Bind Torture Kill Read online

  Bind, Torture, Kill

  The inside Story of

  the Serial Killer Next Door

  Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, and Hurst Laviana

  Contents

  A few words about the dialogue

  Introduction

  1. The Oteros (January 15, 1974)

  2. All Tied Up (January 15, 1974)

  3. Fear and Possibilities (January–April 1974)

  4. Kathryn Bright (April 4, 1974)

  5. Lessons to Learn (April–July 1974)

  6. The Monster as Muse (October 1974)

  7. A Scoop (December 1974–March 1977)

  8. Toys for the Kids (March 17, 1977)

  9. A Vigorous Debate (March 1977)

  10. A Turning Point (Autumn 1977)

  11. Nancy Fox (December 8, 1977)

  12. “You Will Find a Homicide” (December 9, 1977)

  13. Big News (February 10, 1978)

  14. Fear and Frustration (1978)

  15. Getting Focused (1978)

  16. Ambush and Alibis (1979)

  17. The Installer

  18. Police Stories (1980 to 1982)

  19. The Ghostbusters (1984)

  20. Marine Hedge (April 26–27, 1985)

  21. Vicki Wegerle (September 16, 1986)

  22. Prime Suspect (September 1986)

  23. Failures and Friendships (1987 to 1988)

  24. The Rescuer (1988 to 1990)

  25. Dolores Davis (January 18, 1991)

  26. Out in the Country (January 19, 1991)

  27. Bones (1991)

  28. Little Hitler (May 1991)

  29. Heading Homicide (1992)

  30. A Year of Changes (1993)

  31. BTK as Antiquity (1994 to 1997)

  32. Covering Crime (1996 to 1999)

  33. The Joy of Work, Part 1 (2000)

  34. The Joy of Work, Part 2 (December 2000–2003)

  35. An Anniversary Story (January 12–March 19, 2004)

  36. The Monster Returns (March 22–25, 2004)

  37. The Swab-a-thon (March–April 2004)

  38. “The BTK Story” (May–June 2004)

  39. Sidetracked (July 2004)

  40. Landwehr Takes the Offensive (July–August 2004)

  41. P. J. Wyatt (August–November 2004)

  42. Valadez (December 1, 2004)

  43. The First Breaks (December 2004–January 2005)

  44. The Big Break (February 2005)

  45. The Stalker Is Stalked (February 24, 2005)

  46. “Hello, Mr. Landwehr” (February 25, 2005)

  47. The Interview (February 25, 2005)

  48. “BTK Is Arrested” (February 26, 2005)

  49. Guilty Times Ten (June 27, 2005)

  50. Demons Within Me (July 2, 2005)

  51. Auction Bizarro (July 11, 2005)

  52. The Monster Is Banished (August 17–19, 2005)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A few words about the dialogue:

  We have reconstructed many conversations through the recollections of those involved, quotes in news coverage, and our own notes. To the best of our knowledge, remarks presented within quotation marks reflect what was said at the time.

  In cases where dialogue could not be reconstructed but the essence was available, we did not use quotation marks; we used phrasing to indicate that these words are substantially similar to what was said�or in the case of BTK talking to his victims, the conversations as he recalled them.

  Italicized phrases reflect participants’ recollections of their thoughts.

  Introduction

  The Wichita Eagle has covered the BTK serial killer since he first struck in January 1974. From 2004 to 2006 alone, the Eagle published roughly eight hundred pieces about BTK’s reemergence, the intensive investigation, the resolution, and how the case affected our community. The paper spent thousands of dollars on transcripts of court proceedings, then posted them online for everyone to read. The newspaper’s expansive and in-depth coverage earned us awards and accolades. Some might think that there’d be little new to say�especially considering the 24/7 attention BTK got from cable news shows.

  But we’ve got the inside scoop. It’s not only that we know more about the BTK story than anyone else, we’ve lived it�in my case, grown up with it. We have drawn on the Eagle’s thirty-two-year archive�including original reporters’ notes, internal memos, and photographs.

  Over the course of three decades, BTK, the Wichita Eagle, and the Wichita police developed complicated relationships. It was through the Eagle that BTK sent his first message in 1974. It was to the Eagle a few years later that the Wichita police chief desperately turned for help in trapping the killer. It was in a macabre letter to the Eagle�delivered to the police by reporter Hurst Laviana�that the killer announced his reemergence in 2004. And it was through the Eagle’s classifieds that the head of the investigation tricked BTK into making a mistake that led to his capture in 2005.

  And when BTK�family man and church president Dennis Rader�was finally in his prison cell, it was to us, for this book, that Police Lt. Ken Landwehr and his key investigators told their side of the story in intimate detail.

