By January 1991, seventeen years after the slaughter of the Oteros, the specter of BTK had once more faded from most Wichitans’ memories. No one had connected the boastful bondage killer of the seventies with the murders of Marine Hedge and Vicki Wegerle. Nor did anyone but the police know about the poem and drawing that had been sent to Mary Fager three years earlier. But by 1991, much of the past had been wiped out by the elements.
To save money, the city management forced the police to move all their stored evidence on BTK six different times in the 1980s, each time to a location with a lower rental rate. Each time it was moved, more got lost, misplaced or stolen. Finally, the remainder of the evidence so patiently and expensively accumulated by Stewart’s Ghostbusters was packed off to a storage area in the city’s parking garage, located next to City Hall, where it attracted mice and gathered dust. Built by the lowest bidder, the garage had some serious construction flaws. On the night of June 7, 1990, another terrible storm hit Wichita, and one of the garage walls collapsed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of police reports on BTK floated away in the rain and wind, to be lost forever. While all agreed it was too bad, some thought it was fitting in a way—a wet, blustery wind had blown away a blowhard phantom.
But the killer was hardly gone. Instead, he’d been out taking the Census.
The killer had lost his job with the burglar alarm company in 1988. He wasn’t exactly fired, but it was suggested that he find some other work. The ostensible reason was a company retrenchment, but there were some who said that he was asked to leave because he was almost impossible to work with—he was so rigid, so anal-retentive, that it drove his co-workers nuts. He was just too bossy and controlling.
So he’d found a job that suited his roaming desires—he’d become a field supervisor for Uncle Sam’s decennial headcount. He’d had some sort of pull to get the Census gig—after all, he’d been a loyal member of the Republican Party for years. That too was part of his cover.
This was actually an ideal job for someone like the killer: he could drive all over, and always have some sort of plausible excuse for his presence in any particular neighborhood. Even better, the supervisory job allowed him to travel overnight out of town.
On one occasion, his “codes” had fired off, and he’d stalked a woman in another town in northern Kansas for the better part of several weeks. Finally he’d broken into her house, “hit kit” at the ready: this would be “Project Prairie.” But the woman never came home. “She was very lucky,” the killer said later.
Eventually, the Census gig ran out, and the killer was at loose ends for a while; his wife had a job working in a nearby store, and the kids were in school, so he had much of the day free to cruise around, “trolling.” He made it a practice just about every day to go to a post office in Kechi, a small community about eight miles north of Wichita, and two miles from his house in Park City. The post office was directly east on East 61st Street. Returning to his house one day after this daily run, he noticed someone who met his “codes.” This was 62-year-old Delores Davis, known to her friends and family as Dee.
When he first saw Dee Davis, the killer thought she was a man, she wore her hair that short. He kept her under his sly surveillance for some weeks, and eventually decided that she was a woman. Like Marine Hedge, Dee Davis was small and trim—five-feet-five inches tall, just over 120 pounds. The killer thought she would be easy to kill—best of all, there was no man around.
Early in January 1991, the killer approached her house in the darkness. There was a dog kennel on property to the north, so the killer decided this would be “project Dogside.” He approached the house cautiously, trying to decide the best way to make his entry. The doors seemed very secure. He crept close to one of the windows. One of Dee’s cats was sitting on the window sill. As he crept closer, the cat suddenly began batting at the window, furiously hissing. The killer got out of there, leaving tracks around the side of the house. Dee thought it was strange—she thought maybe there was some sort of animal outside that had spooked the cat. But the cat settled down, and Dee thought no more about it.
Several nights later, on January 18, 1991, the killer returned to Dee’s house. It was a Friday night. Once again the killer would use a Scouting trip with his son as his cover, this time a winter camp-out known as the Trappers’ Rendezvous at a rural lake in Harvey County, about thirty miles north of Wichita. The Scouts participated in the sort of activities associated with early American fur-trappers—wrestling, tomahawk-throwing, outdoor cooking.
The killer drove up to the lake on Friday afternoon and helped set up some of the Scouts’ tents. The boys would be arriving the following morning. That night, the killer left the camp and drove to his parents’ house in northwest Wichita. His parents were out of the house, traveling. There he changed out of his Boy Scout uniform and put on his “hit clothes,” as he called them—dark pants and a jacket with commodious pockets, and a watch cap. The dark clothes would conceal him in the winter darkness, the killer believed.
