Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (41 page)
Authors: John Douglas,Johnny Dodd
BOOK: Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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Inside the white envelope was a single sheet of paper containing three photocopied snapshots of a woman who appeared to be unconscious, lying on a carpeted floor. A photocopy of a driver’s license belonging to a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Vicki Wegerle, whose 1986 murder had never been solved, also appeared on the page.
But the most chilling part of the letter were the letters B-T-K scrawled at the bottom of the page. It was penned with the same haunting, telltale flourish employed by the killer back in the 1970s—the letter B had been fashioned into breasts.
At the top of the page was a string of seemingly nonsensical numbers and letters. Police asked several experts to try to decipher the message, but no one was ever able to figure out what it meant. It wasn’t until after Rader’s arrest that they learned what the message, supposedly written in a code used by the Germans in World War II, actually said: “Let Beatty
[sic]
know for his book.” In other words, he wanted the man chronicling his crimes to understand that he was still very much alive.
[sic]
know for his book.” In other words, he wanted the man chronicling his crimes to understand that he was still very much alive.
Although this single piece of paper had all the makings of a bona fide communiqué, Landwehr knew damn well that he needed to proceed with caution. Because BTK had been featured in a lengthy newspaper article a couple of months before, it wouldn’t be unusual to receive a copycat communiqué from some warped and perverted soul with too much time on his hands. The key is to review the document carefully, searching for references to factual data that would be unique to the case. This is one of the main reasons why police sometimes sit on information, preventing it from becoming public knowledge.
The moment I learned about that first communication from my FBI source, I knew that if it was legit, it was just a matter of time before police snared BTK. It had always been obvious to me that the more he wrote to the media and police, the more we could learn about him. He craved attention. In fact, I wasn’t surprised that he’d resumed his writing career.
What stumped me was that he’d been able to stop for all those years. He craved attention, and now he wanted it again. What, I wondered, must be going on in his life at that moment to cause him to surface? He had to be around sixty years old. The only thing I could think of was that he’d grown bored with his life and yearned to recharge his batteries.
As Landwehr examined the contents of the letter, however, he realized that he had plenty of reasons to be guardedly excited over the communiqué. Why? Because the letter offered copies of evidence removed from the scene of the crime—those three haunting photocopied images of what appeared to be a recently strangled Vicki Wegerle lying on her bedroom floor.
The March 17 mailing also answered a question to which Landwehr had long suspected he knew the answer, ever since he arrived at Wegerle’s home after the murder in 1986. The Wegerle homicide had never been directly attributed to BKT, but Landwehr had thought he knew better.
“I always thought it was a BTK kill,” he told me, chewing a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
He remained so convinced that in 2000 he asked two of his detectives to dust off the case files of Wegerle, whose bound and strangled body had been discovered inside her house on West 13th Street by her husband, Bill. Beneath her fingernails, police discovered a man’s DNA. Despite his never having been charged, her husband, who worked as a handyman at a number of apartment complexes in the area, had lived under a cloud of suspicion for years. Which wasn’t exactly surprising—in most murder cases, the husband is the first and foremost suspect investigators look at.
Even though the DNA under Vicki’s fingernails wasn’t her husband’s, investigators always found it suspicious that he’d spent so much time at the couple’s home before telephoning police.
In 2003, investigators input a profile of that DNA sample into a recently created national database containing the genetic information compiled on hundreds of thousands of known criminals. They never found any samples in the registry that matched, which did nothing more than confirm to Landwehr and his detectives that the man they were looking for wasn’t catalogued in any DNA database—nor had he been a known suspect in the case.
Within hours of realizing that the letter was authentic, Landwehr contacted the FBI and soon began consulting with my former unit to create a proactive strategy to reel the killer in. And, just as I’d first envisioned back in 1984, they created a super-cop to become the human face of the investigation—Landwehr. They couldn’t have picked a better man for the role, although Landwehr admitted that he was hardly thrilled with the suggestion.
“I told them I didn’t think the head of an investigation should be holding press conferences,” he recalled. “I knew too much about the case, and I knew that if some reporter asked me a question, no matter what I answered they’d be able to read my body reaction. But they didn’t want to hear about that. They kept telling me, ‘Just stand up there, read your script and walk away. Don’t get into any interplay with the reporters.’”
Six days after BTK’s envelope arrived in the offices of the
Wichita Eagle,
Landwehr stood up in front of a bank of microphones in the fourth-floor briefing room of the city building and held the first of his twenty-two press conferences, none of which lasted more than four minutes. He definitely looked a bit uncomfortable up there in his dark suit, staring straight into the TV cameras, reading the press release crafted by the Wichita police chief’s assistant.
Wichita Eagle,
Landwehr stood up in front of a bank of microphones in the fourth-floor briefing room of the city building and held the first of his twenty-two press conferences, none of which lasted more than four minutes. He definitely looked a bit uncomfortable up there in his dark suit, staring straight into the TV cameras, reading the press release crafted by the Wichita police chief’s assistant.
But that hardly mattered. In fact, it only made Landwehr’s performance all the more convincing. Somewhere out there, he knew the man he’d been hunting since 1984 was watching his every move, hanging on every word he spoke.
“The Wichita Police Department recently received information on the Vicki Wegerle homicide that occurred on September 16, 1986, in the 2400 block of West 13th Street,” he told the crowd of print, TV, and radio reporters packed into the room. “Mrs. Wegerle was discovered in her home shortly before noon on that day by her husband. Her murder remains unsolved.”
Even though word had begun circulating among the media about the nature of this press conference, the edgy tension in the room was palpable, Landwehr later told me.
