Monster: BTK - The Otero Family [1]

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

January 1974. Four members of a family are killed in their home in Wichita, Kansas. Investigators are mystified. Nothing like this has ever happened before in Wichita. Little did they know, this was just the beginning. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised. I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was walking home, the snow was knee deep, and the wind was blowing pretty hard. And I walked into the backyard. We had a wood fence with a gate. So I went through the yard and my dog, Lucky, he was outside in the snow and he was never outside. I'm like, what are you doing out here, boy?

He looked at me and wagged his tail and opened up a kitchen door and went into the back. When I walked in the house, I looked at the stove. It had my mom's purse on it. All the stuff was stowed out and that's not how my mom kept the house. She was very adamant about keeping our house super clean. I yelled out, anybody home? And I heard a voice yell, Charlie, come quick. Mom and dad are playing a bad trick on us. I ran down the hall and I could just sense something was wrong already. I could just feel it. And I opened up the door and saw my mom and my dad. And I saw my mom on the bed.

And my heart broke. It felt like somebody had actually ripped my chest open and pulled my heart out. It was a physical pain. I tried to undo the ropes that were on him. My dad's tongue was half bit off, hanging. The ropes were so tight, there was no way to untie them. To this day, I can smell fear and death. I can smell fear on a person.

Because when you walked in the house, you could smell it. You could smell the death in the house. My name is Susan Peters. I'm a journalist and former news anchor for KAKE-TV, also known as Cake TV in Wichita, Kansas. I started out as a reporter in Illinois and then anchored the news in San Diego. When I moved to Kansas in 1983, people would ask me if I knew about the serial killer BTK. At the time, I didn't know much, but my co-workers told me about the seven people he killed in the 1970s.

His first victims were the Otero family. We moved to Puerto Rico to stay with my grandparents while my dad looked for his future. He just spent 20 years of his life in the Air Force since he was 17, and he was searching for the best opportunity. My name is Charlie Otero. I am a surviving son of Joseph and Julie Otero. One day he got a hold of us and said, you're coming to Wichita.

He had found a job here at a small airfield, Cook Airfield. We hopped on a plane and flew to Wichita and I left the beautiful tropical island of Puerto Rico and landed in the wheat fields of Kansas in the middle of a snowstorm. And we were just getting used to the neighborhood. It was totally different from what I was used to. It was January of 1974. The Otero family had recently moved into a small home at 803 North Edgemore on the east side of Wichita.

In some ways, it was the picture-perfect American dream, with a fenced-in backyard for the children and the dog to play in. The parents were Julie and Joseph Sr., and they had five children. From oldest to youngest, there was Charlie, Danny, Carmen, Josephine, nicknamed Josie, and Joseph Jr., who they also called Joey. They were a close-knit family supported by two hard-working parents from Spanish Harlem in New York. We really hadn't got a chance to meet other people in the neighborhood yet, and it was winter. So we were pretty homebound, and we just spent a lot of time together. Don't get me wrong, we had our moments, but there was always love in the house, always.

My mom didn't cuss. She was in the church. I mean, she was the kind of woman that would bring orphans home for Christmas to our house. Over the years, I've developed a deep relationship with Charlie. He's told me all about his mother and how she kept the family together when they were new to Wichita. Wichita was a quiet and calm town for the family to settle into. It was a stable community, or so it seemed. As the Oteros made their home, evil was brewing, and it was about to boil over. A monster was watching them, stalking them, and learning their daily routine.

He knew when the mother, Julie, took the kids to school each day, and he knew the exact time that the father, Joseph Sr., usually left for work. But on the morning of January 15, 1974, the family routine was different. I remember asking my father to take me to school early that day. My mom used to usually give me a ride because it was like two miles away, southeast high from where we lived.

That day, my dad stayed home because he had an appointment with somebody or something. And so he gave me a ride. He also took me to school early because I asked him to because it was finals day for the nine-week period. And I wanted an extra study hall to bone up a little bit more on some of the classes I was taking tests in. And that's probably what saved me and Danny and Carmen's lives because they had to go with me.

Joseph Otero Sr. dropped his three eldest children off and returned home in his wife's car. No matter how many times I walk through this story, it's very hard to talk about what happened next, as Julie and Joe Otero got their youngest, Josie and Joey, ready for school. That day, it was 20 degrees in Wichita, and snow coated the frozen ground. Around 8.20 a.m., as planned, the stalker unlatched the door on the family's wooden gate and let himself into the backyard of the Otero's home on Edgemore Street.

