Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (24 page)

The cryptic letters stenciled across the top of the letter that BTK sent to the
Eagle.

Elliott felt goose bumps. As a police reporter, she had covered the Otero murders. Four years later, when Chief LaMunyon and Deputy Chief Cornwell sought advice about what to do about BTK, Cornwell had pulled her into an office one day and shown her parts of the BTK file. She had seen a symbol with a B made to look like breasts. This one wasn’t identical, but it was close.

She laid the letter and the envelope on the desk of Tim Rogers, the editor for local news. She didn’t say anything to anyone about who it was from; she was sure they would know.

But they did not. After twenty-six years, Elliott was the only remaining person in the newsroom who remembered what BTK’s signature looked like.

“Hurst,” Rogers called out when Laviana walked into the newsroom. “Come check this out.” Rogers handed him the paper and envelope.

Laviana was mystified. He walked over to Wenzl.

“What do you make of this?”

Wenzl looked, and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“It’s weird,” Laviana said. “It looks like crime scene photos.”

“Why would anybody send us this?”

“I can’t figure it out.”

Laviana was working on two stories, and was in a hurry. The paper puzzled him, but he had not studied it closely; he had not noticed the signature, or the name “Vicki L. Wegerle” in the driver’s license.

It was nearly time for the 10:00
AM
police briefing. Laviana decided to take the letter with him.

The faint penciled-in symbol at the bottom of the letter was Rader’s BTK signature, his attempt to create a “brand” for his killings.

It did not occur to him that the message came from BTK. But he remembered Ken Stephens saying nearly twenty years before that the
Eagle
had blown its chances to have its own copies of BTK’s first two messages.

So he made a copy.

The daily briefings were run by Janet Johnson, a civilian who served as police spokeswoman. This morning there was much to relate: officers had shot to death a man who waved a knife at them the previous night. His relatives had told the
Eagle
’s Tim Potter that the man was mentally ill and probably didn’t understand the officers’ commands to drop the knife.

Laviana took notes to pass along to Potter, then waited. After the other reporters left, he went to Johnson and to a police commander who happened to be there, Capt. Darrell Haynes.

Laviana handed them the paper.

Haynes was fond of cop abbreviations. A crackpot, for example, was CCFCCP: “Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs.”

Haynes looked at the paper and thought it was CCFCCP. Johnson agreed. Cops get a lot of tips from kooks.

Probably nothing, they said.

But Haynes took the paper and envelope.

“I’ll show them to the homicide section,” he said.

Back in the newsroom a short time later, Laviana took a closer look at the copy he had made. What he saw suddenly made him very agitated.

A driver’s license.

A blond woman smiling.

“Wegerle, Vicki L.”

“Date of Birth 03/25/58”

When he had first seen the sheet of paper, he had almost tossed it away. He realized now that if he had paid more attention, he would have taken it to Landwehr’s homicide section himself.

He knew who Vicki Wegerle was: an unsolved homicide. She had lived only a mile from him. Laviana knew one of her relatives, and he had talked with her occasionally about Vicki’s murder.

Laviana handed the letter to Potter, who sat next to him.

Potter pointed out something Laviana had not noticed: the envelope’s return address.

Bill Thomas Killman 1684 S. Oldmanor Wichita, KS. 67218

“The initials would be BTK,” Potter said.

That hadn’t occurred to Laviana. Interesting, he thought. He had written that anniversary BTK story only two months before.

But still…he thought it was a hoax. The newspaper got letters from crackpots. BTK had not killed anyone, as far as Laviana knew, since Nancy Fox in 1977. Twenty-six years had passed.

He studied the sheet a few more moments. Potter had noticed the return address. Maybe there was more.

And then Laviana saw it.

He walked to Wenzl.

“Look at the photos,” Laviana said curtly.

Wenzl looked.

“What?”

“Those are
not
crime scene photos,” Laviana said, jabbing a finger at the photos. “Look at her arms. They’ve been
moved
. They are
not
in the same position in all the photos. The cops
never
move a body around when they shoot photos at a crime scene.”

“This is creepy,” Wenzl said.

Eagle
reporter Tim Potter spotted the initials BTK in the return address of the letter from “Bill Thomas Killman.”

“Potter just pointed out that Bill Thomas Killman’s initials would be BTK,” Laviana said.

“What do you think?” Wenzl asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s a hoax,” Laviana said. “It can’t be.”

“Did you run the name of the woman?” Wenzl asked.

“I already know the name. Vicki Wegerle was a murder victim, 1986. Unsolved.”

“Was Wegerle one of BTK’s victims?”

“Not that we know of. But it is an unsolved homicide.”

Wenzl looked at Wegerle’s face in the driver’s license.

“You have to tell the editors about this,” Wenzl said.

Laviana did.

Then he went to his computer and searched court records for a Bill Thomas Killman. He found nothing.

Rogers walked over to Wenzl.

“You think there’s anything to this?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Wenzl said. “But if it is BTK, we’ll see whether Hurst thinks it’s more than a two-inch brief.”

The “Oldmanor” return address turned out to be false. And there was no trace of a Bill Thomas Killman. The name sounded like a tongue-in-cheek clue. So did “Oldmanor.” BTK liked to taunt people and talk about himself. He would be an old man now.

