She was a large woman, probably tipping the scales at 160 pounds. She wasn’t the type whom most people might assume a serial killer would target. Rader seemed to pride himself in that fact. It was another one of those things that made him different from those other killers—he didn’t discriminate. When it came to victims, everyone was welcome—just as long as they were female, didn’t live with any men, and adhered to a schedule that meshed with his.
He had big plans for her, which was why he wanted everything to be perfect. He wrote in his journal that he’d either strangle her or suffocate her, then spread her body out in the main doorway of her apartment in a wildly suggestive pose. He could only imagine what the cops would think when they saw her. Because of her size, he knew he’d have a heck of a time lifting her and securing her into the position he’d envisioned. He also couldn’t quite figure out exactly how he’d hold her there—would he tie a rope around her feet or place a noose around her head?
Whatever method he chose, he realized he’d need some sort of a device to winch her up into the position he’d been fantasizing about. He stopped off at a hardware store near his house one afternoon during work and purchased a massive hook, a pulley, and a large screw. Rader had arrived at the conclusion that this was how he’d hoist her body up above the door frame. He’d grown so excited about this project that he began carrying his hit kit with him in his truck wherever he went. He even kept his portable drill with him in order to help him sink that screw into the door frame.
Over time, the killing began to grow grander and more elaborate in the secret fantasies of his sick mind. He eventually decided that after murdering her and stringing her up, he’d burn the building down by dousing a few of the rooms with kerosene, then rigging a time-delayed fuse out of a candle. The fuse was crucial, he wrote; the last thing he wanted was for billows of smoke to be rolling out from the windows as he backed out of her driveway.
It would be huge, he promised himself.
Yet not even this grand, bold fantasy could fill the empty hole inside him that threatened to swallow him up. Which was a bit ironic. After all, he’d spent a lifetime telling himself how badly he yearned to live the carefree life of a lone wolf. Yet now that he was free of the obligations brought on by raising children, he had no idea what to do with himself.
According to what Landwehr had told me yesterday while we were driving around Wichita, Rader finally understood what the next chapter of his life would entail on January 2004. The day was a Sunday, and he had just returned from church, picked up a copy of the Wichita Eagle, and read an article that used the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero murders as an excuse to run a retrospective article on the seemingly long forgotten serial killer named BTK.
The headline read, “BTK Case Unsolved, 30 Years Later.” Besides rehashing his seven known murders, the 1,100-word article focused on the efforts of a Wichita attorney named Robert Beattie, who also taught a class in criminal justice at a local university. Beattie had taken it upon himself to pen a book on BTK, partly because he felt that most residents had forgotten this “significant chapter in the city’s history.”
Halfway through the piece, Beattie explained how the year before, he’d brought up the case in one of his classes “and was surprised by the reaction. ‘I had zero recognition from the students,’ he said. ‘Not one of them had heard of it.’”
Rader read the piece and, according to what he told Landwehr during his interrogation, became disgusted that some local know-it-all attorney was going to write a book about him. He was flattered by the idea of it, but he’d be damned if he was going to let this guy have the final say on his life’s work.
And that was when Rader decided he’d write his own damn story, explaining everything—how he worked, how he chose his victims, how he jumped from one project to the next. Nobody knew anything about that sort of thing. They knew about his victims and the facts surrounding his crimes—that stuff was pretty much all out in the public domain—but what he yearned to do was dump the contents of his brain out on the sidewalk for everybody in Wichita to shudder over. He wanted to stir the hornets’ nest. He just hoped he didn’t end up getting stung, although he told himself that the chances of that were slim. After all, he’d been thumbing his nose at the cops for three decades, and they’d never come close to laying a finger on him. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that a publisher might actually take on his project and release his writings in the form of a book. What he had mind was more on the order of a public relations effort. He wanted to set the record straight, while also reminding the community that Wichita’s infamous brand-name killer was still alive and plotting.
By then, Brian had joined the Navy as a seaman apprentice and was based at the Navy submarine base in Groton, Connecticut. Kerri had gotten married and moved to Michigan. Like a lot of tech-savvy couples, she and her husband maintained a blog about their life together, which they posted online. From the sound of it, her night terrors had continued into adulthood; whatever had crawled inside as a child and caused her so much pain whenever she shut her eyes at night was still alive and squirming.
A few months before my arrival in Wichita, I was doing a bit of Web sleuthing on Kerri’s name and stumbled onto one particularly chilling entry from the couple’s blog.
Kerri’s husband had written it sometime in 2004. In it, he described what it was like to live with a woman who suffered from night terrors:
I think this is going to shorten my life. I am either waking up with no covers, waking up with a psychotic woman looking for a monster or for some Mexican person that could’ve broken in to murder us. Either that or she is screaming because she thinks, in my peaceful state of slumber, I am trying to mutilate her in some way. I have heard rumors that all women are completely insane when they sleep. I think the idea is to control every facet of their man’s life. There was a week where I was woke up three times in a night to some sort of dream event of some kind or screaming. Let me tell you, it just about destroyed me.
