Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (46 page)

“I helped arrest him that day,” he said. “And if you ask me, he looked pretty damned embarrassed about it.”

Moon was ready to talk some more, but the lawyers looked down at the floor.

Few people knew the full story of what Landwehr and his detectives had done, or how cleverly he had played Rader. After the arrest, Landwehr told us the strategy that caught Rader�playing to his ego and enticing him to communicate until he made a mistake�was suggested by the FBI’s Bob Morton.

But Holmes and Dotson, Landwehr’s fellow Ghostbusters, scoffed at this, pointing out that the Ghostbusters had decided as early as 1985 to do that very thing, should BTK resurface. Landwehr and Dotson had talked endlessly and with some anguish about BTK in the decades after the Ghostbusters broke up. Landwehr had rehearsed what he would do: use the media, play to his ego, trip him up.

Yes, FBI behavioral specialists were involved, Holmes said. “The FBI did help shape it with us. But we came up with the idea long ago. And Kenny carried it out.”

But why would Landwehr say, as he did after the arrest, that the strategy was the FBI’s idea?

“Because Kenny’s not stupid,” Holmes said. “What’s he gonna do? Invite the FBI into his case, then listen to their ideas, and then call a press conference after the capture and take full personal credit for the strategy and the glory? He’s too smart for that. He’s still working homicide cases, he still needs the FBI, and they really did help shape the strategy. But that’s typical Kenny, to give them all the credit. He doesn’t give a damn about taking credit.”

O’Connor pointed out several acts that combined wisdom with restraint, including the way Landwehr coolly took that call from Snyder, telling him they’d found the black Jeep Cherokee at the home of BTK. Landwehr had decided immediately to pull back the detectives and risk the long, slow but strategic route to Rader’s arrest. Landwehr had, almost in the next breath, begun to propose how to verify Rader’s DNA signature by obtaining the Pap smear DNA of his daughter.

O’Connor thought one of the most ingenious�and courageous�things Landwehr did took place many years before BTK resurfaced. “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when DNA testing became more of a scientific possibility, Landwehr refused the temptation to test the DNA material in the BTK case. Had he tested it then, he would have used up the samples that they had.” They wouldn’t have yielded nearly the amount of genetic information they did once the tests became more sophisticated.

And they wouldn’t have been nearly as useful in eliminating suspects and proving Rader was BTK.

“It was a really smart move,” O’Connor said. “And it was typical of Landwehr; he was playing a long game with BTK long before BTK came back.”

The arrest was such a relief to Landwehr that he was willing to listen to any amount of criticism over why it took so long, knowing that it no longer mattered.

His detectives knew�and did not care�that some people would refuse to accept the best explanation: when people kill randomly, they often get away with it. That’s why Ted Bundy got away with perhaps thirty-six or more murders before they caught him. Jeffrey Dahmer nearly got away with seventeen. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, killed fourteen. Wayne Williams in Atlanta may have killed as many as twenty-four. John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three.

Most murders occur for explainable reasons�money, power, revenge, jealousy. Most killers kill someone they know. The cops can usually connect the dots and find the killer.

Detective Otis told us he would have bet his job that once BTK’s identity was known, he’d find a connection among the victims�however small. But there was none.

And though Rader made mistakes, he was careful to never leave fingerprints, to always wear gloves, and wipe down vehicles. Above all, he kept his mouth shut. The DNA technology that finally nailed the case�it did not exist when BTK was killing people and leaving his semen at murder scenes. When the CSI guys preserved the fluid they found in the Oteros’ basement, they couldn’t foresee how it would be used thirty years later. And even when genetic science had caught up to the evidence, it didn’t directly lead to his capture.

But how do you explain that to critics? How do you convince people of this when week after week they watch fictional cops use fictionalized science to get instantaneous results on television?

Landwehr decided soon after Rader’s arrest to avoid being apologetic or thin-skinned.

“What happened, happened,” he said. “The fact is, we never would have caught him had he never resurfaced. He’d gotten away with it; he’d gotten away with murder.

“We had put together, with the help of the best FBI experts, all those lists with thousands of names of potential suspects,” Landwehr said, “and he wasn’t on most of them.” Like tens of thousands of other Wichitans, Rader had worked for Coleman for a short time; it was a coincidence that Julie Otero and the Brights also had worked there later. He was in the air force during the Vietnam era but didn’t cross paths with Joe Otero. He was a Wichita State student when its enrollment was about fourteen thousand.

“When you pick out a hunting area as he did, and never leave any evidence behind, there’s a good chance you’re going to get away with it,” Landwehr said. “He left no witnesses, or the witnesses he left, all they could really tell us was that BTK was ‘a white male.’”

Once the cops caught Rader and saw example after example of how stupid he was, it embarrassed them.

Landwehr asked Rader about the strange string of characters at the top of his letter to the
Eagle
in March 2004�the Wegerle message. Rader had stenciled
GBSOAP7-TNLTRDEITBSFAV14
.

Rader looked at Landwehr as though the commander of the BTK task force were the stupidest man on earth. It’s a code! Rader said. A German fractional code he had learned in the air force! Rader said this as though explaining that the sun rose in the east.

What did the code mean? Landwehr asked. He told Rader the FBI cryptologists could not figure it out.

It meant “Let Beattie know for his book,” Rader said. Hurst Laviana had quoted the lawyer in his January 2004 BTK story. Rader was clearly baffled at how the cops could have missed the meaning of that coded message.

But when Landwehr asked Rader to re-create how he had formulated the message into code, Rader tried�and could not do it. He could not make any more sense out of the stenciling than the cops could.