In the pockets of his jacket, he carried rope, Venetian blind cord, gags, white adhesive tape, plastic bags, and a knife. The man inched slowly toward the back door. He jiggled the doorknob, but it was locked. So instead, he found a telephone line tacked to the outside wall and cut it with a hunting knife. Just then, the man heard the back door open, and he was surprised to find a small boy looking directly at him. This was nine-year-old Joey Otero. By the boy's side was a large dog. As the man stood there, he felt his plan start to unravel. Not only did the family have a dog he hadn't planned for, but the young boy was home. And as he soon learned, the father was home as well. He panicked and pulled out his gun. Inside, he found the mother and daughter. The young girl began to cry. The man dealt with the dog first, telling Joey to put him in the yard. Then, still

holding the family at gunpoint, he backed them into the main bedroom and began to tie each of them up. One by one, he killed each of them. He strangled Joseph with a rolled-up T-shirt, followed by Julie with a rope. The man struggled. He had never done this before. The man then took Joseph Jr. into a different bedroom and strangled him as well. Finally, he took 11-year-old Josephine downstairs to the basement and hung her from a sewage pipe.

The man tried to cover his tracks. He drove the Otero's Vista Cruiser to Dylan's grocery store. Before he got out, he adjusted the seat forward to disguise his height. Then he walked to his own car down the street. He took inventory and realized he had forgotten his knife. He drove back to the house in his own car and picked up the knife. Quickly, he sped off. And just like that, he was gone.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jake Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beth Lee is guilty. This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. A few steps,

how many times you have blood splatter, where's the change of clothes anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet. And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often. On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live

there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night? Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference. Better Offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily

episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr. with appearances from Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And check out betteroffline.com. That afternoon, Charlie Otero was finishing up his finals two miles away at Southeast High School. The school bell rang and he walked home with his two younger siblings, Danny and Carmen.

They were expecting to reunite with the rest of their family as they had always done. They had no idea what was waiting for them at home. I took all my tests, aced all of them, and then I was walking home. I remember walking through the snow thinking, this really sucks, Kansas sucks. I get across the street from my house. The garage door was up and the car was gone.

So I'm like, here's my chance to rag my mom. Because I never get to rag my mom. You didn't get to say anything bad to her. And this is my chance to say, why did you leave the garage door open? Now I got to clean the snow out. So I'm already practicing my spiel. This is when Charlie and his siblings entered the home to the gruesome scene you heard about at the top of the episode. I can imagine the horror as they pieced together that their parents

were not in fact playing a cruel trick on them. The fear as they figured out what to do next. We tried to use the phone. It was dead. Me and Danny and Carmen went outside and I told Danny to go next door and to the neighbor's house and use their phone to call the police. And we waited outside together in the snow, huddled up. And a police officer came and he goes, what's going on here? I said, go inside, you'll see. Officers Robert Bulla and Jim Lindeberg of the Wichita Police Department

arrived at the Otero household at 3.42 p.m. The police report describes what the officers initially found, read here by a voice actor. Officers checked the bedrooms. The door to the southwest bedroom stood halfway open. The officers pushed the door open and saw a man on the floor. A cut white rope and a butcher's knife were on the floor next to the man. A woman was on the bed. The woman's legs were bent and hanging over the edge of the bed. The officers noticed blood on her nose and mouth.

Officer Bulla found no pulse. The woman's hands appeared to be tied behind her back. A white cloth gag covered with blood was found next to her head. Officers Bulla and Lindeberg found Joseph and Julie in the main bedroom. They radioed dispatch to possible homicide victims. Then Officer Lindeberg left the house to check back in with the children. He came back out and looked at me and said, could your father have done this? I knew what he was insinuating right away.

He was insinuating that my dad had come home and found my mom with another man because my dad was dark, dark, dark, almost Negro. And my mom was white, white, white, as white as you can be without being see-through. My dad's in there with his hands tied and he's dead. How could he have killed himself and tied himself up? I knew what he was insinuating. I had that knife in my hand when he said that. And I almost stuck it in him. And at that instant, I lost all respect for authority.

