Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (29 page)

Lundin and Thomas, the two KBI agents, went to Sumner County. The FBI’s Morton also looked into Allen’s death. The more they looked, the more they agreed BTK was blowing smoke.

Forensics determined that the wire found with Allen’s body came from his farm. An examination of Allen’s computer turned up no evidence that he had conversations with the serial killer.

Investigators concluded that Allen had wrapped the wire around his body and positioned himself on the tracks.

The Jakey letter touched off an intense debate in District Attorney Nola Foulston’s office the day it surfaced. Her first instinct was that the authorities should go public, with a warning that BTK was threatening to kill a child. As the county’s chief elected law enforcement authority, she had the power to do that, or make the cops do it.

Kevin O’Connor and Kim Parker, her two top prosecutors, tried to talk her out of it. O’Connor was a loyal Foulston friend, but she always encouraged him to speak his mind, and he did so now. A lot of hot words flew. O’Connor, who had spent four months shadowing the BTK task force, argued that the cops were right to keep as much of a lid on the investigation as possible. They didn’t want to give BTK information, or publicity, or a feeling that he was manipulating the chase.

Chief Williams wrestled with the decision too. If they revealed BTK’s threat, should they mention the specifics BTK had written about a “latchkey kid”? There were thousands of latchkey children and many after-school programs in Wichita. Revealing the threat would worry thousands of parents, many of whom had to work and leave kids at home. It was clear BTK liked to push the cops’ buttons. Williams didn’t want to boost his ego.

In the end, they decided they should warn the public but not be specific about the threat. The decision weighed heavily on Williams. If BTK killed someone now, Williams would wonder whether he had blown the call.

The task force cops took the threat personally. Landwehr continued to worry about James, Cindy, and himself:
Every time this guy puts out a package for us to find, is he just trying to draw me away from my house so he can attack it?

Otis had a twelve-year-old daughter who was alone at home for twenty minutes after school every day until Netta came home from work. After the Jakey letter arrived, Otis arranged for his sister to stay with his daughter for those minutes after school.

Gouge did not worry. Early on, he told his family to be careful when answering the door, but he didn’t want to say more and make them worry.

He thought that BTK did not have the guts to visit a cop.

When the Jakey letter was found, Landwehr’s BTK task force was down to twenty-three people. Four days later, Williams nearly doubled the size of the task force, to forty. He told Landwehr he intended to keep that number working on the case for a long time. Investigators were brought in to follow up on tips so the detectives most heavily involved could focus more on digging through case files.

There were nights when Williams’s home phone rang in the wee hours, and one of his commanders would tell him about some overnight shooting or something else that needed his immediate attention. Now, when his phone rang, Williams’s first thought upon waking was a silent prayer:
Don’t let it be a BTK killing.

Five days after police got the Jakey letter, Landwehr appeared at a news conference. In words carefully crafted by Johnson, he said: “Based on the information provided to us by the FBI, and the fake IDs and fake badge that were sent to KAKE by BTK, we think it is important for citizens to continue to practice personal and home crime prevention techniques.

“We want parents to teach these skills to their children also.”

He didn’t reveal the contents of the library letter, but many people correctly interpreted his words and tone to mean that BTK had made a threat.

Laviana covered the news conference for the
Eagle
.

Otis approached him in a hallway afterward.

“Hurst, need to talk to you,” Otis said. “Have you got a minute?”

40

July–August 2004

Landwehr Takes the Offensive

The national media kept pestering Johnson with interview requests. Unfulfilled, they continued to turn to people with less-immediate connections to the investigation. Some news shows backstabbed competitors, insisting that interview subjects not talk to other shows. Laviana refused to cut such deals.

These shows irritated the cops. Serial killer “experts” who knew nothing about BTK appeared on air talking glibly, “blowing smoke,” as Otis described it.

A few days after the July 22 news conference, Wenzl saw Landwehr come out of city hall to light up a smoke.

