Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (22 page)

Beattie had interviewed Manson to put together a mock trial for his college students. At Newman University in Wichita, Beattie taught sophomores about juries; citizens should know about jury duty before they perform it, he said.

He wanted to do similar interviews involving other cases. The Oklahoma City bombing. Maybe BTK. When he had mentioned BTK to his sophomores, Beattie said, most of them gave him a blank look.

It was ancient history, though they’d grown up in Wichita.

33

2000

The Joy of Work, Part 1

By February 2000, Wichita’s murder rate had dropped. Community policing, a crackdown on local gangs, and the booming economy all played a role. Landwehr told his detectives: “Let’s see if we can go back and pop some bad boys in the cold cases.”

Otis and Gouge, who had been partners for two years, picked a file at random, a thick document in a three-ring binder labeled “Vicki Wegerle.” Landwehr didn’t tell them much about the case. He didn’t want them working with preconceived notions. They knew that detectives at the time had thought Vicki’s husband killed her.

Otis and Gouge read the file at work and at home. One night Otis told his wife what he was studying. Netta, surprised, told him that as a paramedic she had tried to save Vicki’s life. She told him how sad it was to see Bill Wegerle holding his little boy.

Otis noticed right away that the killer had stolen Vicki’s driver’s license. From that he reached the same conclusion Landwehr had years before: This was a serial killer taking a trophy.

“What do you think?” Otis asked Gouge.

“I don’t think Bill Wegerle killed his wife,” Gouge said.

“I don’t think he killed her, either,” Otis said.

In years to come, Paul Dotson would say that Landwehr made a crucial decision about BTK in the late 1980s. He refused year after year to test the DNA preserved from the semen found at the Otero and Fox crime scenes.

DNA testing was helping solve high-profile cases around the nation. The temptation to test the BTK samples was strong. But a test, Landwehr told Dotson, would use up the samples they had, and would show only what BTK’s DNA signature looked like. It would not tell who BTK was.

“I want to be patient,” Landwehr told Dotson. “DNA technology is like computer technology. It gets a lot better every year. The longer we hold off, the more we’re gonna learn when we test it.”

Examining the evidence in the Vicki Wegerle case, Otis and Gouge found the autopsy inventory included bits of skin found under one of her fingernails. Perhaps DNA analysis of it would lead to a suspect. And if the killer wore no gloves, pulling on the leather laces and nylons as he tied and strangled Vicki would have scraped skin cells off his hands. They might find the killer’s DNA there as well. They decided to also test the covers from Bill and Vicki’s bed. The killer had fought with her and might have sexually abused her there, leaving DNA.

They also sent the lab a blood sample taken from Vicki’s body during the autopsy and a bag of trace material vacuumed from the floor of Vicki’s bedroom the day she was killed.

They needed to talk to Bill Wegerle to learn everything he knew about Vicki, especially the names of men she knew. They could swab those men for DNA and see if it matched the fingernail sample.

They also needed a sample of Bill’s DNA, for comparison.

But Otis realized that Bill might not talk. The transcript of Bill’s interrogation showed Otis that the cops had given Bill a hard time. Otis concluded that if it had been him, he would have walked out on the cops too.

Otis approached Bill indirectly, through one of Bill’s relatives who had a job at the Sedgwick County Courthouse.

“We’re taking another look at Vicki’s death,” Otis told her. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ve looked at the evidence, and I’m leaning toward the idea that Bill didn’t do it. We might be able to prove it.” He explained that he was requesting Bill’s cooperation and a DNA swab.

Otis waited a month.

Through the relative, Bill said no.

On February 14, only one week after Otis and Gouge had submitted Wegerle evidence for DNA analysis, they got some lab results in writing.

There was no result yet on the full DNA profile. That would take time�with DNA analysis, cold cases took a backseat to new cases.

But the lab had determined, nearly fourteen years after her death, that the skin found under Vicki’s fingernail contained human male DNA.

