Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (31 page)

The cops finally heard from BTK on October 22, though they wouldn’t admit that to the reporters who picked up on rumors posted on the BTK discussion board. A United Parcel Service driver had found a strange package in a drop box near I-135 in the center of the city. Witnesses saw task force detectives at the scene, so it was maddening to reporters that the cops wouldn’t confirm “the latest drop.”

It contained a four-page document labeled “C2.” scrawled to the left of the title: “Dawn.” It appeared to be a chronological account of BTK’s childhood and early adulthood. There was also a two-page list titled “THREE: 1-2-3: UNO-DOS-TRES: THEORY The BTK Worhl, Works in Threes and is base on the Eternal Triangle.” It had long been thought that BTK had a fascination with the numeral three; all of his Wichita murder victims had a three in their home address. The documents had been copied, recopied, and reduced several times, making the words difficult to read, even when the cops enlarged the type. It made for dreary reading. Though the content was meant to be titillating, BTK was a dull writer.

Mother Slept beside me at times, the smells, the feel of underclothes and she let me rub her hair. Railroad sounds and smell of coal, Mother worked
somewhere near the RR’s. Mother gone all day and days at time. Grandparents took care of me. I missed mother a lot. Warm baths in a washtub. they bathe us. kissing cousin and I on the porch in the summer and by a stove in the winter.

There was also this:

Masturbation Reflections 10-11 Years Old: If you
Masturbate
,
God will come and kill you. Mom words after she found seminal yellow stain in her underwear one day. She tried to beat me. I fought back. she held my hands behind my back and used the Man’s belt to whip me. Funny it hurt but Sparky liked it. Mother finally quit and said, “Oh My God What Have I Done.”

He wrote that he used prostitutes; that he was born in 1939; that he had spent time in Texas, Louisiana, or Oklahoma, or down South. As a boy, he secretly looked at “Girly Books” about sadomasochism and bondage. He went window-peeping at age eighteen and stole panties. He had hanged a cat, then a dog. He traveled overseas in the air force in the 1960s, and broke into people’s houses while in the service.

He mentioned fantasies, drawings, pictures. “Always had to destroy them when I moved from base to base. Would start over again when the feeling starting coming back.”

By his early thirties, he had tried out bondage on prostitutes. Some refused to see him again “because I was too scary.”

At age thirty-two to thirty-four, “I was getting the feeling again and it was bad this time.”

He listed other serial killers, including Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, and Richard Speck. He wrote about them as though he had studied their crimes.

“They all got caught except the Ripper,” BTK wrote. “Could I become a Killer and not get caught?”

The rambling, two-page “Eternal Triangle” list included the following:

Universe (God)-Cosmos (Holy Spirit)-Elements (Son)

Women-Man-Sex

Psycho-Serial Killer-BTK

BTK-Victim-Police

Detective-Others-Landwehr

Details-Time-Hit

Hit-Thrill-Kill

It also made reference to “PJ Board Water” and “PJ Little Key.”

The last item in the package was a chilling collage: photos of children, cut from
Eagle
advertisements, with gags and bindings drawn on with a Sharpie. The words “Wichita and vicinity”�taken from the cover of the 2003 Southwestern Bell phone book�served as a headline. None of this was released to the public.

On October 26, Johnson e-mailed a short “media advisory” to local newsrooms. From the journalists’ standpoint, it was unneccessarily vague: “Recently, the Wichita Police Department obtained another letter that could be connected to the BTK investigation. That letter was submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Monday, October 25, for authentication.” L. Kelly’s call to Johnson to confirm she was talking about the package found in the drop box was met with a curt response: “The advisory stands.”

One night James Landwehr woke up after a nightmare. It took Cindy a long time to calm him. She asked him to draw and talk about what he had seen.

He was watching television, James said. There was a knock. No one else was home.

“We will never leave you alone in the house,” Cindy said, interrupting him.

“But that’s what was in the dream,” he said.

The knocking persisted, growing louder. James opened the door. Kneeling on the Landwehrs’ front stoop was a big man with a black cape and no head. He rushed in and grabbed James, who screamed.

It was a textbook case of a dream describing reality, Cindy thought. The headless man was BTK, whose face was unknown.

Rader had picked out an eleventh victim, scouting her for weeks. She was in her fifties and lived alone. Thinking of what he would do to her made him feel energized.

He’d seen the online message board chatter. He knew that some people dismissed him as old and feeble, no longer dangerous.

Old? He was fifty-nine.

Feeble? He was not feeble, and he wanted to prove it.

In the lady’s living room, or perhaps in a barn, he would drill holes in a support beam, install eyebolts, and hang his next victim. He had bought cables and a come-along�the ratcheting tool used to tighten wire fence. He would create his scene like a stage director: a crucifixion, with the victim stretched by cables tied to her arms and legs. He would wrap her in plastic. When all was done, he’d set fire to the scene, leaving Landwehr to ponder what he had done.

In late October, Rader set out to scout the woman one last time. There was road construction near her house. The work slowed traffic on Second Street and constricted escape routes. This worried him; he postponed the crucifixion.

In November, Chief Williams traveled to FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, and to its specialized offices in Quantico, Virginia. He asked for additional personnel and equipment, provided background about the case, and noted that the killer’s July letter included a clear threat. Soon the FBI was committing more people and computers. The task force was about to provoke a lot more tips.

On November 30, Landwehr called another news conference acknowledging that BTK “has provided certain background information about himself, which he claims is accurate.”

