Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

by Douglas, John

  They discovered nothing, but eventually hit pay dirt after the store manager played a security videotape for them from the late evening of January 8. The grainy black-and-white footage of the tape showed some sort of SUV pulling into the nearly empty parking lot and stopping beside a parked pickup truck. Because of the darkness and the quality of the image, detectives were unable to pinpoint the exact make of the SUV. However, after roughly calculating the vehicle’s length and wheelbase and the amount of ground clearance, they felt confident that it was a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

  But the most riveting part of the video unfolded just moments after the SUV parked and the driver’s door opened. From out of the interior, a shadowy figure emerged, walked briskly across the parking lot, then appeared to toss something into the bed of the nearby truck. Once again, the detectives paused the tape and scrutinized the individual frames. But no matter how they tried to enhance the image, the man’s face was too blurry and dark for any of his features to be visible.

  Although the detectives wanted to yank their hair out in frustration, they were ecstatic over one thing: they were actually staring at the phantom whom the Wichita police had been trying to locate for three decades. And, if their calculations were correct and the vehicle wasn’t stolen, he was one of nearly twenty-five hundred Sedgwick County residents who owned a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

  But there was another question the police were unable to answer: What the hell had happened to whatever the killer had tossed into the back of that pickup truck? Detectives got their answer the next afternoon after the manager posted a notice on a bulletin board in the back of the store, inquiring if any employee had discovered a curious-looking package in his or her vehicle.

  As it turned out, the roommate of an employee had discovered a Special K cereal box in the back of his truck. He’d pitched it in the garbage, but because the trash collector hadn’t yet stopped by his apartment, he was able to fish the mystery package out of his trash and turn it over to police.

  Among the contents was a two-page document that detailed how the killer’s “lair” was booby-trapped with explosives. He also included a lengthy list of “PJs,” which included “PJ—Little Mex, my 1 big hit . . . a good start as Serial Killer” and PJ Fox Tail . . . Nancy J Fox, My best Hit.” But the part of the communication that caught Landwehr’s eye was the pithy message BTK had tacked onto the final page. It read, “Look, be honest with me. If I send you a disk will it be traceable? Just put (the answer) in the newspaper under Miscellaneous Section 494 (Rex, it will be OK). Run it for a few day in case I’m out of town—etc. I will try a floppy for a test run some time in the near future—February or March.”

  This marked the beginning of the end for BTK. If the killer was being honest—and Landwehr certainly had no reason to believe he was—it appeared that a shift had occurred in their relationship. For the first time in three decades, BTK was no longer just barking at the cops. He was asking them a question. And this was huge. He wanted to know if it was safe to begin sending police his communications on a computer disk. It wasn’t so much what he was asking. What mattered was the notion that BTK finally wanted to establish some sort of a dialogue with police. Landwehr, it seemed, had begun to wear his adversary down. Rader was playing right into his hands.

  The killer had begun to trust the super-cop—which was exactly what I had envisioned when I began suggesting this technique back in 1984.

  Landwehr grinned while recounting this part of the BTK story to me. “We didn’t know what to think,” he said. “The last thing we thought was that he’d use his own computer, because whenever you stick a floppy in a computer, it gets stamped with all the identification information of that computer, and it’s pretty easy to trace. We figured he’d just use one at a library or some school. At the very least, we’d be able to analyze the floppy, and it would give us a better chance to see where he’d just been.”

  As Landwehr later learned when he interrogated him, BTK was growing frustrated with the elaborate, complicated logistics involved with dropping off his communiqués around the Wichita area. He wanted to go digital and begin submitting his messages to them via computer disk. Because the police knew about these high-tech matters, he truly believed he could trust them to give it to him straight.

  So Landwehr decided to do exactly as the man he was trying to catch had requested. On January 28, a detective quietly placed a classified ad in the Wichita Eagle, informing Rex to go ahead and send them a floppy.

  Then Landwehr sat back and waited.

  19

  Landwehr needed a smoke. “I’ll meet you up in your room in a minute,” he said. So I walked slowly back upstairs thinking over everything he’d told me.

  BTK’s reappearance in March 2004 had stirred up the proverbial hornets’ nest, all right. Before long, it was as if the killer had never gone into hiding for the past two and half decades. By that summer, the entire city had gone on red alert—gun sales skyrocketed; so did the number of security systems. Police were being inundated with so many calls on their special hotline that they had to hire more operators. Suddenly it felt like 1978 all over again.

  It was good to be back in the public eye, BTK told Landwehr after his arrest.

  One evening a few months into his BTK 2.0 act, Rader recounted how he flipped on the TV and happened to catch an interview with Charlie Otero, Joseph Otero’s eldest surviving son. Once BTK resurfaced, the media tracked Charlie down, and he had ended up doing lots of interviews over the past few months. He’d also been “pretty verbal” about the killings.

