Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (12 page)

LaMunyon would not tell the journalists why he wanted them to see the files until much later: he and other commanders hoped that new eyes would see new clues.

They did not.

The Williams letter spurred the detectives not only to more effort but new ideas. Over the next two years detectives Arlyn Smith, Bernie Drowatzky, Al Thimmesch, and others tried to track down which copy machine BTK used for the KAKE and Williams letters. They had noticed something interesting. BTK’s first message�the 1974 library letter�had been an original document. Since then BTK had sent copies of photocopies to cover his tracks. The rollers of copy machines leave tool-mark “fingerprints” on the edges of each sheet they process. BTK had even taken the trouble to trim off the margins of his messages.

The detectives resolved to trace the copies anyway. They made themselves experts on every copier in Wichita; there were hundreds. Smith’s peers considered him to be a brainy guy. Decades later, Smith still could recite from memory the names of copy machine parts and ink components. He learned that pulp manufacturers used a mix of northern hemlock, spruce, and pine in copy paper. He knew what amounts of what trace minerals would show up in different paper brands�the result of each tree grower using different amounts of fertilizer.

One day Smith looked up after a meeting to see two blue-suited and briefcase-carrying representatives from the Xerox Corporation wanting to talk. They said Xerox had a lab in Rochester, New York, containing all copy machine models ever made. Xerox studied competitors’ machines. Would these resources be useful? Hell, yes, Smith said.

Thimmesch sent Detective Tom Allen to Rochester with BTK messages: the 1978 letter and the “Oh, Anna” poem and drawing. Thimmesch worried about letting evidence out of the building. He told Allen, “If that plane crashes, you cover the BTK messages with your body to protect them.”

Xerox experts and police eventually figured out that BTK had probably copied the Williams letter at the downtown library. And he had definitely copied the KAKE letter on a machine at the life sciences building at Wichita State University.

Did that mean he was a WSU student?

The cops had already compiled several lists: sex offenders, burglars who had turned violent, Coleman workers, and others. They now compared those lists with lists of WSU students�and also with lists of law enforcement people, because of the police jargon BTK used in messages.

Smith and his partner, George Scantlin, also recruited a child psychologist, Tony Ruark, to develop a behavioral profile of BTK. They showed him copies of the killer’s writings and photos of crime scenes. Tell us what drives him, Smith told him. What sort of guy should we look for? Ruark studied the spelling and typing errors. Some cops had suggested BTK wrote that way to disguise a keener voice.

Ruark disagreed. He thought the guy might be careful but stupid or have a learning disability. Because BTK was so disturbing and disturbed, Ruark also wondered whether he might have BTK’s real name at the Child Guidance Center. Perhaps the center had treated BTK for emotional problems as a child.

Over two years, Ruark studied files of children on his lunch breaks. Smith had given him BTK’s age range: twenties to thirties. Ruark picked out former patients who were the right age and had sexual issues. Eventually he gave Smith more than a dozen names. Smith compared them with lists compiled by investigators.

Nothing matched.

By this time the cops had spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, had compared thousands of names, and had eliminated hundreds of men with alibis. They even put the postal clerk who saw BTK under hypnosis. They learned nothing. In the end, there were only two good things about BTK’s invasion of Anna Williams’s privacy.

One was that Williams survived.

The other was that Ken Stephens got an alibi.

Eagle
newsroom gossips had joked so often about Stephens’s obsession with BTK that some cops suspected him for real. But Stephens could prove that during the hours that BTK waited in ambush at Williams’s house, he was tending bar at the annual Wichita news media parody show, “Gridiron.” LaMunyon was the Mystery Guest on stage that night.

“You were my alibi,” he told LaMunyon.

“And you were
mine,
” LaMunyon said.

On December 17 that year, Officer Kenny Landwehr and his patrol beat partner, Reginald Chaney, tracked a teenage burglary suspect to a house. The suspect slammed the back door twice on Landwehr’s arm, shattering the glass. Landwehr drew his gun when he thought he saw the teenager reach for something. But as he aimed, he suddenly froze�he saw a jet of blood spurting out of his right wrist, spattering onto the coat sleeve of his left arm. The glass had slashed him.

Chaney put the teen on the floor and called for an ambulance�“officer injured.” Landwehr, bleeding profusely, took off his necktie and tied it on his forearm as a tourniquet.

At the hospital, a nurse said a caller was asking to talk to him.

“Who is it?” Landwehr asked.

“Your mother,” the nurse said.

Irene Landwehr had heard the whole thing on her police scanner. Her son, knowing how she worried about him, had given her the scanner when he joined the force, hoping that listening to his work would prove to her that his job was not dangerous.

17

The Installer

An alarm installer for the security company ADT became good friends with Dennis Rader when they first began working together in the 1970s. They shared many stories and laughs, even babysat each other’s children. There were nights when the installer and his wife would come home to find Rader cradling their child in his arms.

To the installer, who didn’t want his name used in this book, Rader seemed ordinary, approachable, and polite. After Rader became a supervisor, he did not allow other workers to swear or tell off-color jokes in front of women.

The presence of a serial killer in the Wichita area was a boon for the home security companies. Rader took advantage of the opportunity as a supervisor for the alarm company ADT.

But he had quirks. The installer thought Rader was sometimes stern and a little controlling. For example, Rader would refuse to issue new rolls of black electrical tape unless the installers showed him the cardboard cylinders from used-up rolls. That seemed weird.

