“Of all his letters, I’d say that was the one that stood out the most,” recalled Landwehr. “There he was telling us that he’d killed again.”
“It confirmed everyone’s worst fears,” I said. “You knew about Vicki Wegerle, so you knew he’d been killing while he’d gone underground. But Wegerle was back in 1986. Suddenly he’s telling you that he’s still at it, he’s still killing.”
“Not only that, his letter led us off on a wild goose chase,” Landwehr said. “Because when we dug into Jakey’s background, we learned that he was studying to be an optometrist. That’s what he wanted to do in college. But we also knew that eyeglasses were important to BTK, so we knew we had to run down that angle.”
“The eyeglasses?” I said. “I’d forgotten all about that. He mentioned Josephine’s glasses in the letter he sent police after the Otero killing, and he drew glasses on the bedside table when he sent you that picture of Nancy Fox in 1978.”
Landwehr nodded. “And Cheryl Gilmore, the woman we believed he was after on the day he ended up killing Shirley Vian, worked for an optometrist,” he said. “So when we learned about Jakey’s optometry connection, the KBI guys started [DNA] swabbing every optometrist in town. I told them, ‘I want to know who refuses, the second it happens, and we’ll put an undercover on them.’”
“You must have thought this was your huge break,” I said.
“But it gets better,” Landwehr grumbled. “Turns out that the eye doctor Gilmore worked for also saw Jake. So now we’ve got a potential victim who didn’t get hit and a kid who might be a possible victim both connected to the same guy.”
“All you needed to do was go put cuffs on the guy,” I laughed.
Landwehr stared at his empty coffee cup, then shook his head, slowly. “This investigation was filled with so many moments like that,” he explained. “There were just so many points when you’d get so excited and think, ‘This is it! We got him.’ You’re ready for the victory party . . . Everything is looking good and then you just get shot down. It all falls apart. You can’t imagine how many times we had victory parties planned. I know of eight in 2004. The same thing happened back in the 1980s.”
But there was something else about the Jakey letter that caused Landwehr’s stomach to twist into knots. In it, the killer threatened that he had “spotted a female that I think lives alone and/or is a spotted latchkey kid. Just got to work out the details. I’m much older (not feeble) now and have to conditions myself carefully. Also my thinking process is not as sharp as it uses to be. . . . I think fall or winter would be just about right for the HIT. Got to do it this year or next! . . . time is running out for me.”
Landwehr glared down at the table in front of him and pushed his plate aside, to the corner of the table.
“That’s the part that really made me sick,” he said. “I was so worried that he’d picked out another victim. To think he might be targeting some kid was just too much. I never worried about me, you know. About how, if he struck again, it might effect my reputation professionally. But what ate at me was that he might claim another innocent life. And if he’d killed a kid, that would have been tough for all of us, too tough for the unit. It would have been very, very bad.”
But for Landwehr, the worst thing about what happened after the so-called Jakey letter was that BTK went silent. “We didn’t get another letter for about three months,” Landwehr said. “I really thought he’d quit talking to us because he’d actually chosen his next victim and was working out all the details before the kill.”
I could understand why Landwehr felt nervous and sick with frustration. I agreed with Landwehr that as long as this guy kept sending communications to the police and the media, he was doomed.
BTK’s next correspondence didn’t arrive until October. A UPS driver spotted an unsealed envelope left in a drop box at the Omni Center in downtown Wichita. He inspected the contents, which consisted of a plastic bag with another envelope inside. The words BTK FIELD GRAM were typed on the front. Tucked inside was a stack of three-by-five cards. Two of the cards were covered with what the killer called his “UNO-DOS-TRES THEORY,” intended to explain the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of the complicated universe he yearned to have police believe dwelled within his head.
“The BTK World, Works in Threes,” he wrote, “and is base on the Eternal Triangle.” He went on to list countless examples of this world, such as, “Sun—Light—Heat . . . Child—Mothers Love—Dad’s Love ... BTK—Victim—Police . . . Detective—Others—Landwehr.”
But what Landwehr and his detectives instantly pounced on were the four index cards that contained what the killer hoped would be accepted as his biography. If his so-called Uno-Dos-Tres seemed bizarre, his purported bio read like the first draft of a novella penned by a sexually frustrated teen with some serious Oedipal issues.
CHILDHOOD REFLECTIONS: 1-8 Years Old: Only memories float around in the mind, but never seem to disappear, but you almost see them (possible sexual overtures or early childhood problems that develop into sexual variant later on in life). . . . Mother slept beside me at times, the smells, the feel of underclothes and she let me rub her hair. . . . 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?’ She kiss me. I was close to her, tears and moisture upon her and my cheeks. I could feel her heart beating and smell those wonderful motherly aromas.
After consulting with the FBI, investigators sat on the contents of the bizarre story for over a month before releasing them to the community.
“We assumed it was mostly lies,” Landwehr said. “But we still had to comb through every single thing he wrote down, trying to track every bit of information down. We kept asking ourselves, ‘What if he is actually telling the truth about something?’ That’s what kept all of us going.”
On November 30, a twelfth press conference was held, and Landwehr distributed a media advisory, titled “BTK describes his background,” that had been created over the previous few weeks.
