Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (14 page)

Probably loners, they said. Probably not family men. Serial killers can’t stop killing.

None of that had applied to him. Now he would prove them wrong again. He would kill in his own neighborhood, kill on his own block, kill a tiny lady whom he knew well enough to wave to as he and his wife drove past on the way to church.

The profilers were right about one thing: serial killers feel compulsions. In the eleven years since he had killed the Oteros, Rader had stalked hundreds of women, in Wichita and in small towns all over Kansas, while traveling for ADT�and as he would in 1989 for the U.S. Census Bureau as the field operations supervisor for the Wichita area.

By 1985 he’d grown tired of trolling, scouting back alleys, planning escape routes. He selected his neighbor in part because she was convenient.

He had never grown tired of the excitement these projects gave him, though. So he was still willing to invest effort in making the fantasy real. For this murder�Project Cookie�he planned an elaborate alibi. He would use a Cub Scout outing with his son as cover.

At Camp TaWaKoNi, perhaps twenty miles from home, they set up tents. It had rained, and the ground was soggy. His son loved these Cubby things. Years later, his son would tell people that his dad had always been his best friend.

In camp after dark that night, Rader told the other Scout dads he had a headache. I’m going to bed early, he said. Then he slipped away, leaving his son with the other boys and their fathers.

He drove west five miles or so toward home. On a country road near Andover, east of Wichita, he stopped to unpack his bowling bag hit kit. He took off the Scout uniform and pulled on dark clothing. Then he drove to northeast Wichita. Near the shops of Brittany Center, he parked at a bowling alley, went in, and pretended to get drunk. He splashed beer on his face and clothing, then called for a cab. He put his hit kit bag on the seat beside him.

The boys and I have been partying, he told the driver. I need a ride home.

When they reached Park City, he told the driver to let him out on West Parkview, one block east of Independence.

I need to walk, he told the driver. I need to wear this off.

He slurred his speech to fool the driver. If this ride ever turned up in an investigation, the cabbie would remember only that he was a drunken bowler in dark clothes, and not the Scout dad who slept in the tent at TaWaKoNi twenty miles to the east. If asked, the Scout dads would say that he stayed in the tent all night with a headache.

One of BTK’s signature moves was to cut the phone lines of his victims. This was Marine Hedge’s line.

He paid the driver and walked in his own neighborhood; he could have found his way here in his sleep. He walked through a park, then through his in-laws’ backyard�and then to the house of Marine Hedge.

Seeing her car bothered him�she must be home already. He had wanted to hide inside and surprise her when she arrived. He hoped she would be alone.

He snipped the phone line with wire cutters and took his time breaking in, trying to be quiet. He slowly worked the door open with a long-handled screwdriver. When he crept in, he found she was not there.

But minutes later, he heard a car door slam, then voices�hers and a man’s. BTK hid in a closet, fuming at his bad luck. He waited for an hour, as the man and Marine talked. The man left; she went to bed.

She woke when Rader climbed into bed with her.

The Park City police chief, Ace Van Wey, and an animal control officer named Rod Rem found her nine days later. Her little body had been hidden under brush in a wet ditch on Fifty-third Street North, northeast of Wichita. Her body was decomposing, and animals had gotten to her.

Marine Hedge’s body, missing for several days, was found next to the culvert, in the water and covered with branches.

Her stolen Monte Carlo had been found at Brittany Center in Wichita. Her purse, missing all identification, was found miles away. She had been strangled. A loop of knotted panty hose was found near her body. When the Wichita cops heard about this, they wondered about BTK, whose last known murder had been in December 1977. But as far as the cops knew, BTK had never killed anyone outside Wichita, had never attacked anyone older than thirty-eight, had never taken a body outdoors. And he seemed to fixate on addresses with the number three; Marine lived at 6254 Independence in Park City. The cut phone line caught their interest, but this case didn’t fit what they knew about BTK.

After Marine’s body was discovered, Rader’s neighbors in Park City chattered in fear. He wondered what they would have thought had they known the full story�what he had done with Marine after he killed her. He had dragged her nude body out to her car, wrapped in bedcovers. She was such a tiny thing, but he could barely lift her. After he stuffed her into the trunk, he drove to his own church, Christ Lutheran, where he had spent many a Sunday pretending to be a Christian.

He taped black plastic over the windows, to block the light he now turned on. He had stashed the plastic at the church before he left for the Cub Scout camp.

In the church, he played God: controlled her, strapped high heels to her cold feet, posed her bound body in lewd positions, and took photographs he could savor later.

Then he took her to the country and dumped her.

By that time, night was creeping toward dawn, and he had to hurry back to the Cub Scouts. He dropped her Monte Carlo at Brittany Center with regret�it was a hot car�and drove his own vehicle back to the campout. He got up that morning with all the other dads and lads.

