Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (27 page)

“The KBI cold case people were awesome about what they did,” Landwehr would say later. “And they didn’t ask us for a damned thing in return.”

Nola Foulston, the Sedgwick County district attorney, sent help. The cops would need to coordinate many of their moves with her prosecutors, in case there was an arrest. She assigned Kevin O’Connor to shadow Landwehr’s task force, day and night if necessary, and to advise them both as needed. “From now on, you’re Kenny’s bitch,” she told O’Connor.

O’Connor researched whether BTK could be sentenced to death if the cops caught him. To his disappointment, he learned Kansas did not have a death penalty law during the years BTK had murdered people.

Three days after Landwehr got BTK’s letter, he drove to the home of the retired Ghostbuster Paul Holmes.

“Wow!” Holmes said when he saw the letter. Then he asked again: “What can I do to help?”

Landwehr didn’t want to ask for anything. Holmes was running a bricklaying company with his brother. But Holmes had helped build the massive Ghostbuster files that the new task force was going to reexamine now; he was the most organized note taker Landwehr knew. He knew how to keep his mouth shut.

“You know,” Holmes said, “I did a lot of work on those files. I could help you a lot with that.”

“I know you could,” Landwehr said. “But you know there’s no money to pay you for something like that.”

“I don’t give a damn about that,” Holmes said.

Relph, Gouge, Otis, Snyder, and Landwehr all knew how bad some retired cops felt about not catching BTK. The older men had often asked, “Did we miss anything? Did we fail to do something we should have done?”

Landwehr did not think so. But on the day that Laviana’s story ran in the
Eagle
, Laviana found Bernie Drowatzky working as chief of police in tiny Kaw City, Oklahoma. Drowatzky touched on the guilt: “I think there’s something somewhere we missed that’s going to take them to him.”

Otis didn’t drink much but thought he’d become a drunk if this lasted long. He barely slept the first two weeks. He would wake up in the dark and his brain would engage. He would make a pot of coffee, get dressed, and drive in to work.

Gouge slept more and did not fret as much, but he was grateful that Landwehr was running things. Landwehr did not babysit or second-guess detectives, and though there was great external pressure to find BTK, he kept it away from the detectives. Gouge thought the investigation would quickly become a disaster if anyone but Landwehr were in charge.

Gouge, Otis, Relph, Snyder, and other cops would head out every morning, approaching men all over Wichita who had been named by tipsters. The cops asked for DNA samples. When they reached the end of a list, they went back for another. The “swab-a-thon,” they called it.

Anybody named in a tip had to be swabbed. A few tipsters suspected Landwehr.

The detectives took it seriously. Police had theorized for years that BTK was a cop. So Landwehr swabbed himself. “I didn’t trust Otis or anybody else to stick a swab in my mouth, so I did it,” he joked later. But he did it with witnesses. Gouge handed him two sterile Q-tips, then made fun of him while he rubbed them against the inside of his cheek�and watched closely to make sure he didn’t cheat.

On the same day that Otis and Gouge saw the new BTK letter, they had gone out to find Bill Wegerle. There was no side-door approach through relatives this time.

Otis told Bill that someone claiming to be BTK had sent a letter, naming Vicki as a victim.

In his coat pocket, Otis had the subpoena that would force Bill to give his DNA if he refused. Otis had asked a judge to sign it, but he was hoping to leave it in his pocket, unused.

Bill listened as Otis explained: “I’m not here to tell you that the cops screwed up in 1986,” Otis said. “But I can tell you we’d do things differently today. I am sorry about how things turned out for you. I believe you did not kill your wife, and now I can prove it. But I need your help.”

He said that he needed a DNA sample�now.

Bill said okay.

It took just a couple of minutes. Otis and Gouge thanked him and drove away, the warrant still in Otis’s pocket.

Two days later, they went to see Bill at his house. Bill, still wary, had a relative sitting beside him�a witness to the conversation.

A test had just confirmed that the DNA profile of the material found under Vicki’s fingernail matched that of the man who had killed the Oteros thirty years before. And now the detectives knew: it was not Bill’s DNA.

It had taken almost eighteen years, but he had been eliminated as a suspect.

When Otis and Gouge told him this, Bill did not smile or complain about the years he’d lived with the suspicion that he had killed Vicki. He did not complain about how other children had mocked his children at school, telling them that their father had murdered their mother.

“I’m glad you cleared me,” he said. “All I ever wanted was for you to find who killed Vicki.”

Otis and Gouge wanted the names of people she knew, places she shopped, details of her life. In spite of the passage of nearly two decades, Bill gave detailed answers.

Otis admired him.
He could have told me to go pound sand. He could have told us to stay out of his house. He could have stayed mad at us for the last eighteen years, but he’s too good a man to do that.

In the first week, Johnson turned down requests from thirty-two national media outlets wanting to interview Landwehr or Chief Williams.

Some reporters got rude.

The FBI’s Bob Morton encouraged Johnson to ignore them and stick to the plan:

“The media is not going to solve this case,” Morton told her. “BTK is a very clever predator; if you put too much out there you are jeopardizing the investigation…. Just because you have spoiled the press doesn’t mean that you can’t change the way you do business on this case…. It is very dangerous for you to overtalk. If you brief every day you run out of things to put out there and you say too much and run the risk of causing another homicide. Then, the very press that you were catering to will turn on you and blame you for the homicide.”

Some local politicians worried about the flow of information too�but for other reasons. They thought the BTK publicity might scare off tourists and conventioneers, including some of the forty-two thousand people who were expected in Wichita for the 85th Women’s International Bowling Congress Tournament.

