Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (41 page)

He hadn’t intended to thank anyone, but now felt compelled to do so:

“I want to thank the families of the victims that gave us their trust and stood behind us,” Landwehr began. “I want to thank the families of our task force who stood behind them.”

Then, peering around the audience (he cracked a little joke about how nearsighted he’d become recently), Landwehr began to thank by name every cop and civilian who had worked on the task force or helped it in some tangible way. Off the top of his head, he managed to name forty-two of them�some of them twice.

“See?” he said. “I’m losing it. I want to thank everybody and their families who gave up a lot for this task force.”

He took a breath.

Then Landwehr uttered what Otis took to be a subtle reprimand to the politicians standing behind him.

“I’m going to quit rambling,” Landwehr said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do this the
right
way.”

He glanced down at a sheet of paper.

“Shortly after noon yesterday afternoon, agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Rader, fifty-nine, a white male, in Park City, Kansas, for the murders of Joseph Otero, Julie Otero, Josephine Otero,�”

At that moment, Landwehr appeared to choke up a little. He quickly recovered and continued: “Joseph Otero Jr., Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian Relford, Nancy Fox, and Vicki Wegerle,” Landwehr said. “He was arrested for the first-degree murder of all those victims. He’s being held at this time at an undisclosed location. We will be approaching the district attorney’s office next week, reference charges to see if charges will be filed against this individual. I thank you very much for your support.”

It was over.

After thirty-one years, plus one hour and thousands of superfluous words, all of Wichita finally knew BTK’s name.

One out-of-town television outfit offered a Park City police officer five hundred dollars to go to Rader’s house and come back with something that said “Dennis Rader.” The officer refused.

BTK’s arrest is front-page news.

Sightseers arrived on Independence Street, some coming from the nearby Kansas Coliseum, where the state high school wrestling tournament was under way. When one girl in a squad of high school cheerleaders held up her cell phone camera to snap a picture of the wrong house, Police Chief Ball helpfully pointed her in the right direction.

Someone started to drag away Rader’s curbside mailbox, which had his name on it. When onlookers protested, the thief dropped the box and fled.

Park City police officers directed traffic on the roads as well as the sidewalks to keep the crowds moving. Neighbors with views of the house set up impromptu businesses, selling bottled water, individual cigarettes, and good spots from which to shoot video.

The detectives continued to interview an eager Rader the day after his arrest.

Relph and the FBI’s Chuck Pritchett showed Rader his drawing of Nancy Fox lying half naked and bound on her bed. As he explained the drawing, Rader suddenly apologized: he was getting an erection. Relph whisked the drawing off the table.

Over two days, Rader talked for thirty-three hours. He told Otis that he had stalked Vicki Wegerle for three weeks. He said the telephone repairman ruse he had used to talk his way into her home had also opened many other doors for him. He boasted that if an officer had stopped him for a traffic violation while he was driving Vicki’s car, he would have shot him.

There should have been many more victims, Rader told the detectives. But his family and work got in the way.

He had planned to kill an eleventh victim and string her up on October 22, 2004. But when he found workers building curbs in her neighborhood, he backed off. “So what in the hell do you do?” Rader said. “You just do a backup and wait for another day. I was going to try it in the spring or fall.”

After killing her, he planned to retire from killing with a last communication�a “final curtain call.”

When the task force arrested Rader, he was planning to make what he called “the Vian drop”�a doll in a miniature coffin wired to look like a bomb. He’d been working on it at his city hall office the night before his arrest, telling his wife he was working late. He explained to the detectives: “I can fudge a little bit getting home late, doing BTK. It’s a riot.” He had a thing for dolls, he said. He would photograph their shoes; he would bind them; he would hang one and use a mirror to view it from many angles.

The twenty-plus
Eagle
reporters, photographers, and editors who came in to work the story that Saturday began to discern the outlines of the lie that Rader had made of his life. He was a church congregation president; a registered Republican voter; a longtime Boy Scout dad; a good neighbor. He’d raised two kids who were good students and good citizens; his son had just graduated from the navy’s submariners school. Many of the church and Boy Scout people described Rader in the nicest terms. The
Eagle
quoted Ray Reiss, a friend of Rader’s since their days at Heights High School. “It’s trite to say that he’s such a nice guy. Well…he is nice.”

But the reporters also learned that he had compartmentalized his life, and in the compartment that involved wearing a uniform and working as a compliance officer, he had been deliberately cruel to people.

The
Eagle
quoted a former coworker at ADT Security Services, where Rader worked from 1974 to 1988. That was the period when Rader did most of his killing. “I don’t believe the gentleman was well liked at all,” said Mike Tavares. He described Rader as blunt, arrogant, and rude.

Houston, the sheriff’s captain, noticed that when Rader described taking Dee Davis’s body out to the bridge, he talked faster and faster, excitedly.

In Rader’s writings, investigators found a journal in which Rader described how Dee pleaded with him: “Please, sir, I have children.”

Investigators found photographs Rader took of himself tied up in his parents’ basement. He was wearing Dee’s undergarments.

Two days after Rader’s arrest, Bonnie Bing’s cell phone rang. It was Landwehr, sounding buoyant, telling the
Eagle
’s fashion writer that she no longer need fear BTK. In fact, he said, the letter that Cindy Carnahan had received in September was not from BTK at all. When Relph questioned him, Rader had said he never would have taken the risk of stalking a journalist. When Relph showed him a copy of the letter, Rader said that it wasn’t his handiwork. Landwehr and Relph were now sure it had been written by a man from a prominent local family; he had mental problems but was harmless.

Bing was relieved.

