Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (19 page)

One day, while looking for a piece of paper in Rader’s office, Whitson opened a two-drawer filing cabinet. Inside were neatly filed black binders, some with labels. He didn’t stop to read them.

Rader had abbreviations and acronyms for everything. Once, Whitson told him, “Dennis, you got to talk English to me. I don’t understand your acronyms.” Rader had hundreds of them. “IR,” for example, stood for “Investigator’s Report.”

Whitson knew Rader took great care in preparing cases against Park City residents, but he’d also seen Rader help people get back their pets when they had to be taken in. When animals were hurt, Rader insisted they be taken to a vet.

One day a woman brought in a duck with an injured wing. Whitson told Rader that the duck couldn’t survive and should be euthanized. Rader said he couldn’t bring himself to kill the bird. He took it to a park with a creek to let nature take its course.

Still, his job guaranteed criticism. Dog lovers seldom love dogcatchers, and no one likes to hear a man in uniform threaten to issue a citation.

Many of the Park City residents whom the compliance officer would check up on in his daily rounds were lower-income men who worked two jobs and who took their time about fixing cars in their yards. They would leave oil pans and junk parts and cars with only three wheels lying around. Or they were single moms, juggling kids and school, who had little time for mowing grass.

Not long after Rader got the job, people began to complain.

They said he seemed like some sort of authority nut. He’d step onto their lawns, stick a ruler into their grass, and tell them that it stood a fraction of an inch too tall. When pets got loose, he would take them away and sometimes have them put down.

On occasion he walked unannounced into the homes of single women and asked detailed questions about their workday schedules, their children, their boyfriends. There seemed to be something creepy about this guy.

On Sundays, he took his wife and kids to church.

29

1992

Heading Homicide

On March 12, 1992, Dennis Rader helped Wichita detectives investigate a homicide.

Six days earlier, an avionics worker named Larry A. Bryan, age thirty-six, shot and killed Ronald G. Eldridge, age forty-two. Eldridge was Bryan’s supervisor at Collins Avionics near Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, and he had apparently planned to fire Bryan.

Detectives investigating homicides like to “do a neighborhood.” They ask questions in the area where a suspect lives, as well as around the site of the homicide. So on March 12, Detectives S. L. Wiswell and Charles Koral drove to Park City to talk to Bryan’s neighbors. As a courtesy they visited the town’s police chief, Ace Van Wey.

He suggested that Wiswell and Koral interview the city’s compliance officer, Dennis Rader, who lived at 6220 Independence, just a couple of doors from Bryan. Wiswell wrote in his report what happened next:

Myself and Det. Koral informed Dennis Rader that we were investigating a homicide in which Larry A. Bryan was the suspect and we were trying to find out any background information on Larry. Dennis Rader states that Larry moved in approx 10 to 12 years ago at the address of 6232 Independence and he described Larry as a quiet person. Dennis states that one thing he remembers about Larry is that Larry never came out during the day time and he kind of got the nickname of vampire around the neighborhood. Dennis also states that he remembers Larry Bryan driving what he described as a hot Chevelle. We asked Dennis Rader to describe Larry Bryan and he stated that he was polite and quiet. We asked him if anyone lived with him and he stated that he did not believe so however he thought that a girl hung around his residence when he first moved in but he had not seen anyone else around the residence. Dennis Rader also states that Bryan has a fascination with young kids in the neighborhood. He recalls an incident approx a month ago where he saw Larry Bryan chasing the kids in the neighborhood around with what he described as a Jason mask. I asked Dennis Rader about the residence of Larry Bryan and he stated that Larry always keeps his shades down and again stating that he has never seen any females over at Larry’s house.

By May of that year Paul Dotson had run the homicide section for three years and was “complete toast,” as he put it�exhausted. When he was reassigned, his commanders told him he could name his successor.

Dotson wanted Landwehr to replace him but worried about what the job stress�and being on call day and night�might do to his friend.

