Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (20 page)

Landwehr married Cindy Hughes on April 24, 1993. Paul Dotson served as best man. The Landwehrs honeymooned in Cancun, Mexico.

In the third-floor apartment where Landwehr lived for the thirteen years before his marriage, he had knocked so many golf balls outside his door that his sand wedge had worn a wide hole in the carpet. But Cindy was settling him down now. She used to worry that he felt attracted to her because he thought she needed rescuing.

But she had rescued him.

Late that year, Park City got its first phone directory. Brian Rader put it together as his Eagle Scout project to provide a service for his community. Scout leader George Martin, a longtime friend of Dennis Rader, liked to point out that there was no way to complete such a demanding project unless the boy got a lot of help from his father.

Brian’s phone book was so well received that
The Wichita Eagle
did a cheery story about it on October 28:

Park City residents will soon be flipping through their own directory to find local phone numbers, thanks to the PRIDE Committee and an Eagle Scout.

“It will be handy,” said Cecile Cox, PRIDE president. “I think it’s nice for a small town to have a directory because the Wichita book is so large and you have to hunt up things.”

Brian had organized ten other volunteers and compiled the book by hand, picking names and numbers out of public information sources and cross-directories. The new directory spelled out the names, numbers, and addresses of every business and person in town.

“We had to use maps to tell who lives where and stuff like that because two other cities have the 744 exchange,” Brian told the newspaper. The books were sold door-to-door, for a dollar apiece, to offset the cost of printing two thousand copies.

Brian’s father already knew the names and addresses of many people in town. Some women thought Dennis Rader seemed incredibly nosy�he was unusually interested in their comings and goings.

Landwehr’s first year as head of the homicide section was busy. Fifty-seven people were killed, a record.

Because the first hours after a homicide are crucial, Landwehr and the detectives often worked without sleep for forty-eight hours straight.

During 1993 and in years to follow, people in Wichita would become familiar with Landwehr’s face and flat television-interview delivery. As the supervisor, it was part of his job to give news briefings. On camera, Landwehr looked a little stiff and talked in a monotone.

Laviana, interviewing him alone, saw a much different personality; Landwehr would brighten with humor and warmth. His laugh betrayed the rasp of a frequent smoker.

One day Laviana misspelled the name of murder victim Kristi Hatfield. In his story, it was “Hartfield.” Landwehr showed up at the police department’s daily news media briefing and gleefully announced to reporters that Laviana had apparently found a new homicide victim.

“Where’s the body?” Landwehr demanded. It was a careless error that would be corrected in the next morning’s paper.

The lieutenant felt so comfortable with Laviana that in one important interview, Landwehr began to talk in the relaxed, no-bullshit tone he used with friends. The subject was the record-breaking number of homicides in 1993. Landwehr showed Laviana a chart, paying particular attention to the fourteen cases still unsolved.

“Magallanes, we have a suspect,” Landwehr said as he started down the list. “Anderson, we’re clueless. Marvin Brown, clueless. Menser, we have an idea.

“Kocachan, clueless,” Landwehr continued. “Gonzalez, clueless. Adams, that’s another one of those where everybody was shooting at a party. Hatfield, clueless.”

His use of “clueless” showed Landwehr’s self-confidence: He did not mince words. He said “clueless” because that’s how he saw it.

But after Laviana’s story appeared, Landwehr took some heat from his detectives and others in city hall. Unlike many public officials in similar situations, however, he didn’t get pissy and blame the reporter. He merely told Laviana, with a sheepish grin, “I wish I hadn’t said it, but I did.”

In 1993 some of the Wichita cops had a strange encounter with the Park City compliance officer. It was a story that Tim Relph and his friends would retell many times.

Relph became interested in joining the police force in part because he got arrested in 1979 as a teenager. He’d been shooting a BB gun he had modified to make a loud bang. Two officers, Darrell Haynes and the future Ghostbuster Paul Holmes, threw him facedown and handcuffed him, in part to frighten him away from a life of crime.

That arrest, and his own reevaluation of his life, led Relph one day to enter the police academy. Like Landwehr and Dana Gouge, Relph was first in his academy class.

