“All of a sudden, I knew what those guys were up to,” Landwehr said. “They’re going to rob the place. But I didn’t think rob as in with a gun. I was thinking they were going to run in and steal some of our leather jackets, then jump into their buddy’s Cadillac and take off.”
So Landwehr decided to play John Wayne. He turned and headed straight back to Butell’s. On the way back, he popped his head in through the front door of a nearby jewelry store and shouted, “Hey, if I’m not back here in five minutes, call the cops.” Seconds later, he pushed open the front door, ready to grab whichever shoplifter he could get his hands on first. But the instant he stepped inside, he felt the cool barrel of a pistol pushed against his neck. A man in a ski mask held the gun, ordering him to move his ass back to the cash register, where he was quickly hog-tied with electrical cords.
After rifling through the cash register, the man spotted an old beat-up Colt .45, last used in World War II. The man chambered the gun’s single round, pulled back the hammer, and looked slowly down at Landwehr lying on the floor nearby.
“Don’t look at me, man,” the robber screamed. “Don’t eyeball me.”
Landwehr was convinced that the man had already made up his mind. He would walk over, bend down, hold the rusted barrel of the gun a few inches away from Landwehr’s sweaty forehead, and fire a bullet into his brain. But he somehow knew enough about criminal psychology to keep looking straight at the man.
“I figured it would be harder for him to shoot me if I was staring him right in the eyes,” he told me. “I wanted to personalize myself.”
His strategy didn’t appear to work. The robber walked over and straddled Landwehr, ordering him to look away. “I figured I was a dead man,” shrugged Landwehr. But for some reason, the man didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he and his accomplice, who had tied up the other employees in the back of the store, ran out the front door with an armful of suits.
A few hours later, Landwehr sat in a room with two detectives and looked through a stack of mug shots. After a few minutes, he thumped his index finger on one of the photos, informing them that this was the guy who he’d heard called Butch during the heist. Both detectives started grinning.
“That’s Butch Jordan,” they informed Landwehr, patting him on the back, thanking him for his help.
But, much to Landwehr’s frustration, the police never seemed to go after the career criminal. It wasn’t until a couple of months later when Jordan shot an off-duty cop while robbing a liquor store that officers finally raided one of his known haunts and arrested him. Landwehr promptly picked him out of a lineup, and, one afternoon shortly before the case went to trial, the young law student found himself seated in the Sedgwick County district attorney’s office, discussing the matter.
Landwehr glanced over at a table full of evidence seized during Butch Johnson’s arrest and noticed a familiar looking pair of pants and a vest.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“That’s what Butch was wearing when they picked him up,” the prosecutor replied.
Landwehr stared at the table a moment longer, then announced, “I got a suit coat that matches those clothes back at the store.”
The DA looked at him, not quite sure what he was hearing. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“When Butch ran out of the store, he dropped the jacket to those pants on his way out,” Landwehr told him. “I’ve still got it if you want it.”
The DA smiled, then told him to get back to the clothing store and fetch the jacket. Two weeks later, Johnson was convicted of two counts of armed robbery and the attempted murder of a police officer and is still serving time at the Lansing Correctional Facility near Kansas City.
The experience left a deep impact on Landwehr. Not so much because it marked the first time he’d been instrumental in helping take a dangerous man off the streets, but for another reason. He was angry and incredulous that police didn’t arrest Johnson when he’d first identified him, hours after the robbery of Butell’s.
“What I didn’t know then was that they were looking for him,” he told me. “But it just seemed to be taking so long to find him. And that just made me mad. That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to wait until I could land a spot with the FBI. I figured I could do more good by being a cop here in Wichita.”
A few minutes after noon on my second day in Wichita, Landwehr returned to my hotel room. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go for a drive.”
We walked downstairs and climbed into his car. For the next ninety minutes, he led me on a tour of Rader’s various haunts around the county. We drove past the locations of his various murders, all of them in safe neighborhoods, all of them middle class. Not a single feature about any of the homes made them stand out from the residences surrounding them.
Some of Rader’s victims lived on corner lots. A few resided in the middle of their block. The backyard of one abutted a park. In the years that had passed, a few of the structures had been razed; the lots now sat empty, overrun with weeds and tall grass.
Twenty minutes into our tour, we drove past the duplex where Rader claimed that his soon-to-be next victim lived. During his interrogation, he told police he’d been targeting the middle-aged woman for months and planned on killing her sometime in the autumn of 2005.
“You gotta leave her name out of this,” Landwehr said. “It would be too much for her.”
Occasionally during my tour, I’d glance out my window and catch sight of a driver in a nearby car doing a double-take upon realizing that the famous Lieutenant Ken Landwehr was in their midst.