By early December 2000 the homicide team had worked only twenty-three new homicides for the year, less than half the number they worked in the record year of 1993. Landwehr had kept his team working on cold cases, including Wegerle.

But on December 7, all spare time came to an end.

Four bodies were found in a house at 1144 North Erie. The dead were Raeshawnda Wheaton, eighteen; Quincy Williams, seventeen; Odessa Laquita Ford, eighteen; and Jermaine Levy, nineteen. Williams and Ford were cousins. Ford was renting the house. Detectives began to compile the names of people who knew these teenagers.

Within hours, detectives had suspects and began to plan arrests.

For a few days, as they worked without sleep, Landwehr and his detectives thought this would be the biggest case they handled all year, one of the biggest since BTK.

One week following the quadruple homicide, Landwehr and his detectives felt numb from fatigue. One of the people they had quickly arrested was Cornelius Oliver, age eighteen. He told the cops that he had gone to the house because he was mad at Wheaton, his girlfriend. But he gave no clear reason why he killed: “I just did it.”

On December 14, Otis and Landwehr worked into the night, Landwehr doing paperwork, Otis investigating what looked like a suspicious death. Landwehr headed home after midnight. Otis determined his case was an overdose, stayed to do paperwork, and drove home about 2:30 AM. It was twenty-five degrees outside, wind-chill fourteen, snow everywhere.

Otis had worked a seventeen-hour day; Landwehr had worked nearly as long and would be in bed by now. Otis pulled into his driveway just as a voice spoke from the police radio he carried.

“Potential homicide,” the dispatcher said. “Multiple victims…Thirty-seventh and Greenwich Road.”

“Jesus,” Otis thought.

He pulled into his garage.

This can’t be,
he thought.
Multiple victims again?
He sat still, his car’s engine still running.

“Caller says four of her friends have been shot in a field,” the dispatcher said.

Otis didn’t believe it.
This has to be some drunk,
he thought.
Somebody’s drunk and calling 911 and messing with us.

Two minutes went by.

The dispatcher came back on with the correct address, the voice urgent:

“Sheriff’s deputy at the scene at Twenty-ninth and Greenwich Road reports four bodies in a field….”

Otis backed out and drove east at high speed.
Holy shit,
he thought.
Unbelievable. A second quadruple homicide in eight days.
He called his boss on his cell phone.

“Landwehr,” Otis said, “we’ve got a quadruple.”

Silence.

“Oh,
fuck you
, Otis,” Landwehr said and hung up. He thought Otis was pulling one of the old jokes.

Otis dialed again.

“What?”

“Landwehr,” Otis said, “we’ve got a quadruple homicide at Twenty-ninth and Greenwich Road.”

“That was
last week,
dumbass!”

“No, no, Landwehr, listen to me,” Otis said. “We’ve got a quadruple homicide,
another
one. At Twenty-ninth and Greenwich.”

Landwehr hung up again.

But this time he got out of bed.

Five people had been shot execution-style in that snowy field at Twenty-ninth and Greenwich. The two men who did it then drove their stolen truck over the bodies. Incredibly, one of the victims got up, bleeding from the wound in her head, and ran naked through the snow to summon help. When Otis met her at Wesley Medical Center, she gave him information that within nine hours led to the capture of two brothers, Reginald and Jonathan Carr.

34

December 2000–2003

The Joy of Work, Part 2

Landwehr looked at the naked bodies in the bloody snow.

Jesus Christ
, he thought.
What’s the world coming to?

After the arrests, Dana Gouge and Rick Craig interviewed the Carr brothers. One of the first things they did was have a nurse take samples of hair, blood, and saliva to learn whether the suspects’ DNA matched DNA found on the victims’ bodies.

At the hospital, Jonathan Carr asked Kelly Otis: “What happened to those boys who shot those kids?” He was asking about the other quadruple homicide case the week before.

“They’ve been charged with capital murder,” Otis replied.

“What’s capital murder?”

“Anyone convicted of capital murder can get the death penalty,” Otis replied.