When he heard a rumor among his neighbors that maybe Marine Hedge’s boyfriend had killed her, he spoke up.

No, he said. It couldn’t have been him.

21

September 16, 1986

Vicki Wegerle

Landwehr’s work on the Ghostbusters task force led to his promotion to detective in 1986.

On September 16 of that year, he lay asleep until afternoon�he had been working late. Had he awakened and walked out on his balcony, he might have seen the very man he was looking for getting out of a gold 1978 Monte Carlo.

Rader had been attracted to Landwehr’s neighborhood three weeks before, when he saw a young woman getting into that car. It reminded him of Marine Hedge’s. After he began stalking the young Wichita resident, he saw that she had a husband but spent a lot of time alone at home. Sometimes, as he listened outside, BTK heard a piano.

Rader thought she played beautifully.

During the first years that Landwehr lived in his little bachelor pad in the Indian Hills Apartments, the maintenance man was a guy named Bill Wegerle. Landwehr thought Bill was a nice person, quiet of manner. Other people who knew Bill said he did not show a lot of emotion.

Bill’s wife, Vicki, usually stayed home during the day taking care of their two-year-old son, Brandon, at their little house at 2404 West Thirteenth Street. She spent a lot of time with Brandon and with Stephanie, their nine-year-old.

She also babysat the newborn son and the two-year-old daughter of Wendi Jones, a friend. Vicki liked babies. She volunteered as a babysitter at St. Andrews Lutheran, which she attended, and at Asbury United Methodist, which was in her neighborhood. Wendi thought Vicki had a calm, motherly instinct�she never raised her voice, even when babies tested her patience. Sometimes, when Wendi came to Vicki’s home to pick up her kids, Wendi would pull up a chair, and they would talk, watching their daughters play.

Rader liked what he saw: a young, blond woman alone during the workday. He liked listening to her music so much that he called her “Project Piano” in his notes.

After Bill left the job maintaining the Indian Hills Apartments, he became a house painter. On September 16, Bill told Vicki that he was working at a place not far away and that he would be home early for lunch�he would need to stop painting to let the first coat dry. He liked to spend time with Vicki and Brandon, who was now toddling all over the house. It was a pleasant house to come home to: wife, children, music. Sometimes she would play piano while Brandon took a nap.

Bill, Stephanie, Vicki, and baby Brandon Wegerle.

Rader had modified a business card to look like a phone company identification card. He had a yellow hard hat, provided by ADT. He had cut out a segment of the cover of a Southwestern Bell repair manual and pasted it on the hard hat, hoping to pass himself off as a telephone repairman. The briefcase he would carry looked official but contained the hit kit supplies�rope, cord, knife, gun. He’d put in something new this time: leather bootlaces tied into what he called a strangling rig. “Leathering up,” he called it. He thought the leather, thin and strong, might make the strangling go quicker. He had tied knots into the laces to give himself a better grip.

He parked the security company van in the Indian Hills Shopping Center parking lot, put on the hard hat, and walked across the street toward the blond woman’s house. But first he went to the home of her elderly neighbors. They let him in, and he pretended to check their phone line. He wanted the blond woman, if she saw him, to see what looked like a telephone repairman working the neighborhood. He entered many houses this way.

When he left the older couple’s house, he walked to the blond woman’s door. He heard the piano. When he knocked, the music stopped.

At the door, she looked warily at him.

I need to check your telephone line, he said. He saw a little boy in the living room.

She asked whether it was necessary to come in. Didn’t he need to go to the backyard to check the phone line? The dog was out there, but she could bring it in.

No, no, he said. He needed to check inside the house.

As he recalled later, she did not like this, but she let him in. She showed him to the dining room phone. He opened his briefcase and made small talk, pulling out a gadget that he’d cobbled together to look like a telephone tester. He fiddled with it and chatted. There appeared to be no man about.

Well, he said, it looks like it works. He put the fake tester into the briefcase and pulled out his gun.

Let’s go to the bedroom, he said.

She began to cry. What about my kid? she asked.

He shrugged. I don’t know about your kid.

My husband is going to be home pretty soon, she said.

I hope he’s not going to be home too soon, he told her.

Rader thought she was probably lying, but he’d watched the house enough to know she did have “a husband thing.” He would need to hurry now, and that upset him.

He made her lie down on her waterbed as she cried and tried to argue. He tied her wrists and ankles with leather shoelaces. Vicki began to pray out loud. Suddenly she yanked her hands, broke her bonds, and began to fight, and then everything became noise and fear. The dog outside heard them fighting through an open window and began to bark. BTK hit Vicki in the face, again and again, then grabbed at her throat. She fought, nicking him on the neck with a fingernail. They fell off the bed on the side farthest from the door.