That evening, in the newsroom, Wenzl called out to Laviana, “Did the cops ever get back to you?”

“No.”

Laviana e-mailed Johnson: “Anything to that letter?”

She e-mailed back that no one in homicide had seen it and that Landwehr had been out of the office all day.

“Have a great weekend,” she wrote.

36

March 22–25, 2004

The Monster Returns

On Monday, Laviana covered the daily briefing again, and stepped into Haynes’s office afterward. “Whatever happened to that letter?” he asked.

Haynes looked sheepish. “I forgot about it.”

He grabbed it and headed upstairs.

Landwehr at that moment was at Riverside Hospital hoping he could avoid work�he was standing beside a gurney on which his wife was resting. Cindy was minutes away from gallbladder surgery. She had timed the surgery for spring break, so that she could recover without missing work at West High School.

Landwehr had left his cell phone turned on.

In the homicide section, Detective Dana Gouge watched with mild amusement as Haynes walked in and looked into Landwehr’s empty office.
Supervisors apparently like to talk only to other supervisors,
Gouge thought.

“Can I help you?” Gouge asked.

“I was looking for Landwehr,” Haynes said.

“He’s not here,” Gouge said, stating the obvious.

Haynes shrugged. “I have something I wanted to show him. Hurst brought it to us.”

“Can I see it?” Gouge asked.

“Yeah,” Haynes said. “Why don’t you look at this?”

Gouge looked at the envelope without touching it. Something about it caught his eye. He stepped away, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then took the envelope and pulled out the paper inside.

One look was all it took.

He turned to Kelly Otis, standing nearby. “Look at
this
!”

Otis looked.

“Shit,” he said.

Landwehr’s cell phone rang just after a nurse stuck a needle into Cindy’s arm and started the saline drip that precedes surgery.

“This is Landwehr,” he said.

“You’re not going to believe what we just got,” Gouge said.

“What?”

“It’s a letter from BTK.”

Landwehr said nothing for a moment.

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s got the BTK signature,” Gouge said. “Wegerle’s driver’s license. Photos of her in her bedroom.”

“Where did this come from?”

“Hurst brought it to us.”

“Bring it to me.”

Landwehr closed his phone and looked down at Cindy.

He waited.

His detectives sometimes teased him. “Kenny’s getting excited,” Otis would say, mocking him. Landwehr had a cool head. He said nothing now to Cindy. He preferred to see things for himself.

Gouge and Otis drove to Riverside mostly in silence.

They had studied the Wegerle case thoroughly in the past four years. They knew no cop had ever taken a photograph of Vicki lying dead on her bedroom floor. Otis’s own paramedic wife, Netta, had told him that. The firefighters had carried Vicki’s body out of her bedroom and into the larger dining room the moment they found her; they needed the extra space to start CPR.

So these images had to have come from the killer’s stash.

But had the letter come from the killer? Otis was doubtful. Maybe some asshole had found BTK’s trophies and was playing with the cops. Maybe it was a son, or a nephew, or somebody who had bought the killer’s house.

Whoever he was, he knew secrets that only the cops and Vicki’s killer knew. Only the killer could have shot these Polaroids.

The shit is going to hit the fan now,
Otis thought.
No cop is going to sleep tonight. We may not sleep again for a long time.

Cindy did not ask Landwehr about his phone call, and he did not tell her. He was always getting calls. He had worked on more than 400 homicides. Maybe 450�he had lost count.

The doctors were going to start the surgery in minutes. Landwehr looked up when Gouge and Otis walked into the room. Gouge had photocopies in his hand.

Nurses were working around Cindy’s bed, asking her how she was, making sure the saline dripped properly. Landwehr led his detectives out of the room and looked at the papers.

“Fuck!” Landwehr said. “It’s him. Oh, shit, shit, shit!”

Otis glanced down at Landwehr’s feet and began to grin in spite of the moment. Landwehr dressed sharply for work, but in the hospital he was wearing a golf shirt, khaki pants, and the sorriest-looking pair of cheap tennis shoes Otis had ever seen.
Old man shoes
, Otis thought: white with Velcro straps, the sides of the shoes stained green from mowing the lawn.

“Jesus, Landwehr,” Otis said. “Why don’t you buy decent shoes?”

Landwehr did not laugh. He looked like he was in shock.

“We’re in so much fucking trouble,” he said. “Fuck!”

Landwehr walked back to check on Cindy. He talked to her for a moment, then came back out.

His first thought, he said later, was
I hope I don’t screw this up
. Homicide section leaders are like anybody else: They feel doubts at the beginning of a case.
Will I fuck this up? Have I already fucked this up by missing something important in the last twenty years? What if we don’t catch him? What if this asshole decides to kill somebody again?

He realized he was holding his career in his hands.

Think fast
. Laviana and the newspaper would want to publish a story immediately about BTK resurfacing. This time around, the shit storm would hit the police department the moment the story was published. The national media would show up, 580,000 people in the metro area would feel twitchy about opening their front doors at night, and everything the cops did, everything Landwehr did, would be put under a giant microscope.

He needed to ask Laviana to hold off on the story long enough for his detectives to set up a task force and a tip line with a tap on it. They needed to be ready in case BTK called the tip line himself. Landwehr needed Laviana to be reasonable.