Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (25 page)

If he could get the newspaper to hold off for two days, he might be able to get the lab people to do a quick turnaround on the DNA found at the Otero, Fox, and Wegerle scenes, then run it through the federal criminal database. Maybe BTK really had been in prison all these years and was now out. CODIS�the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System�contained the genetic profiles of more than 1.5 million offenders. If they got a match, it could be over before the newspaper printed a story.

“Call Hurst,” Landwehr told Otis. “Tell him we need time.”

Otis made a face.

“How much time?”

“Ask him if he can give us a couple of days to get organized.”

Landwehr went back into Cindy’s room. She studied his face.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Just some work.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Come on, Kenny. Two of your guys walk in here, in the surgery room, dressed for work, with papers in their hands.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what is it?”

“We just got a letter they needed me to read.”

“A letter.”

“Yeah.”

She studied his face. “It’s from BTK, isn’t it?” she said.

He sighed. “Yeah. It is.”

“Oh, fuck!” she said.

“Yeah.”

He opened his cell phone, turned away from Cindy, and called the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center. “That cold-case DNA stuff I asked for last year about Otero and Wegerle,” he said. “It’s not a cold case anymore. I need that stuff
now
.”

He paced the room. A nurse spoke to Cindy. “Can I bring you anything?”

“Tequila,” Cindy said. The nurse smiled.

Landwehr paced. Cindy felt sorry for him.

“Guys,” Cindy said to Otis and Gouge. “Get him out of here. Just get him the hell out of here.”

The three men walked out. Landwehr told the detectives to start pulling the BTK files together and to call Laviana. Landwehr would call police commanders and the FBI. He would need manpower. He would stay with Cindy but would start up a task force with his cell phone.

Landwehr turned back to Cindy’s room.

Until this ended, there would be little time for his wife and son.

I’ll be lucky to see James today, or tomorrow, or for weeks to come. I’m going to have to live in my office until we catch this asshole. And we might never catch him.

The nurses took Cindy to surgery moments later.

Landwehr took out his cell phone again.

While we hunt BTK, will BTK hunt us?

He’s seen my picture on television. What if he follows me home? What if he sees James? And Cindy?

What if he kills somebody just to show us he can do it?

Landwehr called his commanders and gave them the news.

When he hung up, he quickly made another call, to his former partner on the Ghostbusters, Paul Dotson, now retired from the WPD and working as police chief at Wichita State University.

“Come over here right now,” Landwehr said.

To Dotson, Landwehr looked as unstrung in the hospital corridor as he had on the day his father had died eleven years before. Landwehr hurried Dotson to a stairwell, put a piece of paper in his hands, and watched him. Dotson took one look at the BTK signature and the image of Wegerle’s stolen driver’s license and felt the hair stand up on his neck.

“So what do we do?” Landwehr asked.

Someone walked into the stairwell. Dotson and Landwehr looked at each other, separated quickly, and by instinct made sure their hands were visible. They suddenly felt embarrassed�they didn’t want anyone thinking that two men were doing or smoking strange things in a hospital stairwell. They almost laughed.

Landwehr asked again: “What do we do?”

Dotson felt compassion for Landwehr�and gratitude. At the pivotal moment of Landwehr’s career, he had reached out to him.

Dotson began to talk fast. “Your world as you know it is over,” he said. He began to tick off a list of what Landwehr would need: Money. Cars for detectives. An off-site headquarters for a new task force, to eliminate leaks to the media. Police departments have office politics, jealousies, and gossip like any other organization. Landwehr needed to get his task force out of city hall.

It was time to implement the strategy the Ghostbusters had devised twenty years before: communicate with BTK through the news media, play to his ego, get him to make mistakes that would reveal his identity. Put one face on television to communicate with BTK.

“But whatever you do, do not become that face,” Dotson warned. “You can’t run the investigation and also be the face that talks to BTK. The workload will tear you to pieces.”

He looked at Landwehr as he said this. What he saw brought him up short. Landwehr no longer looked shocked�he looked resolved. It was clear that Landwehr intended to do both jobs.

“Look,” Dotson said coldly. “It’s not my job to tell you what you want to hear. It’s my job to talk straight. You can’t do both jobs.”

Landwehr just looked at him.

Dotson prepared to leave.

He was so worried about Landwehr that he felt almost sick. He knew how smart Landwehr was, but also what a self-doubter his friend was, how Landwehr disguised a deep need to be liked, how much Landwehr ached when he felt that he had failed at something. Now the whole world would watch Landwehr as he faced a hidden monster, with his ass on the line and lives and careers at stake.

One thing they had agreed upon, after they got control of their nerves: this letter might be opportunity knocking.

As Dotson left, Landwehr began to punch in phone numbers.

Maybe this asshole had given them the key to catching him.

After prodding Capt. Haynes about the strange letter, Laviana had gone back to the newsroom to work on other stories.

His phone rang. “This is Hurst,” he said.

“This is Kelly Otis.”

“What’s up?”

“I need two days.” Otis let the words hang.

It took Laviana half a moment to register what he had heard. “What?”

“We’re asking if you can give us two days before you put anything in the paper.”

What was this? It had to be about that letter. Maybe it was a big deal. Or maybe the cops were just being careful. Whatever it was, this was weird.

“I can’t promise anything,” Laviana said.

Otis sounded polite but cryptic. “Give us as much time as you can so we can get ready.”

Ready for what?
Laviana thought.
Ready to do what?

