Three weeks after the letter appeared in the library book, 23-year-old Sherry Baker was found dead in her small house on New York Street in north central Wichita, a little less than three miles west of the Otero house and two miles southwest of the Bright house. Found face down on the living room floor and dressed only in a negligee and panties, her hands were bound behind her back with coiled telephone line. As Josie Otero had been, she was gagged with a portion of a torn towel. She had been stabbed at least seventy times, her throat had been cut, and a pair of scissors had been thrust into the rear of her head, breaking off one of the blades. It appeared that the house had been tossed, and a window jimmied to gain entrance. She was a student at WSU. And, as Beattie learned much later, her house was one block away from the Coleman human resources department—the firm’s hiring facility.
Sherry’s murder was heavily covered by the newspaper and the broadcast outlets in Wichita. The possible parallels to the Otero and Bright murders seemed obvious to the police: Coleman, hands tied behind the back, gagged with a strip torn from a towel, incapacitated telephone, frantic stabbing as in the case of Kathy Bright, possible sexual motive, forcible entry to the dwelling. Again, there was no semen. And there was a possible “New York” angle: Kevin Bright had said that Kathy’s killer had told them he was on his way to “New York.” Now there was a victim on New York Street. Was that just a coincidence?
Chief Hannon realized that plumbing the mental depths of someone capable of committing such crimes—if indeed they were all connected—was a little out of the police line of expertise, especially when the subject was someone they had never seen or talked to. He decided some expert help was called for. As it happened, the mayor of Wichita in 1974 was Dr. Garry Porter, a psychiatrist. Porter was well acquainted with a psychologist who also practiced in his building, Dr. Samuel Harrell. Harrell was not only a clinical psychologist, he had also been a professional homicide investigator in prior years when he worked for the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations while serving as a military policeman.
The police provided Harrell with copies of all their reports, including autopsy findings, as well as photographs of the crime scenes. They also gave him the letter from the library, and one more thing—a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman with a pair of scissors protruding from her skull. Just where this drawing came from was not made clear to Harrell. Years later, to Beattie, he recalled that it came with the other materials, but was contained in a separate envelope.
After sifting through the police reports and crime-scene photographs, Harrell formed some definite impressions of the person or persons who had killed the Oteros. Whoever did it, Harrell theorized, was someone who took erotic pleasure in tying people up; and if the person or persons followed the pattern he was thinking of, they would have enjoyed tying themselves up as well.
Harrell was particularly reminded of a notorious case that had taken place in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. There, a similar bondage-style killer named Harvey Glatman had killed three women in 1957 and 1958, after first hiring them as models to pose for him. A television repairman in real life, Glatman had convinced the women that he was a professional photographer on assignment for detective magazines. He convinced his victims to come to his house to pose. When they arrived, he pulled a gun, then tied them up. Once the victim was restrained, Glatman raped them, photographed them, then took them out to the desert, assaulted them again, and then capped off the nightmare by strangling them. He again took pictures of them after they were dead. He was caught when one of his victims managed to escape, even though Glatman shot her in the leg.
“I used the same five-foot length of sash cord for all three,” Glatman said of his victims after his arrest. “I kept it in my car with the gun. I made them lie on their stomachs. Then I tied their ankles together, looped the end of the cord around their necks and pulled until they were dead.”
Glatman had an overbearing, controlling mother who nevertheless doted on her son; he also had an addiction to auto-erotic hanging that had begun very early in his life. His murders made him very proud of himself, and after his apprehension, he relished describing the most horrific details. He was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on August 18, 1959—a little more than a year after his arrest.
From the Otero crime scene, Harrell deduced that the killer, like Glatman, was powerfully addicted to erotic bondage. That in turn suggested to Harrell that, like Glatman, the killer had a long history of auto-erotic self-bondage and hanging. Harrell agreed with Hannon that it was more likely there were two killers rather than one; and if that were the case, it was very likely that one person would be the dominant personality, telling the other what to do. The chances were very good, if there were two killers, that the pair had a long-term relationship that involved tying each other up before they had branched out to strangers. If it turned out that there was just one killer, the chances were very good that the Oteros were not his first victims—the scene was too organized, too practiced for it to be a first attempt.
Harrell also thought the library letter was a genuine communication from the killer, not some prank by someone in the know. The letter had some of the self-aggrandizement of the Glatman confession, although with not quite the same boastfulness. Given the eyewitness descriptions of the man seen around the Otero house—that is, someone 25 to 30 years old—it was possible that the Otero killer or killers may have been old enough to have had familiarity with Glatman’s story, which was, ironically, prominently featured in detective magazines of the era after his apprehension. If the killer or killers were at the upper end of the age range, this would mean he or they would have been 15 or 16 years old at the time of Glatman’s execution—a particularly susceptible age for such imagery.
As for the scissors drawing, Harrell concluded that it had not been made by the same person or persons involved in the Otero murders. Based on the number of stab wounds Sherry Baker had sustained, some of them clearly after death, it was most likely that her killer was someone who knew her very well. Such a stabbing frenzy, Harrell knew, usually came from some deep, interpersonal rage.
What to do? Harrell suggested to Hannon that the detectives try to follow up on the bondage fetish so obviously present in the Otero case. They might begin by offering a reward to prostitutes to tip the names of any clients who preferred bondage; they should also attempt to identify any publications circulated in the Wichita area that featured bondage imagery; and last, they should place ads in these publications in an attempt to lure the Otero killer or killers into making contact.
