Kansas killer's reign of terror

Most of the victims were women killed in their homes

The arrest of a suspect in the Kansas BTK serial murders comes after 31 anxious years in the state, and in the city of Wichita in particular.

Most of his victims were women, murdered in their Wichita homes.

He would write to the media and the police to boast that he had "Bound, Tortured and Killed" them, and they called him the BTK strangler.

Between 1974 and 1991, police believe he killed 10 people but if the killings stopped that year, the terror returned in March 2004.

Letters had begun arriving again, containing evidence that only the killer or an accomplice could have collected from the crime scenes.

Thirty years before, an act of horrific mass murder had shaken Wichita.

Car ruse

On January 15, 1974, Joseph Otero, a former Air Force flight engineer, was killed in his home along with his wife Julie and two of their five children, Joseph Junior and Josephine.

Charlie Otero, the eldest child, came home from school that day to find the bodies, the parents bound and strangled in their bedroom, his brother suffocated in his bedroom and his sister hanged in the basement. None of the victims bore defensive marks.

With police struggling to find clues, another murder was soon committed: On 4 April, Kathryn Bright, 21, was found bound and stabbed to death in her home.

Her brother Kevin, then 19, was shot and wounded in the attack but managed to escape. He said the killer, who wore a stocking mask, had told them he was a fugitive looking for a car before he tied them up.

In October of that year, the first BTK letter arrived at Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper.

On 17 March 1977, the killer entered the home of Shirley Vian to bind and strangle her after locking up her children.

Nancy Fox, 25, was bound and strangled in her home on 8 December 1977. This time, the killer reported the crime to the police himself, calling from a Wichita phone booth.

Long silence

It seems the strangler had planned a killing on 28 April 1979, waiting in a house for his intended woman victim who did not arrive. He later sent her mother a letter to say he had been there.

Nearly a decade was to pass between Shirley Vian's murder and the next killing in Wichita, and a further eight years would pass before confirmation that it had been a BTK attack.

On 16 September 1986, Vicki Wegerle, 28, was found strangled in her home. Her driver's licence was found to be missing.

There was no indication, this time, of a BTK link and it appeared that the killer had ceased his attacks in the 1970s. Perhaps he was even dead himself.

But a photocopy of the licence appeared on 19 March 2004, when it was sent along with three photos of the victim's body to the Wichita Eagle. The BTK killer appeared to have resurfaced.

Two more murders were attributed to him after the detention of suspect Dennis Rader on 25 February 2005.

Both victims were women from the Park City area, and their bodies were found in Sedgwick County, Kansas.

That of Marine Hedge, 53, was found in April 1985 while Delores "Dee" Davis was abducted in January 1991 and killed shortly afterwards.