Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (13 page)

“Money and manpower that I cannot spare,” LaMunyon said.

To the chief’s amazement, Kirk said they wanted to make it possible.

The city did not give LaMunyon more money but gave him temporary discretion to move around what he had in his budget. Denton told him he could have a computer. Personal computers were a new thing; LaMunyon realized that a computer could save thousands of man-hours by crunching numbers, holding enormous amounts of data, and giving cops the ability to quickly compare lists of suspects.

When a snag developed about the cops getting one, city official Ray Trail loaned them his.

LaMunyon planned the most sophisticated investigation in city history, employing not only the data-crunching but new FBI theories about behavioral science, and the fledgling science of genetics. The cops had BTK’s DNA�in the dried semen stored in an envelope since the Oteros died.

LaMunyon handpicked task force members after talking to commanders.

“Tell me who your best people are,” he said.

A few days later, Landwehr’s supervisor told him to go to LaMunyon’s office for a new assignment. Landwehr felt a flicker of insecurity, wondering what he might have done wrong. When he got to the chief’s office, Landwehr saw several men he knew: Capt. Gary Fulton, Lt. Al Stewart, and officers Paul Dotson, Ed Naasz, Mark Richardson, and Jerry Harper. There would be one more, he learned: Paul Holmes, an officer who had been wounded along with his partner, Norman Williams, in a shoot-out at the Institute of Logopedics near Twenty-first and Grove in 1980.

Chief LaMunyon said he was forming a secret task force.

“And you guys are it.”

They were an odd group. Holmes, who had killed a man, was short, skinny, and soft-spoken. He took thorough notes in tiny block letters; he was good at organizing. The chief had monitored Holmes’s recovery after the gunfight and learned that Holmes and Harper had worked the BTK case for eight years on their own time, studying files and interviewing people.

Stewart knew more than most people about computers.

Dotson, witty and thoughtful, quickly became one of Landwehr’s best friends. He felt drawn to Landwehr in part because they were both ambitious, self-doubting perfectionists, and they loved macabre humor.

LaMunyon had monitored Landwehr’s recovery from his arm injury and knew he’d helped make Special Olympics the department’s official charity. He had heard that Landwehr partied hard but also that he was resourceful.

Except for Holmes and Fulton, none of these guys had hunted BTK, but LaMunyon liked that. He thought it was time for fresh eyes.

“Tell no one what you are doing,” LaMunyon ordered them. “Not your wives, not even my deputy chiefs.”

Access to their room was granted only to LaMunyon and task force members. One day, when a deputy chief tried to walk in, Holmes shut the door in his face. The deputy chief yelled, “Let me in there
now
!”

“No,” Holmes said.

By late 1984, the
Eagle
’s crime team had a new member. Hurst Laviana had come to the paper two years before with a degree in mathematics. He was quiet, analytical, and prone to solitude.

He knew nothing about BTK. One night he went out to cover a homicide. It would turn out to be a routine murder. As Laviana left, Stephens called out.

“Make sure you ask the cops if the phone line was cut.”

“Why?” Laviana asked.

Some of the BTK evidence was now ten years old. To store it, the city had sent it underground, to vaults in old salt mines dug under Hutchinson, Kansas, fifty miles to the northwest. The city stored old records there. The first day Holmes went there, he thought, “Wow, I get to go into an old salt mine.” By the next day he already dreaded going into the cold, dark caves.

The BTK files and evidence boxes had become scattered. Holmes began to pull them together and index everything: case files, toys from the Vian house, thousands of pages of BTK reports held in red or green three-ring binders. There were at least five boxes of detective notes.

“We read and read and read,” Stewart would say later. “For the first month, we didn’t do anything but read reports.”

Eagle
reporter Hurst Laviana (left) formed an important friendship with Landwehr, based on their mutually quirky sense of humor.

They talked to FBI profilers. The Wichita cops in the task force were beginning to think they should communicate with BTK if he ever resurfaced, and the FBI’s behavioral science guys, whom they consulted, were reaching that conclusion too.

Years before, older detectives probing BTK had created a huge index-card file containing names of suspects they had eliminated. The new task force studied these cards, wondering whether these men should be reexamined. It would mean hundreds of man-hours. They decided yes.

They set up their own indexed lists. From state, county, and city records, they compiled a list of men who lived in the county and were twenty-one to thirty-five years old in 1974. Tens of thousands of names.

They had a separate list of men from WSU, a list of people who worked at Coleman, another list of personnel from nearby McConnell Air Force Base, another from the local electric company. They compiled lists of animal abusers, window peepers, sex perverts, prison inmates, and others.

They wanted to find men who appeared on more than one list. A good idea, but unreliable. They didn’t know it then, but the man they were seeking was there, on the WSU list. But he didn’t have a criminal record. He’d never been stationed at McConnell. And though he’d worked at Coleman like countless other blue-collar Wichitans, it was before Julie Otero and the Brights did; investigators were looking for a coworker. Thousands of people appeared on at least two of the lists, which made them good suspects until blood samples cleared them. The cops ran their own names too�and Paul Holmes, a police shoot-out hero, appeared on
four
lists. His blood sample cleared him.

