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I was 11 when the BTK strangler first struck in 1974, killing four members of a family in their home on Wichita's east side, the same part of town where I lived. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle--odd since Mr. Otero was a retired Air Force officer and Mrs. Otero had taken judo classes with her kids--and the phone lines had been cut.
The Wichita Eagle printed a composite sketch of a man neighbors had seen that morning: in his 20s, between 5 feet 2 and 5 feet 6, with a slender build and shoulder-length, dark, bushy hair. I turned quickly past that face to the comics.
But there was no escaping it. Soon after, a letter from the man himself announced a pseudonym: "The Code words for me will be Bind them, Torture them, Kill them, B.T.K.," the killer had written. "The Monster goes on."
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Those of us who grew up in Wichita in the '70s were forever changed by the terror of BTK's most active and visible years. Wichita's image of itself as a quiet, overgrown cow town was deeply shaken.
Suddenly, the whole tenor of our childhoods was altered. Adults murmured in fearful voices and checked the locks obsessively each night. My fifth-grade teacher banned all discussion of BTK from the classroom. Even on the playground, it seemed like too frightening a subject to broach aloud. None of us knew the victims, but if grown-ups were afraid, we had reason to be, too. BTK's activity became the yardstick against which all threats were measured. If it wasn't BTK, it wasn't real danger.
BTK killed two more women over the next three years. In the first case, the victim's children reported that a paunchy, dark-haired man in his late 30s or 40s had locked them in the bathroom before he strangled their mother. In the second case, BTK himself reported the murder. A witness later described a man he'd seen at a phone booth at about the time of the report: he was white, about six feet tall, with blondish hair.
In a letter to the local TV station, BTK said he'd killed not six but seven people (a claim later verified by police). After he murdered, he wrote, "I come home and go about life like anyone else."
This haunted me most. BTK could be anyone: blond or dark-haired; paunchy or thin; tall or short; in his 20s, 30s, 40s; a neighbor, a relative, a teacher. He was just a man who went about life like anyone else.
That is, until he seemed to gain supernatural powers, and, undeterred by locked doors or whole families who knew judo, he killed. We didn't have a defense against someone like that.
In 1979, after one last failed murder attempt, BTK faded from the public eye, though not from our consciousness. He took on mythical proportions, symbolizing evil uncontained and unknowable, this mysterious monster from the past. He lived on in all our memories, in my case in deep fears unleashed by every threat, large or small.
Once, in the early '90s, I requested the BTK file at the Wichita Public Library reference desk. The news clippings were faded and yellowing, and nothing had been added in years. The file had the feel of something historical. Still, my neck prickled with the sensation that someone was watching. Was BTK still among us?
And then, last winter, my mother called to report the arrest of a suspect. There was a lift in her voice, a relief of a tension that had brewed for 31 years.
Now the man's picture flashed on the national news. Could this be the person, grizzled but jolly-looking in some photos, wearing a brutal sneer in others, ordinary and without any supernatural powers, who had had such a hold on all of us? This bumbling man, the supposed mastermind behind what have proved to be clumsily planned and executed crimes, was the one who had instilled such terror?
I live in a small town on the East Coast where my neighbors don't lock their doors, but sometimes I still pick up the phone and am comforted by the sound of the dial tone, a habit carried over from the BTK years. Whenever I was home alone, when fear needled my skin in the creaky house, the dial tone was a reminder of the ordinary world to which that phone could connect me, an announcement that all was as it should be.
Now I recall from the far reaches of memory what it was like to feel safe, as safe as we ever feel in this world, back before a dial tone became the sound of my connection to all the wires that interlaced over streets, sagging a little between poles, stretching on to safety. For as long as I can remember, it was those wires, barbed by birds, that undergirded the moon, underlined the stars and held the Earth in plac
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