I hated police. I hated the world at that moment. When I first saw my mother, I lost my religion. Instantly, I hated God. We were in a state of shock. And I kept telling the police officer, I said, I got to stop Joey and Josie from coming home. He called the station and had a bunch of cops coming. And I told myself, I do not want Joey and Josie to get here and see all these cops. And I want them here with me now. I knew it was my job to take over and take care of my siblings. And I didn't know Joey and Josie were in the house. So I kept telling them I need need Joey and Josie with me, over and over again. Seemingly all of Wichita's police force made their way to the Otero household on North Edgemore, in what was generally a quiet neighborhood, to begin solving a quadruple

homicide. The children told the officers that when they arrived home to find their parents, they attempted to cut the ropes and desperately tried to perform CPR. As Officer Bulla interviewed the Otero children, Lieutenant Jack Watkins arrived at the house. It was he and Officer Bulla who discovered little Joey in the upstairs bedroom and Josie in the basement. Here again is an excerpt from the police report. While Officer Bulla was outside of the home, Lieutenant Jack Watkins discovered the body of Joseph Otero Jr. in another upstairs bedroom. Lieutenant Watkins and Officer Bulla searched the rest of the home. Josephine Otero was found in the northwest storage area of the basement. Josephine Otero was hanging by a rope that had been tied to a sewer pipe. A white cloth was tied around her mouth.

Josephine Otero was wearing a blue short-sleeved knit sweater and was naked from the waist down. As the eldest, Charlie pleaded for answers about his little sister and brother, Josie and Joey. It's Charlie's nature to protect his family, and he wanted to protect the two youngest from what the three of them had already seen. I kept telling him when we got to the police station, I kept saying, where's Joey and Josie? I need them here now. I need them here now. I can't even tell you how

long we were there. It could have been an hour. It could have been 10 hours. It could have been 10 seconds. At that point, the world is upside down, inside out for me. Finally, a police chaplain pulled me over and says, Charlie, we got to tell you Joey and Josie were in the house. They're dead too. After that, I pretty much went blank. Back in East Wichita, local police officers, detectives, and other officials were gathered in mass at the Otero household. They immediately set up a headquarters in the school across the street from the Otero home. The police report states that Chief of Police Floyd Hannon assigned 10 teams of detectives to investigate the murders and search for the family's missing car.

Again, here is an excerpt from the police report. At 5.46 p.m., Detective Lewis Brown located the Otero car in the parking lot of the Dillon's grocery store at Central and Oliver. The keys to the beige 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser were missing. Steve Christian, the brother of the former owner of the Otero home, reported seeing the car backing out of the driveway at approximately 10.30 a.m. At the Otero home, Officer Bulla assisted Lab Director Ron Eggleston in processing the scene. Notably, Eggleston found stains on the concrete floor directly in front of young Josephine in the basement. He collected samples of those stains. The local newspapers and television stations

caught wind of the killings and also set up shop by the Otero home. They had very little to go on. Back in that day and to this day, we monitor the police frequencies, the fire frequencies, and that type of thing. We didn't know what had happened, but we knew that they had sent a lot of detectives to this one particular address in East Wichita. Nobody was talking about it on the frequencies that we were monitoring. So we didn't know what was going on, but we thought, you know, there's something going on there.

And I was sent out to see what was happening. This is my longtime colleague and friend, Larry Hattaberg, who was on the scene reporting for Cake TV on the day the Oteros were murdered. None of the detectives, no one would talk to me. They just say, you know, we'll have information later, but no one would talk to me. And it wasn't until hours and hours and hours after I arrived that we found out that there were four dead bodies inside the house.

And it wasn't until later that we found out that two of those bodies were children. And it was shocking. All we knew is that some crazy person had gone in and killed an entire family. That was the shocking part. That just didn't happen in Wichita, Kansas. Even the police department, I think, were shocked by the murder. They had never had really a murder of that size happen before. Detectives went to work studying the crime scene. For 10 days, 75 officers and detectives worked 18 hours a day. At the end of the first week, sleep deprived, out of energy, and out of ideas, the police

and all of Wichita were left with the same questions. We wondered, what kind of crazy person do we have? Is it somebody on drugs that did it? Is it somebody who had a vendetta against this people? During the investigation, police chief Floyd Hannon held press conferences at least twice a day, where he would disclose specifics, speculate about motives, and possible suspects. Newspapers like the Wichita Eagle and The Beacon covered every development. The police began with a handful of different possibilities. The first was that the killer could be someone within the family, as Officer Bullis suggested to Charlie upon initially securing the scene.

