killer as another challenge—if Beattie was essentially saying the killer didn’t have the nerve to communicate with the public again, wouldn’t that goad him into doing exactly that?
If BTK did exist, if he was still alive, if he did still live in the community, Beattie was certain that reading that someone else was getting publicity for his crimes would stimulate him to come forward once again.
And on this point, as on so many others, Beattie would turn out to be exactly right. What he did not know, what he could never have imagined, was that the killer not only read about Beattie’s book from this account, but had, years before, begun writing his own. Now all he had to do was get it “published,” by relying upon the news media’s ravenous appetite for sensation. He could mail his “chapters” anonymously to his “publisher,” or use “dead drops,” just like in the spy stories he was so fond of. His book would be better, much better than Beattie’s, the killer thought.
And why not? Just as Beattie suspected he might, he had every detail of every case, and some that no one even suspected, completely documented and carefully indexed, right down to detailed crime-scene drawings, in a filing cabinet in his office, not ten miles from Beattie’s own house. He called them “projects,” “PJs” for short, as if they were elaborate covert operations, and he was “licensed to kill.” In comparison to the killer, Beattie knew almost nothing, while he, he could go back to the scenes of the murders anytime he liked. And often did, at least in his mind.
The book race between Beattie and BTK was on.