My cell phone rang. It was Landwehr.
“You up yet?” he asked.
“Never went to bed.”
“Got tied up last night,” he said. “Homicide we’re working. Couple things we’d been waiting to happen fell into place. Made some arrests.”
“That always feels good,” I said, remembering the rush that I’d sometimes get after helping take some dangerous scumbag off the street.
“Yeah. I’m hungry,” he said. “You wanna grab some breakfast? I got some time before work.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You get a chance to look at that disc I left on the desk?” he asked.
“You might say so,” I laughed, wearily. “He’s one prolific son of a bitch.”
“Yeah,” Landwehr grumbled. “Just another poor frustrated artist.”
“Twisted,” I said. “Don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across one quite like him.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it over breakfast.”
“Meet you down in the hotel lobby,” I said.
“Gimme fifteen.”
18
The moment Ken Landwehr walked into Egg Cetera, nearly every head in the breakfast eatery turned to look. Some stared, others whispered. Landwehr took it all in. His face seemed to tighten just a bit; he looked annoyed.
“Let’s take that booth in the back,” he said. “Back in the corner.”
As we navigated our way through the maze of tables, I noticed that he was clutching a folder stuffed with paper. One of the patrons stood up, grabbed his hand, and pumped it.
“Lieutenant Landwehr,” the man exclaimed. “It’s a pleasure, a real pleasure.”
“How you doing?” Landwehr growled, sounding truly excited. “How you been?”
The man proceeded to tell him.
Afterwards, as we slid into our booth, I asked, “Friend of yours?”
“Never laid eyes on him before,” he said. “Figured he was one o
f your fans and was just trying to be nice to me.”
The waitress handed us menus, smiling at Landwehr the whole time. “I’m telling you, you oughta run for mayor,” I laughed.
Landwehr’s face went taut. “Yeah,” he said. “Gonna put that one on my to-do list later today.”
The waitress returned, took our order, filled our cups with coffee, and disappeared.
“So where were you when he resurfaced?” I asked. “I’m curious what the hell you were doing when he poked his head up.”
Landwehr nodded at the waitress to come dump some more coffee into his cup. He was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie. He ran his fingers along his neck, just inside his stiff white collar. Then he told me. The morning it happened, he was standing beside his wife’s hospital bed. She’d just had stomach surgery, and he was waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. It was March 17, 2004, the twenty-seventh anniversary of Shirley Vian’s murder.
“My phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a detective in my unit. ‘We just got a letter,’ he said. ‘Looks like it could be from BTK.’”
“How’d that make you feel?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“Sick to my stomach,” Landwehr said. “I thought, ‘We could be in a lot of trouble, here’ . . . But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we had a chance to finally catch this guy.”
A half hour later, he was holding the white envelope that had arrived in the morning mail at the offices of the Wichita Eagle. The sender’s name, typed in the upper left-hand corner, was listed as Bill Thomas Killman. His return address—1684 S. Oldmanor—didn’t exist on any map of Wichita.
Inside the white envelope was a single sheet of paper containing three photocopied snapshots of a woman who appeared to be unconscious, lying on a carpeted floor. A photocopy of a driver’s license belonging to a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Vicki Wegerle, whose 1986 murder had never been solved, also appeared on the page.
But the most chilling part of the letter were the letters B-T-K scrawled at the bottom of the page. It was penned with the same haunting, telltale flourish employed by the killer back in the 1970s—the letter B had been fashioned into breasts.
At the top of the page was a string of seemingly nonsensical numbers and letters. Police asked several experts to try to decipher the message, but no one was ever able to figure out what it meant. It wasn’t until after Rader’s arrest that they learned what the message, supposedly written in a code used by the Germans in World War II, actually said: “Let Beatty [sic] know for his book.” In other words, he wanted the man chronicling his crimes to understand that he was still very much alive.
Although this single piece of paper had all the makings of a bona fide communiqué, Landwehr knew damn well that he needed to proceed with caution. Because BTK had been featured in a lengthy newspaper article a couple of months before, it wouldn’t be unusual to receive a copycat communiqué from some warped and perverted soul with too much time on his hands. The key is to review the document carefully, searching for references to factual data that would be unique to the case. This is one of the main reasons why police sometimes sit on information, preventing it from becoming public knowledge.
The moment I learned about that first communication from my FBI source, I knew that if it was legit, it was just a matter of time before police snared BTK. It had always been obvious to me that the more he wrote to the media and police, the more we could learn about him. He craved attention. In fact, I wasn’t surprised that he’d resumed his writing career.