Johnson e-mailed Morton that the cops were getting a lot of pressure from politicians “to go on TV and say everything is fine.”

“Do not do that,” Morton said. If BTK killed someone after police sounded the all clear, the city could be liable in lawsuits.

With the investigators off-limits, the television crews descended on anyone they thought had a remote connection to the case: former BTK investigators like Drowatzky; Beattie, who was rushing completion of his book; and Laviana, who had broken the story.

With three daughters at home, Laviana worried about going on TV and talking about the killer. But he knew more about BTK than anyone else at the paper�so he gave interviews the day his first story ran. The media lined up to talk to him after that. (Laviana didn’t have cable TV, so he had no idea who Greta Van Susteren was or that she had a national prime-time show on the Fox News Channel.) That weekend he got more than a dozen calls at home from national shows wanting more. “Come to the paper if you want to talk to me,” he told them. Within days, he also got calls from Japanese and German television crews, and magazines he’d never heard of.

The
Eagle
published a story about the swab-a-thon on April 2, after three men contacted the newspaper to say their DNA had been collected: “A police spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny that DNA testing was under way,” the
Eagle
reported.

That same day, Landwehr held his third news conference to keep the tip lines ringing. Some callers suspected ex-husbands. Some turned in sons or fathers. Some suspected neighbors or coworkers.

Men were named as suspects for many reasons: because they were loners, eccentrics, or “just mean.” Some were known kooks. Others were upstanding citizens.

Some tipsters viewed themselves as amateur sleuths. One theory had BTK and California’s Zodiac killer being the same person. Others were sure BTK had strangled JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado.

By this time, Landwehr’s instructions had been passed along to every street cop: if they responded to a homicide call, burglary or even attempted burglary and noticed a cut phone line, “that’s it, clear the house.” He had the same instruction for any scene involving a missing person or a female in bondage.

While some detectives read e-mail tips or phone call transcripts, others did computer background checks. They could quickly eliminate people as potential suspects if they were black (because of the DNA profile), if they weren’t the right age (at least forty-six), or if they had a provable alibi (such as being incarcerated at the time of one of the murders).

Sgt. Mike Hennessy prioritized which of the others would be asked for DNA.

Tip after tip led to dead ends, and Otis feared that something they overlooked would come back to haunt them.

Because the BTK news conferences were so brief, television reporters often filled out their stories by getting reactions from people downtown. Young women would say that BTK did not frighten them. They’d point out he was an old man.

Landwehr cringed when he heard that. “He’ll take that as a challenge,” Landwehr told Johnson. “He’ll try to kill somebody to show he still can.”

To help the detectives anticipate the killer’s next moves, Landwehr brought in Bob Morton, the profiler from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.

Landwehr was comfortable working with the FBI. His uncle Ernie had been an FBI guy. So had his close friend, KBI Director Welch.

But many other cops regard FBI agents as arrogant, removed from the street. Morton began his overview of the case by stating the obvious: BTK probably has sexual fixations. He might live in the Wichita area; on the other hand, he might not.

I’ve got better things to do than listen to this,
Otis thought.

He and Gouge walked out.

38

May–June 2004

“The BTK Story”

Landwehr wondered whether BTK might follow him home some night and learn that he had a family.

Probably not. But Landwehr asked supervisors to cruise officers past his house�and his mother’s�every hour. He suspected officers were already doing it on their own.

His mother, Irene, did not tell him she was scared, but she conceded it to Cindy. Cindy told her that BTK must be old by now, feeling cautious. But Cindy got in touch with Morton.

She understood why Landwehr had to talk to BTK on television, she told Morton. But he had made himself a target, and now they were telling James, their eight-year-old son, that he could not play in their front yard and must never answer the door to strangers. The boy was scared.

Morton told her that serial killers almost never hunt cops�they prefer defenseless victims. “Take precautions,” he said. “But don’t dwell on this.”

Landwehr worried for weeks about whether the talk-to-BTK strategy would work. His worries went away on May 4, forty-six days after the Wegerle message surfaced.

A receptionist at KAKE-TV found an envelope in the mail with a return address of Thomas B. King�the initials an anagram reference to BTK.

The news director, Glen Horn, opened the package and found several items: a word search puzzle, photocopies of two identification cards, a photocopy of a badge with the words “Special Officer” on it, and thirteen chapter headings for something titled “The BTK Story.” It made reference to fetishes, “PJs,” a “final curtain call,” and asked: WILL THERE MORE?

Rader’s word-search puzzle was sent to KAKE, filled with clues about how he stalked his victims.

KAKE called the cops. Otis went to fetch the package. KAKE shot video of him picking it up, much to his irritation. He walked out without saying anything, much to Horn’s irritation.

The puzzle included a section called “Ruse,” that included the words
serviceman, insurance,
and
realtor.
BTK was hinting that he gained access to homes by pretending to be someone on business.

James Landwehr called his father at work one day. “Dad, you need to come home! Why haven’t you come home?”

Landwehr and Cindy had not told James what was going on.

It seemed to James that his father had disappeared. Sometimes his dad worked twenty-four-hour days. Or he would come home for a few minutes to put James to bed, then drive back to work. James was an affectionate little soul; once he got to know someone he greeted them with a bear hug. His bond with his father had grown deep, and Landwehr liked nothing better than to help with homework or play alongside him. James was now seeing his father on television, and the boy sensed something sinister.