Relph, a devout Roman Catholic with a gregarious and meticulous nature, joined the homicide unit in December 1991, a few months before Landwehr took command. By 1991, Relph had many cop friends, including the officers who had once arrested him, and John Speer, a longhaired undercover cop Relph had met when both worked street patrol.

In October 1993, Speer needed to reroof his house in Park City. He asked Relph and twenty other cops to help. It was a hot, nasty job. Toward the end of the day, some cops noticed a man in uniform standing outside Speer’s house, taking Polaroid photographs.

“Everybody stop,” Speer said. He climbed off the roof.

Relph watched Speer confront the man, who was standing beside a Park City truck. The man spoke to Speer in a cold, official manner about needing a work permit.

Speer argued. Relph watched this with some amusement. “This guy must be pretty brazen,” Relph thought. None of the men were in uniform, but with their haircuts and the cop jargon that Speer talked and from the way that they all stared, Relph thought it should be obvious to the compliance officer that this was a flock of cops perched on the rooftop.

But the Park City compliance officer insisted Speer needed a permit; he didn’t leave until the the cop agreed to get the proper paperwork.

Speer’s friends thought the guy was arrogant. But they teased Speer about getting lectured by a guy wearing a uniform and quoting regulations, chapter and verse. Something about that guy’s cold manner stuck out enough that the cops remembered it for a long time.

31

1994 to 1997

BTK as Antiquity

The
Eagle
published Bill Hirschman’s twentieth anniversary story about the Otero family murders on January 15, 1994. Hirschman knew that he needed to write it as though many of the newspaper’s readers had never heard of BTK.

The trail had grown cold; many readers didn’t know about the killings, and others had lost interest as their fear faded. BTK had not killed, as far as anyone knew for certain, since strangling Nancy Fox in December 1977. Some cops thought BTK might be dead or in prison on unrelated crimes. So when Hirschman wrote his anniversary story, most of it was background information.

Like a lot of crime reporters, he did what he did because cruelty upset him. To stop it, you write about it to make people care. The idea that BTK had become old news bothered Hirschman. He wanted the monster caught.

Before Ken Stephens left the
Eagle
in 1985, Hirschman had listened to him talk about BTK at a newsroom party. Stephens had related it as a ghost story, and Hirschman had watched chattering friends grow silent, listening in the dark. He remembered that as he wrote his story:

Failure to convict BTK is always mentioned as the one lasting regret of every retiring police officer who worked the case, ranging from LaMunyon to Sheriff Mike Hill, once head of the police homicide squad.

“No, it’s something you don’t ever get rid of,” LaMunyon said.

Shortly after the story ran, Hirschman left the
Eagle
and joined the newsroom of the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel,
in Fort Lauderdale.

Perhaps Hurst will get to write the big BTK story someday
, he thought.

At Hirschman’s going-away party, newsroom staffers gave him a mock front page with a banner headline:

HIRSCHMAN LEAVES; BTK CASE SOLVED

Laviana thought that was really funny. Like Stephens before him, Hirschman had been identified in town gossip as a BTK suspect.

BTK was not an old story to Detective Tim Relph.

One night, while working a two-month night-shift rotation, Relph got bored. He looked at the gray four-drawer cabinet sitting in a corner. People seldom opened it. Relph fetched a key, opened a drawer, and began to read the Otero files.

It took Relph back to when he had felt terrified as a child after the murders. He had been in seventh grade then, and he had worried that something like that might happen to his family.

Now, in the investigations room, he read old files for a long time.

The next day, Relph went to lunch with Landwehr and surprised him by saying he wanted to study the BTK files.

Landwehr needled him.

“What are you doin’, Relph?”

“What?”

“Are you tryin’ to fuckin’ take my job?”

“No!”

“No no no, you fucker�you’re tryin’ to take my job, I know it!”

“No, I’m not. I just want to understand it.”

Landwehr stopped teasing and grew thoughtful.

“I’ve been thinking I need to have someone else study BTK, in case I ever leave,” he said. “Are you serious about wanting to learn?”

“Yes.”