According to Harrell, Chief Hannon rejected these recommendations. He didn’t agree with Harrell that the letter was a legitimate communication from the killer; he still thought it was a hoax. He could just envision himself trying to explain to the city council the reason that his police department had used tax dollars to pay for advertisements in bondage publications, and why it had subscribed to same.
Eventually, according to Beattie, roughly thirty Wichita-area psychologists and psychiatrists reviewed the library letter. It appeared that many also copied it. Some agreed with Hannon: the letter was a hoax. Others agreed with Harrell: the letter was the real deal. Some thought the letter should remain secret, while others thought it should be published. Some, in fact, warned that the letter should be made public to prevent the killer from killing again. But psychological analysis and profiling is like intelligence analysis in the foreign policy field: often the most accurate assessments are on the extremes of possibility, not in the consensus middle. In the center, there’s usually too much qualification, too much hedging, to produce anything of real value.
But the letter, suppressed by the Eagle at the request of the police, and analyzed and overanalyzed by the shrinks, turned out to have a life of its own. With so many people having copies of it, it was only a matter of time before it leaked.
That happened in the first week of December 1974, when a copy of the library communication, with its dreadful detail of just what had happened at the Otero house, and its discussion of “monsters” and more murders, came to the attention of Cathy Henkel, a writer for the Wichita Sun. The Sun was an alternative news weekly, of the type that was then springing up all around the country, in the mold of The Village Voice, or the Chicago Reader. It was underwritten by the owners of KAKE-TV, the city’s oldest television broadcasting company.
Henkel obtained a copy of the library letter, and was told by someone—just who remains a journalistic secret kept by Henkel ever since—that unless the writer of the letter got his due public notice, he would kill again. Henkel wrote a classic turn-the-tables-on-the-establishment-press story that publicly revealed much of the letter’s content, and then proceeded to examine the murder of Kathy Bright, and the attempted murder of Kevin Bright and the Coleman supervisor who had been shot during the supposed robbery, and made the link: Coleman for Julie Otero, Coleman for Kathy Bright, Coleman for the wounded supervisor. It also mentioned the dope-loaded airplane that had crashed on its way to Wichita from Puerto Rico, and something of Joe Otero’s financial conflicts with people in Panama.
Before writing the story, Henkel met with Chief Hannon, who was clearly upset that the letter was about to be made public.
“Chief Hannon was so angry, so red-faced, that the temple on the side of his forehead was visibly pounding,” she later told Beattie.
“Hannon never told me not to publish the letter,” she also recalled. “He was too much in shock; just wanted me out of his office as fast as he could so he could figure out their next step. I waited to talk to him until the day we went to press (we were a weekly, remember), so there wasn’t much time . . .”
Henkel interviewed Wichita Police Major Bill Cornwell, who told her that the drug angle had been investigated and discounted, and that Joe Otero’s financial conflicts were unavailing as an investigative lead. As for the possible Coleman connection, police said it was a coincidence.
On December 11, 1974, the Sun ran a large article about the Otero murders, and for the first time anywhere in print, linked them to the attack on Kathy and Kevin Bright, although Cornwell said the connection had been discounted by his detectives. More important, the paper revealed that someone who called himself “BTK” had sent a letter to the Eagle via the public library, claiming to have killed the Oteros. While it knew what “BTK” represented, the Sun chose not to spell the words out, but made it clear that the initials were not those of a person, but rather the killer’s own self-description, related to his m.o. The Sun recounted the details of the recovery of the letter from the library, and Granger’s circumscribed attempts to renew contact with the killer.
The same evening the Sun article appeared, KAKE-TV featured it on their nightly newscast. Watching the broadcast from off-camera, Henkel was approached by two Wichita detectives. They wanted to know if she was sure that the person who had provided her with the copy of the letter wasn’t the killer. She was sure of that, she said.
Henkel did not appear on the KAKE newscast. “Back then,” Henkel said, “newspaper reporters wrote and reported; they didn’t go on TV . . . editors probably commented on the story for television, but I never did.” Henkel was just as glad to remain behind the scenes. “I didn’t want my face known,” she said. “I was very careful, generally, after the story came out, as you can imagine.” There was no point in tempting BTK.
When some asked why the Sun had published it when the Eagle had not, the Sun’s editors pointed to the editorial explanation that had appeared with the story: “The responsibilities of a free press and those of the police sometimes clash, but the public good is the usual result . . . [the publication] feels that, after some two months under wraps, this letter should be made public for two separate but equally important reasons: the community’s right to know, and the possibility that the Sun‘s comprehensive circulation and the letter’s contents could bring forth information on the case.”
Besides, the paper’s editors added, they hadn’t included any of the details of the crime scene that the writer had cited, nor had they revealed what BTK meant. If the police ever did find a viable suspect, they would still have these secret facts to help them separate the false confessors from the real.
Henkel agreed with the editors. “I believe information is power, and that the public needed to know there was a serial killer out there stalking his next victim,” she recalled. “They needed to know the Otero family weren’t victims of some drug deal gone wrong; that there was a dangerous man on the streets, that the Otero killings weren’t an isolated incident. With this knowledge, people could be more aware of their surroundings, take precautions, that sort of thing.”
To Beattie, Henkel gave an even more pertinent reason for the publication of the letter.
“The advice I got was that the killer needed that kind of exposure or he would kill again,” she said.
And if that was the advice given to Henkel, it seemed to have at least some validity: for a little over the next two years, no one heard from the letter writer who had called himself BTK. But there were no similar murders in Wichita, either.