  Landwehr and the detectives were unhappy with the rampant errors in other books about this case; they knew we cared about this chapter of our community’s history just as much as they did, and they trusted us to get the facts right. Laviana has covered crime in Wichita for more than twenty years. Tim Potter has been nicknamed “Columbo” by the cops for his habit of calling back to double-check facts in his notes. Roy Wenzl has two brothers in law enforcement. My father was a Wichita homicide detective.

  But this is not a “just the facts, ma’am” recitation of the case. The people who stopped BTK are real cops�and real characters. They’ve lowered their shields to let us take you along with them on stakeouts and shoot-outs and into their homes and hearts. In the past, talking to us for newspaper stories, they’ve been guarded. Landwehr’s public face has always been stoic. He has never sought publicity, never played games, never answered questions about himself. He is witty in person, but not easy to know.

  Starting work with him on this book, Wenzl told Landwehr that we wanted to portray him accurately, not as “a plaster saint, all sweetness and success…. I want to know your flaws. I want to ask your wife about your flaws.”

  Wenzl, who had covered cops for years, could not imagine any police supervisor saying yes to this. It required daring.

  Landwehr shrugged, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed Cindy Landwehr.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do ya wanna talk to these guys?”

  Then Landwehr looked at Wenzl.

  “Once you get her started about that, she might not ever stop.”

  The portraits of Rader and Landwehr that we have been able to draw for this book are mirror images�both men are native sons of the heartland of America, products of churchgoing middle-class families, Boy Scouts who grew up to marry and have children of their own. Yet one became a sexual deviant who killed for his personal pleasure while the other became a cop who dedicated himself to protecting the lives of others. The choices they made destined Rader and Landwehr to become opponents in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

  In writing this book, we had a choice to make as well. Others have focused on portraying the evil; we wanted to give equal time to the people who stopped it.

  L. KELLY

  1

  January 15, 1974, 8:20 AM

  The Oteros

  Her name was Josie Otero. She was eleven years old and wore glasses and wrote poetry and drew pictures and worried about
her looks. She had started wearing a bra and growing her hair out; it fell so thick around her head and throat that the man with the gun would soon have a hard time tying the cloth to keep the gag stuffed in her mouth.

  As Josie woke up that morning, the man with the gun crept to her back door and saw something that made him sweat: a paw print in the snowy backyard. He had not expected a dog.

  He whistled softly; no dog. Still, he pulled a Colt Woodsman. 22 from his waistband and slunk to the garage wall to think.

  In the house, Josie had pulled on a blue T-shirt and walked from her room to the kitchen. It was a short walk; it was a small house. Her mom, Julie, was in the kitchen, wearing her blue housecoat. She had set the table, putting out cereal and milk for breakfast and tins of potted meat for school-lunch sandwiches. Joe, Josie’s dad, was eating canned pears.

  At five feet four, Josie was already an inch taller than her mom and as tall as her dad. But she worried the worries of a child.

  “You don’t love me as much as you love the rest of them,” she had blurted one day to her brother Charlie. At fifteen he was the oldest of the five Otero kids.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “I love you as much as I love any of them.”

  She felt better; she loved them all, Mom and Dad and Charlie, and Joey, who was nine, and Danny, fourteen, and Carmen, thirteen. She loved the way Joey studied his brothers and tried to be tough like them. He was so cute; the girls at Adams Elementary School adored his brown eyes. This morning he had dressed to draw attention: a long-sleeved shirt pulled over a yellow T-shirt and white undershirt, and purplish trousers with white pockets and white stripes down the back.

  It was Tuesday. They would play with the dog, help Mom pack lunches, then Dad would drive Josie and Joey to school as he had done already for Charlie, Danny, and Carmen. Mom had laid their coats on a chair.

  Outside, the man hesitated.

  In the pockets of his parka he carried rope, venetian blind cord, gags, white adhesive tape, a knife, and plastic bags.

  The Oteros had lived in Camden, New Jersey, and then the Panama Canal Zone for seven years, and then their native Puerto Rico with relatives for a few months. They had bought their house in Wichita only ten weeks earlier and were still getting their bearings. Wichita was a big airplane manufacturing center, and this spelled opportunity for Joe. He had retired as a technical sergeant after twenty years in the U.S. Air Force and now worked on airplanes and taught flying at Cook Field, a few miles outside Wichita, the Air Capital of the World. Boeing, Cessna, Beech, and Learjet all had big factories there; the city that once sent sixteen-hundred B-29 Superfortress bombers to war now supplied airlines and movie stars with jets. Julie had taken a job at Coleman, the camping equipment factory, but was laid off a few weeks later in a downsizing.

  Charlie, Danny, Joey, Carmen, Josie, Julie, and Joe Otero.