  He was one angry dude, Rader thought. Big, too. He listened to the TV and quickly concluded—as he told the police after his arrest—that Charlie wanted to cut him up and feed him to the sharks.

  Rader told Landwehr after his arrest that the more he thought about it at the time, he realized that that probably wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. Sure as hell beat being locked up in prison for the rest of your life. All the same, he decided that if he had to be put away, he wanted to be hanged, as they had done to the killers of the Clutter family. But because they don’t do that anymore, he resigned himself to the fact that he’d either rot in prison or, if it came down to it, commit suicide. He hoped it would never come to that.

  Just a little while longer, he kept telling himself. A few more taunts to the police, then he’d disappear forever.

  Rader told Landwehr that he found it interesting watching Charlie—not so much because he had any interest in learning how the murders had affected the families of his victims. What he found intriguing was the effect Charlie’s TV appearance had on him. He was sitting with Paula at the time his interview came on, and the moment it started, he felt himself suddenly shift into what he referred to as chameleon mode.

  “I had to pretend he was somebody else besides who he really was,” he explained during his interrogation. “After all these years, this sort of thing was easy to do. He just kept telling himself, “Don’t tip it ... Don’t tip it.’”

  He had another close call a few days later. As Landwehr told me, Rader was at home writing a letter to his brother Paul, who was stationed over in “the big sandbox,” which was how Rader enjoyed describing Iraq. Paula happened to walk by and glance over her husband’s shoulder at the letter, reading the words he’d written. Suddenly, he heard her exclaim, “You know, you spell just like BTK.”

  Rader realized that like everyone else in Wichita, she’d been watching and reading all the coverage of his recent communiqués. He knew the case had been on her mind lately. So he didn’t panic. Not like the time back in 1979 when she told him he sounded like the man who telephoned police to inform them where they could find the murdered body of Nancy Fox.

  Instead, he joked around with her and said, “We [he and BTK] went to school before they were teaching phonics.” Then he laughed, and she walked off into the kitchen.

  He finished the letter and mailed it, he told police. But for the next few days he found himself wondering, Does she have a
clue?

  One Friday in February 2005, Rader met with Michael Clark, the pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, where Rader had recently been chosen to serve as congregation president. Over lunch at a local Park City eatery, the two discussed the agenda for the upcoming church council meeting. Early on in the discussion, Rader placed his briefcase on the table, opened it up, reached in, and without a moment wasted, quickly pulled out a notepad and pen.

  Clark told me that he sat there dumbfounded, watching as Rader retrieved the items. He was astonished at how everything in his briefcase appeared to have been positioned in an exact, very precise position. He’d never seen anything like it.

  “He didn’t have to hunt for anything,” Clark said. “He knew exactly where everything was—unlike me, who has to search through four different compartments in my briefcase before I can find anything. I thought to myself, ‘I knew Dennis was organized, but not anything quite like this.’”

  Over the course of the next hour, Rader took copious notes as Clark spoke. Afterwards, the pastor suggested that Rader give him the notes and he’d have the church secretary type them up in an agenda-style format and hand them out to the other church council members, so they could prepare for the meeting two weeks away.

  “I’ll type it up myself,” replied Rader.

  “As you wish,” said Clark.

  Just before they parted company, Rader told the pastor, “You know what? I don’t really have a good place to print up any copies for you.”

  “No problem, Dennis,” Clark told him. “Type it up on your home computer, load it onto a disk, then bring it into the church tomorrow and I’ll show you how to load it onto the church computer. You can print it up from there.”

  Which is exactly what Rader did. The next morning at ten sharp, he showed up at Christ Lutheran Church. Clark showed him what to do, then disappeared into his office to work on his sermon. Fifteen minutes later, Rader poked his head in through Clark’s door.

  “He looked at me,” Clark told me, “and said, ‘I’m out of here.’”

  In his hand was the computer disk.

  Ken Landwehr pushed open the metal door of my hotel room and walked inside. He took off his suit coat, carefully draped it over the one chair in the room, and took a seat on the bed. A few minutes earlier, I had assumed my usual perch beside the desk, basking in the glow of my computer screen.

  “So how’d it go down?” I asked him. “Walk me through those final days before you put the cuffs on him.”

  Landwehr explained that after Rader met with Clark, he returned home, placed the disk into his computer, deleted the agenda for the upcoming church council meeting and made the biggest mistake of his life—besides being born. He typed out the next installment of his message to police.

  On February 16, a padded envelope arrived at the studios of KAKE-TV. Inside was the usual assortment of index cards, along with a locket attached to a gold chain, no doubt pilfered from one of his victims. But the envelope also contained something else—a purple computer disk. The communiqué was quickly turned over to the task force.

  The moment Landwehr spotted the disk, he dialed the extension for Det. Randy Stone, the department’s computer crimes sleuth. Within minutes, Stone had popped the disk into a PC and began clicking his way inside it.

