Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (16 page)

On the last day of 1987, a woman named Mary Fager, who had been out of town visiting relatives, arrived home at 7015 East Fourteenth Street and discovered her husband and daughters were dead.

Sherri, sixteen, had been drowned in the hot tub. Kelli, nine, was strangled hours later and dumped in the tub with her sister. Their father, Phillip, had been shot in the back.

Landwehr was assigned to assist the lead detective, Jim Bishop. The girls’ bodies had soaked for more than a day. When Landwehr got home and undressed after working the scene, the odor of boiled flesh was clinging to his clothes. For the rest of his life, the warm-water-and-chlorine smell of a hot tub would remind him of the Fager house.

In Stuart, Florida, a few days later, police tracked down William T. Butterworth, the thirty-three-year-old contractor who had just finished building the sunroom that housed the hot tub.

The cops were sure Bill Butterworth was the killer. He had driven away from the Fager home in the family’s car, stopped at the Towne East shopping center to buy new clothes, then headed to Florida. Butterworth told police he was so traumatized when he found the bodies that he fled with a case of amnesia. They did not believe him.

The evidence he helped gather against Butterworth seemed to Landwehr like a slam dunk.

A few days after her husband and daughters were murdered, the widow Mary Fager opened her mail and read the first line of a rambling, taunting poem from an anonymous sender:

A ANOTHER ONE PROWLS THE DEEP ABYSS OF LEWD THOUGHTS AND DEEDS

The message came with a drawing of a young girl, hands bound behind her, lying beside a tub, a look of fear on her face. In the lower right corner of the drawing was a symbol. Police noted that it looked similar to the symbol BTK signed to his fantasized drawing of Anna Williams: a letter B turned on its side. This time, however, the legs of the K formed a frown.

The writer did not claim he had killed the Fagers. Instead he wrote in admiration of the murderer:

OH GOD HE PUT KELLI AND SHERRI IN THETUB SUN AND BODY DREWING WITH SWEAT _WATER, FEMININE NAVETTE

THE BUILDER WILL CHRISTEN THE TUB WITH VIRIN MAIDS…

Landwehr saw that the sketch, unlike BTK’s drawing of Nancy Fox, was inaccurate�drawn by someone who had not been at the murder scene.

No one had heard from BTK since the letter to the burglary victim Anna Williams in 1979, more than eight years before. BTK had killed no one, as far as they knew, since Nancy Fox in 1977.

In fact, the cops were not sure BTK had sent this letter. But Butterworth’s attorney, Richard Ney, filed motions arguing that the Fager killings looked similar to the seven BTK murders from the 1970s. Perhaps BTK had killed the Fagers, Ney said.

A judge ruled that Ney could not bring up the letter during the trial because he could not prove a link to the older killings. Landwehr was relieved. But the newspaper and TV stations heavily covered the case and the BTK connection before the trial. So even though BTK wasn’t mentioned during the trial, he was on everybody’s mind�including jurors’.

The jury found Butterworth not guilty, but the police considered the case closed.

In this same year, 1988, Netta Sauer rode her ambulance to a home where someone had been bitten by a dog. There was a cop working the case who made her laugh.

Netta had been a new paramedic on the day she had tried to save Vicki Wegerle two years before. She was more experienced now and had seen several more murder scenes.

At the dog bite house, the young cop began to tease her in a friendly, engaging way. She teased back. His name was Kelly Otis.

They met several times more, both of them working accidents or crime scenes. Over time, this led to a breakfast meeting, then dates, then talk of marriage. Netta thought guys with a keen wit were highly intelligent, and Otis was unusually witty. She saw character under the teasing. He had grown up the son of a hardworking single mother. Like Netta, he was an adrenaline junkie: it was why he’d become a cop.

She did not tell him about that day at Vicki Wegerle’s house. The Wegerle murder was a cold case, interesting only to detectives, and Otis had no interest in becoming a detective. He loved street patrol.

