Bind, Torture, Kill Read Online Free Page A

killed the Oteros�after he came down from the high the murders gave him.
    He was trolling every day now, spying on women, following them to work and back home, writing notes on each. He had to keep track�he spied on multiple projects, breaking off if one did not look safe. He peeped in windows, walked alleys, and hunted females living alone.

    Kathy Bright’s high school yearbook photo.
    In the spring of 1974 he settled on a woman he called Project Lights Out.
     
    Kathryn Bright had lived in the little house at 3217 East Thirteenth Street for only a year. She was twenty-one. One semester at the University of Kansas in Lawrence had left her missing her family, so she had come home and worked at Coleman, where Julie Otero had worked for about a month.
    By family she meant cousins too: counting the five Bright kids, there were eighteen. They were all tight; they often went to see their grandparents on a farm outside Valley Center. They would hook a cart to a donkey named Candy and ride for hours. When Kathryn was six, a newspaper photographer shot their picture. Kathryn stood smiling in the middle. “Youngsters Find Donkey Pal,” the headline said.
    At nine she learned the ukulele and played with a kids’ group dressed in Hawaiian outfits.
    Sometimes the Bright kids would go to a cousin’s farm in nearby Butler County, make mud pies, and drive a car around a cow pasture, their legs too short to reach the brake pedal. They’d stick it in first gear, hope for the best, and laugh.
    In church Kathryn sang in a trio with a sister and a cousin. They liked the hymn “In the Garden.”
    And He walks with me,
    And He talks with me,
    And He tells me I am his own,
    And the joy we share as we tarry there,
    None other has ever known.
    Rader saw her one day while on his way to take his wife to lunch. A pretty good figure, as he said later. Other things caught his eye: long blond hair, a jeans jacket, an old beaded purse. The first time he saw her, she was collecting her mail.
    He treated his wife to lunch that day, but as they ate, he daydreamed. He went back and spied on the woman for weeks. This might work, he decided; she looked like a college girl, living alone, no man around, no children, no dog.
    Rader squeezed rubber balls to strengthen his hands. It had freaked him out how long it had taken to strangle the Oteros; his hands had gone numb. He wanted to be ready this time.
    He made a plan. In normal life, he was a Wichita State University student; he would carry books to her door and tell her he needed a quiet place to study. Then he would force his way in.
    Before he knocked, he pulled on his rubber gloves.
    His plan went to pieces immediately.
    No one answered his knock.
    On impulse, he smashed through the glass of the back door, and then panicked a little. He realized she might come home, see the glass, and run. He cleaned it up as best he could, hid in a bedroom, and pulled out his Colt. 22 to take the safety off. And� bang! �the gun went off. That scared him; he thought she might smell the gunpowder when she arrived. As his heart pounded, the front door opened. He heard her talking to someone.
    It was a man. Rader began to sweat again.
    He could hear them laughing. He had no place to run. But he had the .22, and a .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster, so he stepped toward them.
    Hold it right there, he said.

    Kevin Bright.
    I’m wanted in California, Rader told them. They’ve got wanted posters out on me. I need a car. I need money. I just need to get to New York. I need to tie you up. But I don’t want to hurt you.
    That’s when Rader realized he’d made another mistake.
    He had brought no rope; he had assumed she would be alone, easy to control. He had planned to tie her with panty hose or whatever she had, so that when the cops found her body they would see a method different from the Otero murders. But now here he stood, Mr. Bind, Torture, and Kill, with nothing to bind them.
    He marched them to a bedroom,