BTK had boasted that there was another victim, so far not identified�the fifth of his seven murders. After weeks of debate, the task force decided that victim was Kathryn Bright. They added all the Bright files and evidence bags to the BTK evidence, including one of the bullets that struck Kevin Bright in the head.

Because BTK had shot Kevin with a Colt semiautomatic .22 pistol thought to be a Targetsman or Woodsman model, the cops compiled a massive list of people who had bought such guns.

They set up computer programs to compare lists.

At one point they narrowed their suspect list from tens of thousands to 30 men in Wichita and another 185 living elsewhere. Holmes told the task force they should get blood and saliva samples from every one of them.

“How the hell are you going to convince these men to give you a blood sample?” LaMunyon asked.

“I’m going to walk right up to them and ask,” Holmes said.

To find these men, detectives traveled to nearly every state, driving circuits in two-person teams, to Tulsa, Dallas, Houston, and so on. They pricked fingers to collect blood and touched paper to tongues to collect saliva. In Hutchinson one night, Holmes met with a suspect and his wife. “Your name turned up on a BTK suspect list, and I want to eliminate you from it,” Holmes said. “I need your blood and saliva sample.”

“Don’t give these guys a damned thing,” the woman told her husband.

“Then I’ll have to interview your employers, and your neighbors, and do a complete background check on you,” Holmes said.

“Don’t give these people
anything
,” the woman said.

“Excuse me for just a moment, Officer,” the man suddenly said.

He turned to his wife.

“Shut up, bitch,” he said. Then he turned to Holmes. “Take whatever blood you want.”

The cops tracked down former wives of suspects.

Sorry to ask this, they would say. But does your ex-husband like bondage during sex? Does he like to penetrate from behind? Does he like anal sex? They asked because BTK had accentuated the buttocks of the women in his drawings.

The cops had thought people would argue or refuse their requests for samples and information. But nearly everyone cooperated. “Most people are law-abiding citizens who want to help police do their jobs,” Stewart concluded.

Every one of these suspects was eliminated; the chemistry of their bodily fluids did not match that of BTK. This surprised the task force. They started new lists.

In October 1984, FBI criminal profilers, including Roy Hazelwood, provided the cops their first detailed impressions of BTK. Hazelwood thought BTK practiced bondage in everyday life, that he was a sexual sadist, a control freak, and could interact with others only on a superficial level. “You know him but you really don’t know him.” The profiler felt that although BTK would do well at work, he wouldn’t like anyone telling him what to do. “He would love to drive…. People would associate him with driving.”

Hazelwood also thought BTK collected bondage materials and read crime books and detective magazines. That caught the cops’ interest. They considered detective magazines to be instruction manuals showing how to get away with murder. After Hazelwood told them that, Holmes, when he entered someone’s home, looked around for detective magazines.

They were working sometimes seven days a week. “It’s terrible,” Landwehr said later. “You’d be up for one week, and down for three because you don’t have anybody that looks good and you don’t know where he went. There’s times you don’t even want to come to work.”

After work, they sought a traditional cop stress remedy.

“We needed to get drunk,” Stewart said. “The guys were working twelve, fourteen hours a day on their own.”

One day, not long after the task force started, Holmes overheard an officer ask: “What are those guys doing in that closed room?”

“Chasing ghosts,” someone said.

Someone taped a poster to their office door. It advertised a Bill Murray movie about ghost-chasing pseudoscientists in New York.

Ghostbusters.

A catchy name.

But the Ghostbusters caught no one.

In 1985 Stephens took a job at the
Dallas Morning News
. He made a copy of the BTK file and took it with him. He had long ago showed the original file to Laviana.

“You need to study this,” Stephens told him, “in case he comes back.”

If BTK ever sends a message to the
Eagle
again, Laviana should take it to the cops, but only after making a copy, he said.

Right after Stephens left, BTK killed again.

20

April 26–27, 1985

Marine Hedge

Marine Hedge stood not much more than five feet tall and weighed about a hundred pounds. She was a fifty-three-year-old grandmother with a southern accent that slipped off her tongue the way molasses drips slowly off a spoon.

She liked jewelry, dressing with care, and stocking her closet with shoes to match every outfit. She made small look stylish. She liked cooking from scratch and taught younger in-laws how to fry hush puppies and catfish the way she learned when she grew up as little Marine Wallace in Arkansas.

Marine Hedge lived only six doors down from Dennis Rader.

Her husband, a Beechcraft worker, had died in 1984, leaving her feeling lonely in their house at 6254 Independence in the Wichita suburb of Park City. She dealt with loss by giving to others, to friends, a son, three daughters, and grandchildren. She enjoyed seeing customers she had served for a dozen years at the coffee shop at Wesley Medical Center, second shift. And there was bingo, and her friends at Park City Baptist Church.

Rader timed Hedge’s comings and goings, looked for men, and even visited the coffee shop at Wesley, where he learned she started work at 2:00
PM
and got off about midnight.

He realized it might be a dumb move to murder someone who lived six doors down. But he had grown lazy in the years since he had stalked Nancy Fox, and he had studied serial killers and wanted to flout the wisdom of the FBI profilers.