Investigators quickly ruled that theory out. The second was that there was a possible drug connection. Chief Hannon himself flew to Panama and to Puerto Rico to follow this idea. The third was that someone was out to get Julie. Usually there's a connection of something, and in this particular case, there was no connection. We didn't know anything. What caused this? What's the background of the Oteros? Who would do this? What was it? The investigators, their immediate reaction was this was a revenge killing of some kind. Whether it be drug-related, whether it be a business thing, we didn't know what it was. My name is Richard Lemunyon. I'm currently the city manager for the City of Mays. At the time of the

Otero murders, I was a member of the Wichita Police Department. I joined the department in 1963. I was a police chief from 1976 through 1989. Lemunyan says they didn't have very much to go on at the start of the investigation, but that from the get-go, police could tell this had not been a random killing. It was a planned scenario. There was a script, at least if not written, in this individual's mind. Our individuals, we didn't know if it was one, two, or 22, but there was definitely a plan premeditated, and that's why it threw us back to this has to be a revenge. The chief authorized some of the detectives to make some trips. One of them was

even made to Mexico, so there were some special efforts made. It's not unusual to send out detectives and things to other places, but when you send them out of the country or something, that's unusual. A week had passed since the Otero murders, and the investigators assigned to the case weren't getting any answers. Chief Hannon pulled out all the stops, signing off on any and all ideas detectives came up with for solving the murders. One night, detectives Gary Caldwell and Bernie Drowatzky hired a psychic to stay in the house with police. The detectives were desperate, and the psychic had claimed she helped solve a crime by leading police to a body in a trunk. One overnight stay with the psychic later,

and Caldwell and Drowatzky still had nothing to bring back to Chief Hannon. With each lead running into a dead end, pressure was mounting on the department, as the community feared what would come next. The officers themselves struggled to come to terms with the tragedy. Lemunyan describes the department's turmoil as they worked the case. You know, police officers, even though you deal with tragedy every day and everything, you're still a human being. When you see a situation like this, you see the victims laying

there with plastic bags over their heads, strangled. And then you see children. In your mind, you think back, well, I have children. I have sisters. I have brothers. I have other things. So it does impact you. But you can't let that influence you at the time. The first week of the investigation was difficult. In hindsight, we can say that the Wichita Police Department was not equipped to deal with this kind of murder in 1974.

In fact, they made multiple mistakes. Someone in the department lost several crime scene photos and most of the autopsy photos. Through crime scene photographs, they discovered that a responding officer opened the Otero freezer and left the ice tray on the counter. This mistake set the department back as they worked to piece together the timeline of the crime. Yet, there was one big thing that the investigators did correctly on the first day. When it came to preserving evidence, you know, we had preserved evidence before. In this particular case, there was semen found on the little girl in the basement where he had literally brushed up against her and there was a little bit in her leg. Now, how do you preserve that?

And this is 1974. We didn't have computers. We didn't have DNA. We didn't have any of that stuff. However, our crime investigation unit, what they ended up doing was they did three things. Number one, they dried part of it. They kept part of it in fluid.

And then they froze part of it, all three of them. As the investigation unfolded, tensions were understandably high in the city. The close-knit community of Wichita was starting to fall apart. People were becoming suspicious of their neighbors, fearing that the killer could live next door. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence

but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beth Lee is guilty. This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you'd have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet.

And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.

On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference. Better offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast

of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with appearances from Behind the Bastards Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And check out betteroffline.com. Following the murder, the Otero children were once again swept off to a new location,

leaving a city in which they had not spent long enough to consider home, one that would remind them only of darkness for decades to come. We had known a family in Panama that was stationed at McConnell, Sergeant Jaquez. So we called them up and they said, and it was Senator Kennedy's office. He was the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee at that time, and they called and said, well, what can we do for you? I told them, I said, I have four bodies to bury and I don't want them in Wichita. I'll be damned if I'm going to bury my family here in Wichita. So he said, what do you want to do? I said, I want my family buried in Puerto Rico.

And he said, done. And they buried my family in a national military cemetery in Puerto Rico in my dad's hometown of San Turce. At just 15 years old, Charlie took on this responsibility, shouldering the immense weight of this tragedy out of love for his siblings. I kept telling myself, you know, if I came unglued, what would Danny and Carmen do? I had to be that pillar of strength for them to hold on to because we didn't have anything at that point.

