children being hustled under the crime scene tape; they had filmed bodies being removed. This will shake up the city, Bruce thought.
“Get some rest,” Bruce told his detectives. “Get a night’s sleep so you can come back.” No one listened.
Caldwell and Drowatzky volunteered to stay in the house all night. If the killer came back, they would greet him. Caldwell called his wife and told her; she got upset. Then he and Drowatzky settled in. Sometimes they peeked out the windows; all they saw were photographers and a parade of gawkers.
Back at his office, Cornwell pondered conflicting reports. A neighbor said he had seen a tall white man with a slender build wearing a dark coat outside the Otero house at about 8:45 AM. Other witnesses described a much shorter man�perhaps just five feet two. They said he had bushy black hair and a dark complexion. Police Chief Floyd Hannon told reporters the suspect might be Middle Eastern. But in the sketch artist’s composite drawing, the man looked Hispanic. In fact, the man looked a lot like Joe Otero with a thin mustache. Someone else said he had seen a dark-haired man driving the Oteros’ station wagon at about 10:30 that morning.
A detective had found the Oteros’ car parked at the Dillons grocery store at Central and Oliver, a half mile away. The position of the seat showed that the driver might be short.
Cornwell stayed in his office all night, taking calls, pitching ideas, taking catnaps in a chair. He and other detectives did not go home for three days; they had sandwiches brought in. For ten days, seventy-five officers and detectives worked eighteen hours a day.
The killer had tied a dizzying variety of knots: clove hitches, half hitches, slipknots, square knots, overhand knots, blood knots. There were so many knots that one detective photocopied the names, drawings, and descriptions of knots from an encyclopedia published by the Naval Institute Press. Maybe the killer was a sailor, Bruce thought.
Detectives studied the autopsy reports. The coroner found bruising on Julie’s face; she had been beaten before she died. There were deep indentations around Joe’s wrists; he had fought to break his bonds. There were ligature marks and broken capillaries on Joey’s neck and face; he had died of strangulation and suffocation.
The autopsy showed that Josie had weighed only 115 pounds and that she had died in a hangman’s noose with her hands tied behind her back. She was bound at the ankles and knees with cord that snaked up to her waist. The killer had cut her bra in the front and pulled her cotton panties down to her ankles.
The lab people had scraped dried fluid from her thigh. When they put the scrapings under a microscope, they saw sperm.
At the end of the first week, sleep-deprived detectives began to run out of energy and ideas.
They tried one nutty idea: Caldwell and Drowatzky stayed all night in the house again, this time with a psychic. She claimed that she had once helped solve a crime by leading police to a body in a trunk. The two cops sat in silence as the psychic scribbled her impressions. Nothing came of it.
There had been one major foul-up. Someone lost most of the autopsy photos and several crime scene photos. The chief blew his stack.
Still, there was a pile of photographs to study. Among them was a curiosity�a picture of an ice tray in the kitchen with ice still in it. The killer had struck before 9:00 AM and turned up the heat before leaving the house. Witnesses saw the Oteros’ Vista Cruiser on the street at about 10:30 AM. The crime scene photographer arrived six hours later. And the photo showed ice. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure this out: Someone from the police who had surveyed the dead then opened the Oteros’ freezer and made himself something to drink.
Chief Hannon held press conferences at least twice a day, disclosing specifics, speculating about motives and suspects. The morning Wichita Eagle and