Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

by Douglas, John

  “Don’t trick him to try to play games because he’s enough of a police buff to know what’s going on. Be rested and ready for a long interview. You want him to be the one who fades out. In the end, he may be looking for some sort of face-saving scenario. Don’t bring up his killing of young children because he doesn’t want to be known as a child killer. That’s not a healthy reputation to have in prison. Get him thinking that maybe he was in a trance when he committed his murders. If he’s arrogant, then be very nonchalant. Let him speak in the third person, if he wants.

  “At the same time as your interview, you need to be performing a simultaneous search of his residence. If he gets tipped off in advance that this is what you’re going to do, he won’t destroy his stash, but he will move it. Drill it into his head that you’re not going to stop going until you solve this case because you know it is solvable. What you want is for him to become extremely rigid. That’s going to mean he’s losing control and you’re gaining control.”

  As I spoke, Pierce Brooks walked into the conference room and took a seat at the table. A veteran LAPD homicide detective, Brooks was something of a legend, made famous for his role in Joseph Wambaugh’s crime classic The Onion Field. For years, Brooks used to pour over out of town newspapers searching for violent crimes that might be similar to cases he was investigating in Los Angeles. After coming to the FBI, he’d begun developing a computer program, known as VICAP. The idea was for police around the nation to enter data from open cases into a centralized computer, allowing cops to better track violent crimes where the same UNSUB might be responsible.

  When Brooks heard me talking about interrogation techniques, he said in his strained, whisper-like voice: “Be ready to go with the polygraph at the right moment. But be careful. Do it the wrong way and you might just get an inconclusive unless the questions are designed in a way that will be more distressing to him. For instance, the killing may not upset him, but the fact that he was soiled by the victim’s blood could cause a reaction. He may respond to the Bright case because he screwed up. In the Otero case, he might respond more to the boy because he feels bad about him. Don’t expect him to break down.”

  I had to force myself not to interrupt Brooks. Walker looked at me and grinned. He knew how I felt about polygraphs. I hated them, especially when it came to cases involving violent offenders. The way I saw it, whenever you resort to using a polygraph, you’re basically tipping your hand to the suspect, informing him that you don’t have anything on him, so your only hope is to rely on this primitive Buck Rogers type of device to determine if he’s telling the truth.

  Walker felt the same way. “If this guy passes his polygraph, he’s going to sit back and smirk,” he said. “He’s going to feel that he’s beaten you. But I like the idea of telling him that you’re executing a search warrant of his home while he’s at the station talking to you. That would cause him a lot of stress. Which is what you need to do during your questioning. Create stress, then give him the benefit of doubt. Watch how he responds to the stressors, figure out why he reacts that way, then go after him.

  “Use two interviewers, one peeling off the other. You have to come off professional, thorough, but low key. Show him you mean business and you’re not going to stop until he caves in. He’ll be more vulnerable to that. And play up the notion of the task force being created just for him, just to catch him. He’ll like that he’s being taken seriously, that he has these select super-cops trying to catch him. He’ll like it that he’s not considered just some small case.”

  As I listened to Walker’s words, something else just occurred to me. It didn’t come to me in the form of an image. It was a sense, almost a knowing.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing some sort of a uniform,” I said. “When you bring him in for questioning, make sure he’s not wearing his uniform. He’ll feel shielded by it, protected by it. Don’t insult him by canceling the interview if he arrives wearing it, but plan things so that it’s unlikely he’ll arrive in his work clothes. If he still walks into headquarters wearing it, that might tell you something.

  “Don’t insult his intelligence directly by saying something like, ‘That was a stupid thing to do.’ All that’s going to do is make him react defensively or get hostile because the bottom line is that he thinks he’s pretty smart. But you do want to attack him indirectly by pointing out mistakes at the crime that led you to him. This would be easy to do in the third person. He might rationalize the mistake away much more easily in the third person.”

  Walker suddenly picked up on the notion of vanity that I’d touched on a moment before. “You gotta gratify his ego. That’s going to be important to him. You gotta make him feel important. If you bluff him and he knows it, then you’ve lost and you lose respect in his eyes.”

  “This guy isn’t mental,” I said. “But he is crazy like a fox. If he ever got into trouble, he’d try and con someone into thinking he’s crazy.”

  I glanced around the table. Hazelwood and Walker looked as spent as I felt. We’d been going at it for nearly six hours. The detective who had been furiously scribbling notes at the end of the table was kneading his hand. I needed to get the hell out there and clear my head. I could practically hear the ever-growing stack of paperwork on my desk screaming for attention. I needed to get back to the office.

  “This thing is solvable,” I told the detectives from Wichita as I stood up and put on my jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance. You’re gonna nail this guy.”

  Walking down the hallway to my office, I prayed to God I was right. I prayed to God that I wasn’t just pumping sunshine up everybody’s trousers. Because somewhere out there, BTK was waiting, watching, and plotting.

  ACT TWO

  The Capture and Arrest of BTK

  8

  Twenty-one years after that afternoon in 1984 when I sat at that oak table at the FBI Academy, brainstorming ways to help Wichita police find BTK, I landed in Wichita, Kansas, where I was scheduled to meet Lieutenant Ken Landwehr, the no-nonsense fifty-one-year-old veteran homicide detective with the Wichita police force who’d kept the BTK investigation alive ever since the Ghostbusters task force was disbanded in 1987. Landwehr had agreed to meet with me in my hotel room and had promised, whenever he got a break from the other homicides that he and his detectives were investigating, to give me an insider’s view of the case that had wormed its way deep into his psyche.

