Video Included

Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005

His mother used to sing to him. Shirley Vian’s songs warmed the childhood days of little Stephen Relford and his two siblings. Until the unthinkable happened in early spring 1977, when the cold hand of BTK silenced their mother and their life. Vian was BTK’s fifth victim.

A warning, as Relford relives the day his mother was murdered, some of the language is graphic.

“Its been 28 years and I hope to hell I meet this ***** ***** face to face,” says Relford.

You can understand Relford’s anger and tears, when you hear what happened that March day. Relford was only 5 years old, when for some reason BTK knocked at the door.

BTK asked if Relford’s parents were home, when he told him his mother was sick in bed. He came in and turned off the TV, Relford says.

He then pulled down the blinds of the house on South Hydraulic, reached in his jacket and pulled out a pistol. Then the phone rang, it’s a phone call that BTK would later say saved the children’s lives.

Relford asked his mother if she wanted him to answer the phone, but BTK told him not to, he says. His mother told him to do as he said.

His next order was to Vian, instructing her to put blankets and toys in the bathroom, a scene reenacted by America’s Most Wanted.

“Then he told her to put us three kids in there, tied a rope around one door…to the bathroom sink,” Relford says. “Then, put the bed against the other door. I stood on something in the bathroom, looking over the door. I don’t remember what I stood on.

“I remember seeing my mama being stripped, her hands tied behind her back, taped behind her back, plastic bag over her head, rope tied around her neck,” he says.

The 5-year-old then called out that he was going to untie the rope. BTK yelled back.

“He said, ‘You better not…I’ll blow your ******* head off,” Relford says.

Relford estimates BTK was in his home a total of 40-minutes. His brother broke through the bathroom window. They tried to crawl out; it didn’t work. Finally, Relford broke open the bathroom door. By that time, BTK was gone.

He ran to his mother.

“I tried to untie the rope around her neck,” says Relford. “I couldn’t.”

He ran to a neighbor’s house, pounding on the door.

“I was hollering, ‘Call the police, my mama’s dead,’” Relford says.

From that day, Relford’s life and that of his brother and sister, to say the least, was never the same.

“I went silent for about two years, couldn’t talk,” Relford says. “I was terrified.”

Living with his grandparents, trouble started when he was 8. He is now 34 and married. He has been in and out of jail, never prison he says, several times. He blames the shattered lives of himself and his siblings directly on BTK. So you can understand his anger when he reads a letter written in 1978 by BTK about the day the three kids were locked in a bathroom while their mother was murdered.

“They were very lucky the phone call saved them,” says Relford. “I was just going to tape the boys and put plastic bags over their head like I did Joseph and Shirley and then hang the girl.”

Relford says if he met him face to face, “he would suffer.”

A statement coming from a 34-year-old man, but Relford quickly goes back to being 5 and experiencing the guilt over opening the door to a killer.

“I’m the one who opened the door to the son of a *****, let him in,” says Relford. “You know, you never forget that. Never.”

Something else Relford will never forget, the way his mother held him, the way she sang to him one song when he couldn’t sleep at night, satin sheets to lie on, satin pillows to cry on.

On Friday at 10, Relford talks about new clues, which he feels, could lead to BTK, including that infamous picture BTK showed Relford 15 minutes before BTK killed his mother.