Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (35 page)

The two detectives gathered up the items and left. Gouge drove. Otis pulled out his cell phone. “Get Randy Stone ready,” Otis told Landwehr. “We’ve got a computer disk in the package.” Stone was the task force’s computer whiz.

The drive back to the Epic Center, where the task force was now based, took only minutes but seemed longer. Otis, talking with Gouge, was still skeptical: “He’s probably deliberately done a disk where he used it at a public computer, so we’ll show up and shake the place down, while he stands back and watches us.”

Gouge drove to the Epic Center as fast as the law would allow. When he and Otis got there, they walked into the third-floor office where the task force gathered and gave the disk to Stone. Gouge thought the computer disk might yield a tiny clue, which would have to be matched to the name of someone driving a dark-colored Jeep Cherokee. He thought that would take a lot of time and work.

Rader was president of the congregation at Christ Lutheran Church in North Wichita.

Stone loaded the disk into his computer, with Landwehr, Relph, Gouge, Otis, Snyder, Cheryl James, and FBI agent John Sullivan standing behind him. Kim Parker and Kevin O’Connor were there too, from the district attorney’s office. They had all learned to hold their excitement until proof arrived. Gouge thought it might take days to sort this out.

Stone quickly called up “TestA.rtf,” the message BTK had created for them: It read:
“This is a test. See 3 X 5 Card for details on communication with me in the Newspaper.”

Stone then clicked onto the “properties” field of the file. And then, in plain letters, they read the name “Dennis.” The screen also told them the disk had been in a computer registered to Christ Lutheran Church and had last been used at the Park City Community Public Library.

“Look at that,” someone said excitedly. Was it going to be this easy?

James and Sullivan sat down at computers nearby and searched the Internet for “Christ Lutheran Church.” This took only seconds. They called up the website and pointed to the name of the congregation president: Dennis Rader.

“Oh my God!” someone said.

They had a name.

Gouge, Snyder, and the rest of them looked on in amazement.

James then used ChoicePoint to get Dennis Rader’s address: 6220 Independence Street, Park City.

There was the sound of scuffling feet. Stone turned from his computer and saw that all the detectives had bolted for the door.

Snyder and Relph raced north; Gouge and Otis tried to catch them, but they weren’t even close. Gouge later claimed that he and Relph traded paint as they zoomed separate cars north on I-135 to Park City, but the truth was that by the time Gouge pulled his car into Dennis Rader’s neighborhood, Relph was hundreds of yards ahead, and Snyder, sitting beside him, was feeling fear: Relph’s driving was scary even when he wasn’t on some sort of mission from God. As they rolled north, James called on a cell phone to tell them that a computer search had turned up no evidence that Rader owned a Jeep Cherokee.

They drove on, fearing another big disappointment. “Maybe BTK is setting up Dennis Rader,” Snyder said.

Relph turned a corner and headed south on Independence, watching numbers fly by on the mailboxes. He saw Rader’s house just as Snyder started yelling: “There’s a Jeep in the driveway!”

Relph saw a black Cherokee. Snyder let out another wild yell and punched Relph in the arm again and again. Snyder yelled “Slow down!” then “Speed up!” almost in the same breath as he tried to read the Cherokee’s tag number. Relph shot past the house, then slammed on the brakes, hit the gas and spun the car in a half-doughnut, tires squealing. “Shit!” Relph said, embarrassed. “So much for staying low-profile.” They could not afford to tip off BTK.

It dawned on them that their car and Otis and Gouge’s car were both Ford Tauruses, each carrying two men wearing suits. They might as well paint the words “COP CARS” on the sides. “Tell those guys to stay back,” Relph told Snyder. Snyder called Otis and relayed the message.

“Relph is saying don’t drive by the house,” Otis told Gouge.

“Fuck Relph!” Gouge said. “I’m driving by�I want to see it myself.”

