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The Conspiracy Theory
Charlie and his surviving siblings were sent to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where one of their father's Air Force buddies had offered to raise them alongside his own six kids. But before long, Charlie withdrew from his siblings and new family. He began to obsess about his theory that his loved ones had been murdered by a team of assassins on the wrong side of his father's intelligence work -- and that the killers would return to finish the job. "I always thought someone was coming to get me," he says.Back in Wichita, investigators probed several conspiracy scenarios. "We tried to follow up on leads in the direction of Joseph's military work," says Gary Caldwell, one of the first detectives on the case. "We even sent a couple of investigators to Panama." They came up dry.
Fearing for his and his siblings' lives, Charlie kept people at bay, neglected his schoolwork, and spent most of his time racing motorcycles. After graduating from high school, he managed to get into the University of New Mexico, but his crime-scene flashbacks and nightmares made it hard to concentrate on his studies.
Charlie switched to a vocational institute, then drifted to Las Cruces, where a Honda dealership hired him as a mechanic. After he was injured in a traffic accident, he wound up in a dispute with the hospital over his unpaid bills. When the judge ruled against him, Charlie says, "I went outlaw."
He quit his job and got by on freelance work -- rebuilding Harleys, selling handguns, and breeding pit bulls and Dobermans -- for clients who didn't need to see his ID. He figured that without a paper trail, a hit squad would have a harder time finding him. He began drinking heavily and using drugs, becoming lost among his increasingly embattled thoughts.
By 1987 he was living with a girlfriend, Lynette Shafer, in a remote desert area in New Mexico. Their house was a shack made of shipping containers from a local missile range, encircled by barbed wire and guarded by attack dogs. Carved into the hillside behind it was an abandoned jail in which Billy the Kid was briefly imprisoned a hundred years earlier. Sometimes Charlie would sequester himself for days behind the lockup's steel-plate door. "Nobody could get to me," he says.
When Lynette announced that she was pregnant, Charlie sent her back home to Wisconsin to have the baby, whom she named Joseph, after Charlie's father and brother. Just weeks later, the couple cut off all communication with each other. Both believed that Charlie's would-be assassins might harm the child as well -- and that letters or phone calls might be intercepted by the killers.
In time, Charlie found a new girlfriend and became the father of two daughters. "I loved those girls," he says. "We'd go to the park with the dogs. I'd take them motorcycle riding." But neither Charlie, then in his mid-30s, nor the children's mother, not yet 20, was able to fully care for them. When the girls were four and five, the couple separated. Charlie tried to stay in touch, but that grew difficult after he married a woman with bipolar disorder and a taste for methamphetamine.
Then came an event that would again change Charlie's life. He became a plaintiff's witness in a civil lawsuit his wife had filed. While doing a routine background check on Charlie, the attorney received case files on the Otero family murders. That day, while the two were having lunch at a Mexican restaurant, he asked Charlie, "Have you ever heard of the BTK killer?"
"No," Charlie said.
The lawyer told him that a serial killer who went by the initials BTK for what he did to his victims -- bind, torture, and kill -- had long ago contacted a Wichita newspaper claiming responsibility for the Otero murders and vowing to strike again. And he did: Over the next 12 years, he committed at least four more murders in the Wichita area. The victims, each a woman, were trussed up with elaborate knots and strangled slowly.
BTK's subsequent messages for investigators took the form of macabre poetry, puzzles, and gruesome works of art. He knew details of the murders that the police had not made public. He wrote that he had a "monster" inside him. He sent half a dozen notes in all, then, in 1988, stopped all correspondence. The trail went cold.
Charlie was stunned -- and angry -- when the lawyer finished recounting what he'd learned. Wichita investigators had failed to share this break in the case with him when it came to light 24 years earlier. "In these types of investigations, there's a whole lot you don't want to let out," says retired detective George Scantlin, who worked on the case. "The initial messages were kept confidential and used as an investigative tool."
Still, something didn't add up for Charlie: How could just one person have subdued his father, an ex-commando, and his mother and siblings, all of whom had trained in judo? "I said, 'This is bull -- I'll never believe it,' " Charlie recalls.
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