Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (18 page)

Ray drove off, found a working phone, and called 911.

By that evening, Detective Sam Houston and other Sedgwick County sheriff’s officers had mustered search parties to walk along roads all over northern Sedgwick County. Deputies knocked on doors, asking if anyone had seen Dee. In her home, Houston noted that someone had gone through her lingerie drawer. A neighbor had seen Dee’s keys on the roof of her garage. Deputy Matt Schroeder found some of Dee’s bedding stuffed into a culvert miles from her home. No one found Dee, though.

Her family prayed and braced for bad news. Sheriff’s investigators determined that someone had wiped down the doors and trunk of her car.

On February 1, thirteen days after Dee disappeared, a teenager named Nelson Schock took a morning walk. Accompanied by a stray dog, he headed west along 117th Street North, several miles north of Dee’s home. The dog trotted under a bridge and would not come out when called. Nelson climbed down and saw a bedspread and a body. Beside the body lay a painted plastic mask.

Nelson was so upset that when he ran for home, he headed the wrong way for a few steps.

Sheriff’s investigators photographed Dee’s frozen body, diagrammed her location, and studied what they saw: panty hose tied to Dee’s throat, wrists, and ankles. Animals had gnawed her.

Houston noticed similarities between this and the Hedge killing, which had occurred six years earlier: both women had been tied up and strangled, their phone lines cut. These facts were similar to those in the BTK cases, the oldest of which had occurred seventeen years earlier.

There were also significant differences: the Park City victims were older women, and they had been taken from their homes. BTK had not done that in Wichita.

Most of the detectives concluded that the Hedge and Davis cases might be related, but they doubted they were related to BTK. Houston wasn’t sure he agreed.

Rader had dragged Dee’s five-foot-five, 130-pound body out of the house in her own bedding and dumped her in the trunk of her car.

He took her first to a Kansas Department of Transportation lake at Forty-fifth and Hillside, near I-135, the highway that divides the eastern part of Wichita from the west. He hid her in some bushes.

Rader used this mask on Dolores Davis when he took his souvenir photos after he’d killed her.

He wanted to tie up Dee in all sorts of poses and shoot pictures in the privacy of an abandoned barn. But it was snowing, and the night was wearing on. He would need to sneak back into the campout soon. He decided to take Dee’s car back to her home. But first he drove through Park City, to Christ Lutheran, his own church, and stuffed her jewelry box and other belongings underneath a shed out back. Then he drove to her house, wiped her car clean, threw the keys on her roof, and walked the several hundred yards back to the Baptist church where he had left his own car. He drove back out to the lake, picked up Dee’s body, and started driving north, toward an abandoned barn that he had a mind to use. He felt the press of time; the Scouts would miss him.

He found a bridge along 117th Street North and dumped her body under it. Then he took the long drive back to the Scout Rendezvous.

Rader placed Dolores Davis’s body under this bridge before returning to his Boy Scout campout.

27

1991

Bones

Rader was like a dog with a bone: He would not leave Dee alone. By the evening of January 19, the day after he broke into Dee’s house, officers all over Sedgwick and Harvey counties were searching for Dee. Rader had spent the day with the Scouts, but he was curious about the search and wanted to see Dee again.

So in the evening, he made up another lie: I have a headache. He drove to the little town of Sedgwick, supposedly to buy aspirin in a convenience store but actually to see if he could learn about the investigation.

He drove on I-135 to a rest stop north of the Sedgwick County line, went into the restroom, and began to change into dark clothes. A Kansas Highway Patrol trooper walked in, glared at him, and asked what he was doing. Troopers got called to the rest stop when people saw men undressing and doing strange things.

BTK, half dressed, told him a version of truth: I’m with the Boy Scouts. I’m changing into my Scout clothes to go to the Trappers’ Rendezvous.

If the trooper asked to search his car, he might be in a lot of trouble. Some of Dee’s belongings were in there. To his relief, the trooper walked away.

Rader finished dressing, drove out in the fog, found Dee’s body, and took photos of her. Her breasts had deflated.
Not very sexy,
he thought. But he took photos anyway. He had brought something to pretty her up: his mask, made of heavy plastic, on which he had painted red lips, black eyelashes, and eyebrows.

He left the mask with her to impress the police.

After he got home from the Rendezvous with his son, he wrote in his journal how much he enjoyed killing Dee, how she pleaded. He kept trophies: Dee’s driver’s license and Social Security card, clippings of stories published by the
Eagle
after the murder. Some of those stories noted similarities between Dee’s killing and the deaths of Marine Hedge, the Oteros, and other BTK victims.

He missed his mask. He had worn it a number of times, when he put on women’s clothing and photographed himself in bondage, in poses of distress. He went to his parents’ house when they were not at home, put on Dee’s clothing, and took pictures of himself in the basement.

On February 18, 1991, only one month after Dee Davis was murdered, a jogger trotting through woods south of the small town of Belle Plaine, Kansas, found a skull sticking out from under some leaves. Belle Plaine is thirty minutes south of Wichita. Wichita police sent their crime lab team, including Landwehr. The news media were notified.

At the
Eagle
, Bill Hirschman turned to Hurst Laviana, his teammate covering cops.