  I was thrilled to finally be in Wichita, where the Chamber of Commerce Web site plays a persuasive public relations video called “I Found It in Wichita,” touting the city’s great opportunities for full employment, a short commute, and a great way of life.

  Plenty had happened in my life since the afternoon I’d retired from the FBI in 1995. I’d made the transition to best-selling crime author, lecturer, and pro bono criminal profiler, volunteering my time to small-town police departments and to the families of victims. During that time, my three children had grown into adults, my marriage had crumbled and then put itself back together, and, on two different occasions, I nearly died from pulmonary blood clots.

  But most important, on February 25, 2005, the phantom-like killer who had eluded capture for more than three decades was finally unmasked.

  He turned out to be the fifty-nine-year-old father of two grown children. For the past thirty-three years he’d been married to the same woman and had lived in the same small house in the sleepy bedroom community of Park City, located six miles north of downtown Wichita.

  He’d served as a longtime Boy Scout leader and as president of his church congregation, and, for almost fifteen years, he could be found driving the streets of Park City, wearing a drab brown uniform that made him look like a cross between a park ranger and a cop. He bullied residents as he handed out tickets for such infractions as overgrown grass and expired dog tags.

  His name was Dennis Rader.

  In many ways, Denn
is Rader turned out to be everything I’d predicted. In other ways, however, he was a bit different.

  Almost four hours after Rader’s arrest on a quiet residential street near his tiny house in Park City, he was informed that his saliva had the same genetic makeup as the semen found on Nancy Fox’s nightgown. So Rader confessed to the seven killings that police knew he’d committed between 1974 and 1977, then admitted that he’d murdered another three women in 1981, 1986, and 1991.

  Four months later, Rader pled guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to ten life sentences in El Dorado Correctional Facility. Because the murders he committed all occurred before Kansas reinstituted the death penalty in 1994, Rader managed to avoid a date with the executioner’s needle.

  Many people—myself included—believed this to be a tragedy. If any killer deserved to die for his selfish, savage crimes, he did.

  Two months after Greg Waller, a Sedgwick County district judge, imposed Rader’s sentence, I decided the time had come to make the journey to Wichita. I wanted to breathe the same air that had nurtured Rader for the nearly six decades he’d lived there. I wanted to drive slowly over the same tree-shaded streets he’d driven. But mostly, I wanted to probe the brain of Wichita police lieutenant Ken Landwehr, the man credited with helping nail Rader.

  Landwehr had served as an original member of the Ghostbuster task force that had been started in 1984. To say the case got under his skin is a gross understatement. BTK had consumed his existence. He lived, breathed, and dreamed about the enigmatic killer who had eluded law enforcement for three decades. And during the last eleven months of BTK’s reign of terror, Landwehr not only oversaw the investigation but also essentially became Wichita’s super-cop. He stood up in front of the TV cameras at nearly two dozen press conferences and convinced the killer that he should trust him.

  Which proved, as I had hoped, to be BTK’s biggest mistake.

  The decision to transform Landwehr into the face of the investigation came at the suggestion of several agents from my former unit, echoing the findings of my old 1984 analysis. After BTK resurfaced in 2004, the agents consulted with Wichita police and outlined a proactive technique I’d first begun toying with over two decades earlier and had suggested at that time in my report on BTK. Since then, I’d been preaching the gospel of the super-cop at training seminars and consultations with various law enforcement agencies up until the day I retired from the agency. The fact that those two agents in the Behavioral Science Unit knew about this concept told me that the seeds I’d planted during my years in the trenches with the FBI had sprouted and taken root.

  Like me, Landwehr was a cop who had recurring dreams. As best as Landwehr could remember, the dream he’d been having once or twice a year for the past decade had always played itself out in the same way. He’d drift off to sleep, and after a short while, he and the man he wanted to arrest were trudging up and down the manicured fairways of a golf course, their clubs slung over their shoulders. No one else was around—always just the two of them. Their games, always quite friendly and pleasant, often seemed to stretch out for hours. As they played, they’d compliment each other on their shots, make small talk about the types of things golfers talked about—wind direction, the break of a green, a shagged shot.

  Yet even in the depth of this dream, despite knowing that his opponent was a serial killer, Landwehr never tried to arrest him. Dreams, he seemed to realize, didn’t work like that. This was about something else, something deeper. Landwehr figured that it was about who could out-think whom.

  And in the morning, when he awoke, the first thing he’d always do was announce to his wife, Cindy, “I had the dream again.”

  Whenever his wife heard this, she’d reply, “Did you get a good look at his face this time?”

  But, of course, Landwehr never had. His opponent managed to stay just a few steps ahead of him, his face perpetually shrouded in shadow. Cindy would groan whenever her husband told her this.

  “I don’t get it,” she’d say. “You play golf with BTK, yet you never manage to get a good look at his face.”

  “No,” Landwehr would smile. “But I beat him again. I always beat him in the end.”

  Sitting there on the edge of a bed in my downtown Wichita hotel room, I studied the lines etched into Ken Landwehr’s face, particularly those around his eyes. He looked miles past tired.

  I’d spoken to the men and women who had worked for Landwehr on the case. From them I’d learned that the past eighteen months had been a crazed, high-stakes roller coaster ride for Landwehr. He had everything to lose if BTK slipped away again. For most of those months, Landwehr seemed to subsist on Mountain Dew and Vantage cigarettes.

  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 r
emembered 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.