Netta met Otis’s closest friend, a patrol officer with an impassive face, big shoulders, and a brusque manner. Dana Gouge’s father had been in the military. His mother was Japanese and owned a fabric store in the little town of Tonganoxie, Kansas. Gouge had a reserved manner, but Netta saw it was a mask: Gouge was warmhearted, shy�and one of the few people funny enough to put Otis on the floor, shaking with laughter.

The Butterworth verdict had political consequences.

LaMunyon blamed District Attorney Clark Owens for assigning the case to two prosecutors LaMunyon claimed were inexperienced. He wasn’t the only person who was unhappy. Weeks later, Nola Tedesco Foulston, the tough young lawyer who long ago had checked her phone and accepted escorts to her car out of fear of BTK, announced she would run against Owens in the November elections. She declared the Butterworth verdict a travesty, vowed to assign herself some homicide cases, and promised that her assistants would go into trials well trained and prepared. Owens was well known in Wichita. Foulston was known hardly at all. But Foulston beat him 82,969 votes to 55,822.

Foulston wanted a new start for the district attorney’s office and asked everyone in it to reapply for their jobs if they wanted to stay on. When she made her selections, several people involved with the Butterworth case were not rehired.

Landwehr vented his bitterness over the Butterworth verdict in bars. Sometimes he got drunk at home, as well, and tried to humor himself out of bad moods by knocking golf balls out the balcony door of his third-story apartment. Sometimes he would shift his stance a bit and splash a few balls into the apartment complex swimming pool. Then he’d laugh his ass off.

LaMunyon heard rumors that Landwehr wanted to resign over the verdict. The chief warned commanders: “No paperwork involving the job of Kenny Landwehr had better cross my desk. If such paperwork comes, I’ll dispose of it.”

Landwehr later denied that he tried to quit. If the chief heard that, it was an “urban myth.” The Butterworth verdict didn’t bother him that much, he said.

But that was a myth too.

24

1988 to 1990

The Rescuer

By now people like Cindy Hughes had forgotten BTK, or no longer worried. Cindy had other problems: she was a divorcée with a daughter and an extended family with a penchant for trouble. Her brother had just made Sedgwick County’s Most Wanted Criminals list.

She had a female friend who one night told her about a Wichita cop who supposedly had quite a wild streak.

“He hangs out at Players,” Cindy’s friend said. “Let’s go see if we can find him.”

“Are you dating this guy?” Cindy asked.

“No,” her friend said. “But I really want to.”

By the late 1980s, the job Landwehr had worked so hard to get proved to be a curse as well as a blessing.

Cindy had a wild streak of her own. She thought watching her friend chase after unrequited love with a cop in a bar would be a fun way to spend an evening.

At Players, her friend pointed out the cop, who was sitting unsteadily on a bar stool. Cindy saw thick dark hair, a tanned face, a lit cigarette in his hand. He was drunk, and he was yelling at a woman beside him who sat unperturbed, sipping a drink. The cop was hollering about injustice and some guy named Butterworth.

He went on yelling until he finally fell off the bar stool with a thud. The woman beside him acted cool, as though this wasn’t the first time. Cindy found this entertaining.

She did not talk to him much that night. But on subsequent nights, when her infatuated friend took her along, Cindy began to study Kenny Landwehr.

He appeared to be the Party Guy From Hell. Landwehr drank at west-side bars: Players at 21st and West, or Barney’s at Ninth and West. He walked in every night wearing a $300 black leather bomber jacket given to him by a former girlfriend. He would order a drink, tell a funny story, order another drink, tell another story. He bought drinks for Cindy, for his friends, for her friends. He would listen intently to the stories of others. Once in a while, somebody would push his buttons and mention Butterworth and he would yell about injustice. After Cindy heard the full story, she understood why.

At first she thought Landwehr was merely one of those quick-witted people who like to tell tall tales in bars but had little else going for them. He seemed like such a bad boy, chain-smoking, getting hammered, telling off-color stories. But she soon saw deeper shades to his character. He wasn’t like other guys. Landwehr was curious, likable, and empathetic. He had a habit of leaning forward and listening more carefully than other men.

