Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (21 page)
Authors: John Douglas,Johnny Dodd
BOOK: Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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After twenty-five years of silence, BTK had resurfaced on March 27, 2004, with a cryptic taunting letter sent to a local TV station.
It was a terrible shock to the people and especially to the police force of Wichita, as most of the community had thought BTK had left town, been arrested for another crime and was rotting in jail, retired as a serial killer, or died, and that they would never hear from him again.
Five days before BTK emerged from the shadows to raise this furor, Landwehr was being pressured to take a lateral transfer out of homicide, where he served as chief. When it comes to murder investigations, he’s a walking encyclopedia. Top brass wanted him to take a new post as an instructor for recruits. But Landwehr loved working homicide and had held the top spot for twelve years—which ranked as some kind of police department record. So he had resisted this promotion every time it came up, and did so again on this occasion. On March 22, Landwehr persuaded the Wichita Police Department’s top brass to let him continue on as the homicide chief.
As he sat on the edge of a bed in my hotel room, he chuckled over what would have happened if he’d left the post, as he was expected to do, only to have the long-silent killer resurface five days later with that taunting letter.
“At least seventy percent of the department would have said that I wrote that letter in order to keep my job,” Landwehr laughed.
“Can’t blame ’em,” I said. “I would have probably thought the same thing. Reminds me of the Zodiac Killer case. Remember what happened with that one?”
“Still unsolved,” he said. “I know that.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “But remember the lead investigator? They gave him his own office, private telephone, and a small staff. But by the early 1980s, Zodiac had stopped communicating with the cops. Then one day I got a call from the FBI field office in San Francisco. Turned out the investigator had just received a communiqué that seemed like it had come from Zodiac. They wanted to send it to me for analysis. I got it, but before I could complete my full analysis, my phone rang. It was the same special agent from San Francisco.
“‘Don’t bother,’ he said.
“‘What do you mean, don’t bother?’ I shouted.”
“Now I remember how this one ended,” Landwehr smiled.
“The word was that the author of the letter was the lead investigator,” I said. “The guy was under so much stress from the investigation that when all the leads dried up, he decided to create a new one by writing his own Zodiac communiqué. They yanked him off the case and gave him a nice little rest and some psychological counseling.”
Landwehr chuckled, nodding his head slowly as though it were a hundred-pound block of granite. He had the frazzled look of a man who’d just been tossed into a threshing machine but managed to make it out the other side in one piece. During those weeks and months after the arrival of BTK’s first communiqué, Landwehr carried the weight of the investigation on his shoulders. Since being tapped to serve on the Ghostbusters task force, he’d managed to cram more information about the case into his head than anyone else in the department. He became the go-to guy for information of every twist and kink of the three-decade-long odyssey.
That the killer had never been caught, he told me, ate at him. But deep inside, during those years when Landwehr remembered BTK, he’d remind himself that if he just stayed patient, the UNSUB might someday reappear. And after that first communiqué surfaced in March 2004 and he became the investigation’s most visible presence, Landwehr realized something else: if the killer managed to slip away again or, even worse, claimed another life, he’d be the whipping boy. For the rest of his days, he’d be known as the detective who got outsmarted by BTK.
But things didn’t quite turn out that way.
“I never really set out to be a cop,” Landwehr told me. He had his mind set on becoming an FBI agent, just like his uncle Ernie Halsig, who’d always served as his role model. But then one afternoon in 1977, a few months after BTK tied a plastic bag over the head of Shirley Vian and stood beside her bound body, masturbating as she suffocated, the twenty-three-year-old Landwehr’s life took a weird twist.
At the time, he was studying history at Wichita State University and working as a salesman at Butell’s Menswear in downtown Wichita. One afternoon, he walked out the front door of the store to grab some lunch and ran straight into two African American guys in their twenties making a beeline inside. Both looked terribly on edge, Landwehr thought to himself. A moment later, while walking up the sidewalk, he spotted a Cadillac parked in a nearby alley. He could hear its engine idling. At the wheel, he spotted the same bozo who’d wandered into Butell’s a half hour earlier, wasting ten minutes of his time pretending to be interested in buying a leisure suit.
“All of a sudden, I knew what those guys were up to,” Landwehr said. “They’re going to rob the place. But I didn’t think
rob
as in with a gun. I was thinking they were going to run in and steal some of our leather jackets, then jump into their buddy’s Cadillac and take off.”
rob
as in with a gun. I was thinking they were going to run in and steal some of our leather jackets, then jump into their buddy’s Cadillac and take off.”
So Landwehr decided to play John Wayne. He turned and headed straight back to Butell’s. On the way back, he popped his head in through the front door of a nearby jewelry store and shouted, “Hey, if I’m not back here in five minutes, call the cops.” Seconds later, he pushed open the front door, ready to grab whichever shoplifter he could get his hands on first. But the instant he stepped inside, he felt the cool barrel of a pistol pushed against his neck. A man in a ski mask held the gun, ordering him to move his ass back to the cash register, where he was quickly hog-tied with electrical cords.
After rifling through the cash register, the man spotted an old beat-up Colt .45, last used in World War II. The man chambered the gun’s single round, pulled back the hammer, and looked slowly down at Landwehr lying on the floor nearby.
“Don’t look at me, man,” the robber screamed. “Don’t eyeball me.”
Landwehr was convinced that the man had already made up his mind. He would walk over, bend down, hold the rusted barrel of the gun a few inches away from Landwehr’s sweaty forehead, and fire a bullet into his brain. But he somehow knew enough about criminal psychology to keep looking straight at the man.