“So why are you calling me?” she teased Landwehr. “Listen, Bud, we ain’t goin’ steady anymore.”

Landwehr laughed. He sounded strong and happy.

He said he’d played a round of golf that morning.

Many citizens of Park City, after they got their names in the paper with a quote or two about Rader, got dozens of urgent calls from news organizations asking for more. At the
Eagle
, L. Kelly told reporters in the field to call only her cell phone; her desk phone was overwhelmed with calls from news editors and producers around the country and overseas wanting interviews. Although the reporters had been happy to give interviews about the case in the past, now their first priority had to be covering the story for local readers.

She and her boss, Tim Rogers, monitored local and national television coverage of BTK. Rogers ran across the newsroom when he saw a cable news channel reporting that Rader’s daughter had turned him in: “Do we have that? Do we have that?”

“I’m checking it out,” said a skeptical Kelly, dialing the phone. She called the city’s biggest gossip on the case, who had sent the paper and the task force hundreds of e-mails in the past year. (“We can’t control who e-mails us,” Otis later said.) Kelly told Robert Beattie what she’d just seen on TV. Had he heard anything like that?

“Oh, I’m the one who told them that,” he said, sounding surprised.

“Bob, do you
know that
, or have you just heard that?” Kelly asked.

“I’m just passing along everything I hear.” The lawyer said he never expected the tip to be reported as fact.

Kelly next called a contact at the cable network; no, the woman said, they hadn’t checked it out before putting it on the air. They had just assumed Beattie had inside information.

The network backed off the story.

Eagle
reporter Suzanne Perez Tobias was in a living room surrounded by people who loved and missed Vicki Wegerle.

Vicki’s husband, grown children, and others had gathered to talk over old photos, but they were waiting for Bill to get off the phone in the kitchen. Tobias was working on one of ten profiles the
Eagle
was preparing to honor the dead. In the upcoming Sunday paper, the victims would no longer be just a name, a photo, and a date of death.

“I’m sorry, Suzanne,” Bill Wegerle said. “We aren’t going to be able to do this today.”

Bill explained that he’d gotten a call from the district attorney’s office and had been told that speaking with Suzanne could jeopardize the case. He didn’t want to do anything that might let Vicki’s killer go free. Tobias didn’t understand how talking about Vicki as a person�a beloved wife, a good mother�would have any impact on the trial, but Bill was clearly shaken. He asked Tobias to call the DA’s office back to clarify what he’d been told, but it was after 6:00
PM
, and no one answered. Everyone was disappointed, but the interview was over before it started.

The same thing happened to other families and reporters. Kelly fumed. Rader had confessed, the reporters were trying to portray the victims as real people, and now the burden of successful prosecution had been placed on the shoulders of their families. When Kelly received an e-mail from the DA’s office saying BTK victims’ families were requesting no further contact from reporters�with a list that included the Wegerles and the others who canceled interviews after getting “don’t talk” phone calls�she made
that
a story.

It quoted DA spokeswoman Georgia Cole: family members had not been ordered to not talk to reporters, “We just told them the repercussions of what might happen if they did.”

Three days after Rader’s arrest, Laviana found an address for a George Martin, whom Laviana had heard might have known Rader in the Boy Scouts. He gave Martin’s name to Wenzl, who with photographer Jaime Oppenheimer drove to Park City. Martin talked for half an hour about how good Rader was to boys in the Scouts. Wenzl thought about the knots mentioned in the 1974 Otero letter.

“I was in the Boy Scouts for about five minutes when I was a kid,” he told Martin. “And all they talked about was how I needed to learn to tie knots in the Boy Scouts. Was Rader any good at tying knots and teaching knots?”

“Oh yes,” Martin said. “He was one of the best teachers we had for teaching knots. All the knots, the square knot, the sheepshank, the double half hitch, the bowline knot, the taut line hitch for tying down tent poles, he knew them all. And I’ll bet you he learned how to tie knots as a boy himself, in the Boy Scouts.”

This was a scoop�one of America’s most notorious serial killers had bound and strangled his victims using knots learned in the Boy Scouts. Wenzl asked for everything Martin could tell about Rader and knots.

Oppenheimer’s cell phone rang. She interrupted Wenzl to say that they’d just been assigned to stop by the homes of Rader’s in-laws and mother.

“Like anyone will open the door to us there,” Wenzl said. He ignored the instructions and quizzed Martin about who else in the Park City Boy Scout troops might have known about Rader’s skill with knots. Over the next half hour, editors repeatedly called Oppenheimer’s phone, but Wenzl, writing down more Boy Scout names, waved off the calls.

By the time he finished with Martin, the editors were sounding frantic. Wenzl and Oppenheimer drove first to Rader’s in-laws, walking up to their door as Wenzl swore about the assignment�“Nobody’s going to answer the door.” Oppenheimer turned on him.

“Why don’t you just shut up and do your job?” she asked.

“Because I already have a great story on the knots, and this relatives thing is a goose chase,” he said.

No one answered the door.

Wenzl wanted to break off and go find more Boy Scout leaders, but Oppenheimer drove to Rader’s mother’s house. Minutes later, they walked up to the door, with Wenzl still snapping at Oppenheimer. “If I was Rader’s relative, I’d tell us to go to hell,” he said. “They won’t talk.”

Wenzl knocked.

The door opened, and a big man with blue eyes and a thick mustache glared out at them.

“What do you want?”

“To talk to people from Dennis Rader’s family,” Wenzl said.

The man stepped out, shut the door behind him, and folded muscular arms across the top of his blue denim bib overalls.

“I’m his brother,” the man said. “What do you want to know?”

Wenzl looked at Oppenheimer. She stifled a smile.