“How’s that done?”

“Lethal injection.”

Carr sat silent for a long time before he spoke. “Do you feel anything?”

“We’ve never been able to ask anyone,” Otis said.

Tim Relph went to the hospital to ask the surviving victim more questions. Relph regarded her as a hero. In the next few months, as he helped “H.G.” prepare to testify, he came to regard her as a friend.

Relph had seen horrible things as a homicide detective, but what she told him was worse than most things he’d heard about cruelty. The dead were her fiancé, Jason Befort, twenty-six; Brad Heyka, twenty-seven; Aaron Sander, twenty-nine; and his friend Heather Muller, twenty-five. Over the course of three hours, the two intruders had beaten the men, repeatedly raped and sodomized the women, forced them to take money from their ATM accounts, made all five kneel naked in the snow, then shot them.

Relph pondered how cops internalized cruelty in different ways. Gouge appeared to rise above anger as he followed chains of evidence. Otis, in contrast, allowed himself to feel rage, then channeled it. Snyder, helping to solve the murder of a little girl, had sunk into despair, pulling out of it with the help of prayer and talks with his wife. Landwehr’s remedy for a day’s work in homicide had been widely known, though he didn’t often take that remedy anymore.

Relph had felt the anguish too, as he stood at the edge of the bloody soccer field. He thought about his family. Relph had four children, and his wife was pregnant with their fifth.
These killers wiped out four people,
he thought.
Four lives and loves like mine.

Still, he thought he fared better than most of the other homicide investigators, and told them so. His faith had been a blessing for his work. The first time he saw the photographs of Josie Otero in her basement, he studied them with calm detachment. His faith ensured that he could quickly recover his composure, even standing in that field. Like most people, he had questioned God at times. Some cases brought him to tears. But they all served only to confirm his faith, as he saw it: God did not make these five people kneel in the snow. God did not hang Josie Otero or strangle Nancy Fox. God is never one-sided or cruel or blameworthy. There is a devil in the world; evil people do evil things by their choice.

And when they do, it becomes necessary to hunt them down.

Robert Beattie, the Wichita lawyer who had put the Charles Manson case through a mock trial at Newman University, got back in touch with the
Eagle
in the summer of 2001. Beattie was corresponding with the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who was soon to be executed for killing 168 people. Beattie told Roy Wenzl that he was planning mock trials beyond McVeigh. He had corresponded with the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and planned to put him on trial for creating the evil computer HAL, which killed astronauts in
2001: A Space Odyssey.

Beattie said again that he might do something similar with the old BTK cases.

In Park City that October, Mayor Emil Bergquist presented city compliance officer Dennis Rader with an award for ten years of service.

Rader was restless. He and Paula were empty nesters now; their son and daughter were grown and gone.

When Rader patrolled streets, he took solace in an unusual collection. He cut advertisements out of the
Eagle
, the slick ads that pictured women and girls modeling outfits and underwear. He had collected hundreds of these pictures. He pasted many of them on index cards and wrote notations on the back about fantasies he entertained.

Earlier that year a woman named Misty King moved out of Park City because the compliance officer had harassed her for nearly three years.

He would park outside her house and sit, watching. He did this at least twenty times in one six-month stretch. Sometimes she would glance up and see him peeking through her kitchen or living room windows. He handed her one citation after another for code violations.

It hadn’t always been like that.

She first met Rader in 1998, the night she came home from the hospital after her husband was critically injured in a Toughman amateur boxing match.

Rader asked if he could do anything to help. He checked on their well-being even after her husband returned home.

When her marriage ended, Rader continued to offer to keep an eye on things.

Then a boyfriend moved in.

She began getting citations. Rader claimed the grass next to her fence was higher than the grass in her lawn. He issued a citation because her boyfriend was working on a car in the driveway, even though her former father-in-law had done the same thing in the same spot for years without a citation.

There were at least six citations between 1999 and 2001. She called the police several times to complain about Rader.