“I’ll do what I can,” Laviana said.

“Good.” Otis hung up.

Laviana stood up slowly and looked around the room. He would need to clue in the editors. This could be big.

Maybe whoever had killed Vicki Wegerle was hoaxing the paper and police. Maybe the real killer was posing as BTK.

Maybe it was BTK.

But no.

He didn’t believe it.

Landwehr called the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia; he asked to speak to a profiler. He found himself talking to Bob Morton, a behavioral analyst he had never met. Landwehr did not know it at that moment, but Morton would become a key player in the task force he was hurriedly forming. Morton�thin, muscular and balding, a former state trooper standing more than six feet tall�had studied serial killers for years. His work involved predicting not only their criminal behavior but also how to lure them into making mistakes. Morton suggested the same strategy for trapping BTK that Landwehr and the Ghostbusters had decided to adopt years before. He now helped to fine-tune the tactics:

• BTK likes publicity.
  Call news conferences to say things about him. Make them look like real news conferences, but make communication with BTK the real purpose. Read scripted statements and answer no questions from reporters.
  
• Pick one person to conduct all the news conferences.
  Give BTK a face to fixate on. That could be dangerous for the person doing it, but the risk was necessary.
  
• Imply that you are making progress on the case.
  BTK does not want to get caught, Morton said. If he thinks you are breathing down his neck, he might be reluctant to kill.
  

Over the course of the first frantic day, Landwehr and police spokeswoman Janet Johnson talked frequently with Morton to prepare a presentation for Chief Williams and his staff.

FBI profiler Bob Morton (far left) confers with Landwehr on the BTK case.

Landwehr wondered whom they would choose to be the face talking to BTK. Probably himself. He knew Cindy would dislike that. How could he tell her that she and James should feel safe or that BTK might not stalk him? But Landwehr thought it was the right move. He had pursued BTK for twenty years; he had run hundreds of news briefings and knew how to do them right.

There was one other reason to do it himself. Landwehr didn’t want anyone else to take the risk.

Landwehr called another retired Ghostbuster. Paul Holmes�sharp nosed, sandy haired, and small, at 148 pounds and five feet eight�had spent his four years of retirement laying bricks with his brother Larry. But he still jogged six miles a day, three times a week, a compulsion resulting from a vow never to let other street cops down by showing up for a fight out of shape. He still had that bullet wound from 1980, and still carried a .40 caliber Glock strapped to his hip on most days. And he still worked privately on BTK, reading files, trying to find something they had all missed.

“He’s back,” Landwehr said.

Holmes drew a breath.

He did not ask who “he” was.

He asked only one question.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Like Holmes, Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Larry Welch was Landwehr’s friend. Welch faced many of his own problems: the KBI, which fought crime statewide and assisted sheriff’s offices and police departments with specialists and experts, had been fighting an expensive campaign for years against the worst drug scourge since crack cocaine. Hundreds of methamphetamine cooks had appeared throughout rural Kansas, setting up illegal labs in homes, abandoned barns, and sheds. They stole propane, anhydrous ammonia, and other hazardous ingredients and used them to cook common cold medicine into a cheap street drug.

Welch had some of the best detectives in Kansas working for him, and they were stretched to the limit. But he knew how bad BTK was. Welch had been an FBI agent; he had run the KBI for ten years. For years he had lived in Goddard, just west of Wichita. He and Landwehr had been friends since Landwehr was a patrol officer. Landwehr explained the situation. Welch then made a generous offer.

You can have some of my agents, he said, and whatever other help I can provide.

He soon sent Larry Thomas and Ray Lundin to work with Landwehr for however long it took.

“We’ll give you those two days,” Laviana told Otis later that afternoon. “But after two days, we want the story, and we want it exclusive.”

Otis did not like that. But he conceded that when the letter first arrived, Laviana could have burned the investigation with a huge story in the
Eagle
. Laviana had not done so. The
Eagle
was not in the business of panicking people with hoaxes, and at this point, the editors had no proof that this was anything but a letter from a twisted prankster. The paper’s best shot at getting a comprehensive and accurate story was to wait and let Landwehr check it out�then have Laviana sit down and talk with him about it.

Otis told him he would get back to him about the exclusive.

The next morning’s newspaper contained nothing about BTK.

In the stairwell, Dotson had counseled his friend not to set up a tip line unless his commanders gave him enough investigators to check out every tip, every alibi, every background of every suspect. Dotson thought Landwehr would need a battalion of investigators. But Landwehr limited that problem with one decision: the task force would check out tips, but detectives would not wear themselves out running down each man’s story. They would merely swab him for DNA and compare it to BTK’s DNA. Either the DNA matched or it didn’t.

Of all the clever things Landwehr did, Dotson said later, this was one of the cleverest. The strategy might not catch BTK, but it would eliminate thousands of suspects quickly and save hundreds of thousands of man-hours.

For two days, as they set up the plan, the cops worked around the clock. As Otis had predicted, none of the detectives slept.

On the first day, the homicide team set up a tip line and the means to record calls. The chief provided twenty-four-hour-a-day staffing.

They picked a task force: Gouge, Otis, and Relph from Homicide; Thomas and Lundin from the KBI. Landwehr also wanted Clint Snyder from narcotics. Snyder had volunteered, and the commanders approved. Another detective from narcotics, Cheryl James, joined the task force to compile and shape the task force’s computer databases and to work with ViCap, the giant database the FBI had established to collect and sift information on violent criminals. James also went out and swabbed people.