“Investigations personnel now believe that this homicide could possibly be linked to the unsolved homicides that occurred in Wichita in the 1970s and were attributed to the BTK serial killer,” Landwehr told reporters. “This is the most challenging case I have ever worked on, and the individual would be very interesting to talk with. We are working closely with the FBI, the KBI [Kansas Bureau of Investigation], the Sedgwick County sheriff’s office, and the district attorney’s office on this investigation. This case is a top priority with the Wichita Police Department, and we will be working this as a strong, unsolved case, and exploring all possible leads.”
Landwehr did everything I’d recommended back in 1984, when I suggested that a close bond with the lead investigator on this case could create the kind of situation in which BTK would not only feel respected but also see himself as a consummate professional, playing a game of hide-and-seek with a collegial opponent. In the end, he might just let his guard down enough to give himself away or possibly even give himself up.
A few days after the contents of that first communiqué were released to the public, the seven phone lines in the BTK task force offices started ringing. Nearly a thousand tips came flooding in. A command post was soon established in the nearby offices of the FBI. Before long, police were driving around town with sterile Q-Tips, eventually taking DNA mouth swabs from nearly sixteen hundred local men in their late forties and fifties, including a number of retired police officers. Not surprisingly, this caused plenty of grumbling among former cops.
When Landwehr told me this, I could feel the frustration he must have been enduring at the time. Clearly the police had no leads and were forced to resort to tossing out the widest high-tech net they could find in order to catch their killer. The reason retired cops were targeted was that investigators always believed that BTK possessed some type of law enforcement background and even may have once worked for the Wichita Police Department.
By April 2004, the offices of the BTK task force were buzzing. Not only had the killer surfaced after nearly twenty-five years of silence, but there was another cause for excitement. Crime lab technicians at the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center had managed to link the DNA extracted from a semen stain on the blue nightgown found at Nancy Fox’s house with the skin fragments scraped out from beneath Wegerle’s fingernails. The same killer, it seemed, was responsible for the murders of both women. This also meant that during the two-and-a-half decades that had elapsed since Fox’s killing, BTK hadn’t been dormant as many had suspected and hoped. He’d just managed to keep a lower profile than he had with his first series of murders. Exactly how many other homicides, they wondered, might he be responsible for?
On May 4, a second envelope, supposedly from the killer, arrived at the KAKE-TV studio in downtown Wichita. It contained three pages. The first sheet bore the title “The BTK Story.” It resembled the table of contents from a biography the killer seemed to envision he was writing.
Landwehr reached across the table to the folder he’d placed atop the napkin dispenser. He opened it, quietly fished out a sheet of paper encased in plastic, and handed it to me. It looked like this:
1. A SERIAL KILLER IS BORN
2. DAWN
3. FETISH
4. FANTASY WORLD
5. THE SEARCH BEGINS
6. BTK’S HAUNTS
7. PJ’S
8. MO-ID-RUSE
9. HITS
10. TREASURED MEMORIES
11. FINAL CURTAIN CALL
12. DUSK
13. WILL THERE MORE?
The next page contained a computer-generated word-search puzzle that at first felt reminiscent of something that a diabolical master-mind like the fictional Hannibal Lecter might create to confound authorities. But the more investigators scrutinized it, the more they realized that this guy was no better at designing a puzzle (he couldn’t quite seem to line the numbers up with the letters) than he was at spelling.
The puzzle contained words relating to the case, including
victim, serviceman, fantasies, lost pet,
and
officer.
On the final page were photocopies of two ID badges—one from a phone company in town, the other from the local school district.
victim, serviceman, fantasies, lost pet,
and
officer.
On the final page were photocopies of two ID badges—one from a phone company in town, the other from the local school district.
One month later, BTK’s third communication was discovered in a Ziploc plastic bag, duct-taped to a stop sign near an on-ramp to I-135, which bisected the city. On the outside of the enclosed brown envelope were the words “BTK Field Gram.” It contained a disturbingly sophomoric account of the Otero murders, including a graphic description of his slaying of eleven-year-old Josie. The killer also included a sketch of a gagged, bound, nude woman dangling from a noose. The caption read, THE SEXUAL THRILL IS MY BILL.
On July 17, Wichita Public Library workers discovered a clear plastic bag marked BTK at the bottom of an outdoor book collection bin. This mailing consisted of five sheets of paper. Two of those pages detailed BTK’s involvement in the death of a troubled nineteen-year-old young man named Jake Allen, whose suicide had been reported in the local press a few weeks earlier. Of course, everything Rader wrote in that communiqué was pure bullshit, but the Wichita police didn’t know that at the time. According to Landwehr, Allen, a star athlete and high school valedictorian, had dreamed of becoming an optometrist, but weeks before his death he and some buddies had gotten caught by local cops for having beer in their car. Allen soon convinced himself that he’d blown his chances of ever getting into optometry school and, in the early morning hours of July 5, lay down on the train tracks near his home in tiny Argonia, Kansas, forty miles from Wichita. Not long afterwards, a passing Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train barreled over his body, crushing it almost beyond recognition.
Hoping to send police off in countless directions, the killer wrote that he’d been responsible for the death of “Jakey” after meeting him in a computer chat room and convincing him that he was a private eye hunting for BTK. The young man, who he claimed “had fantasies about Sexual Masturbation in unusual ways with Bondage and Homosexual thrills,” agreed to help him. Everything he wrote was pure make-believe. Rader had absolutely nothing to do with Allen’s tragic death. But Landwehr couldn’t take that chance, so his men began combing through Allen’s computers, sifting through his e-mails and piecing together every word he’d ever posted in a chatroom. After a couple of weeks, it became evident that everything BTK had written about Allen had either been lifted from newspaper accounts of his death or fabricated.
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