“God, I hope this isn’t what I think it is,” Hirschman said.

“What do you think it is?” Laviana asked.

“Nancy Shoemaker.”

Laviana hoped he was wrong too.

Nancy was nine years old.

Detectives soon determined that the skull belonged to Nancy. She had disappeared the previous July while going to a Wichita gas station to buy 7 UP to settle her little brother’s upset stomach. Her disappearance touched off prayer meetings, searches, and some of the worst community-wide fear in years.

Wichita police formed an investigative squad. Among the detectives they loaned to the city and county Exploited & Missing Child Unit investigation was Clint Snyder, a lean, intense burglary investigator in his late twenties who had grown up on a cattle farm near Burden, southeast of Wichita.

Snyder went to the spot where the jogger found the bones. Among the people he talked to there was the crime lab lieutenant, Landwehr. Snyder wanted to get to know him better.

Paul Dotson, now a lieutenant in charge of the police department’s homicide section, was still obsessed with BTK. Two months after Davis’s murder, in March 1991, he called a meeting with Sam Houston and other Sedgwick County sheriff’s investigators, FBI behavioral scientists, and Landwehr. Dotson’s goal was to jointly review not only the Davis homicide but all open homicide cases in the city and county.

The investigators compared files and opinions. The FBI specialists noted that in the Park City murders the bodies had been moved around. They said serial killers usually don’t do that. And it wasn’t BTK’s style.

To Dotson’s disappointment, the meeting ended inconclusively. Once again the BTK detectives tried to see links in the killings and concluded, “Maybe, and maybe not.”

Landwehr and Dotson had investigated BTK for seven years. No matter how confidently Landwehr talked about catching him someday, Dotson felt only disappointment and doubt.

One day Snyder and the crime lab people processed a car belonging to a man police were investigating as a possible Shoemaker suspect. Snyder got to know Landwehr a little better. He learned a lot.

They talked about what could be done to move the case forward. Landwehr chain-smoked, cracked little jokes, and made useful suggestions, supplementing the street wisdom of detectives with forensic science.

For all his skill, Landwehr was unpretentious, even humble. Not all police commanders were. Landwehr seemed warm, sympathetic, and curious about people. He also seemed to love what he did. That got Snyder’s attention because Snyder wanted to continue developing as a detective, and the Shoemaker case had shaken him deeply. He wondered how full-time homicide investigators managed their emotions as they pursued their work.

After work, Snyder would go home and spend time with his daughter, Heidi, only eighteen months old. As they played, he wondered how the Shoemakers learned to cope with the way Nancy had died. Snyder also wondered how cops could learn to cope especially considering the limitations of their own department. Nancy’s murder had horrified him; he could not imagine any job more valuable than finding her killers. But his bosses in burglary pressed him to return to working property crime cases, though Nancy’s case was unsolved.

He wondered what kind of beast could torture and kill a child. Like a lot of other detectives, Snyder had to teach himself anger management. Snyder spent a lot of time talking it through with his wife, Tammy, with friends, and with God.

A few months after Nancy’s body was found, detectives got a tip from a Wichita man who, by coincidence, had once been landlord to BTK victim Kathryn Bright. The tip led investigators to a man named Doil Lane, who was already under investigation for another murder in Texas. Further investigation led to an acquaintance of Lane’s, a mentally challenged man named Donald Wacker. Snyder and another detective got him to confess. Wacker said he watched Lane rape, beat, whip, and strangle Nancy. Wacker told them that she kicked her attackers, demanded to be let go, and fought until the last.

One of the saddest murders in Wichita history was solved. Snyder went back to working burglaries, grateful for what he had learned. Snyder didn’t know it yet, but Landwehr had been impressed with him. Landwehr thought Snyder would be a good guy to work with someday.

28

May 1991

Little Hitler

Four months after Dee Davis was killed, Park City hired a new compliance officer to catch stray dogs and enforce zoning rules. Dennis Rader’s résumé appealed to city officials for several reasons. He was a former ADT employee with a good work record. In his four years in the air force, he had been a wire and antenna installer, serving primarily in Mobile, Alabama, and Tokyo, Japan, with temporary duty in Okinawa, Turkey, and Greece. He had been discharged in 1970 as a sergeant. He was a lifelong Park City resident who attended a nearby church and volunteered with his son’s Scout troop. He had many friends in town.

People who encountered him after he was hired noticed that he kept his uniform immaculate, that his boots were always polished, that he seemed to relish the power to tell people what to do.

Jack Whitson, who supervised Rader for years, said he tended to tell rather than ask. He’d say “You need to fill this out” rather than “Would you please fill this out?”

Rader wasn’t a loner; he would talk if someone engaged him. But he did not kid around�work was work. On breaks he never went a minute over the allotted fifteen. Rather than socialize on downtime, he would sit at his desk and read the
Eagle
. When he chatted about something other than work, it was about either Kansas State University football or his children. Mostly he talked about his kids. When his daughter became a K-State student, Rader attended the school’s football games religiously.

He eventually got his own office. When he was there, he always kept the door open, but he locked it when he left for the day. His office had a second door, one that led to the outside and allowed him to come and go without being noticed.