Bind, Torture, Kill Read Free

on the floor; a woman lay on the bed, bare legs bent and hanging over the edge, her faced streaked with dried blood from her nose. The rope around her neck had been cut. The cops learned later that Carmen had nipped at it with toenail clippers, trying frantically to revive her mother.
    Bulla felt for pulses, then radioed dispatchers: two possible homicide victims.
    Lindeburg and Bulla walked out of the house to the children, who looked frantic. There are two more children, the teens said. They have not come home yet. We can’t let them see this. The family station wagon was missing, they said: a brown 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. The officers made a note.
    More officers arrived, then detectives.
    Officers questioned the children.
    “You think your father could have done this?”
    Charlie kept telling the cops to stop Josie and Joey from coming home.
    Officers told the children to move away from the house. Detective Ray Floyd pulled Charlie aside.
    They had found the two kids in the house, Floyd told him.
    They were dead.
     
    The phone on Jack Bruce’s desk rang minutes later.
    “We’ve got four dead people in a house on Edgemoor,” the emergency dispatcher said.
    “What?”
    “Four dead people. On Edgemoor.”
    “What do you mean, four dead people?”
    “They’re dead, and all four are all tied up.”
    Bruce, a tall commander with a confident manner, was a lieutenant colonel supervising vice and homicide detectives. He heard other phones ring on other desks now, and he watched detectives bolt out the door. Within minutes, Bruce was talking on two phones at once, trying to keep people from bumping into each other. He made assignments, sent lab people, coordinated shifts. The entire police department mobilized.
     
    Sgt. Joe Thomas arrived minutes after the first call and secured the scene, which meant keeping people from messing up evidence before detectives took charge. Thomas took a quick tour, looking into each room just long enough to get angry. Within minutes, the place filled: detectives, lab people, police brass. Like Thomas, they were shaken by what they saw.

    Danny and Carmen Otero enter the roped-off crime scene to talk to police.
    Detective Gary Caldwell walked down into the dark basement. He did not have a flashlight. Caldwell felt his way, turned a corner, groped for a switch, and brushed against something hanging from the ceiling.
     
    He found the switch and saw a dead girl, nearly naked, hanging by a rough hemp noose from a sewer pipe. Her dark hair was draped across one cheek, and her tongue protruded past a gag.
    Maj. Bill Cornwell ran the homicide unit; he took over. He and Bernie Drowatzky, a craggy-faced veteran detective, noticed that whoever had done this had used a variety of knots to tie wrists, ankles, and throats. They suspected the killer had run out of cord: some of the victims’ wrists had been taped.
    The boy had died beside his bunk bed. In the boy’s room, Cornwell saw something that stayed with him for life: chair imprints on the carpet. They looked fresh. Cornwell thought he knew what that meant: the killer, after he tied the boy’s wrists, after he pulled two T-shirts and a plastic bag over the boy’s head, after he pulled the clothesline tight around the boy’s neck, had placed a chair beside the child so he could watch him suffocate.
    There were so many ligature marks on the throats of the other Oteros it looked as though the killer had strangled them more than once, letting them have some air, then finishing them.
    Keith Sanborn, the crew-cut district attorney for Sedgwick County, took a grim house tour. The detectives told him they had found dried fluid on the girl’s naked thigh, and spots of the same stuff on the floor. Looks like he masturbated on her, they said.
     
    Cornwell’s boss, Lt. Col. Bruce, went in after the bodies were taken away that night, walking past reporters and photographers stamping outside in the cold. They had shot pictures of the surviving