In it, police laid out list of biographical factoids about BTK and urged residents to read it with a grain of salt. Releasing a list of his “claims,” they reasoned, might allow someone, somewhere to make a connection that police couldn’t hope to.
Because I’d never worked a case in which the perp told us the truth about himself, I had learned to ignore those kinds of “facts” and just concentrate on motive and what could be done proactively to rein in the UNSUB.
“What in God’s name did you pull from his letter?” I asked. “Anything that turned out to be useful?”
Landwehr reached into his folder and plucked out a copy of the release police distributed. It read like this:
• He claims he was born in 1939, which would make his current age 64 or 65.
• His father died in World War II, and his mother raised him.
• His mother was forced to work, so his grandparents cared for him.
• His mother worked during the day near the railroad.
• He had a cousin named Susan, who moved to Missouri.
• His family moved a lot, but always lived near a railroad.
• His grandfather played the fiddle and died of a lung disease.
• His mother started dating a railroad detective when BTK was around 11 years old. This relationship would have occurred during the years 1950-1955.
• In the early 1950s he built and operated a ham radio.
• He has participated in outdoor hobbies including hunting, fishing and camping.
• As a youth he attended church and Sunday school.
• He had a female, Hispanic acquaintance named Petra, who had a younger sister named Tina.
• Around 1960, he went to tech military school. He then joined the military for active duty and was discharged in 1966.
• He has a basic knowledge of photography and the ability to develop and print pictures.
• In 1966 he moved back in with his mother who had re-married and was renting out part of her house.
• His first job was as an electro-mechanic, requiring some travel.
• After attending more tech school, he worked repairing copiers and business equipment; this sometimes required travel and he was away from home for extended periods.
• He admits to soliciting prostitutes.
• He has a lifetime fascination with railroads and trains.
After immersing myself in his journals and talking to his friends, I could clearly see that nearly everything Rader purported to be biographical truth was anything but. He’d sprinkled a few tiny shreds of veracity into the “life story” he sent to police, but it was all so general and ambiguous that it gave investigators nothing to work with.
Why on earth Landwehr and his men spent any time and resources trying to make sense out of his nonsense initially escaped me. Clearly all Rader wanted to do was fling as much disinformation into the air as he could, then sit back and watch as the cops ran off in a million different directions, chasing wild geese. But Landwehr was desperate. He’d finally hooked his big fish, and this, he felt, was all part of the process of reeling him in.
Landwehr and I split the tab for breakfast, gulped down another cup of coffee, and headed back to my hotel room. Along the way, he continued to walk me through the next twist the case took.
It happened on January 25 with the arrival of a postcard at the studios of KAKE-TV. The sender’s name was listed as S. Killet, and his return address was the same as the Otero family home.
On the back of the postcard beneath the words COMMUNICATION #8, he explained where he’d tied a Post Toasties cereal box to a street sign on North Seneca Street. It was found to contain some jewelry from one of his victims along with a doll fashioned to resemble Josie Otero. Around its neck was tied a tiny noose attached to a bit of pipe.
The presence of this package in north Sedgwick County, Landwehr explained to me, began fueling rumors that two unsolved homicides in the area might be the work of the killer. In April 1985, the body of fifty-three-year-old Park City resident Marine Hedge was discovered near a rural dirt road several miles away from her home. Near her body, a knotted pair of panty hose was found. A coroner determined that she’d been strangled. Her 1967 Chevrolet Monte Carlo was later discovered in the parking lot of a local shopping center several miles away.
The area’s next unsolved homicide occurred in January 1991 when Delores “Dee” Davis, sixty-two, disappeared from her Park City home. Like Hedge, Davis had been strangled and abducted from her residence and her phone line cut. Two weeks passed before her body was discovered on a dirt road. Her hands, feet, and knees were still bound in panty hose.
Just as Landwehr had always believed that Vicki Wegerle’s murder could be the work of BTK, he had long suspected that the killer was responsible for the killings of Hedge and Davis. Yet because both cases apparently took place outside Wichita city limits, the homicides were handled by detectives working for the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department. According to Landwehr, county investigators originally considered that BTK might be the killer of the two Park City residents, but they eventually discounted the possibility. One of the reasons was that the bodies had been discovered so far from their homes, which didn’t appear to fit BTK’s known MO.
The most perplexing part of this latest package was the killer’s inquiry about whether or not police had discovered “#7 at Home Depot Drop Site 1-8-05.” Landwehr and his detectives had no idea what he was talking about. Several task force members were dispatched to the local Home Depot, where they spent the next few hours scouring the inside and outside of the store, searching for what they assumed would be a package or letter.
They discovered nothing, but eventually hit pay dirt after the store manager played a security videotape for them from the late evening of January 8. The grainy black-and-white footage of the tape showed some sort of SUV pulling into the nearly empty parking lot and stopping beside a parked pickup truck. Because of the darkness and the quality of the image, detectives were unable to pinpoint the exact make of the SUV. However, after roughly calculating the vehicle’s length and wheelbase and the amount of ground clearance, they felt confident that it was a Jeep Grand Cherokee.