Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (44 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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“So four task force detectives took off to Park City,” Landwehr recalled, “to check out what they could find about this guy. And I’m standing there thinking to myself, ‘Can it really be this easy?’”
Within an hour, they’d pieced together a rough idea of just who Dennis Rader was. He’d lived in the same house for thirty-three years, had been married to the same woman for thirty-three years, and every morning for the past thirteen years had gotten dressed in a brown uniform that made him resemble a park ranger—complete with a badge, cap, and two-way radio dangling off his jacket—and driven off to a job where he got to play make-believe and pretend to be a cop. The more Landwehr learned about the guy, the more he liked what he saw.
Fifty minutes later, on their first drive-by of Rader’s tiny ranch-style home, located a half mile from the Park City municipal building, detectives spotted a black Jeep Cherokee in the driveway. It resembled the vehicle they’d spotted in the Home Depot security videotape and was registered to Rader’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Brian, currently serving in the navy.
Undercover agents began loosely tailing Rader, watching his movements, but keeping an extremely low profile. Although Landwehr didn’t post undercover detectives in front of his house or at the Park City Municipal Building, his men monitored Rader’s activities on a regular, steady basis. During the day, they continually watched to ensure that he was at work. And at night when he was supposed to be at home, they performed hourly bed checks to make sure he didn’t sneak out.
“But we were careful not to jump on him right away,” Landwehr told me. “We’d had too many close calls before. So we stuck to him day and night, studying everything he did and, most important, making sure he didn’t try and go after anyone else.”
Within hours of discovering Rader’s identity, the task force met to brainstorm what needed to be done to nail Rader to the BTK murders. After thirty-one years spent searching for their killer, the last thing investigators wanted was for their top suspect to slip through their fingers. Landwehr had other reasons for wanting to move slowly. He couldn’t shake the sick feeling that BTK was setting them up, leading them straight to Dennis Rader in the hopes that they’d arrest him and become the laughingstock of the media for nabbing the wrong man.
“His use of the word ‘encase,’” Landwehr told me, “was just something I couldn’t write off to bad spelling.”
And there was another reason. In one of BTK’s early communiqués, he had threatened to blow up his house—or as he called it, his “lair”—if police tried to close in on him.
But Landwehr was far too smart a detective to let these obstacles slow him down. He’d spent a couple of years learning the ins and outs of DNA evidence while working in the department’s high-tech crime lab back in the early 1990s. What he learned there convinced him that the next step in the investigation would involve obtaining a DNA sample from Rader and matching it with semen left behind at his crime scenes.
There was just one problem, Landwehr explained to me. How the hell could police do that without tipping Rader off that he was a suspect in the case? And it was during a brainstorming session the next morning at task force headquarters that one of Landwehr’s investigators on loan from the KBI came up with a novel solution that sounded like something straight out of an episode of the hit TV show
CSI.
CSI.
If they couldn’t get Rader’s DNA, Landwehr reasoned, why not get hold of a sample from a relative? Landwehr had used that technique in the past to help ID murder victims whose identity they weren’t sure of. If they could just locate a sample from a parent, sibling, or child, it should be close enough to Rader’s to confirm whether or not police had the right man.
But Wichita was far too small a city for police to be able to waltz into a doctor’s office with a court order asking for the medical records of someone related to Rader. Word would quickly leak out about what they were up to, and that was the last thing Landwehr or anyone on the task force wanted.
Ray Lundin, a KBI special agent, attended that task force meeting, held on the following Monday morning. Two weeks before I flew out to Wichita, Lundin’s boss, KBI director Larry Welch, a longtime friend of mine, gave Lundin the green light to speak with me about those final days of the investigation.
Lundin told me that when he learned at the meeting that Rader’s daughter, Kerri, had attended Kansas State University—which happened to be the same university he had attended—a light bulb went on inside his head.
“I remembered that at K-State everyone used the student clinic,” he said. Lundin also knew that the school’s medical center was far enough away from Wichita that his inquiries there about Kerri Rader’s health records wouldn’t send up so many red flags.
So on Thursday morning he drove to Manhattan, Kansas, 130 miles away from Wichita, and learned that Kerri had visited the clinic on several occasions. Lundin returned the next day with a court order for the young woman’s medical records and spent the weekend combing through them, finding reference to a pap test.
The following Monday morning, Lundin returned to Manhattan and confirmed that the tiny glass microscope slide containing a collection of cells scraped from Kerri’s cervix still existed. It was stored, he learned, at a nearby lab. The next morning he showed up at the lab with another court order. Thirty minutes later, he began the drive back to Topeka to deliver the slide to the KBI’s crime lab.
On Wednesday morning, he handed it off to the lab supervisor, who ended up spending hours trying to remove the thin, brittle glass cover from the top of the slide.
Thursday night, just around 7:30, Lundin was walking into Sam’s Club in Wichita when his cell phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that the call was coming from the crime lab.
“I remember thinking, ‘Well, here we go,’” Lundin told me.
He placed the phone to his ear. “I’m shaking,” said the KBI’s forensic lab supervisor Sindey Schueler.
“What’d you get?” Lundin asked.
“I can tell you this,” said Schueler, “this girl is the offspring of BTK.”
Landwehr was notified about the match, and he knew the hunt was finally over. He’d found his killer. Now all he had to do was go collect him.
The same day Kerri Rader’s pap smear was being examined by Schueler in Topeka, Park City resident Kimmie Comer was sitting on the couch in the front room of her house, watching Dr. Phil on TV.