“You ought to run for mayor,” I laughed.
“Yeah,” Landwehr frowned. “That’s just what I need to do.”
A look of boredom had begun to settle across his face. He appeared to be growing tired of this incessant talk of Dennis Rader. Not only that, he looked almost embarrassed by the attention he’d received since the arrest.
Sitting there beside him in the car, I got the feeling that he wanted to be done with the whole damn thing so that he could go back to focusing on the other homicide investigations that he and the detectives in his unit were currently working. After all, most of the elements that made this case interesting from an investigative standpoint had all been explained away—all except the question of how Rader had been able to stay under the radar for so long. Which was the very question that ate away at me.
Despite spending my career studying remorseless monsters just like BTK, I still didn’t feel I could solve the riddle of Dennis Rader. His proficiency as a killer didn’t quite seem human. I still didn’t understand him.
Landwehr punched the gas, and we began traveling north on I- 135, the highway that connects Wichita to Park City. Although Rader sometimes took surface streets in order to traverse the seven miles into “town,” this highway provided the quickest beeline to his haunts. After six miles, Landwehr pulled off at the 61st Street exit. In a matter of seconds we were driving past the side street where Rader, on his way home to lunch, was pulled over on that fateful afternoon eight months before and taken into custody by a dozen heavily armed cops.
Just around the corner from that spot where Rader was arrested sat the nine-hundred-square-foot ranch-style home where the killer moved shortly after his marriage in 1971. The three-bedroom home, built in 1954, was his home for thirty-three years and the place where he and his wife, Paula, raised their two children. But on this sunny October afternoon, the house sat vacant. Paula had moved out shortly after her husband’s arrest, fearful for her own safety.
We pulled to a stop in front of the driveway. The empty home gave off the feel of a mausoleum. Dried leaves and long, brittle branches littered the driveway and yard. The grass had turned brown. Several of Rader’s neighbors stood in their front yards and glared at us. None of these folks appeared to recognize Landwehr. For all they knew, we were just two more gawkers who’d descended on their neighborhood to stare at the house where the devil lived.
&n
bsp; We sat there in the middle of the street for a few moments, the car idling, both of us staring in silence at the nondescript structure.
“Not a helluva lot to it,” I said.
Landwehr said nothing. He stepped on the gas, and we sped off.
All morning long, he’d been alluding to a run-down grain silo he wanted me to see. He’d learned about it from Rader while interrogating him. To get out to where it was, we drove past Rader’s office in the neat and tidy one-story brick Park City municipal building on Hydraulic Street. The structure had the sterile, nondescript feel of a medical complex and was located just a few minutes away from his house. Rader’s white work truck with a camper top on the back sat in the parking lot.
Roughly three miles down the road stood the empty silo. Rader had spent much of the last decade driving past this silo, fantasizing about all the terrible things he wanted to do inside it one day. Some guys dream about retiring and moving to Arizona or Florida. Rader told Landwehr that he wanted to stay right here in Park City and set up shop in this old, run-down grain silo, located on the corner of a small family farm.
For Landwehr, the structure represented everything frustrating and sadistic about Dennis Rader. After all, for decades investigators weren’t quite sure what they were dealing with—an evil genius or just an evil guy who somehow managed to catch all the lucky breaks.
Now they knew.
Dennis Rader was a guy with a slightly below average level of intelligence who somehow possessed a repressed type of patience not often found in serial killers.
He was a survivor.
Landwehr slowed down, then pulled over to the side of the road.
“There it is,” he said, pointing past a barbed-wire fence at a concrete column that jutted up into the blue sky. From where we’d parked, the structure appeared to list slightly to the right, resembling a rural version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Beside it sat a decrepit wooden barn; a number of boards were missing from its side, along with pieces of sheet metal from its rusting roof.
“Don’t ask me how in the world he was gonna construct his torture chamber in there without the owner ever realizing what he was up to,” he chuckled. “Like I told you, this guy just doesn’t always seem to think a lot of things through.”
It was midafternoon by the time we made it back to my hotel. Landwehr’s cell phone rang just as he shut off the engine. He fished it out from the pocket of his suit jacket and said, “Landwehr.” I listened to him speak for a few moments and realized he’d just gotten a break in one of the homicide cases he was working.
Landwehr excused himself hastily and sped away while I walked up to my room by myself, checked my e-mail inbox on the laptop I’d brought with me from home, then pulled back the curtains and stared out the window over Wichita.
The city looked as though it had sprouted up from the flat expanse of prairie like a cluster of steel, wood, and concrete mushrooms. I couldn’t help but believe that deep down Dennis Rader identified with the flatness of this land where he’d lived his entire life. Yet he forever yearned to be like one of these buildings that had burst forth from the smooth, predictable ground to become something. Something that stood out. The kind of thing people stopped to stare at.