“I know you want this job more than anything,” he told Landwehr. “But you have to promise me that you won’t let the pressures break you.”

Landwehr gave him a long look. “You know what I’m really about,” he replied.

Commanders gave the position to Landwehr. He had spent fourteen years working toward this job, and was hoping, against considerable odds, to stay in it for the rest of his career. He was thirty-seven years old. There would be steady work, he knew: Wichita had twenty-eight homicides in 1991, eighteen the year before that, thirty-three the year before that.

The new job wasn’t his only success. He was engaged to Cindy Hughes, the special-education paraprofessional with a wit as sassy as his. When people asked him how Cindy could fall in love with a homicide investigator, Landwehr would shrug. “She spent several years dealing with special-ed kids, so she felt qualified to deal with me.”

Cindy was happy too, but Landwehr’s promotion prompted her to make an unusual request:

“I want you to run my entire family through your criminal computer.”

“Why do you want me to do that?” he asked.

“So that you’re not surprised. My brother was on the county’s Most Wanted list, and I don’t ever want you surprised at work by anything my family has done, or will do later.”

“I won’t do it.”

“What?”

“I won’t do it.”

“I
want
you to do it.”

“No.”

“I want you to run them so that you can know what you might be getting into.”

He smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “I would
never
do that to your family.”

“Bullshit, Kenny. I know that you’ve already done it�you’re not stupid. So I’m just telling you to do it so that you know it’s all right with me.”

“But I haven’t done it.”

“You’re lying.”

“No,” he said. “And I’m telling you, I would never do that to your family.”

“You goddamned
liar
.”

He smiled.

Five months after Landwehr took over homicide, officers in a parking lot near Twenty-first and Amidon confronted a man who had tried to kill his wife. When the man jumped toward the open door of his car to get a gun, the officers fired. The medical examiner later determined that he had shot himself just as the officers shot him, so it was part suicide and part officer-involved shooting.

Homicide detectives arrived, along with their new boss.

Landwehr had decided that he should be mostly a hands-off boss�that he should assign detectives to a case, then support them with advice and resources. Unless they fell down on the job, he would stay out of their way. But he had also decided he would walk every scene himself, not only because he might prove helpful, but because he was aware of his own shortcomings. There were supervisors who could look at photographs of a homicide scene and see the whole thing in their minds, but he couldn’t do that. “I’m more of a 3-D person,” he told people. “I have to see it in the full dimensions myself.”

The detectives liked him. He let them do their jobs. He did not have a big head: he didn’t say “I’m head of homicide” or even refer to himself as a lieutenant. When he called people, he told them only that he was a police officer.

Landwehr arrived at Twenty-first and Amidon and began to pace inside the yellow police tape that blocked news reporters from getting near the evidence.

Hurst Laviana from the
Eagle
decided this was an opportunity. He had spent eight years covering crime and wanted to develop the new head of homicide as a source, and earn his trust.

Landwehr was dressed, as usual, in a suit with a crisp white shirt. There are habits that the Police Department teaches detectives about clothes and grooming. The male homicide detective must shave close, wear a suit, and must not smile or crack a joke at a homicide scene. If the news cameras catch a detective smiling, TV stations might play the tape repeatedly and make him or her look uncaring.

On this day, after an on-site briefing, the television people packed their gear and left. Landwehr still paced the parking lot. He looked at the brick wall of a nearby building. There had been several bullets fired. Perhaps some bullets had hit the wall.

Landwehr stepped outside the tape barrier and walked to the building. Laviana stepped forward. He stopped a few feet from where Landwehr peered at the wall. Laviana, usually a taciturn man, decided to crack a joke. He pretended to peer around the corner of the building.

“Hey,” he said to Landwehr. “Have you checked this dead guy over here?”

Landwehr laughed. An important friendship had begun.

