Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, Hurst Laviana Page B

clerk later described the man as clean shaven, white, about five feet nine, and about thirty years old. He was dressed in a jeans jacket, jeans, and gloves. His hair was cropped short above the ears, and he had gaps between his teeth.
    The clerk did not know it, but the man had mailed a similar package to Anna Williams.
     
    Williams’s envelope was addressed in block letters. Inside was one of her scarves and a piece of her jewelry. There was a sketch of a gagged woman, nude except for stockings, lying on the edge of a bed. Her hands and feet were tied to a pole the way safari hunters carried home big game in the movies; she was trussed so she would pull her bindings tighter as she struggled. There was also a poem laced with typos and sexual menace. The name Louis had been crossed out and replaced with “Anna” and “A”:
    OH, ANNA WHY DIDN’T YOU APPEAR
    T’ was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement, like new vines so tight.
    Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear
    Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness to scent the lofty fever that burns within.
    In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desperation, the games we play, fall on devil ears.
    Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.
    Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments across most private thought.
    Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes so deep and clear.
    Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why you number eight was not.
    Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear.
     
    And there was a strange signature: a B turned on its side to resemble eyeglasses, with a T and part of a K conjoined to look like a smile dangling below. The signature was stylized, as though the author was proud of himself. It was the first time he’d marked a message this way.
    The cops wondered why BTK had targeted Williams. Most of his victims had been female, but all had been younger than forty. Perhaps BTK was really after Williams’s twenty-four-year-old granddaughter, who often stayed with her.
    Williams did not wait for police to figure it out. She left Kansas.
     
    LaMunyon asked Eagle editor Buzz Merritt to look at the Otero crime scene photos. Knowing that he would never publish such graphic images, Merritt didn’t want to see them. So LaMunyon offered a deal: Eagle reporters would get a look at some portions of the secret investigative files in return for a promise not to report what they saw until BTK’s capture. LaMunyon was insistent and seemed anxious.
    This would take the relationship between the police department and the newspaper to a new level. Merritt thought that soon, perhaps before 1979 ended, BTK would be captured. Getting a look at the file would help build that story in advance. He went to see the photos, then arranged to send the reporters too. Twelve days after BTK mailed the Williams poem, LaMunyon showed BTK’s letters and a slide show of Otero crime photos to Ken Stephens and Casey Scott. Stephens copied BTK’s signature into his notebook; KAKE had given its package to the cops unopened, but now the Eagle knew what was inside.
    LaMunyon would not tell the journalists why he wanted them to see the files until much later: he and other commanders hoped that new eyes would see new clues.
    They did not.
     
    The Williams letter spurred the detectives not only to more effort but new ideas. Over the next two years detectives Arlyn Smith, Bernie Drowatzky, Al Thimmesch, and others tried to track down which copy machine BTK used for the KAKE and Williams letters. They had noticed something interesting. BTK’s first message�the 1974 library letter�had been an original document. Since then