Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (15 page)

He tried to use his strangling rig, but could not get a grip on it after he got it around her throat. He saw a pair of panty hose nearby. That worked, once he looped it around her neck.

He was disappointed, though. He had wanted to spend time with her, but there was no time to masturbate.

He got his Polaroid camera, arranged her to his liking, pulled her top up to partially expose her breasts, and took a photo. Twice more he tugged on her clothing and squeezed the shutter. Then he packed his things, got into her Monte Carlo, and drove away.

She died in the space between the bed and television cabinet. Anyone looking through the doorway would not be able to see her.

Rader used panty hose from Vicki Wegerle’s dresser drawer to strangle her.

22

September 1986

Prime Suspect

Bill Wegerle went home early for lunch as planned. At Thirteenth and West Street a Monte Carlo passed him going the other way. Bill thought it was his wife’s car until he saw a tall man at the wheel.

When he got home, the Monte Carlo was gone, and so was Vicki. That upset him�their son was alone. Bill could not imagine why Vicki would drive off and leave a two-year-old; maybe she had made a flying trip to a store. Bill held Brandon and waited, made a sandwich and ate it, walked around.

Time passed; he grew more puzzled. He needed to go back to work. He walked through the house again. Forty-five minutes passed before he found her.

Moments later, a 911 dispatcher heard anguish in his voice. “I think someone has killed my wife,” he said. The dispatcher heard him moan. “Vicki, Vicki, Vicki, Vicki, Vicki, oh God, oh no no no no.”

Rader had driven the Monte Carlo west, then north about a mile, to Twenty-first Street. In a trash bin outside a Braum’s ice cream store, he dropped the briefcase. In a trash can outside a muffler shop, he dropped the hard hat�after peeling off the Southwestern Bell label. Besides the label, he kept the Polaroids. He drove back to the woman’s street, parked the Monte Carlo next to a meat market, and walked to his van, which was parked across from her house.

He heard sirens.

Two firefighters, Ronald Evans and Lt. Marc Haynes, found Bill Wegerle punching the wall of his porch. “If I could’ve been here five minutes earlier, I could’ve done something,” he told them.

They found his wife in the bedroom. There was a pocketknife beside her head. Bill told them later that he had used it to cut the leather shoelaces and the nylon stocking encircling her throat. There was no room to work, so they carried her into the dining room.

An ambulance arrived. A twenty-eight-year-old paramedic, Netta Sauer, saw Bill in the front yard, talking to a cop and holding a little boy. The child looked calm.

In the dining room, Netta found the firefighters starting CPR, even though Vicki looked dead. Her face was mottled, and the cause was obvious from the ligature mark around her throat. Her hands were tied behind her back; the leather had dug deep into her skin. There were also laces around her ankles. Netta, glancing around, saw toys scattered. The killer had done it in front of the boy.
Had he cried? Had the killer hurt him?

Netta and other paramedics worked on Vicki for ten minutes, then put her in the ambulance. A television crew filmed them.

As Netta drove Vicki away, she saw the husband still standing in the yard holding his son, talking to police.

At Riverside Hospital’s emergency room, doctors pronounced Vicki dead. Netta heard someone say that the cops thought the husband might have done it.

Detectives probing the death of a wife at home usually suspect the husband first. It’s standard procedure: quickly rule him out as a suspect, or establish guilt. So detectives asked Bill pointed questions: What time did you say you saw the Monte Carlo? How long did you sit in your house before you realized your wife was in the bedroom? Forty-five minutes? Why so long?

Bill did not show a lot of emotion. His friends knew this was because he was reserved; but to these cops, in these circumstances, Bill came off as coldhearted.

The detectives were trying to move fast. The first few hours in a homicide investigation are crucial. Detectives increase the chances of catching the killer if they press hard from the first hour, stay up most of the first night following leads, questioning witnesses. The more hours go by, the more the trail cools.

They took Bill downtown and grilled him: Were you having an affair? Was she having an affair? What did you argue about? They were not satisfied with Bill’s account of what streets he had driven to go home and where he had seen his wife’s Monte Carlo as it passed him going the other way. And he sat in the house for forty-five minutes before he found her? What gives?

The detectives suggested a lie detector test.

Bill said yes. He was innocent, after all.

The doctor who performed the autopsy saw that the killer had strangled Vicki so hard that there was internal bleeding in her throat. She had been beaten�there were scrapes on her right ear, cheek, and jawline. He found a gouge on her left hand and a knuckle that had swollen just before she died. That told him she had fought.

He found a bit of skin under one fingernail. She had nicked her attacker.

The doctor looked for evidence of sexual assault; there was none. He took a swab from her vagina and preserved it, in case there was male fluid in the sample.

Lie detectors record heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. The theory is that a guilty person registers physical signs when lying. But cops use lie detectors only as a supplemental tool. Most courts consider them unreliable.

In years to come, Wichita detectives would conclude that a lie detector test should never be given to a spouse or close family member immediately after a murder. If a husband has just lost his wife, his emotions might falsely register as guilt. But that conclusion was in the future. On the day of Vicki’s death, detectives gave Bill two polygraph tests�and he failed both.

The cops really got tough after that. Their voices rose. They were questioning Bill on the sixth floor of city hall, and had let Bill’s family sit close by. Bill’s relatives overheard some of the questions. And they got mad.

Bill told his interrogators he had to go to the restroom. He stepped out where his family could see him. One of them yelled: Stop answering questions and get a lawyer.

Bill told detectives he was done with them.

Under the law, it was his right.

They let him go.

