Wichita ? Jan. 15, 1974.

It was the day that “Happy Days” premiered on ABC. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” by Brownsville Station was the No. 1 hit in Wichita. And a panel of experts examining the Watergate tapes reported that an 18-minute gap was not caused by an accidental erasure.

In northeast Wichita, the sun was turning snow to slush when Charlie Otero returned home from Robinson Junior High School at 3:40 p.m. A minute later he ran out of the house at 803 N. Edgemoor and yelled to a neighbor, “Come quick! My father’s dead, I think!”

Police found four bodies inside the one-story wood-frame home: Joseph, 38; Julie, 34; Josephine, 11; and Joseph II, 9. Each was strangled with the type of cord used in Venetian blinds.

“It was one of the most blood-curdling scenes I ever worked, and I worked a lot of murders in Wichita,” said former Wichita police detective Gary Caldwell.

Police had no way of knowing they were seeing the work of a man who would go on to become one of the nation’s most bizarre serial killers.

During the next three decades, BTK would kill at least four more people. He would write to the media seeking attention for his exploits. And he would drop out of sight for 25 years. Although only he knows his name, much is known about what he has done.

Grisly discovery

It all started that winter day in 1974. When police arrived at the little house on Edgemoor, they found three of the Oteros in bedrooms. Josephine was hanging from a sewer pipe in the basement wearing only socks and a sweater.

Caldwell didn’t see her when he descended to the basement without a flashlight. Groping around for a light switch, he bumped into the body — an experience that later gave him nightmares.

Although none of the victims was raped, police found semen in the basement. It would take them five days to find someone to process it and conclude that the killer had type O blood. They later learned that all semen reverts to type O within 24 hours.

Police think the killer got into the home after 8 a.m. while Joseph Otero was taking his three oldest children to school. The younger children started school at 9.

A neighbor reported seeing a white male about 6 feet tall with dark shaggy hair and a dark coat about 8:45 a.m. Police don’t know if it was the same person who cut the phone line and entered the home carrying tape, rope and wire cutters.

Another neighbor reported seeing a man with a dark complexion and a rumpled hat leaving in the Oteros’ car at 10:35 a.m. that day.

The car, a 1966 beige Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, was found that evening in the parking lot of a store. The keys were never found. Of the 23 fingerprints found on the car, six belonged to Joseph Otero. Many of the rest belonged to his wife. None was believed to have come from the killer.

Lab investigators spent 12 hours processing the crime scene.

The search for evidence turned up no drugs, cigarettes, alcohol or guns. The family’s dog, described as vicious, was in the fenced back yard.

Fingerprints found on a bag wrapped around the face of Joseph II were later determined to not be from the killer. The only print that remains unaccounted for was removed from the back of a chair that police think was moved by the killer.

Joseph Otero, born and reared in New York, had moved his family to Wichita four months earlier. He was a retired Air Force officer and had found a job as a mechanic and flight instructor at an airport in Rose Hill. Julie Otero worked on the assembly line at Coleman.

‘Like Grand Central’

As word of the killings filtered out, Edgemoor became choked with cars filled with people trying to get a glimpse of the house.

“It was like Grand Central Station,” said police detective Bernie Drowatzky.

He and Caldwell sat in the Otero house all night with a psychic, watching traffic and hoping the killer would return.

During the first 10 days of the investigation, 75 police officers worked on the case 18 hours a day. Police said they contacted 1,500 residents that week and sent bulletins to 500 law enforcement agencies. The Wichita Eagle set up a “secret witness program” that allowed residents to send tips anonymously.

The Oteros’ bodies eventually were flown to Puerto Rico for burial.

In February, Police Chief Floyd Hannon and Maj. William Cornwell flew to Puerto Rico to interview relatives. They went on to the Panama Canal Zone, where Joseph Otero had been stationed for six years. They returned after eight days and concluded that the killings might have been motivated by a dispute over money in Central America.

Over the months, the Otero investigation was scaled back and public interest waned.

April 5, 1974

Most Wichitans weren’t thinking about the Otero case the day 21-year-old Kathryn Bright found a killer waiting inside her home. The intruder entered before 2 p.m. after breaking a glass in the back door. He waited in a back room, apparently expecting Kathryn to arrive alone. But on that day, she was accompanied by her brother.