Landwehr read more than twenty items, including the following: BTK claimed he was born in 1939, making his current age sixty-four or sixty-five. He had a cousin named Susan, who moved to Missouri. His grandfather played the fiddle and died of a lung disease. His father died in World War II. His mother dated a railroad detective. He had an Hispanic acquaintance named Petra, who had a younger sister named Tina. He had repaired copiers. He was in the military in the 1960s. He had a lifelong fascination with trains and had always lived near a railroad.

Landwehr asked for help in identifying anyone with a similar background. The amateur sleuths on the online discussion board loved it. Other people did not. A lot of people in town were sick of the BTK coverage. A caller to the
Eagle
complained: “The only reason BTK should be in the news is if he is captured. Period. The media should stop feeding into his ego with all the coverage. The scary music that TV stations add to their BTK stories is humorous, though.”

BTK’s “clues” led detectives down frustrating paths.

Detectives called the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for help compiling a list of mining locations where people might contract lung disease. They cross-checked their suspect lists with railroad workers and hobbyists.

And how many sets of sisters named Petra and Tina, in the right age range, could there be? Police compiled a list of twenty-seven from across the nation. A dozen pairs were from the Southwest, where BTK hinted he was from. One set was from Wichita, which the online sleuths quickly discovered.

To ward off harassment, the sisters issued a written statement denying any connection to the killer�and pointing out they were of Bulgarian descent, not Hispanic.

42

December 1, 2004

Valadez

At 9:30
AM
on December 1, reporter Tim Potter found several phone messages awaiting him at the
Eagle
from a good source who was frantically trying to give him a tip. About twenty cops were about to kick in a door in south Wichita and arrest someone, the caller said. It sounded like the cops thought they’d found BTK.

The address was near railroad tracks.

Potter, reporter Stan Finger, and photographers Randy Tobias and Bo Rader headed toward the location. They fanned out, in separate cars, trying not to alert the suspect. They didn’t see any sign of an impending arrest: no marked cars, no signs of surveillance. Perplexed, Potter parked a couple of blocks down and watched the little white house.

At the
Eagle
, other reporters started looking up public records on the man who owned the house. Apparently he was sixty-five. He lived across the street from train tracks. He was Hispanic, as some eyewitness reports and linguists had suggested BTK might be. He had lived in Wichita his whole life.

That afternoon, as Potter drove down a side street in the working-class neighborhood, he noticed a small blue sedan following. He recognized it as one of the unmarked cars used by detectives. Potter pulled over; the sedan stopped. Out stepped Otis, looking irritated.

“What are you doing?” Otis asked.

“Working,” Potter said.

Otis gave him a tight smile.

“Stay out of the way, stay out of sight, and stay off private property,” Otis said.

Otis was furious. He walked back to his car, called Landwehr, and told him Potter was staking out the stakeout. Landwehr blew his stack. He told Otis to come back to the office; he called back the other detectives as well.

The
Eagle
was onto an investigation that had started early that morning with another tip. A source the police never named had tipped them that a man named Roger Valadez might be BTK.

When Gouge, Relph, and Otis went to his house to ask for a DNA sample, they saw movement through a window, but no one answered their knock. Potter had pulled within viewing distance as the cops waited to hear whether outstanding warrants�not related to BTK�would give them legal authority to enter Valadez’s house.

“What do we do now?” the detectives asked Landwehr, back at their office. They were cursing reporters, dropping f-bombs. Part of it was anger; were
Eagle
reporters hunting them while they hunted BTK? Part of it was sleep deprivation; they were strung out, dead on their feet. Part of it was they really thought that this might be their guy.

Otis wondered whether reporters were following detectives when they left the city parking garage. If so, they were flirting with obstruction of justice charges.

“Fucking assholes,” Landwehr called the reporters.

Potter called L. Kelly to say, “I’ve been made. Otis pulled me over.” This sealed it. If Otis was there, it was about BTK. But this also complicated things. The reporter and detective knew the law, and they were both just doing their jobs. The journalists had a right to observe from their cars, as long as they didn’t impede the cops’ work. Kelly told Potter that if a cop said he was obstructing an investigation and ordered him to leave, he should back off and call her immediately; the editors would sort it out from there. But it didn’t come to that. As the day wore on, reporters and photographers waited in shifts for something to happen. It looked as though the cops weren’t coming back. But they might.

Dana Strongin, the
Eagle
’s night cops reporter, took her turn as the stakeout stretched into the afternoon. After several hours, Laviana drove out to let her take a dinner break. When Strongin tried to start her car, she found the battery was dead; she’d been running the heater to stay warm. Laviana said he’d jump-start her car, but it took the two of them ten minutes to get their car hoods open. Then they fumbled with cables in the dark.

Finally, about 7:30
PM
, Laviana noticed a flurry of activity at the house. Minutes later,
Eagle
photographer Travis Heying’s flash captured an image of Valadez being led from his home in cuffs by two uniformed cops and Detective Tim Relph.

Police hauled a few bags and boxes out of the house. They booked the man into the Sedgwick County jail on outstanding warrants alleging criminal trespass and housing code violations from years earlier�minor charges.

After things had been quiet for a while, Strongin walked up to the house. When she knocked, someone peeked out, but no one answered.

Then she saw a man with a flashlight.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Who are you with?”

She told him.

The man said he was with the KBI. Strongin recognized him as Larry Thomas, one of the agency’s best homicide investigators. They were going to occupy the house for the night, he said. “You need to get off this property.”

At the
Eagle
, reporters checking public records realized that the arrested man had a couple of grown children, and an ex-wife who lived in west Wichita.

Potter went to the ex-wife’s address. He told the young man who answered the door that his father had been arrested and that preliminary information indicated police might consider his father to be a BTK suspect. Potter chose his words carefully.

The young man sat stunned. Children scampered around. He said they had just celebrated his father’s birthday. He was retired. He’d worked at Coleman most of his life.