He said outrageous things as a defensive move�he’d been hurt by a few girlfriends, and wanted to keep people at arm’s length. But this strategy didn’t work with Cindy, who talked as outrageously as Landwehr.

“Why do you have a vanity plate on your car that says ‘Skippy’?” Landwehr asked one night, whirling on Cindy with a grin.

“Because I’m proud of what I do for my softball team,” Cindy replied. “It means I skip around the bases.”

“Bullshit,” Landwehr said. “It means you’re like Skippy peanut butter�you spread easy.”

“You’re a witty little shit,” she said.

“Where did you go to high school?” he asked.

“South High,” she said.

“Really? We used to call South High girls the South High Sluts.”

“And we used to call your bunch the Bishop Carroll Fucks,” she shot back.

She liked this. She had little use for people who tiptoed in conversation, and though Landwehr could be unusually cagey around strangers, he never tiptoed around friends. And after she became friends with him, she decided that for all his swearing and teasing, he was nevertheless “the most gentlemanly gentleman I ever met.” He was curious about her work with special-ed kids for the school district. She helped teach the most damaged of children the most basic of skills; she changed diapers on these children. Her dedication to them touched him.

She learned that he went to dinner at his parents’ house every Sunday and had done so all his life. He had friends from boyhood who were intensely loyal to him. Other cops openly admired him. Paul Dotson said he was brilliant, and meant it.

There were former girlfriends still around. She noticed they seemed like herself: nice, but wounded�recovering, like her, from a busted marriage, or abuse, or a bad family. Landwehr seemed drawn to such women. A rescue compulsion, Cindy decided.

Eventually Cindy met his mother, Irene, and from her and Landwehr heard some of the family’s favorite Kenny stories: Irene told how Kenny used to be an altar boy, and at Christ the King School liked to drop books on the floor to startle the class. He pulled girls’ pigtails, then batted his eyes at nuns to avoid getting whacked with a yardstick. Landwehr himself took pride in telling a story about an elderly nun, Sister Wilfreda Stump, who suffered from narcolepsy�she dropped off to sleep, sometimes in mid-sentence. One day in seventh grade, Sister Wilfreda was talking to Landwehr’s best friend, Bobby Higgins. She was talking and pointing at Higgins when she suddenly fell asleep with her finger still pointing. “Quick,” Landwehr said to Higgins. “Switch seats with me.” Moments later, Sister Wilfreda woke up to find herself pointing at Landwehr. She leaped up, grabbed a yardstick, and chased Landwehr, who ran away cackling.

Years later, after high school, Landwehr was knocked senseless when he collided with a teammate during a softball game. He seemed fine when he got up, but after the game ended he began to repeatedly ask, “What inning is it?” Landwehr regained consciousness the next day in a hospital, surrounded by family and friends. When he saw where he was, his first thought was that he had wrecked his car.

“What day is it?” the nurse asked.

“Monday,” Landwehr said.

“No, it’s Friday.”

“What?” Landwehr said. “Damn. It’s Friday, and I’m not out drinkin’?”

Landwehr’s friends did not want to see Irene Landwehr’s reaction to that. They quickly slunk out the door.

When LaMunyon retired in 1988 he regarded the BTK case as his worst disappointment in his twelve years as chief.

BTK had outlasted entire cop careers. People who had been boys when the Oteros died were now veteran officers. Landwehr had gone from being a kid to a clothing salesman, a rookie patrolman, a Ghostbuster chasing BTK for three years, and now one of the detectives working the city’s twenty-five to thirty homicides a year.

Now he took another job. The department promoted him to lieutenant and assistant commander of the crime lab. In the Ghostbusters he had already become well versed in elements of forensic science such as blood chemistry, fiber evidence, and fingernail scrapings. As the lab lieutenant, he worked hard to increase his knowledge. People who saw him in the new job realized he seemed gifted at applying science to criminal cases.