30

1993

A Year of Changes

Lee Landwehr, a retired Beechcraft tool and die maker, died at age seventy-three on January 24, 1993. Paul Dotson had never seen Kenny Landwehr so undone. Lee had gotten his son interested in reading, had handed him stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes. Together they’d worked on cars in the driveway. Kenny wasn’t good at repairs, but he had held wrenches for his father so that he could learn from him and trade stories about news of the day.

After Lee died, Landwehr went over to his mother’s house and worked in the garden. Landwehr hated gardening, but it was his mother’s garden, and it got weeded regularly.

A few weeks after his father’s death, the police department sent Landwehr to a full week of FBI training at Quantico, Virginia. The subject was “vicarious victimology”�how law enforcement officers, including homicide detectives, often hurt themselves by empathizing in an unhealthy way with crime victims. What Landwehr learned gave him much to think about, and it was a lucky break that the training occurred just after his father’s death; Landwehr had been drowning his sorrows. What he heard at Quantico stopped him.

Cops often feel so shaken by the suffering of victims and their families that they begin to pursue investigations as though the victim were a member of their own family. That was how Landwehr had felt ever since he joined the police department. He learned that if investigators are already prone to self-destructive behavior�avoidance, drinking, melancholy, depression�working cases gives them every excuse to hurt themselves. The suicide rate among cops is high.

At Quantico, instructors described the dangerous relationship between stress and drinking. Do not assume responsibility for actions you are not responsible for, they said. Not all cases can be solved; not all the guilty get convicted; not all victims receive justice.

In addition to working with a therapist, find people you trust and care about, the instructors said. Talk things through.

After Landwehr got home, he applied what he’d learned. He asked Cindy if he could talk honestly about his work, and she agreed.

He began to talk to her regularly to vent frustrations. She listened, empathized, teased, and consoled him. Marrying her, Landwehr often said later, was the best thing that ever happened to him. “You think you can cope with this stuff alone, but you can’t.”

Landwehr had spent much of his life partying. That began to taper off now. He wanted to head the homicide section for years to come, and he could see that his drinking was leading to no good. “I just decided to grow up.”

Shortly after he moved to Park City in 1993, Jan Elliott bought a young bird dog and trained her to fetch. Jessie was friendly and wouldn’t bother anybody. But during storms, Jessie would climb Elliott’s ten-foot chain-link fence or slip her leash. Rader, the Park City compliance officer, caught her three times and told Elliott to resolve the problem�or else.

Rader seemed arrogant as he told Elliott he owed the city two hundred fifty dollars.

I don’t have that kind of money, Elliott said.

Then I’ll have your dog put down, Rader said. And he did.

Elliott got so mad that he moved out of Park City.

But something puzzled him.

He had heard similar stories about Rader from other people, but he’d also heard good things.

Years before, his mother, Thelma Elliott, had lived across the street from someone she described as “a wonderful girl”�Paula Dietz�who had married Rader. Elliott’s mother liked Rader. She said he was “the nicest person.”

On April 7 that year, Rader’s parents, William and Dorothea, marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The family planned a dinner and put a notice in the
Eagle
.

William Rader had served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. He had worked for thirty-seven years for the local utility, Kansas Gas & Electric, before he retired in August 1985.

Dorothea Rader had worked for twenty-six years as a bookkeeper at a grocery, Leeker’s Family Foods. She had retired in January 1986. She was a gentle person, appreciated by her neighbors and others who knew her.

The elder Raders took their four boys to church and Scout meetings and encouraged them to explore the great outdoors. They tried to do right by Dennis, Paul, Bill, and Jeff, although Jeff, as he admitted later, was a hell-raiser.

Now that they were retired, Bill and Dorothea were pleased that Dennis, their eldest, was so attentive. He worked close to home, and he and Paula lived only a couple of miles away. They stopped by frequently and went to the same church. Dennis and Paula’s daughter, Kerri, had shown up on school honor roll lists for years. Their son, Brian, was becoming an Eagle Scout.