Wenzl knew Landwehr would not talk about BTK, but he also knew from Laviana that Landwehr had a sense of humor. Wenzl pretended to interview him.

“Kenny Landwehr,” he said, shaking his hand. “Have you caught BTK yet?”

“No,” Landwehr said.

“I have a suspect, if you don’t mind me intruding,” Wenzl said.

Landwehr listened politely.

“It’s Hurst Laviana.”

Landwehr’s face crinkled into a grin. “No,” he said.

“Really? You got to admit, Hurst is a weird dude.”

“No,” Landwehr said.

“Okay. But we’ve talked about this in the newsroom for weeks now, and we’ve concluded that one day Hurst is either going to reveal BTK on the front page, or come to you and confess.”

Landwehr took a long pull on his cigarette. “I know for certain that it’s not him,” Landwehr said.

“But how?”

“Because we have eliminated him as a suspect.”

“How?”

Landwehr grinned. “No comment,” he said.

A few minutes later, back in the newsroom, Wenzl found Laviana writing a story.

“I’ve cleared your name,” Wenzl said. “I ran into Landwehr outside city hall. We compared notes and concluded you’re not BTK.”

“Thank you,” Laviana said.

“I didn’t say you are innocent,” Wenzl said. “I said you’re not BTK.”

Laviana nodded.

“Landwehr said something weird,” Wenzl said. “He said they eliminated you as a suspect. He said it like it meant something.”

“It does,” Laviana said. “The cops swabbed me to get my DNA.”

“WHAT?”

It was true, Laviana said. After the July 22 news conference, Otis had pulled him aside.

“I hate to do this, but I need to ask for your DNA,” Otis said. “You’ve been named in some of our tips as a suspect.”

Laviana shrugged. “I’m surprised it took you this long,” he said. He had thought the cops would swab him from the moment he began giving TV interviews. He figured someone would see him on television and call him in as a suspect for knowing so much about the case.

Laviana followed Otis to Johnson’s office. Otis shut the door.

The cops had refused to talk about the rumors swirling around town that they had swabbed thousands of men.

Laviana decided he’d try to get Otis to talk.

Otis pulled on latex gloves.

“Some of the television people say you’ve already swabbed two thousand people so far,” Laviana said. “Is that true?”

Otis had picked up a cotton swab. “No, that’s not right,” Otis said. “It’s only about five hundred.”

“What makes you decide you need to swab somebody?”

“All it takes is one tip,” Otis said.

Otis rubbed the inside of Laviana’s cheek, first with one cotton swab, then with a second.

“How long does it take to get the results back?”

“If I don’t come looking for you again in two weeks, you’ll know you’ve been eliminated,” Otis said. He dropped each swab into a container. They were done.

Laviana went back to work, told his editors that he’d been swabbed, and tried to sort out how he felt about being a suspect.
Weird,
he thought. And you can’t keep it secret.
In some ways it’s a relief,
Laviana thought. He knew other men who had been swabbed, and it had been awkward asking them about it. But it was also like being in an exclusive club. Once you were in, you could talk openly. He was in now.

He considered whether he should volunteer to write a first-person story about what it was like to be a BTK suspect.

No, he decided. Laviana had three daughters at North High School; he didn’t want them teased or taunted.

Before the “Jakey” letter arrived, the task force and Johnson had called news conferences only in reaction to BTK’s messages.

Landwehr and Johnson were wondering whether they should go more on the offensive�find excuses to communicate, even when BTK had not written them.

They fretted a lot over the messages. Every word and all the timing was planned. They always sprang the news conferences on reporters with little notice. They did not want to provoke shallow conjecture that would scare people�or cause BTK to delay communicating until after a scheduled news conference. After “Jakey,” reporters sometimes got no notice at all that a BTK briefing was coming. Sometimes reporters would arrive at the daily 10:00 AM briefing and be surprised to see Landwehr stride in, script in hand.