You got to remember, we had just spent our whole lives as a family unit traveling all over, and now there wasn't one. We had no mom. One minute, my mom was bringing orphans and giving them my bedroom for Christmas, and the next minute, I'm the orphan. So I got on the phone. I called my Uncle John. He became my guardian, our guardian. To this day, I'm still very close to them and the family. He was there the next day. I called them. They got in the car and drove straight to Wichita from New Mexico, from Albuquerque. And that's when our life turned around again. After the funeral, the surviving Otero children tried to settle into life in New Mexico. With their parents and siblings gone, it was understandably difficult to adjust.

We had a hard time. PTSD was kicking in. Danny was acting up. I started racing motorcycles to release my aggression. I was very aggressive, very careless with my life, with my body. I got in a bike wreck right after I graduated from high school and I had a handlebar go through my helmet and down my throat. Saw my whole life pass before me, and my life kind of changed at that point. I was like, who cares?

Why build a future if somebody's just going to come take it from you? We just maintained an existence. While Charlie and his siblings carried on, the city of Wichita was still in shock. As Cake Anchor Larry Hatterberg says, this was a level of violence that seemed inconceivable in a small town like Wichita, Kansas. And that in itself, I think, turned this quiet town that never had anything happen

into a town that for a period of time was really on edge because they didn't know what was going to happen next. They didn't know who was going to be next. And it was a terrifying time for an awful lot of people. Someone killed four members of a family, two children and two adults. And that had really never happened before in Wichita, particularly the children. I mean, they've had double murders, but to include the children in that, that was shocking to a Kansas town. It just didn't happen here. And yet, it did.

But this was just the beginning. Over the next five years, the killer would continue to terrorize Wichita. He targeted dozens of women and stalked them at night. He watched them come and go from work, and for many of them, he broke into their homes and murdered them. In the 70s alone, he killed seven people, but even that wasn't enough for him. He also started writing taunting letters to the media. Larry Hatterberg talks about one letter that arrived to Cake in February of 1978. Cake TV received a postcard from someone who indicated that they had information about the killings. I will never forget this. It was a Saturday morning,

and the postcard had come into our mail room. How many people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention? I am compelled to kill by Factor X, the same factor that motivated Son of Sam in New York, Jack the Ripper in London, and the Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles. It seems senseless, but we cannot help it. There

is no help, no cure except death or being caught and put away. A little paragraph in the newspaper would have been enough. In one of these letters, he even named himself BTK, which stands for Bind, Torture, Kill. Then in April of 1979, BTK seemingly disappeared. He committed his last murder and cut off all communication. Or so we thought. For a period of time, everything just shut down. We heard nothing from BTK, not a word.

And so all of the rumors started to fly of what has happened to BTK. Is he dead? Is he incarcerated? What's the deal with BTK? Is he dead? Is he incarcerated? What's the deal with BTK? As suddenly as he appeared, he was simply gone. To outsiders, it may have seemed as though Wichita had finally been freed of its boogeyman. But the presence of BTK was always felt. I initially moved here in the 80s. People no longer left their doors unlocked, and there were always nervous whispers. No one felt safe in Wichita anymore. This was not a community that locked its doors so much. After BTK, this was a community that

locked its doors. This is a community where young women were terrified. They didn't go out alone at night. If they were going out, they let everybody know where they were going and what time they would be arriving. It turns out that feeling was justified because BTK hadn't gone anywhere. He was just laying dormant, waiting for his time to rise again. In this case, it would be decades later. Fast forward to 2004, when this story culminated in one of the most dramatic turn of events in Kansas history. Eight minutes past now and decades after a serial killer terrorized Wichita, Kansas, cops say the case that was once cold may be warm yet again.

