The “poet” case had been a disaster for the Wichita police. Two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars had been poured down the drain, and the investigators were no closer to identifying BTK than they had been the morning after the Oteros had been murdered. LaMunyon had lost face; he’d also lost confidence in the existing homicide squad. The thing to do, he decided, was to start from scratch.
In 1982, he decided to form a special team within the department, composed of detectives who had not worked on any of the BTK cases before. LaMunyon’s idea was that the new team would be free of any of the biases that had crept into the investigation from all the years of frustration. And he had a gift for this new team—the additional resources of the FBI.
By that time, the BTK murders had received a substantial amount of national publicity, and why not? Here was the ultimate urban nightmare—an unknown killer who broke into people’s houses at random, and strangled them to death. No apparent connection between the victims, and no viable suspects. It could be anyone, and anyone could die. It was any police chief’s worst scenario.
By the early 1980s, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was up and running. Douglas, Ressler, Hazelwood and a variety of other specialists were studying serial crimes reported from across the country, attempting to identify patterns among the crimes, and among the perpetrators. A new tool was in place at Quantico—essentially, a lengthy questionnaire that would attempt to identify the keys to solving serial crimes. Called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Project, or ViCAP, the questionnaire was the end result of work done years earlier by legendary Los Angeles Police Department Homicide Detective Pierce Brooks. It was Brooks’ idea that serial predators tended to follow patterns in all their crimes. Statistical analysis of the patterns might in turn lead to better methods of identification of the criminals.
To get the ViCAP system running, two cases were selected for input into a computer—the Atlanta child murders supposedly committed by Wayne Williams, and BTK.
With the FBI ready to assist, LaMunyon moved to activate his new crew of investigators. For the next four years, they would work with the FBI in an effort to use the latest in computer and scientific technology to winnow the killer’s name out of the darkness.
To head the new unit—soon to be nicknamed the “Ghostbusters” after the popular movie of the era—LaMunyon picked Captain Al Stewart. Stewart had been commanding the department’s internal affairs division, the cops who investigated other cops. Seven others, all men, were also selected; none of them had worked on BTK before.
At the first meeting of the group, LaMunyon instructed them that they were never to tell any other police officer what their assignment was. According to Beattie, LaMunyon told the members of the new unit that if any one of them ever revealed their assignment, he would fire them all. By this point, given Douglas, Ressler and Hazel-wood’s earlier assertions about the wannabe-a-cop characteristics of the killer, LaMunyon had to consider the very real possibility that the killer actually was a cop. It would explain a lot, he thought.
LaMunyon was also determined to get qualified outside help from the academic world to assist in the project. By the time the Ghostbusters were done, the advice of mathematicians, psychologists, biologists and even astrologers and numerologists had been solicited. An Air Force general associated with the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite controllers, would be consulted. But mostly the work was collecting and analyzing the reams of paper that had already been generated. The answer had to be in there somewhere—it was just that they couldn’t recognize it.
In 1984, three FBI agents—Douglas, Hazelwood and Ron Walker—met with a detective from the Wichita Police Department to give him their collective impressions of BTK. Sitting in on the session, which was tape recorded by the Wichita detective, was the legendary Pierce Brooks, the retired Los Angeles Police Department detective who had been instrumental in getting ViCAP launched. As it happened, one of Brooks’ early cases with the LAPD was none other than Harvey Glatman—BTK’s claimed idol “Harvery” Glatman.
As recalled by Hazelwood, the Wichita officer later transcribed their taped remarks, and provided each man with a verbatim, hand-written record of what had been said. No formal written report was ever produced by any of the FBI men, or Brooks, according to Hazelwood. But each profiling expert provided some educated guesses as to what sort of person BTK was.
“There were some points of departure among us,” Hazelwood recalled, referring to the opinions provided to the Wichita detective, whose name Hazelwood could no longer recall two decades later. “But we were all pretty much in agreement that what the killer was after, what motivated him, was control.” The murders weren’t personal, all agreed; the killer had no anger toward the victims, or even a desire to have conventional sex with them. What got him going was the process—looking for a victim, stalking them, planning, anticipating, followed by the execution. All thought the killer was married, probably lower to middle class economically, attracted to pornography, an underachiever, and someone prone to thinking of himself as better than everyone else—a classic narcissist with a mostly hidden streak of sadism.
One of the bureau’s most insightful profilers, Hazelwood had substantial experience profiling sexual predators. He first became interested in violent, serial sex crimes when, while in training as a military policeman, an instructor lectured about the Glatman case.
“I kept asking why?” Hazelwood recalled. “Why did he take pictures of the victims? Why did he do this or not that?”
“It’s not important,” Hazelwood said he was told by the instructor. But to Hazelwood, it was important. Later, he met Brooks, who gave him considerable insight into Harvey Glatman’s history, including that killer’s early bondage experiences and penchant for auto-erotic hanging.
As a sexual sadist who was excited by bondage, BTK had been practicing bondage for some time, not unlike Harvey Glatman, Hazelwood thought. The bondage fetish had probably begun when the killer was between seven and ten years old. As an adult, the killer, Hazelwood thought, collected bondage tools such as ropes, chains and handcuffs, along with detective magazines that featured bondage cases. He had an interest in psychology and criminology, and probably frequented adult book stores. He was articulate and intelligent, but an underachiever, and someone adept at convincing people they knew him, when they really didn’t. He saw himself as a “lone wolf” type, and for him, the primary motive was to have control over someone. It wasn’t sex that drove the killer so much as the stalking, the planning, the capture, the execution of the crime. He was angry at women, but not at the victims personally. They were just props necessary to his desire to demonstrate his control. He carried a gun and a knife, but he preferred to kill his victims by hand, which was more satisfying to his desire to show his control. BTK, Hazelwood said, considered himself intellectually and emotionally superior to everyone else.
Future cases, Hazelwood said—and he believed there would be more—would be marked by the combination of sexual bondage and strangulation.
“I can’t stop it so the monster goes on, and hurt [sic] me as well as society,” the killer had written. “It’s hard for me to control myself. You probably call me ‘psyhcotic [sic] with sexual perversion hangup.’ When this monster enter [sic] my brain, I will never know. But, it here to stay. How does one cure himself?” The killer himself believed there was no cure, that he would keep on killing for as long as he lived.
The toxic self-love was what drove the killer to send the communications. He absolutely had to get the publicity for his actions, or his life would lose all meaning.
This tape-recorded profile was augmented with some observations by a clinical psychologist, Dr. John Allen. Allen told the Ghostbusters that they had to put aside their preconceptions of the sort of sex predator they were looking for. The man they sought wouldn’t have tattoos, he wouldn’t linger around school playgrounds, he wouldn’t drool or expose himself, and he certainly wouldn’t cavort with ducks. The predator they were looking for was someone who seemed utterly normal on the outside, in fact, someone who was absolutely self-controlled. That would be the exterior of the personality, Allen suggested—the shell. Carefully erected, assiduously maintained, the shell would carry BTK through society like a suit of armor, concealing the raging narcissism within. For proof, Allen pointed to Kevin Bright’s description of the behavior of the man who was trying to strangle him—that the strangler was calm, matter-of-fact, but deliberate. Or the Relford children—the man who’d come to the door seemed well-dressed, and had said he was a detective.
No, the cardinal thing to remember about BTK was that he wore a mask—a mask that made him seem just like any other person.
Even a detective.