“No, no, don’t do that, man,” Otis said, laughing. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Yeah, I do,” Gouge said. But he stopped the car.

Parked half a block from Rader’s house, Snyder called Landwehr to tell him about the Jeep Cherokee and ask what to do. If Landwehr gave the word, Snyder said, he would happily tear Rader’s door off the hinges and pull him onto the pavement. He guessed, as he talked, that the four of them would stake out the house and wait for a lot of other cops to surround it before they went through the doors. But he thought they shouldn’t wait long.
What if BTK got a tip that they were onto him? BTK might kill himself or burn his evidence if he still had it. What if there was a leak to the media now, like with the Valadez thing?

Landwehr listened as Snyder told him about the Cherokee. “I’ll get back with you,” Landwehr said. And he hung up.

Otis and Gouge parked at one end of Rader’s street; Relph and Snyder parked at the other. They waited and watched. Time had flown. The call from KSAS had come in the morning. It was now just after noon.

Cheryl James called again; she had found a Cherokee after all, registered to Brian Rader, Dennis’s son.

They wondered if Rader was at the house. They wondered if he had a surveillance camera, and if the house was rigged to explode with propane tanks and gasoline.

“It’s absolutely him,” Snyder told Relph. “BTK has no idea that we saw the Home Depot tape and that we know he’s got a Jeep Cherokee. So there’s no way he could have set up someone else by planting the Cherokee on him. It’s him!”

Relph agreed. This would be over in no time.

But when Landwehr called back, he surprised them all.

“We’re going to bring you back home and plan this deal out,” he told them. “We’re not going to do this now.”

Snyder and Relph sat in disbelief. They had BTK! After thirty-one years he was only a hundred yards away, but Landwehr told them to come home.

From the south, unmarked cars drove off the I-135 exit ramps into Park City. The cars, with two undercover cops apiece, took up positions at either end of Rader’s short street. They would stay all night. Landwehr had told them to be careful; Park City had only seven thousand people. People in small towns notice strangers easily.

The detectives drove back to Wichita. On the way, as the adrenaline began to subside, Snyder talked it through with Relph. They decided that after three decades they should not hurry and risk blowing the arrest or the court case. Landwehr was making the right call.

It galled them to drive south, though.

At the task force offices back at the Epic Center, Deputy District Attorney Kevin O’Connor watched Landwehr take that call from Snyder. “I’ll get back to you,” Landwehr had said. Then he closed his cell phone and said something about needing to do things right.

O’Connor would never forget what happened next.

Landwehr made a little joke, poking fun at Snyder “for wanting to tear Rader’s front door off its hinges.”

Landwehr sat still for a moment or two.

Then he said, to those standing around him, that he would pull the task force detectives back into the office and take a long, slow approach to arresting Dennis Rader. Given the fear of leaks that had plagued the task force since Valadez, O’Connor was surprised.

But Landwehr said that he didn’t want to screw up the case, that he didn’t want to be wrong. He wanted the court case, if there was a court case, to be clean and solid.
It took guts to make this decision
, O’Connor thought.

Landwehr had a plan on how to be absolutely sure that Rader was BTK.

As he listened to Landwehr describe it, O’Connor began to smile.

“BTK had stalked people for thirty years,” O’Connor said later. “And you know it’s him, and that you can prove it. And yet Landwehr held back, because he wanted to make sure it was done right, in spite of the danger of media leaks, in spite of all the pressure. He had mentally prepared himself for this moment long before. I’m sure he’d thought it through years before: ‘What if we actually find this guy? How do we arrest him? How do we prepare?’ It was clear that he had already thought it through.”

Gouge, Otis, Relph, and Snyder arrived at the Epic Center almost high on excitement. There were high fives and hugs and bets: surely Rader was their guy. But around them, while they celebrated, other detectives moved the case forward. Cheryl James and others were quickly amassing a pile of paper on tabletops, outlining names, addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions of relationships involving Rader’s relatives, friends, coworkers, and other connections.