What the hell is it, I wondered, that creates a killer as twisted and remorseless as BTK? I caught an image of him sitting on a chair, watching Joey Otero’s thrashing, twitching body. Genetics can only go so far in explaining how someone could manage to be so devoid of empathy. There had to be other factors, all of which conspired together in just the perfect way to create a Dennis Rader.
Over the years, I’d heard all sorts of theories put forth to explain what makes men kill. Although some theorists have suggested that even something as seemingly inconsequential as location can play a contributing role, I have to agree with Landwehr when he insisted, “This would have happened wherever Dennis Rader lived. If his family had moved to Kansas City, it would have happened there. It’s not the environment. It’s not the town. It’s the person.”
That may be the case. Nevertheless, the territory around Wichita—like many former frontier settlements—possessed a history rich with blood and gore, stories that someone like Dennis Rader would have found both empowering and inspiring. The darkest tale, which may or may not be rooted in absolute fact, involved the first European ever to set foot in this region. I’d heard the story years ago from a cop on one of my first trips to Kansas while investigating a homicide.
The place that eventually came to be known years later as Wichita, Kansas, was first seen by a white European man in 1540. His name was Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and the day he stumbled into this region, his mood turned foul. The odyssey that led Coronado to this spot had started in 1538, when he and his band of fortune hunters began their bloody trek across the southwestern portion of the so-called New World, killing just about every indigenous man, woman, and child they encountered.
Coronado was chasing a strange vision that had seized the imagination of the intelligentsia and upper class of his era. He’d come looking for a city constructed entirely out of gold, known for decades in Spanish mythology and popular rumor, called Cibola.
For two long years this golden metropolis had eluded him. One day, an Indian slave named El Turco told some of Coronado’s soldiers about just such a city that he claimed to have once seen, located in the land that lay to the east. Against the pleadings of some of his other native scouts, the impatient, gold-drunk Coronado decided to trust El Turco.
The group wandered for months through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and southern Kansas, eventually arriving at the sandy junction of two shallow rivers, now known as the Arkansas and the Little Arkansas. It didn’t take long before he spotted a cluster of domed huts, constructed from golden straw—hardly the opulent splendor he’d been promised. So incensed was Coronado at being brought to this place that he ordered his men to torture a confession out of El Turco.
Exactly what atrocities they performed was never recorded. But the history books are filled with accounts of conquistadors using their razor-sharp rapiers to force information out of their victims by methodically slicing off ears, noses, fingers, and feet. They were also fond of burying people alive for extended periods of time. Whatever the specifics of his torture, El Turco eventually confessed to fabricating the story about the golden city.
It was only then that Coronado finally had him strangled.
From the window of my hotel room, I watched as the sun, misshapen and colored like a pumpkin, rolled beneath the horizon. The Arkansas River ran near here, but it was dry as a bone now, nothing but sand, clay, and willows. Nightfall was looming, and once again I found myself far from home in yet another hotel room, trying to understand what had compelled a man I’d never met to murder ten people while leading a life that, on the surface, appeared hopelessly normal.
I was about to finish the journey through the dark, convoluted mind of a monster, a journey I had begun over thirty years ago when I first became obsessed with capturing and understanding the Wichita serial killer during my first job as an FBI agent in Detroit.
Landwehr knocked on the hollow metal door of my room, then pushed it open. He pulled a CD out of his pocket, held it in the air, and said, “Got some things on here you might find interesting.” He placed it on the desk, beside my computer. “It’s the stuff we seized from Rader after his arrest—his stash of journals, personal pictures, notes from his killings. I show it whenever I do PowerPoint presentations at Rotary Clubs, Elks’ Lodges, places like that. Been asked to do plenty of talks ever since they put him away.”
But before he could utter a word, his cell phone once again jingled. Landwehr frowned, flipped it open, scrutinized the number on the display, and said, “Gotta take this call.” He pulled open the door to my room and disappeared out into the hallway.
I turned on the TV, kicked back on the bed, and tried to cool my heels until he returned. But the cable was out, so I just sat there staring at the gray
static on the screen, listening to the hiss.
The CD Landwehr placed on the desk was still sitting there, next to my computer. I tried to ignore it. Sunlight, the last remnants of it, faintly orange and tired, shone in through my window. I studied the luminous puddle it cast on the blood-red carpet, trying to piece together how it was I’d ended up here in this hotel room in Wichita.
I remembered the phone call.
It came late one night in March 2004. By then I’d been retired from the FBI for nine years. On the other end of the line was a criminal profiler I’d once trained, who still worked in my former unit.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 16