Rader wore gray Hush Puppies, and in winter he wore the kind of cap with flaps that Elmer Fudd wore in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. He talked a lot about his church and his family. Rader was always sweet to his wife, Paula, and talked proudly about his two children.

Rader was a capable man. On one occasion, a homeowner in the wealthy Vickridge neighborhood who was in and out of his house a lot asked if an alarm could be installed in such a way that he wouldn’t have to fiddle with it every time he came home. Rader devised a clever relay mechanism and timer that eliminated the need to constantly reset the alarm.

The installer rode with Rader in the ADT trucks. Rader always had a dark blue gym bag with him. He seemed unusually protective of it; the installer wasn’t sure why. On the job, Rader would sometimes disappear for a couple of hours at a time, saying he needed parts or equipment.

ADT installers sometimes worked in Hutchinson, Salina, and Arkansas City, small cities miles from Wichita. ADT let them stay overnight, but Rader always drove back to Wichita, saying he needed to go to his WSU classes.

Rader carried a pager, and sometimes had to work until the wee hours.

Outside work, the installer and Rader liked beer, jokes, fishing, gardening, and hunting. They went together on a quail hunt one time at Marion Reservoir.

Rader asked one day whether the installer knew of a way to tie up tomato plants to make them more productive. The installer recommended panty hose�strong, pliable, easy to tie. Rader said later that panty hose worked well.

Rader had started working for ADT in November 1974, when Jim Wainscott was a branch manager. Rader was twenty-nine then. Wainscott ran an ADT security guard service and handled some installation and sales.

Like the installer, Wainscott would remember Rader’s ordinariness.

In his hiring interview, Rader did not suck up or try to oversell himself. He listened intently as Wainscott described the work. Wainscott thought at first that Rader was trying to get inside his head so he could say what Wainscott wanted to hear, but when Rader answered Wainscott’s questions, he was matter-of-fact about what he could do.

Wainscott raised the idea of working as a security guard. Rader said no. He wanted to be a police officer someday, “in the worst way,” but working as a security guard at night would not work out�he was taking night classes to finish his administration of justice degree at Wichita State.

ADT installers drank at a bar called the Play Pen on South Washington. They had a secret code. They would radio each other: “PP30.” It meant “Meet you at Play Pen at 4:30.” Rader loved wry little codes.

Sometimes the two friends drank more than was good for them. Rader sometimes drank a lot but never got falling-down drunk.

Sometimes the installer would get a call from Paula Rader late at night, asking if he knew where Dennis might be.

18

1980 to 1982

Police Stories

Arlyn Smith became Landwehr’s boss in 1980, when LaMunyon promoted Smith from detective to patrol lieutenant. Smith said later that Landwehr was the smartest officer he ever supervised. Landwehr was a character too. Smith had a theory about that: humor channels stress. And because police work is sometimes brutally stressful, cop humor is sometimes cruel or macabre.

Smith often started his third-shift work with Landwehr at a Denny’s restaurant on West Kellogg. Landwehr called him Smitty.

One night there was nobody else in Denny’s but a couple with a squalling baby. As the cops left and passed the noisy child, Landwehr joked to Smith: “They don’t do that after you hold their heads under water for a while.” Landwehr walked out, with Smith behind him. Outside, Smith confronted Landwehr.

“What if that family would have heard you? I’m your lieutenant. What was I supposed to say if they got mad?” Landwehr grinned and walked to his car.

Smith concluded after a long career that cops, including kind ones, use humor like that to blow off steam, especially after they see cruelty at crime scenes. Landwehr had seen his share.

Smith thought of cop humor as therapy.

“I want my detectives loose,” Smith would say later. “I want them cracking jokes, and I want them going home at night and sleeping soundly, should they ever have to walk through a crime scene. Why? Because when you don’t get emotional, when you get a good night’s sleep, that’s when you do your best work. Kenny Landwehr was that kind of cop.”

The problem with that conclusion about Landwehr was that it wasn’t true. Other people who knew him said Landwehr used jokes and pranks to hide a brittle sensitivity. Irene Landwehr, for one, was sure that her son’s supposedly cool detachment was an act. She had noticed that when he was a child he seemed easily hurt when teenagers at family gatherings left little kids like him out of things. When he became a teen himself, he included smaller kids in everything. His attachment to children, especially victimized or disabled kids, continued after he became a cop. He volunteered to help the Special Olympics, a charity he would serve throughout his career.

One night, when Landwehr was a patrol officer, Irene saw him sit in uncharacteristic silence at the dinner table, unable to eat. It took him awhile to get it out, but he finally told her why.

Earlier in the day, as he sat in his patrol car, he had heard a distant scream.

He drove two blocks and found the cause: an eight-year-old boy walking home with his five-year-old sister had looked away for a moment as they crossed the street hand in hand. A trash truck had backed up, crushing the girl.

Landwehr called for paramedics over his car radio and began to scream the location. Smith, parked several blocks away, hearing Landwehr’s anguish, thought for a moment that Landwehr himself had backed over the child.

Landwehr led the boy to his patrol car and did the only thing he could think of to help him: he lied to him.

“They will do all they can for her,” he said.

Later, at his mother’s house, he sat in shock.

After nights on the job now, he sometimes drank to forget.

19

1984

The Ghostbusters

Ten years after the Oteros were killed, city officials approached Chief LaMunyon one day and began to ask about BTK. The more they talked, the more they surprised LaMunyon.

No one had heard from BTK in five years, but people were still scared. Gene Denton, the city manager, and Al Kirk, a city commissioner, wanted something done. They asked what it would take to catch BTK.