The man confronted the Brights with a gun, then told them he needed money and a car to get to New York.

He forced Kevin Bright to tie his sister to a chair, then forced Kevin into another room. When the man wrapped a cord around Kevin Bright’s neck and began to pull, Kevin fought back. He was shot twice in the head with a .22-caliber pistol but managed to run outside and flag down a car that would take him to Wesley Medical Center.

The killer stabbed Kathryn Bright three times in the abdomen. She was unconscious when police arrived and died five hours later.

Kevin Bright described the killer as a white male about 25 who was wearing a black stocking cap, orange shirt and orange jacket.

Although Kathryn Bright and Julie Otero worked on the same assembly line at Coleman, police did not make a public connection between the cases.

October 1974

Police announced they had made an arrest in the Otero case after a man in a psychiatric ward confessed. Police later discounted that confession and two others.

But the killer apparently decided he needed to make sure Wichitans knew who had been responsible for the deaths.

He called Don Granger, who was in charge of the tips hot line for The Wichita Eagle. The caller directed Granger to a letter in a mechanical engineering textbook at the Wichita Public Library. Granger forwarded the tip to police, who retrieved the letter.

“Those three dude(s) you have in custody are just talking to get publicity for the Otero murders,” the letter said. “They know nothing at all. I did it by myself and no ones help. … Lets put it straight.”

He then detailed the position of each body. And he gave himself a name — the BTK strangler — saying he liked to bind, torture and kill his victims. Police didn’t tell the public about the letter; they feared hysteria. But they showed it to nearly 30 psychologists and came up with a profile. The doctors said BTK had a fetish for bondage, and a limited education — possibly at a technical college — in engineering or bookbinding.

‘The monster’

On Oct. 24, police quietly ran a classified ad in the Wichita Eagle:

“BTK Help is available. Call 684-6321 before 10 p.m.”

The ad ran for four days without results.

On Oct. 31,Granger wrote a column that invited BTK to call the number. The killer never did.

In December, someone gave a copy of the letter to a reporter for a weekly magazine called the Sun. On Dec. 11,the Sun carried a front-page story that included excerpts from the letter:

“I cant stop it so the monster goes on and hurts me as well as society.

“Its a big complicated game my friend the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting … the pressure is great and some times he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t.”

At a news conference later that day, Police Chief Hannon said the letter was real.

March 17, 1977

“Jaws” was playing at the Cinemas East theater. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” was at the top of the radio charts. President Jimmy Carter was pleading for a Palestinian homeland.

In northeast Wichita, there was a knock at the door of 1311 S. Hydraulic. It was 11:45 a.m. Shirley Vian, 26, who lived there with her three children, was feeling ill that morning and her two oldest children had stayed home from school.

The man at the door had a gun in one hand and a bowling bag or small suitcase in the other. He came inside.

“Don’t hurt us,” Vian told the man.

“I’m not going to,” the man told her.

When the stranger started to tie up Vian’s 8-year-old son, the boy began to cry. The man herded the children into the bathroom. He wedged one door closed and tied the other shut with a rope. By the time the children freed themselves, the man was gone. Their mother was dead.

Emergency crews found Vian’s nude body face-down on her bed. She was bound hand and foot. There was a plastic bag over her head and a cord looped around her neck.

The children told police the stranger was a paunchy, dark-haired man in his late 30s or 40s. Two money orders were missing from the home.

Officers at the scene who had worked the Otero and Bright cases didn’t know if Vian’s murder was related to BTK. The Vian children had not been harmed.

Police didn’t know a serial killer was working in Wichita — or that he would strike again before the end of the year.

Dec. 9, 1977

At 8:20 a.m., a man stopped at a pay phone at Central and St. Francis, and called a Wichita police dispatcher.

“Yes. You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing. Nancy Fox.”

A woman dispatcher tried to double-check the address.

“Yes, that’s correct,” the caller said. He left the phone off the hook and walked away. A firefighter who had stopped to use the phone said the caller was about 6 feet tall, with blondish hair, dressed in a gray industrial uniform. He may have been driving a late model van that had writing — possibly advertising — on its side.