The year 2005 was a good one for Landwehr. On April 9, only forty-three days after the biggest arrest of his career, he pulled a four-iron out of his golf bag on the 585-yard thirteenth hole of the Tex Consolver golf course in west Wichita. Landwehr scored a double eagle�two shots on a par five. His buddies Bob Ebenkamp, Mike Razook, and Steve Schulte looked on and cheered. In some ways, Landwehr would cherish that far more than the “Hello, Mr. Landwehr” moment.

Chief Norman Williams named Landwehr Wichita’s police officer of the year for 2005. At one of the official gatherings to celebrate this, Landwehr stood patiently as a city staffer pinned a flower to his lapel. Then he leaned against a wall to wait for the ceremony, looking tired and uncomfortable.

“Nice flower,” someone said.

“Yeah,” Landwehr deadpanned. “But I wonder, does wearing it on the left lapel somehow signify that I’m gay?”

When the ceremony began, as Landwehr stepped up to speak, someone in the small room took his picture with one of those point-and-shoot cameras. The rasping rewind noise was so loud that several heads turned to look at the embarrassed photographer, who was trying to look small in her chair.

It was Irene Landwehr, eighty-five years old, sitting with Kenny’s wife and son.

He was now semifamous, if only briefly, and was appearing, with his detectives, in nationally televised cable news documentaries. Women fawned over him at speaking engagements; he would look at the floor in embarrassment, leaving them talking to the top of his graying head.

There would be a made-for-television movie, in which Gregg Henry played Rader, and Robert Forster, looking like Landwehr, played a composite cop with a different name. CBS released it in October 2005 after crash-producing it in six months. People in Wichita made fun of the highly fictionalized account in part because the pseudo-Landwehr had the invaluable help of an attractive female detective, played by Michael Michele, even though the primary detectives on the BTK task force were guys who looked like linebackers gone to seed.

“That’s all I need,” Landwehr said when Tim Potter told him about the fictional female. “Cindy will kick my ass.”

He looked forward to the time when the people from the news networks finally stopped shining lights on him and clipping tiny microphones to his shirt. To the time when he could relax and have a smoke and play golf and sleep at night without having to hunt BTK in his dreams.

At El Dorado Correctional Facility, Rader sits in his eight-by-ten cell, sometimes in boxer shorts with his hairy back exposed. Most of the time he wears a two-piece uniform�chocolate-brown scrubs�with a white T-shirt and blue slip-on shoes.

His cell is furnished with a metal desk, a metal stool bolted to the floor, a combination toilet-sink-water fountain, and a concrete bed covered with a two-inch slab of foam.

In the mornings he splashes water on himself from the metal sink. He gets to take a shower nearly every other day.

He spends a lot of time talking on the phone in his cell, mostly to Kris Casarona, the Topeka woman who befriended him in jail.

Rader never leaves his cell without wearing restraints. Guards pass his food trays through a hinged slot called a “bean hole.” Other inmates call him “child molester.” Landwehr thinks Rader probably would not survive if he were ever put into the general prison population; someone would kill him.

Rader’s official prison mug shot at El Dorado Correctional Facility.

Although Rader can leave his cell an hour a day for a walk in one of the fenced enclosures in the yard, he often declines to go. The enclosures resemble dog runs, with fencing overhead. Each enclosure has a chin-up bar. There are about twenty such pens in the yard. Each pen is limited to one prisoner at a time, but the inmates can yell at each other from pen to pen. It gets loud in the yard.

His neighbors include the Carr brothers, who killed those four people in the snow.

Inmates sometimes communicate by sending things from cell to cell using dental floss. They call it fishing. They shove notes, called “kites,” under doors. Some have tried to get autographs from Rader, hoping to sell them. He got in trouble not long after his arrival for trying to smuggle a letter out by tucking it into an envelope addressed to someone else�but all his mail is screened, so it didn’t work. Since then, his good behavior has earned him the right to purchase pencils, paper, and “handicrafts” at the commissary; watch television; and listen to the radio. The prosecutors�as well as many other Wichitans�were outraged when the
Eagle
broke the story about Rader’s living conditions and perks. District Attorney Foulston had argued that Rader could look at just about anything and find it sexually stimulating, and Judge Waller had recommended to prison officials that Rader not be given access to anything that could fuel his violent sexual fantasies. But the warden determined that Rader would be treated much like other inmates in his classification; he can earn rewards and lose privileges based on his behavior in prison.

Rader’s view consists of a vertical slit window at the back of his cell. From there he can see food service workers and corrections officers coming and going at shift changes.

Rader’s phone conversations with Casarona often start with him voicing hope that his ex-wife and children will communicate.

Someday they will, Casarona tells him.

I’m never going to be able to hold Paula again, he tells her.

To his surprise, Landwehr missed the chase.

“As with a car chase, your adrenaline is pumping, and when it’s over�well, it didn’t feel good when it was going on�but for eleven months, we were challenged like no other. We were never bored. Not that going back to the regular stuff is all that boring, but…I had to adjust to it after it ended.

“But over time, I realized something: there’s a lot of stuff that can happen, and maybe they won’t be as famous as this one. But there are still a lot of bad people out there; you are still gonna see people doing harm to kids out there, and it’s your job to stop them. There are still going to be serial killers out there. And maybe the next one will start tomorrow, and this one, unlike Rader, will be leaving new bodies for us to find. And that will be a lot worse to endure than what we had to go through with Rader.”

Landwehr spent more time with his family after Rader’s arrest. They went to Hawaii for a few days. He took Cindy to Las Vegas to see a singer she’d spent thirty years swooning over: Barry Manilow.

At night, on his back porch, he could look at the moon and the stars moving slowly over the tops of tall trees. The crickets sang, and he listened.