Police never charged Bill Wegerle with his wife’s murder, but there were detectives who said privately for the next two decades that Bill probably killed her. That rumor spread through town. Schoolkids on playgrounds sometimes told the Wegerle kids that their dad had killed their mom.

Bill never publicly complained, but he refused to talk to the cops further.

That crippled the investigation. An innocent husband is the investigator’s best source because he holds the key to countless leads: he knows the names of his wife’s family and friends, the stores where she shopped, the kid she hired to mow the lawn.

Bill had loved his wife�he and Vicki had made love the night before she died. But Bill’s cooperation disappeared after he walked out.

Hours after Vicki died, Ghostbuster investigator Paul Holmes called Landwehr and said a car belonging to a homicide victim had been found within walking distance of his apartment. Landwehr stepped out on his balcony and saw a gold Monte Carlo parked across the street.

Three days after Vicki died, Landwehr and Holmes were sent to the Wegerle house. And that put them in an awkward position.

They studied the scene, the bindings, the reports. Their role was limited to a quick look. But that look convinced them Bill was innocent.

Landwehr and Holmes shared what they had seen with Paul Dotson, another Ghostbuster. He reached the same conclusion: this was probably not Bill. It might even be BTK. That ran counter to what the detectives working the Wegerle case thought. Dotson’s brother, John Dotson, was the captain supervising the homicide section. Landwehr and Holmes decided not to press their conclusions on the other detectives. Landwehr did not want to contradict the assigned detectives based on his quick look at incomplete evidence.

But Bill’s two-year-old son had told police, “Man hurt Mommy.” No child, in Landwehr’s opinion, would say “Man hurt Mommy” if he had seen his father do it.

Landwehr also thought it unlikely that Bill would strangle Vicki in front of Brandon. Bill would know that Brandon could speak a few words and might tell what he saw.

The most convincing evidence of Bill’s innocence, Landwehr thought, was that the killer had stolen Vicki’s driver’s license, leaving behind her wallet, money, and credit cards.

That’s not a husband killing a wife, Landwehr thought. It’s a sex pervert stealing a trophy.

Landwehr felt sorry for Bill, felt bad that his wife was murdered and that some cops thought he had killed her. But Landwehr also thought Bill should have stayed in the interview room, even after the cops badgered him. “If it was my own wife murdered,” Landwehr said much later, “those cops would have had to fucking
throw
me out of the room to make me quit talking to them. I would have never shut up, I would have just kept throwing ideas at them until they figured out who did it.”

But that is not how it worked out.

23

1987 to 1988

Failures and Friendships

Had the city known that BTK had killed again, the Ghostbusters would have stayed together. But by the time Vicki Wegerle was killed, LaMunyon had begun to scale back.

By the next year, 1987, most of the Ghostbusters had been reassigned; only Landwehr remained.

He packed the files in a cabinet and in thirty-seven boxes; the boxes ended up in the basement of city hall.

LaMunyon let the
Wichita Eagle
interview the Ghostbusters. Bill Hirschman spent hours tape-recording interviews with Landwehr, Capt. Al Stewart, and others. His transcripts revealed frustration. Stewart broke down and cried when he talked about Josie Otero; he thought he had failed her.

“You feel the frustration of the investigators before you just by reading their reports,” Landwehr told Hirschman. “It’s always gonna be there: Why can’t we find him?”

They had tried everything they could think of: Landwehr had been assigned, for example, to test the theory that BTK was dead. To do this, he had taken a list of every white male who had died in Wichita since 1980 and had done background checks on them. It was boring work. The Ghostbusters task force spent thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, and they imposed terrific strains on themselves and their families.

Paul Dotson never shook his disappointment. “When I think of the Ghostbusters all I can think of is what a failure it was, and what I didn’t do and how I could have done more if only I’d been smarter.”

Was it worth it? Hirschman had asked.

Probably yes, Landwehr told him. If BTK ever resurfaced, Landwehr would know a lot about him. He knew an important BTK flaw�arrogance. That might prove useful. The Ghostbusters had eliminated hundreds of potential suspects, so if BTK showed up again, the cops would not be starting from scratch.

What keeps you going on this case? Hirschman asked.

“I still believe that he can be caught,” Landwehr said. “I still believe that he’s out there.” He speculated that BTK might be in prison for a minor crime, and if so, “he will probably get out sooner or later, and I believe that if he does get out that he will not stop.”

Landwehr was just as resolved in private. Dotson, sharing disappointment over their failure with Landwehr, was surprised by what his friend said in reply.

“Don’t worry about it,” Landwehr said in a grim tone.

“But why?”

“Because we still might get him.” Landwehr pointed out that they now had a plan that they had polished in the days when they got nowhere: if BTK ever resurfaced, they would deliberately use the news media to play to his ego and keep him sending messages until he tripped himself up. Landwehr also reminded Dotson that the study of human DNA was still developing. BTK had left them DNA at three of his murders.

But with all Landwehr’s upbeat talk about finding BTK, Dotson could see that the investigation had taken a toll. Self-doubt nagged at Landwehr; Dotson could see strain and fatigue in his friend’s face. They tried to joke each other out of these moods. But at bedtime, Landwehr often found himself unable to sleep. He was drinking more.

Just before the end of 1987, the Wichita Police Department, which had promoted him to detective the year before, assigned Landwehr to the homicide unit, a job he had sought for nine years.

The Ghostbusters never truly disbanded. LaMunyon said they would never disband unless they proved that they had run down every lead. So even as Landwehr began to investigate other cases, he thought about BTK every day.