Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (11 page)

Eagle
reporter Ken Stephens became so obsessed with covering the story that some people came to think that
he
was BTK.

Part of that story�unknown to all but a handful of
Eagle
staffers�was the uncommonly close relationship that quickly developed between the newspaper and the police chief.

Ken Stephens, Casey Scott, or Craig Stock talked to LaMunyon every day, not for publication. He gave them status reports on the investigation and confided that he wasn’t sleeping much and that his wife was “extremely worried” about becoming the killer’s next victim.

From the beginning, according to an internal memo in Stephens’s file, there was
“much debate on how to handle relationship with police, though no disagreement that it is better to cooperate than to look for good quick scoop. Fear of provoking another murder or in blowing cops chances for catching BTK is expressed. Merritt decides that as long as we aren’t getting deceived or feel we’re being unfairly used, we will go along with police. Police worried about how to play cards, which cards to play and when to play them. They rely heavily on psychiatrists’ advice, LaMunyon confides. Chief worries that if BTK kills again, some persons will blame him and news media for publicizing and encouraging BTK. Much feelings of helplessness on part of cops, newspaper people. New situation for cops and us…. Newspaper makes special arrangements for checking incoming mail and taking phone calls. The usual black humor in the office, quite prevalent in most cases, is notably skimpy on this case. Few jokes about the situation, perhaps because in this case newspaper plays a role. Merritt expresses worry about trying to outguess a deranged mind. Not happy about tailoring news judgment to try to appease a murderer, but not willing to challenge the guy to kill again. Even smallest details are questioned, agonized over to try to figure whether they will provoke killer or blow cops strategy…. ‘This is one case in which there isn’t any value to having the competitive thing.’ Merritt on no point in trying to scoop everybody else. Reporters and editors torn. Desire for scoop and letting readers know everything is tugged at by desire to try to avoid provoking another murder. No one sure whether he or she is making right decision…Brutality and bizarreness of case frightening everyone, even those who have dealt with weird stories.”

One benefit of covering cops, Stephens pointed out to friends, was that he saw life and death in the raw. It taught lessons: life can be short, so savor it. But it also made him feel safer than other people felt. He knew that BTK couldn’t kill everybody, and that there was no reason to be afraid all the time. The chances of dying in a car wreck are much higher than of being murdered, yet most drive without fear.

Covering cops also taught him the value of gallows humor. Like most cops and many reporters, Stephens joked about danger, though some of his single women friends felt especially jittery.

One night Stephens went to a movie with Janet Vitt, a copy editor. They went to a theater in the Mall, where Nancy Fox had worked the night she died. After the movie, Stephens and Vitt went to Vitt’s apartment to have a beer. She lived in east Wichita, near Wesley Medical Center and not far from where the Oteros and Brights were attacked. When she opened her door, she reached in, picked up her phone, and checked for a dial tone. It was her nightly ritual, she told him. If she heard no dial tone, she would race downstairs to flee BTK. Stephens thought this was funny.

When they went inside, she began to search her rooms.

“Janet, come on,” Stephens said. “If he’s here, it’s already too late. We’d never get out of here alive.”

Just then they heard someone open the building’s outside door.

They heard footsteps on the stairs:
Clump. Clump. Clump.

Stephens stepped out to the stairway to face down whoever it was. He saw a big man coming up to Vitt’s door. He carried the biggest pipe wrench Stephens had ever seen.

The man looked startled when he saw the burly Stephens. “Plumber!” he called out, lifting the wrench.

Stephens and Vitt laughed afterward, but Stephens decided he would never make fun of BTK fears again. He had been scared on the stairs. Over the next few months he got so obsessed about BTK that people in the newsroom began to joke that maybe
he
was the killer.

He told the other crime reporters that from now on, whenever they covered any homicide, they should ask: Was the phone line cut? Was the victim strangled? Was the victim tied up?

They added notes to the file month by month.

On March 10, one month after the news conference, police arrested a man they thought might be BTK. He fit their profile, had connections to some victims, and bought clothesline one day as the cops watched in surveillance.

LaMunyon was so confident they had the right man that he told
Eagle
reporters in the city hall pressroom that this was the guy. He handed them background information about him and said that tests were being done to show that his blood type matched that of the semen found at the Otero house.

The reporters typed furiously, assuming they were writing the most sensational story in city history. But LaMunyon stopped by the pressroom that evening.

“It’s not him,” LaMunyon said.

Everybody stopped typing.

“The blood test rules him out.”

Like the two detectives who were willing to sit in the Otero house with a psychic, LaMunyon was now ready to try any idea. Soon after the news conference, with help from the news staff at KAKE, he tried communicating with BTK through subliminal suggestion. Police in Wichita had never tried it before; they would never try it again.