Today, a Wichita paper says it received another letter claiming responsibility for an eighth victim who was killed in 1986. It was spring of 2004. No one had heard from BTK in 25 years. Most of us had moved on with our lives, assuming he was gone. But on March 19, 2004, the Wichita Eagle received a letter from someone claiming to be Bill Thomas Killman, initials BTK. In it, he claimed to have killed a new victim. Investigators believe the letter is from BTK because it has information about a two-decade-old homicide linked to BTK that only the killer would know. At KTV, of course course this became our top story and for a

whole year it remained our top story because the letters didn't stop there a few months after this first correspondence a letter arrived at our tv station a letter received by Cake TV was turned over to us last Wednesday, and we are treated as if possibly being sent by BTK. He started writing to us. He wrote to Cake TV, my employer. We knew that he was watching us every night, which was a little terrifying. And for the female anchors at our television station, it was getting pretty close because we were concerned that he could strike them, that he could kill them, make them a target. One of those people was me. As the most visible female anchor at Cake, I knew I was at high risk. In fact, in one of his letters, BTK even mentioned my name. This is from the BTK letter

received on February 3rd, 2005. Thanks to the news team for their efforts. Sorry about Susan and Jeff's colds. During a newscast, I had mentioned on the air that my co-anchor and I were feeling under the weather. Just two days later, this letter arrived. It hit me like a punch to the gut, because that meant he was watching me. So we had extra security on all our on-air females. It was a terrifying time. I know I would walk a co-anchor out to the station, out to the parking lot every night,

and get her in her car just to make sure that there wasn't anybody waiting around there. It was a scary time, particularly for the women in our television station. Throughout 2004 and early 2005, BTK continued to send letters, threatening to kill again, presumably at random. His letters made it very clear he was once again targeting women across Wichita. Here is his letter from July 17, 2004, a poem titled, Oh Death to Nancy. I'll stuff your jaws till you can't talk.

I'll bind your legs till you can't walk. I'll tie your hands till you can't make a stand. And finally, I'll close your eyes so you can't see. I'll bring sexual death unto you for me. I mean it when I tell you every woman in Wichita was scared to death. You can imagine how terrified everybody was. Looking behind themselves. Wondering if they were going to be next. Afraid to walk out of the grocery store at night. Afraid to be alone in their own homes.

February 25, 2005. I was home. It's snowing and I see that dad. So I'm home in these mint green fuzzy pajamas. It's like getting close to noon and I see this strange car parked out underneath this window. It was maroon, four-door, like an old Cadillac or something. You know, it seemed out of place. It was parked there for a long time.

I'm getting scared because, like, my dad had instilled such a stranger danger fear into me. You know, be wary of strangers. Don't let strange people into your house. Make them show you their badge. You know, question their uniform if you're not expecting them. I literally called my husband,

like, once or twice. I said, there's a strange car with a man sitting in it. He's not moving. I don't know what he's doing. I said, should I call the police? It almost felt like he was there for me. I hear a knock on my door. And it was like something in me knew that the man in the car was now on the other side of

the door. And then he said on the other side of the door, I'm with the FBI and I need to question you. And so I said, can I see your badge? And so he like flashes his badge. It looks legit. He didn't have a gun, which I thought was weird. All he had was like a yellow legal pad and like a pencil. It was a very small apartment, very narrow hallway. And I remember I was comfortable enough that I turned my back to him to walk the few steps into the kitchen. And he just drops it. He's like, do you know about BTK? And now I'm thinking, like, what? I knew BTK had been active in, like, the 70s, but I knew that BTK murdered women that lived alone.

So instantly I thought my dad's mom, Dorothea, had been murdered because she was a widow and living alone. So I instantly went there thinking, Grandma Dorothea has been murdered by this BTK. So I said, is my grandma okay? He's perplexed. He's like, why is she talking to me about grandma? He's like, your grandma, she's fine. And then he drops it. Your dad is BTK.

Someone killed four members of a family. Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone lines had been cut. Her door left open. You see the victims laying there with plastic bags over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a planned scenario. While police have said no more about the contents of the letter, it does contain some sort of threat and implies the killer may strike again. He's going to play with these victims. He'd get them to the point of death and then bring them back. And then brings them back

to the point of death. For Myart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters, and this is Monster BTK, is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts. The show is written by Gnomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey, alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Podcasts

include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young alongside producers Gnomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising producer Rima Ilkayali. Marketing support by David Wasserman and Allison Wright at iHeart Podcasts and Caroline Orajema at Tenderfoot TV. Additional research by Claudia D'Africo. Original artwork by Kevin Mr. Soul Harp. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA and the Nord Group. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Begley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life?

Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On Tech Stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars. From conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok, to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference. Better Offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends,

but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr. With guest appearances from Behind the Bastards Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.