What stumped me was that he’d been able to stop for all those years. He craved attention, and now he wanted it again. What, I wondered, must be going on in his life at that moment to cause him to surface? He had to be around sixty years old. The only thing I could think of was that he’d grown bored with his life and yearned to recharge his batteries.
As Landwehr examined the contents of the letter, however, he realized that he had plenty of reasons to be guardedly excited over the communiqué. Why? Because the letter offered copies of evidence removed from the scene of the crime—those three haunting photocopied images of what appeared to be a recently strangled Vicki Wegerle lying on her bedroom floor.
The March 17 mailing also answered a question to which Landwehr had long suspected he knew the answer, ever since he arrived at Wegerle’s home after the murder in 1986. The Wegerle homicide had never been directly attributed to BKT, but Landwehr had thought he knew better.
“I always thought it was a BTK kill,” he told me, chewing a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
He remained so convinced that in 2000 he asked two of his detectives to dust off the case files of Wegerle, whose bound and strangled body had been discovered inside her house on West 13th Street by her husband, Bill. Beneath her fingernails, police discovered a man’s DNA. Despite his never having been charged, her husband, who worked as a handyman at a number of apartment complexes in the area, had lived under a cloud of suspicion for years. Which wasn’t exactly surprising—in most murder cases, the husband is the first and foremost suspect investigators look at.
Even though the DNA under Vicki’s fingernails wasn’t her husband’s, investigators always found it suspicious that he’d spent so much time at the couple’s home before telephoning police.
In 2003, investigators input a profile of that DNA sample into a recently created national database containing the genetic information compiled on hundreds of thousands of known criminals. They never found any samples in the registry that matched, which did nothing more than confirm to Landwehr and his detectives that the man they were looking for wasn’t catalogued in any DNA database—nor had he been a known suspect in the case.
Within hours of realizing that the letter was authentic, Landwehr contacted the FBI and soon began consulting with my former unit to create a proactive strategy to reel the killer in. And, just as I’d first envisioned back in 1984, they created a super-cop to become the human face of the investigation—Landwehr. They couldn’t have picked a better man for the role, although Landwehr admitted that he was hardly thrilled with the suggestion.
“I told them I didn’t think the head of an investigation should be holding press conferences,” he recalled. “I knew too much about the case, and I knew that if some reporter asked me a question, no matter what I answered they’d be able to read my body reaction. But they didn’t want to hear about that. They kept telling me, ‘Just stand up there, read your script and walk away. Don’t get into any interplay with the reporters.’”
Six days after BTK’s envelope arrived in the offices of the Wichita Eagle, Landwehr stood up in front of a bank of microphones in the fourth-floor briefing room of the city building and held the first of his twenty-two press conferences, none of which lasted more than four minutes. He definitely looked a bit uncomfortable up there in his dark suit, staring straight into the TV cameras, reading the press release crafted by the Wichita police chief’s assistant.
But that hardly mattered. In fact, it only made Landwehr’s performance all the more convincing. Somewhere out there, he knew the man he’d been hunting since 1984 was watching his every move, hanging on every word he spoke.
“The Wichita Police Department recently received information on the Vicki Wegerle homicide that occurred on September 16, 1986, in the 2400 block of West 13th Street,” he told the crowd of print, TV, and radio reporters packed into the room. “Mrs. Wegerle was discovered in her home shortly before noon on that day by her husband. Her murder remains unsolved.”
Even though word had begun circulating among the media about the nature of this press conference, the edgy tension in the room was palpable, Landwehr later told me.
“Investigations personnel now believe that this homicide could possibly be linked to the unsolved homicides that occurred in Wichita in the 1970s and were attributed to the BTK serial killer,” Landwehr told reporters. “This is the most challenging case I have ever worked on, and the individual would be very interesting to ta
lk with. We are working closely with the FBI, the KBI [Kansas Bureau of Investigation], the Sedgwick County sheriff’s office, and the district attorney’s office on this investigation. This case is a top priority with the Wichita Police Department, and we will be working this as a strong, unsolved case, and exploring all possible leads.”
Landwehr did everything I’d recommended back in 1984, when I suggested that a close bond with the lead investigator on this case could create the kind of situation in which BTK would not only feel respected but also see himself as a consummate professional, playing a game of hide-and-seek with a collegial opponent. In the end, he might just let his guard down enough to give himself away or possibly even give himself up.
A few days after the contents of that first communiqué were released to the public, the seven phone lines in the BTK task force offices started ringing. Nearly a thousand tips came flooding in. A command post was soon established in the nearby offices of the FBI. Before long, police were driving around town with sterile Q-Tips, eventually taking DNA mouth swabs from nearly sixteen hundred local men in their late forties and fifties, including a number of retired police officers. Not surprisingly, this caused plenty of grumbling among former cops.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 30