Landwehr now told the detectives what he had already told O’Connor and the others. He wanted to get the DNA of someone related to Rader�without tipping off Rader or his family�and see whether the family DNA was a close match to BTK. This was no surprise to the detectives. Landwehr had used this technique before, with other crimes, other men, and other families.

James had established through records that Rader had a daughter named Kerri. Landwehr said they could track down her doctors, obtain her medical files, and get a subpoena for an old Pap smear sample without her knowing it. A database search showed that Kerri Rader had gone to Kansas State University in Manhattan, two and a half hours northeast of Wichita. Ray Lundin had graduated from K-State and served as a law enforcement officer in Riley County, where Manhattan is located. He recognized one of her addresses as a residence hall. Lundin thought she might have gotten checkups at the student health center. He would go there.

Landwehr tried to sleep a little that night, in spite of the excitement ahead. He needed to put a huge arrest plan together, but he also needed to go in front of the cameras one last time and talk reassuringly to BTK.

Landwehr’s plan to get the daughter’s DNA touched off another vigorous debate in the district attorney’s office. O’Connor was all for letting the cops obtain the DNA in secret, but Foulston, his boss, demanded to know how this did not violate Kerri Rader’s privacy rights. The young woman had done nothing wrong, as far as was known. Even if taking her DNA in secret were legal, Foulston said, it was nevertheless personal, potentially embarrassing to Kerri Rader, and invasive.

“Isn’t there any other way to get DNA, including from Rader himself?” Foulston asked.

“Not a good way,” O’Connor replied. “That CSI stuff we see on TV…it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Kevin,” she told him. “Can we justify this legally? Tell me all the reasons we should do this. But then tell me all the reasons we shouldn’t.”

“We’re trying to catch someone who has killed people,” O’Connor said. “And given the evidence and the circumstances, I sure wouldn’t worry about anyone suing for privacy violations.”

Foulston later met with Landwehr and the task force and agreed to let them do it. But she felt sorry for Kerri Rader and wished there was another way.

At ten o’clock February 17, Landwehr walked into the fifth-floor briefing room in city hall and conducted another news conference. As usual, he kept his tone remote and formal, and his face betrayed nothing. Once again, he spoke directly to BTK:

“The Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI has confirmed two letters as authentic communications from BTK,” he began. “The letter that was dropped in a UPS box at Second and Kansas streets in October 2004 has been authenticated. This communication contained information about BTK that was subsequently released to the public on November 30,2004. The FBI can confirm that it’s a BTK communication, but cannot confirm the accuracy of the information he wrote about himself in the letter.

“The other communication that the FBI has confirmed is from BTK is the package that was located in December by a Wichita resident in Murdock Park. This package contained the driver’s license belonging to Nancy Fox, which BTK took with him from the crime scene.

“Recent communications from BTK have included several items of jewelry. There was jewelry included in the Post Toasties box that was left on North Seneca Street…and in the package received yesterday by KSAS-Fox 24. The contents of yesterday’s KSAS-Fox 24 communication have been sent to the FBI.

“We are in the process of determining whether or not any of this jewelry belonged to our victims.”

Landwehr looked up from his printed text and addressed the cameras in a friendlier tone, as though talking to someone he knew.

“I have said before…that the BTK investigation is the most challenging case I have ever worked on, and that BTK would be very interesting to talk with. I still contend that this is our most challenging case, but I am very pleased with the ongoing dialogue through these letters.”

In Park City, undercover cops spied on the house from a distance.

At the Epic Center offices, Landwehr and the cops frantically laid plans. Gouge heard some fancy ideas being discussed, everything from creeping up and sticking little tracking devices onto Rader’s trucks to bringing in FBI surveillance planes to watch him from the heavens. They wanted Rader to lead them to his stash of evidence. They thought he might have hidden it so deep that they might never find it otherwise. But as they talked, Gouge spoke up.