Kimmie had just gotten home from her job as a dialysis technician. Her kids were off at school. And that was when something happened, something that still makes her queasy whenever she thinks about it. She tries not to.
Not long before I arrived in Wichita to interview Ken Landwehr, Comer tracked me down through my Web site, wondering if I might be interested in hearing her story.
I told her I was.
It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. Nice day. Sunny. Spring, it seemed, had arrived early. Comer left her front door open, and a warm breeze was seeping in through the screen door as Dr. Phil’s twangy Texas voice drifted out of the TV.
“All of a sudden, I turned and looked up and he was standing there, staring at me,” she recalled. “Dennis Rader had walked right in my house without knocking. He looked at me sitting there, then said in this calm, quiet voice, ‘Oh, I wanted to make sure you didn’t forget your court date . . . for the ticket I gave you.’”
Comer told me that she couldn’t believe what was happening. For the past eight months, Park City’s heavy-handed compliance officer had made her life a living hell—all because she’d parked two cars in her driveway. Both cars worked just fine, but Rader started giving her tickets—eight of them, to be exact—for having what he considered to be an inoperable vehicle on her property. Each time he’d pull up in front of her house to give her another one, she’d attempt to show him how both automobiles ran perfectly fine, but the officious Rader didn’t want to hear about it.
“That’s why we have courts,” he’d tell her. “Take it up with the judge.”
So on that balmy Wednesday afternoon in late February when she saw him standing in her family room, holding his goddamned ticket book, she lost it. “I jumped up from the couch and got right in his face and started cussing him out. I told him how dare he walk into my house like this, and he better get the hell out. And that’s what he did. He didn’t get angry. He just turned and walked out.”
As Rader futzed around his truck, pulling papers in and out of his briefcase, Comer stood there on the doorstep shaking.
“You’re an old pervert,” she shouted at him. “Why won’t you leave me and family alone? You’re just a goddamned dog catcher.”
Rader had began thrusting himself into Comer’s life shortly after her move to Park City in November 2003. A single mother of two young children, Comer’s second husband was murdered several years earlier. She’d come to the sleepy little bedroom community of Wichita because it seemed like a nice place for her young son and daughter to grow up.
“I’d only been there about an hour and a half, moving boxes inside the house, when I saw him walking up the driveway in that little uniform of his,” she recalled. “I thought he’d stopped by to meet the new people, to say hello.”
But, she told me, it quickly became apparent that Rader wasn’t in the welcoming mood, and he certainly hadn’t dropped by her house on a social visit. “Before I could even get a single word out of my mouth, he pointed to my washer and dryer that had just been unloaded from our moving truck and were sitting under the carport and snapped, ‘You can’t have these here. You’re going to have to put those inside the house.’”
Comer was dumbfounded. “I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I tried to tell him that we’d just unloaded them a few minutes before and were going to move them inside, but we hadn’t had a chance yet.’ But all he could say was, ‘Just move them inside or I’m going to write you up.’”
Within a couple of months, she explained that Rader began showing up at her house with alarming, annoying regularity. In February 2004, he started writing Comer tickets for the vehicle in her driveway. On more occasions than she could recall, she’d arrive from work and find his white truck parked in front of her house. The moment he spotted her, he’d drive away. One Saturday afternoon, her two children walked into the family room and informed their mother that a man in white truck had just given them a ride home from the park where they’d been playing.
“What do you mean a man in a white truck gave you a ride?” she asked, alarmed.
“The man who always parks in front of the house,” her son replied. “He said there was a dog with rabies running around and that’s why he needed to take us home. He gave me his card.”
He handed his mother a stiff white piece of paper that read, “Dennis Rader. Park City Compliance Officer.”
“After a while, it was like he knew my schedule,” she said. “I’d come home from work, and my neighbors would tell me that he’d stopped by their house, asking them questions about me. Sometimes he’d be out in front of my house, measuring my grass. I am not kidding about that. He would actually measure grass with a little tape measure. I just thought he was a crazy old pervert. I know all this sounds crazy, but I think he used to come in here and take things. Pictures would be missing and . . . well, so would my underwear. It used to drive me crazy. I never could understand where my panties had disappeared to. It doesn’t mean he did it, but I’ve never had things disappear like that. Not ever. One night, my dog—he was an old, blind racing greyhound I’d adopted—disappeared. I’d put him out in the backyard on the chain, and the next thing in knew he was gone. The only way that dog could have gotten loose is if somebody unclipped him from that chain.”
On another occasion, Comer received a phone call at work from a neighbor, informing her that some “old guy in a brown uniform, who claimed to be a police officer” was looking for her. She rushed home on her lunch break and a few minutes later watched as Rader thrust his ugly head in through her open kitchen window.
“You fucked up, buddy,” she yelled, picking up the phone and dialing 911. But the Park City police officer who arrived at her house a few minutes later told her that Rader was just performing his duties and that she really needed to chill out.
20
Landwehr had gone downstairs to snag a Mountain Dew, smoke a cigarette, and make a couple of calls. The guy needed to take some time off, I thought. Reminded me of me, back before I crashed and burned, then spent a week in a coma.
I turned on my laptop, clicked my mouse a couple of times, and began wading back through Landwehr’s disc, looking for something I might have missed, something to help explain when the murderous short circuit inside Rader’s brain occurred. Just as I stumbled on several pictures of Rader in a feminine mask, buried up to his neck in a grave, Landwehr marched back into my room and took a seat in the chair by the window.
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