Police found Fox’s partially clothed body in the bedroom of her duplex apartment. A nylon stocking was wrapped tightly around her neck. Her hands and feet were bound with other stockings. The adjacent apartment was vacant.

The phone line had been cut and a window at the back of the duplex had been smashed. Inside, the phone was off the hook, and the contents of Fox’s purse had been dumped on a coffee table. A sweater was draped neatly over a chair.

Police later learned that Fox, 25, had left her job at Helzberg’s Jewelers on East Harry at 9 p.m. the night before. They said she apparently was killed shortly after arriving home.

Police did not publicly make a connection between the Fox and Otero cases even though both involved cut phone lines and semen left at the scene.

January-February 1978

An envelope postmarked Jan. 31 and sent to The Wichita Eagle contained a single 3-by-5-inch index card. On it was a poem, printed with a child’s rubber-stamping set. “SHIRLEY LOCKS SHIRLEY LOCKS, WILT THOUGH BE MINE,” it began, referring to Shirley Vian.

The person who opened the envelope mistook it for a Valentine’s Day advertising message and forwarded it to the classified ads department.

After getting no reaction, the killer turned to KAKE-TV. The two-page, single-spaced letter arrived on Friday, Feb. 10.

“How many people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” he asked. He said he planned to kill again.

Police Chief Richard LaMunyon made the bombshell announcement that evening: A serial killer claiming to have taken seven lives was living in Wichita, and he was threatening to kill again.

In excerpts released by police and the television station, the killer said that he was 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,” the killer wrote. “There is no help, no cure except death or being caught and put away.”

BTK also complained about the lack of publicity: “A little paragraph in the newspaper would have been enough.”

And he suggested that he might be living a normal life in Wichita: “After a thing like Fox, I come home and go about life like anyone else.”

LaMunyon said the killer had claimed responsibility for the murders of the Oteros, Fox, Vian and a seventh victim later identified as Bright.

“I want to restate that there is no question in my mind but that the person who wrote the letter killed these people,” the chief said. “I know it is difficult to ask people to remain calm, but we are asking exactly that.”

Police did not publicize BTK’s first letter because they hoped to forestall future killings, LaMunyon said. They went public with the KAKE letter when they realized that their first strategy hadn’t worked.

LaMunyon said last week that the decision to go public with the second letter was difficult. He got advice from psychologists, profilers and others.

“There was never, ever a situation where everyone was in agreement,” he said. “There was always conflict. … Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t bad people, but everyone had their own opinions.”

Ultimately he decided that it was important to establish a possible communications link with the killer through the media, which BTK clearly wanted to use to express himself.

“The utmost thing on my mind was public safety,” LaMunyon said. “How do we prevent this from happening again?

April-August 1979

Police were dispatched to what appeared to be a routine burglary in the 600 block of South Pinecrest. The intruder entered through a basement window. The 63-year-old female homeowner had arrived home from a dance at 11 p.m. to find some clothing, jewelry and $35 missing. The intruder had entered through a basement window.

There was only one odd thing: The phone line had been cut.

On June 15, an 8 1/2-by-11-inch manila envelope arrived in the mail at the woman’s home. The envelope, neatly addressed in printed block letters, contained a 19-line poem, a sketch and clothing and jewelry that had been taken in the break-in. In the poem, the strangler said he regretted that the woman had taken so long to get home that night. He had intended to kill her.

An identical envelope containing similar items arrived at KAKE-TV the next day. That letter was turned over to police unopened.

Police immediately assigned 15 detectives and eight lab investigators to the BTK case. They looked for similar break-ins and walked the neighborhood talking to residents. They worked with postal inspectors to learn what they could about the latest letters. A new telephone hotline produced a flurry of tips but no solid leads.

Then, they added a new twist: They sent a copy of the BTK phone call made after the Fox murder to a New York professor who had developed a computerized method of enhancing recordings. The BTK recording was made on a slow-speed tape recorder and was described as poor in quality.