With his letter, BTK had sent his drawing of Nancy Fox; it was so detailed that it showed Fox’s glasses lying on a dresser near the bed. Police thought that might be important.

They had noticed that most of BTK’s victims wore glasses. In his first letter, he had mentioned where Josie Otero’s glasses were left in the house. Perhaps glasses meant something to him.

By this time, police were even thinking that maybe BTK hunted women based in part on their eye color. Or perhaps it was hair color or age, some said.

LaMunyon arranged a personal appearance on a KAKE newscast to talk about BTK. And as he spoke, an image flashed on-screen for only a fraction of a second: a drawing of a pair of glasses, with the words “Now Call the Chief.”

BTK did not call.

Other people did; the cops got hundreds of tips. None panned out.

On October 2, 1978, the police department hired a new patrol officer. He was a native of Wichita, from the rough-around-the-edges west side. He had graduated six years earlier from Bishop Carroll Catholic High School, and he was still a few credits shy of graduating from WSU with a history degree.

That robbery in the clothing store nearly a year before still weighed on Kenny Landwehr’s mind. He had decided not to apply to the FBI.

At a family funeral, he had pulled his father, Lee, off to the side to talk. He told him that he was going to drop out of college to enter Wichita’s police academy. He wanted to fight crime on the street.

Lee Landwehr sighed.

“Okay,” his father said. “But let’s not tell your mother yet.”

When Landwehr broke the news to her a few days later, she did not complain. But she was more scared than she let on.

Rookie cop Kenny Landwehr never wanted to be chief�his dream was to head the homicide unit someday.

At the application interview, a police supervisor asked the twenty-three-year-old Landwehr a standard question: What do you want to do with your career?

The standard answer from enthusiastic recruits was, I want to be chief of police someday.

But this recruit said, “I want to work in homicide.”

His interviewer was surprised: You don’t want to be chief?

“No,” Landwehr said. “I want to command the homicide unit someday.”

16

1979

Ambush and Alibis

On April 28, 1979, more than a year after BTK’s last letter, a sixty-three-year-old widow named Anna Williams arrived home about 11:00
PM
from a night out square dancing. She found the door to a spare bedroom open, a vanity drawer open, and clothes on the floor. Someone had stolen jewelry, clothing, and a sock in which she had hidden $35.

When she found the phone line was dead, she ran.

Weeks later, on June 14, a clerk opening the downtown post office near Central and Main found a man waiting for her at 4:00 AM. He handed her a package.

“Put this in the KAKE box,” he said.

The clerk later described the man as clean shaven, white, about five feet nine, and about thirty years old. He was dressed in a jeans jacket, jeans, and gloves. His hair was cropped short above the ears, and he had gaps between his teeth.

The clerk did not know it, but the man had mailed a similar package to Anna Williams.

Williams’s envelope was addressed in block letters. Inside was one of her scarves and a piece of her jewelry. There was a sketch of a gagged woman, nude except for stockings, lying on the edge of a bed. Her hands and feet were tied to a pole the way safari hunters carried home big game in the movies; she was trussed so she would pull her bindings tighter as she struggled. There was also a poem laced with typos and sexual menace. The name Louis had been crossed out and replaced with “Anna” and “A”:

OH, ANNA WHY DIDN’T YOU APPEAR

T’ was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement, like new vines so tight.

Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear

Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness to scent the lofty fever that burns within.

In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desperation, the games we play, fall on devil ears.

Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.

Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments across most private thought.

Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes so deep and clear.

Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why you number eight was not.

Oh, A�-Why Didn’t You Appear.

And there was a strange signature: a B turned on its side to resemble eyeglasses, with a T and part of a K conjoined to look like a smile dangling below. The signature was stylized, as though the author was proud of himself. It was the first time he’d marked a message this way.

The cops wondered why BTK had targeted Williams. Most of his victims had been female, but all had been younger than forty. Perhaps BTK was really after Williams’s twenty-four-year-old granddaughter, who often stayed with her.

Williams did not wait for police to figure it out. She left Kansas.

LaMunyon asked
Eagle
editor Buzz Merritt to look at the Otero crime scene photos. Knowing that he would never publish such graphic images, Merritt didn’t want to see them. So LaMunyon offered a deal:
Eagle
reporters would get a look at some portions of the secret investigative files in return for a promise not to report what they saw until BTK’s capture. LaMunyon was insistent and seemed anxious.

This would take the relationship between the police department and the newspaper to a new level. Merritt thought that soon, perhaps before 1979 ended, BTK would be captured. Getting a look at the file would help build that story in advance. He went to see the photos, then arranged to send the reporters too. Twelve days after BTK mailed the Williams poem, LaMunyon showed BTK’s letters and a slide show of Otero crime photos to Ken Stephens and Casey Scott. Stephens copied BTK’s signature into his notebook; KAKE had given its package to the cops unopened, but now the
Eagle
knew what was inside.