In all these gatherings, Landwehr read his prepared statement, then walked out. Sometimes Otis or one of the other detectives would sit in the back, looking for anyone suspicious. They thought BTK might show up. Otis and the others obtained several DNA swabs from strange men they saw at the briefings.

After each announcement, the newspaper quickly posted the news on its website. TV broke into programming with live reports. KAKE sometimes used the clip of Otis picking up the May letter as a background visual. A confused elderly viewer sent Otis sixty dollars to buy new clothes because every time he appeared on TV he was wearing the same suit. Otis sent the money back.

A few small news leaks got out, which put the cops on edge. Were reporters following them when they went out to swab suspects? Were reporters eavesdropping in hallways? Did they have a source on the task force?

Their worries got worse as they lost sleep. Detectives who before March had sometimes chatted amiably with reporters stopped talking even about the weather.

Nobody at the
Eagle
was focused exclusively on BTK, not even Laviana, who was part of the Crime and Safety reporting team. He and Potter kept hearing rumors about BTK connections to the death of the teenager in Argonia; Potter dogged that story while covering day cops. At the end of July, the newspaper’s editor, Sherry Chisenhall, pulled in a new team leader to organize the coverage. L. Kelly had grown up in Wichita and had listened as her father, a former detective, talked about the Otero crimes with disgust. She had helped her best friend and mother cope with their fears after Chief LaMunyon announced that a serial killer was in Wichita. She had been with the
Eagle
more than twenty years and had been close to Ken Stephens and Bill Hirschman back in the day.

Chisenhall wanted a sharper effort on BTK coverage. She knew none of the cops were talking�the task force had proven unusually leakproof. But there were plenty of other people to talk to, other ways to move the story forward. She wanted the
Eagle
to own the story. Kelly was eager to get started, but she first had to make an unrelated trip to Toronto.

By the time she got back, Landwehr had made his own plans for moving forward.

The cops felt their anxiety growing. BTK hadn’t communicated since the July 17 library message. Gouge worried that BTK was busy planning a murder; his last letter had been a clear threat.

Morton told the cops to keep communicating and use their scripts to hint that BTK should worry. BTK has to feel confident to kill, so undermine his confidence. Keep him off balance, remind him that police are hunting him. Do not challenge or threaten him but drop hints that you’re closer.

This was easy to say and not easy to do. Johnson, a former crime and government reporter at newspapers around Kansas and Missouri, wrote drafts of each message, faxed a copy to Morton, and showed the copy to Landwehr and Williams’s command staff.

On August 17, one month after BTK’s last communication, Johnson noted after a meeting with Morton: “We are now changing the rules. Instead of us reacting when he sends a letter, we are going to go proactive, and then he will have to respond in order to gain control of the game.”

BTK had pushed their buttons. Now they would push his.

Keep Landwehr talking to him, Morton said. From the beginning, Morton wanted BTK to feel a connection with Landwehr so that the killer would confess willingly to Landwehr someday, if the cops caught him.

Morton told Landwehr to get plenty of rest the night before each briefing. His hair was to be combed, his clothing neat. He was to look and sound refreshed, alert, upbeat. The public needed to see him and feel confident. The killer could not see him tired. Landwehr began to study his own face, looking for bags under his eyes.

With every day that BTK did not communicate, Landwehr lost sleep.

41

August–November 2004

P. J. Wyatt

Three days after Johnson told the FBI that police were taking the initiative, the task force made up a flimsy reason to talk to BTK and sucked the news media into playing it big.

On August 20, Landwehr went before reporters and began talking about BTK’s 1978 letter. He noted it included a poem,
“OH! DEATH TO NANCY,”
that was an adaptation of the folk song “O Death.” It read, in part:

I’ll stuff your jaws till you can’t talk

I’ll blind your leg’s till you can’t walk

I’ll tie your hands till you can’t make a stand.

And finally I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see

I’ll bring sexual death unto you for me.