BTK Killer, January 15, 1974, by Marshall Poe
From MemoryArchive
Who: Marshall Poe What: The BTK (Dennis Rader)killer's first victims When: January 17, 1974 Where: Wichita, Kansas
I remember clearly in 1974 sitting down in our den to watch TV one day after school and seeing news footage of bodies being taken out of a small house. The news casters were saying something about murders (not terribly unusual), but they also said something about a family being executed (unusual). This got my attention. I looked carefully at the screen (I was sitting about 4 inches from it, you know the way kids do) and saw what looked like a house in my neighborhood. Couldn’t be. No way. But I recognized it, at least I thought I did. I called my mom to see. She walked in, looked at the screen, gasped, and said something like “My God, that’s right down around the corner!” I wanted to bolt down the street to look (it was on Edgemore, a couple blocks away), but my mom wouldn’t let me (damn it). The next day a bunch of us went to the house after school. We knew right where it was. It was creepy. Yellow police tape all around. We looked for blood, but couldn’t find any. There were other people there, and kids. One of them told us (and this is the freaky part) that the entire family had been chopped up and put in a storage freezer in the basement. This rumor was common, and I heard it several times in the coming days. There were others: that they had been bound and tortured in the basement, etc. It never occurred to me that all those houses (like ours) were built on concrete slabs, so they didn’t have basements. It just seemed like that kind of thing should happen in the basement. The whole thing was very exciting, at least to a little kid like me. It wasn’t scary, just exciting. I knew I was near something big and important, though I didn’t really understand what.
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