“I figured it would be harder for him to shoot me if I was staring him right in the eyes,” he told me. “I wanted to personalize myself.”
His strategy didn’t appear to work. The robber walked over and straddled Landwehr, ordering him to look away. “I figured I was a dead man,” shrugged Landwehr. But for some reason, the man didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he and his accomplice, who had tied up the other employees in the back of the store, ran out the front door with an armful of suits.
A few hours later, Landwehr sat in a room with two detectives and looked through a stack of mug shots. After a few minutes, he thumped his index finger on one of the photos, informing them that this was the guy who he’d heard called Butch during the heist. Both detectives started grinning.
“That’s Butch Jordan,” they informed Landwehr, patting him on the back, thanking him for his help.
But, much to Landwehr’s frustration, the police never seemed to go after the career criminal. It wasn’t until a couple of months later when Jordan shot an off-duty cop while robbing a liquor store that officers finally raided one of his known haunts and arrested him. Landwehr promptly picked him out of a lineup, and, one afternoon shortly before the case went to trial, the young law student found himself seated in the Sedgwick County district attorney’s office, discussing the matter.
Landwehr glanced over at a table full of evidence seized during Butch Johnson’s arrest and noticed a familiar looking pair of pants and a vest.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“That’s what Butch was wearing when they picked him up,” the prosecutor replied.
Landwehr stared at the table a moment longer, then announced, “I got a suit coat that matches those clothes back at the store.”
The DA looked at him, not quite sure what he was hearing. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“When Butch ran out of the store, he dropped the jacket to those pants on his way out,” Landwehr told him. “I’ve still got it if you want it.”
The DA smiled, then told him to get back to the clothing store and fetch the jacket. Two weeks later, Johnson was convicted of two counts of armed robbery and the attempted murder of a police officer and is still serving time at the Lansing Correctional Facility near Kansas City.
The experience left a deep impact on Landwehr. Not so much because it marked the first time he’d been instrumental in helping take a dangerous man off the streets, but for another reason. He was angry and incredulous that police didn’t arrest Johnson when he’d first identified him, hours after the robbery of Butell’s.
“What I didn’t know then was that they were looking for him,” he told me. “But it just seemed to be taking so long to find him. And that just made me mad. That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to wait until I could land a spot with the FBI. I figured I could do more good by being a cop here in Wichita.”
A few minutes after noon on my second day in Wichita, Landwehr returned to my hotel room. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go for a drive.”
We walked downstairs and climbed into his car. For the next ninety minutes, he led me on a tour of Rader’s various haunts around the county. We drove past the locations of his various murders, all of them in safe neighborhoods, all of them middle class. Not a single feature about any of the homes made them stand out from the residences surrounding them.
Some of Rader’s victims lived on corner lots. A few resided in the middle of their block. The backyard of one abutted a park. In the years that had passed, a few of the structures had been razed; the lots now sat empty, overrun with weeds and tall grass.
Twenty minutes into our tour, we drove past the duplex where Rader claimed that his soon-to-be next victim lived. During his interrogation, he told police he’d been targeting the middle-aged woman for months and planned on killing her sometime in the autumn of 2005.
“You gotta leave her name out of this,” Landwehr said. “It would be too much for her.”
Occasionally during my tour, I’d glance out my window and catch sight of a driver in a nearby car doing a double-take upon realizing that the famous Lieutenant Ken Landwehr was in their midst.
“You ought to run for mayor,” I laughed.
“Yeah,” Landwehr frowned. “That’s just what I need to do.”
A look of boredom had begun to settle across his face. He appeared to be growing tired of this incessant talk of Dennis Rader. Not only that, he looked almost embarrassed by the attention he’d received since the arrest.
Sitting there beside him in the car, I got the feeling that he wanted to be done with the whole damn thing so that he could go back to focusing on the other homicide investigations that he and the detectives in his unit were currently working. After all, most of the elements that made this case interesting from an investigative standpoint had all been explained away—all except the question of how Rader had been able to stay under the radar for so long. Which was the very question that ate away at me.
Despite spending my career studying remorseless monsters just like BTK, I still didn’t feel I could solve the riddle of Dennis Rader. His proficiency as a killer didn’t quite seem human. I still didn’t understand him.
Landwehr punched the gas, and we began traveling north on I- 135, the highway that connects Wichita to Park City. Although Rader sometimes took surface streets in order to traverse the seven miles into “town,” this highway provided the quickest beeline to his haunts. After six miles, Landwehr pulled off at the 61st Street exit. In a matter of seconds we were driving past the side street where Rader, on his way home to lunch, was pulled over on that fateful afternoon eight months before and taken into custody by a dozen heavily armed cops.
Just around the corner from that spot where Rader was arrested sat the nine-hundred-square-foot ranch-style home where the killer moved shortly after his marriage in 1971. The three-bedroom home, built in 1954, was his home for thirty-three years and the place where he and his wife, Paula, raised their two children. But on this sunny October afternoon, the house sat vacant. Paula had moved out shortly after her husband’s arrest, fearful for her own safety.
We pulled to a stop in front of the driveway. The empty home gave off the feel of a mausoleum. Dried leaves and long, brittle branches littered the driveway and yard. The grass had turned brown. Several of Rader’s neighbors stood in their front yards and glared at us. None of these folks appeared to recognize Landwehr. For all they knew, we were just two more gawkers who’d descended on their neighborhood to stare at the house where the devil lived.
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