Landwehr began to coach him, at lunch and in the days that followed. Landwehr talked so fast, and with such enthusiasm, that he sometimes lost his train of thought. Relph listened, enthralled. As Relph described it later, Landwehr gave a master clinic on how to hunt BTK�and how to become a great detective.

Not all of Landwehr’s detectives praised him at first. Some of them thought that the details of management bored Landwehr and that he was a better investigator than administrator. Clint Snyder, who joined the homicide section in 1995 and admired him a lot, joked that Landwehr’s brain sometimes worked on a different frequency than his mouth. Detectives had to know the context to understand what Landwehr was talking about, Snyder said. “He’ll say something about ‘needing to get the deal’ or ‘do the deal’ or something like that. But you know what he means.”

When Dana Gouge first joined the unit, he had a little trouble with Landwehr’s attitude about supervision. In other units, bosses had told Gouge what to do. It puzzled Gouge at first how little Landwehr talked to him. The work worried Gouge�it was hard, and he wanted to make sure he never accused the wrong person of murder, or accused the right person but saw the killer walk free because of a mistake in the investigation. But Landwehr barely talked to him unless Gouge asked him something. Gouge’s initial impression was that Landwehr wasn’t much of a teacher.

That impression slowly changed. At crime scenes, Gouge began to study what Landwehr looked at, listened to questions Landwehr asked, and tried to think what Landwehr was thinking. Gouge concluded that when he watched Landwehr he learned a lot.

Landwehr’s own assessment of his coaching was cold and simple: “The one thing I cannot teach anyone is IQ points. You either have the brains to work in this unit or you don’t.”

The detectives all noticed Landwehr’s memory. Other people had to study a case; Landwehr could glance at reports and recall the details with precision years later.

One day Relph got into a lively argument with Landwehr over a point of Roman Catholic teaching: is Ash Wednesday a holy day of obligation? Relph, a student of Catholicism, said yes; Landwehr, a backsliding Catholic, said, “No, it ain’t.”

They investigated; Landwehr was right.

“It doesn’t bother me that you know more about forensics than I do,” Relph said. “But it pisses me off that you know more about church teachings.”

To some extent the detectives’ attitudes, even their humor, became a reflection of their boss. They needled each other, and Landwehr, sometimes cruelly. They dropped the f-word in casual conversation�even Relph, who could talk eloquently about his religious beliefs. They had a plastic rat that they put on the desk of the detective due to take the lead on the next homicide. They carried on a Dotson-era practical joke tradition of sometimes calling a sleeping detective to say “We’ve had a triple homicide” just to jolt him awake. They bonded. The stress of this work would have been unbearable to most people, but whenever a detective would get upset, someone would weigh in with a smart-ass comment and lighten the mood. Over time they realized that Landwehr used humor with calculation. It dawned on Relph that after reading his reports, Landwehr would say funny things that sometimes stung. Landwehr embedded criticism in humor. After that, Relph began to listen closely when Landwehr made him laugh.

Not every funny thing Landwehr said was intentionally funny. One day Gouge, Snyder, and Landwehr worked the murder of a Wichita prostitute. The killer had dumped the body in Harvey County, near Newton. Gouge and Snyder went into the Newton police interview room to talk to the suspect. They could not take their handguns in, so they handed them to Landwehr, who paced outside. Landwehr, who had his own gun in a holster, stuck theirs in his waistband.

Gouge and Snyder interviewed the suspect, then separately interviewed his wife. Their stories did not match. Gouge and Snyder went to Landwehr and excitedly told him this. Landwehr was delighted; they were solving the case.

A Newton detective rounded a corner and saw Landwehr with three guns jutting from his clothing, rubbing his cheeks vigorously, yelling: “God, I
love
this job!” The detective thought Landwehr was a nutcase.

The work wasn’t for everyone. Snyder left in 1997, trading the horrors of homicide investigation for the grim task of outwitting narcotics dealers.

Kelly Otis joined the homicide section in 1997, after taking the test to qualify for detective on a whim. One day the strain of building a particularly tough case got to the new investigator, and he walked into Landwehr’s office to vent. He worried that it might be picked apart in court. In frustration, he kicked a sofa.