From his parents’ house, the killer drove to the nearby Park City Baptist Church, which was the sponsor of the Scout troop he was affiliated with. He had a key to the church, and used it to store some tools for his “hit kit.” He left his car at the church, and began walking toward Dee Davis’ house. It was about 10 P.M.
Dee Davis, meanwhile, had had dinner with Tom Ray, a friend, at the Red Coach Restaurant—the same place where Marine Hedge had had her last meal with her own escort six years earlier. Ray dropped Dee off at her house around 7:30 P.M. It was the last time he ever saw her alive.
The killer walked about a half-mile east on 61st Street, keeping inside a row of trees to avoid being seen, then angled across an open field to a cemetery north of Dee Davis’ house. He stopped for a while in the cemetery, perhaps to put himself in the mood. Then he began to creep up on Dee’s house.
Once he got there, he peered in one of the windows. He saw Dee was still up, reading in bed. He located the telephone line and snipped it. He waited for a while, hoping she would go to sleep. Searching the back yard, he entered a small metal shed, where he found a portion of an old cinder block. Sometime just after midnight, he threw the block through a sliding glass door in the rear of the house, shattering it. He reached inside, unlocked the sliding door and stepped into the house.
Dee came out of the bedroom, alarmed.
“What happened? Did you hit my house with your car?” she demanded.
The killer had already decided to use his “wanted man” trick. Before entering, he’d covered his face with a nylon stocking.
“No,” he said. “I’m wanted by the cops, they’re after me. I need your house and your car and your money. I’m going to tie you up and I’m going to leave you. I’m going to be a little time in here, because I need to—I need to get inside and warm up, but I’m going to take your car and some food.”
Dee retreated. “You can’t be in here,” she said.
“Ma’am,” the killer said, polite as any policeman, “you’re going to cooperate. I’ve got a club, I’ve got a gun, I’ve got a knife, I suggest you do what I say. You take your choice of how you want it.”
“Okay,” Dee said.
The killer cuffed Dee with her hands behind her. Then he tied her ankles together with pantyhose.
“Someone’s coming over in a few minutes,” Dee told him.
The killer wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth. If someone really was coming over, he would have to get moving. He forced Dee back into the bedroom. Then he began searching the house, finding the keys to her car, and making noises as if he were looking for food.
He returned to the bedroom. He removed the handcuffs, holding her arms with his hands.
“You say you’ve got somebody coming?” he asked. He pulled off his mask.
“Yes, somebody is coming.”
“Well, they’ll find you,” the killer told her. “They’ll find you and call the police. I’m out of here.” The killer was trying to calm her down.
Then he took one end of the pantyhose still around her ankles and began to tie her hands. Dee realized that he wasn’t going to leave as he’d told her.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” she asked. “Don’t kill me. I’ve got kids.”
“Too late,” the killer said, and he strangled her with another pair of pantyhose.
“I used quite a bit of pantyhose on her,” he recalled later.
The killer had planned to take pictures of Dee, but her warning that someone was coming changed his plans. He quickly tossed the house, taking Dee’s jewelry box and a camera, and several other items, including her driver’s license. Then he used a bedspread to drag her body out to her car, keeping it covered with the blankets and sheets. He put the body and the bedding in the trunk.
He drove Dee’s car south on Hillside Street, heading for the 45th Street underpass of I-135, the main route north from Wichita. It was about three minutes’ drive from Dee’s house. There were two man-made lakes there, one on either side of the freeway, which took some of the overflow from Chisholm Creek, named after the early-day cattleman who had helped put Wichita on the map.
At the east lake he put Dee’s body under some bushes. He went back to her car and drove to his own church, Christ Lutheran, where he had once profaned the basement with his abuse of Marine Hedge’s dead body. There he stashed Dee Davis’ jewelry box and other things he had taken from her house, using a hidey-hole he had fashioned under the floor of a shed on the church grounds. It was wonderful to have the church as a place of refuge.
Next he drove Dee’s car back to her house, making sure to wipe it clean of any evidence. No one was there—no one had come, despite what Dee had told him. He threw the car keys onto the roof, just as he had the Otero car keys seventeen years earlier, almost to the day. Then he walked back to the Baptist church where he’d left his own car. On the way he realized he still had two keys belonging to Dee Davis, so he threw those away in the trees.
The killer started his own car and drove back to the lakes. He’d had a lust in his mind for years: he wanted to pose one of his victims in a barn. Bondage in a barn. Or a silo. His grandparents had owned a farm, and the fantasy of doing whatever he wanted to do to someone in a barn was one of his fondest desires.