  “There were seven of us there,” recalled Landwehr. “We were all staring over his shoulder, watching what he was doing, and he was walking us through every step he took.”

  Stone quickly saw that the disk held only one file, which was titled “TestA.rtf.” He clicked it open and read the message left by the killer:

  “This is a test. See 3 x 5 Card for details on Communication with me in the newspaper.” Stone asked to see the index card and moaned after reading the message: “Any communications will have a # assigned from now on, encase one is lost or not found.”

  Landwehr explained to me that it was Rader’s use of the word “encase” that put everybody in the room on alert. It turned out that Encase is the proprietary name for a sophisticated type of software used in forensic computer investigations. “With it, you can literally strip off all the identifying information we were hoping to find,” Landwehr explained. “Randy said that it looked like it could be a setup, and his use of the word was some sort of clue he’d left for us.”

  Landwehr had begun to wonder the same thing.

  But a few minutes later, Stone worked his way into a portion of the file that he hoped would contain some traces of identifying information about whoever created it, along with the computer’s registered owner. Stone clicked open this portion of the file and read that the alleged creator of the file was someone named Dennis. The owner of the computer was listed as Christ Lutheran Church.

  Stone called up Google on another computer and typed what he’d just learned into the search engine. In less time than it took to blink, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Christ Lutheran Church was located in Park City. Somebody named Dennis Rader was listed as the church president.

  “So four task force detectives took off to Park City,” Landwehr recalled, “to check out what they could find about this guy. And I’m standing there thinking to myself, ‘Can it really be this easy?’”

  Within an hour, they’d pieced together a rough idea of just who Dennis Rader was. He’d lived in the same house for thirty-three years, had been married to the same woman for thirty-three years, and every morning for the past thirteen years had gotten dressed in a brown uniform that made him resemble a park ranger—complete with a badge, cap, and two-way radio dangling off his jacket—and driven off to a job where he got to play make-believe and pretend to be a cop. The more Landwehr learned about the guy, the more he liked what he saw.

  Fifty minutes later, on their first drive-by of Rader’s tiny ranch-style home, located a half mile from the Park City municipal building, detectives spotted a black Jeep Cherokee in the driveway. It resembled the vehicle they’d spotted in the Home Depot security videotape and was registered to Rader’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Brian, currently serving in the navy.

  Undercover agents began loosely tailing Rader, watching his movements, but keeping an extremely low profile. Although Landwehr didn’t post undercover detectives in front of his house or at the Park City Municipal Building, his men monitored Rader’s activities on a regular, steady basis. During the day, they continually watched to ensure that he was at work. And at night when he was supposed to be at home, they performed hourly bed checks to make sure he didn’t sneak out.

  “But we were careful not to jump on him right away,” Landwehr told me. “We’d had too many close calls before. So we stuck to him day and night, studying everything he did and, most important, making sure he didn’t try and go after anyone else.”

  Within hours of discovering Rader’s identity, the task force met to brainstorm what needed to be done to nail Rader to the BTK murders. After thirty-one years spent searching for their killer, the last thing investigators wanted was for their top suspect to slip through their fingers. Landwehr had other reasons for wanting to move slowly. He couldn’t shake the sick feeling that BTK was setting them up, leading them straight to Dennis Rader in the hopes that they’d arrest him and become the laughingstock of the media for nabbing the wrong man.

  “His use of the word ‘encase,’” Landwehr told me, “was just something I couldn’t write off to bad spelling.”

  And there was another reason. In one of BTK’s early communiqués, he had threatened to blow up his house—or as he called it, his “lair”—if police tried to close in on him.

  But Landwehr was far too smart a detective to let these obstacles slow him down. He’d spent a couple of years learning the ins and outs of DNA evidence while working in the department’s high-tech crime lab back in the early 1990s. What he learned there convinced him that the next step in the investigation would involve obtaining a DNA sample from Rader and matching it with semen left behind at his crime scenes.

  There was just
one problem, Landwehr explained to me. How the hell could police do that without tipping Rader off that he was a suspect in the case? And it was during a brainstorming session the next morning at task force headquarters that one of Landwehr’s investigators on loan from the KBI came up with a novel solution that sounded like something straight out of an episode of the hit TV show CSI.

  If they couldn’t get Rader’s DNA, Landwehr reasoned, why not get hold of a sample from a relative? Landwehr had used that technique in the past to help ID murder victims whose identity they weren’t sure of. If they could just locate a sample from a parent, sibling, or child, it should be close enough to Rader’s to confirm whether or not police had the right man.

  But Wichita was far too small a city for police to be able to waltz into a doctor’s office with a court order asking for the medical records of someone related to Rader. Word would quickly leak out about what they were up to, and that was the last thing Landwehr or anyone on the task force wanted.