The professor enhanced the tape using the same method he had used on Watergate tapes from the 1970s and police dispatch tapes from the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

The BTK tape was aired on Wichita radio and television stations on Aug. 15, 1979. Again, police received a lot of calls but no solid leads.

It would be 25 years before BTK would communicate with Wichitans again.

Sept. 16, 1986

“Stuck With You” by Huey Lewis & The News was No. 1 on the pop charts. “Remington Steele” and “Cheers” led the NBC lineup on Channel 3. Wichita leaders were preparing for an upcoming vote on whether the city should have an elected mayor.

In west Wichita, stay-at-home mom Vicki Wegerle took her 10-year-old daughter to OK Elementary School shortly before 9 a.m., then returned home with her 2-year-old.

Wegerle, 28, volunteered as a baby-sitter both at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, which she regularly attended, and at the Asbury United Methodist Church, which was in her neighborhood.

When her husband, Bill, a self-employed apartment maintenance man, arrived home for lunch shortly before noon, he found his wife on the bedroom floor. She was bound at the ankles and wrists, and she had been strangled.

When rescue crews arrived, they rushed Wegerle to Riverside Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. An autopsy showed that she had not been raped. No crime scene photos were taken of the body, which was removed before police arrived.

A neighbor reported hearing an unusual amount of barking from two dogs in a fenced back yard about 10:15 a.m. Another neighbor saw the family car, a 1978 gold Monte Carlo, pull out of the driveway about 10:30 a.m. The neighbor didn’t see who was driving.

Police found the car at 12:10 p.m.

They never disclosed how the killer got into the house or what he used to strangle Wegerle. They also said nothing about what had been taken from the house. Relatives said the only thing missing was the victim’s driver’s license.

Investigators considered the possibility that BTK was involved, but there was no way to confirm that.

By that time, a secret investigation into the BTK killings was well under way at City Hall. The new effort was launched in 1984 using advances in computers and DNA technology.

The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit told police that it could be significant that the known BTK murders occurred within 3 1/2 miles of one another. BTK felt comfortable in time-consuming torture, the profilers concluded, and probably was working near home.

Detectives compiled a list of every white male who had lived within a quarter-mile of the Oteros. They made similar lists for the Vian and Fox homes.

The poem about Vian that was mailed to The Eagle was patterned after a “Curley Locks” nursery rhyme. The rhyme had recently appeared in a puzzle magazine, so its subscribers were added to the list of suspects.

A poem about Fox, “Oh Death to Nancy,” was patterned after a poem called “Oh Death” that was published in a textbook used in a WSU American folklore class. The names of male students in that class went on the list. That poem accompanied one of the letters to KAKE.

A detective took the Fox letter to Xerox headquarters in Syracuse, N.Y., where a lab technician determined that it was a fifth-generation copy of the original. That would make it hard to trace to an individual typewriter. Police learned that the machine used to make the copy was in the Wichita State University library.

Using the FBI profile and the computer, detectives pared their list of suspects to 225 men, most of whom no longer lived in Wichita. Two teams of detectives set out on cross-country trips, collecting blood and saliva samples.

Only five of the men contacted refused to cooperate, police said. The DNA tests were unable to eliminate seven other suspects. In the years since the samples were taken, DNA testing has grown far more sophisticated and can sometimes eliminate all but one human being on the planet.

But the investigative unit was disbanded in 1987, with a dozen names still on the list.

Early 1988

The wife of slaying victim Phillip Fager received a letter from a man claiming to be BTK. The letter talked about killing Fager and his two daughters, but did not claim responsibility for the killings, which occurred in their east Wichita home that same month. BTK experts disagreed whether the letter actually came from BTK.

During the next 1 1/2 decades, BTK publicity subsided. The killer wasn’t mentioned in The Eagle during 1993, 1995 and 1996.

On Jan. 17, 2004, The Eagle published a story marking the 30th anniversary of the Otero killings.

The next Eagle story appeared on March 25 — a day after police Lt. Ken Landwehr confirmed that a letter sent to the newspaper had come from BTK. The letter contained a single sheet of paper with a photocopy of Wegerle’s driver’s license and three pictures of her body — pictures that could only have been taken by the killer.