At the lake, he reclaimed Dee’s body and put it into the back of his own car, a station wagon. Just the sort of car one might expect a family man like him, a Scout leader, to drive. He headed north and west, out into the rural darkness. It was snowing very lightly. He was looking for the barn he’d already picked out, but as the snow got worse, he began to worry. He had to get back to the Trappers’ Rendezvous before someone missed him. If he wasn’t there when the Scouts showed up in the morning, there would be questions.
He decided to give up on the barn. Too bad. About eleven miles out, just before the county line, he saw a bridge over a small drainage swale. This will do it, he thought, and he stopped his car, opened the back of the station wagon and dragged Dee’s body out. It fell on the pavement. He dragged the body down into the swale under the bridge and left it with the debris. Then he got back in his car and drove to the barn, where he’d left some things—ropes, his Polaroid camera—he didn’t want anyone to find.
He got back to the camp-out before dawn. No one had missed him.
The next day, just after noon, Tom Ray, Dee’s friend, arrived at her house. They’d made plans to get together; Tom had promised to wash her car. But when she hadn’t arrived at his house, he’d called her to see if something was wrong. No one answered the telephone.
Worried, Ray drove to Dee’s house. He could see that the outside light was still on, and the living room curtains were drawn. That was unusual, because Ray knew that Dee liked to get up early. Not only that, her car was in the driveway—Dee never left her car out in the winter elements. Ray opened the garage door and saw that the interior door to the house was ajar. He went into the house and saw that the telephone line had been pulled out of the wall. As he walked through the house, he saw that the sliding glass door into the family room had been shattered by a cinder block. In the bedroom he noticed that the sheets and blankets were missing, and that Dee’s jewelry box was gone.
At that point, Ray had no doubt that something very bad had happened to Dee. He left the house and went to a telephone to call 911. Minutes later, two Sedgwick County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the house. Another search disclosed that keys to Dee’s car were on the roof of the house.
That night, a man walking his dog along North Hydraulic Street discovered several blankets and other bed linen in a culvert about a quarter mile to the northwest of Dee’s house. They were identified as having come from Dee’s bed.
The killer wasn’t done yet with Dee Davis. That night, even as the Sedgwick County sheriff’s deputies were collecting the bedding from the culvert, the killer was on his way back to the place where he had dumped her body the night before, seven miles to the northwest of the culvert. He made another headache excuse to the Scouts, and drove to Sedgwick, a small town a few miles southeast of the Trappers’ Rendezvous. Dressed in his Scout uniform, he stopped at a convenience store to buy a newspaper. He wanted to see if there was any news about Dee Davis. Of course, there was nothing—it was too early.
He drove on, pulling into a highway rest stop just over the county line. In the lavatory, he took off his Scout uniform and put on his “hit clothes.” At that moment, a Kansas Highway Patrol officer came into the lavatory, checking it for unsavory activity.
“What are you doing?” the patrolman demanded.
Shit, the killer thought, I’m done. It’s over, this guy’s gonna bust me. His heartbeat started racing.
Somehow he managed to stay calm. He explained that he was on his way to the Scout camp, that he was changing his clothes.
“Well,” the trooper said, “when you’re done, come outside. I need to talk to you.”
Now the killer was really worried. There were things in his car that he didn’t want the trooper to see—a mask, for one thing.
But outside, the trooper simply ran his name on the computer to see if there were any wants or warrants on him or his car, a routine procedure, and of course, there were none. The trooper let him go.
Vastly relieved at his escape, the killer drove back to the place where he’d left Dee’s body in the swale. It was very foggy—spooky, the killer thought. When he climbed down to look at the body, he saw that small animals had been gnawing on it
Creepy, he thought. He bent down over the body and put the mask he had brought over her face. He wanted to “pretty her up,” he said later. It was a plain white mask of a man’s face that he’d altered by painting it a flesh color, the lips red, and gluing eyebrows and eyelashes to it. He’d put a black line of ink between the crimson lips. The mask had a length of venetian blind cord tied to it. He took several photographs of the body with the mask. Then he decided to leave it with the body—a signature of sorts.
Twelve days later, a boy walking his dog near 117th and Meridian Streets just a few miles short of the county line, discovered the remains of Dee Davis’ body. He immediately ran home to call the police. When they arrived, they found her decomposing remains still tied with pantyhose around the neck, knees and ankles. Nearby they found a very weird flesh-colored mask with a piece of venetian blind cord attached.
But by then the killer was back in his snug little house in Park City, miles away, and utterly no one’s suspect as the horrible killer known as BTK.