  They now lived among the 260,000 people of Wichita, many of whom were ex-farm kids who cherished the trust they felt for their neighbors and left their doors unlocked. The airplane manufacturers had come to Wichita decades earlier in part because they were able to hire young people who had grown up on neighboring farms, learning how to fix tractor engines and carburetors from early childhood, and these workers and their families had brought their farm sensibilities with them to the city. People still left the keys in their cars at night and took casseroles to sick neighbors. This was a culture the Oteros liked, but Joe and Julie had more of a New York attitude about safety. Joe had acquired the dog, Lucky, who hated strangers. Joe had street smarts, and at age thirty-eight he was still wiry and strong. He’d been a champion boxer in Spanish Harlem. Julie, thirty-four, practiced judo and taught it to the children.

  Joe was streetwise but playful. At work among Anglo strangers, he made people laugh by mocking his own Puerto Rican accent. He made shopping fun, once dragging the kids around a store on a sled as they laughed. When Joe signed the mortgage for the house (six rooms and an unfinished basement), he joked to the broker, “I hope I’m still alive when this lien is paid off.”

  Two months later the Oteros were still unpacking boxes.

  One night Joe and Charlie had watched the movie In Cold Blood, the story of two losers who in 1959 murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.

  How could anybody do that? Charlie asked.

  “Be glad nothing like that has ever happened to you,” Joe said.

  Dennis Rader had seen the woman and the girl one day while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration; his wife didn’t like driving in snow. On Edgemoor Drive, he saw two dark-skinned females in a station wagon backing onto Murdock Avenue.

  After that, he stalked them for weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that they left about 8:45 and that it took Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the husband left for work around 8:00 AM. He did not want to confront the husband, so he timed his own arrival for about 8:20. The husband would be gone. The boy would be there, but he was incidental to the plan. He would kill the boy, but he did not want him. He wanted the girl.

  He did not know that the Oteros were down to one car.

  Joe had wrecked the other one a few days before, breaking some ribs. To get Carmen, Danny, and Charlie to school before 8:00, Joe had taken the station wagon that Julie usually drove. Charlie had started to close the garage door, but Joe told him to leave it up because he would come back. With his injury, Joe wasn’t able to work.

  It was twenty degrees outside, and snow lay frozen on the hard ground.

  Rader was twenty-eight; he had dark hair and green eyes that had lately spent a lot of time looking deep into the dark. He liked to look at pornography; he liked to daydream. He had nicknamed his penis Sparky. He fancied himself a secret agent, an assassin, a shadow.

  Rader had risen in the dark this morning, packed his coat pockets, parked several blocks from the target house, then walked. The house sat on the northwest corner of Murdock Avenue and Edgemoor Drive in east Wichita. He had arrived as the dim light of dawn obscured the comet Kohoutek that for weeks had hung like a ghost above the southern horizon.

  Dennis Rader, while he was in the air force in the 1960s.

  He thought of the girl with long, dark hair and glasses. She looked like she was made for SBT, his abbreviation for “Sparky Big Time.”

  But now, in the backyard, he hesitated.

  Where was the dog?

  Over the next thirty-one years, Rader would write many words about this day, some lies, some true:

  He selected the family because Hispanic women turned him on.

  He fantasized about sex, trained himself how to kill. He tied nooses, and hanged dogs and cats in barns. As a teen and then later in the air force, he peered through blinds to watch women undress. He broke into homes to steal panties.

  He stalked women as they shopped alone in grocery stores. He planned to hide in the backseat of their cars and kidnap them at gunpoint. He would take them to places where he and Sparky could play: bind, torture, kill.

  He had always chickened out.

  But not this time.

  He crept from the garage to the back door.

  He reached out to open it.

  Locked.

  He pulled a hunting knife and severed the telephone line, which was tacked to the white clapboard wall.

  He suddenly heard the back door opening. He pulled his gun and found himself staring into the face of the little boy. And finally he saw the dog, standing beside the boy. The dog began to bark.

  Quickly now, as the sweat began to flow, Rader hustled the child into the kitchen�and came face-to-face with another surprise. The man was home.

  The dog barked and barked.

  Rader towered seven inches over the smaller man, but he felt quaking fear now. He pointed his gun.

  This is a stickup, he said.

  The girl began to cry.

  Don’t be alarmed, he told them.


  Across town several miles to the west lived a college kid who had no clue how the events of this day would shape his life.

  He was something of a character, or so his mother thought. He could never sit still; he always had to be doing something with his hands. He was a smart aleck. As a little boy playing cops and robbers, he always played the cop. When the other boys pressed him to be the bad guy, he walked away.

  He seemed the straight arrow, but he was not. He got into fights, like a lot of other boys growing up on the rough blue-collar west side of Wichita, but learned to avoid them. He won debate championships in high school but hid his partying from his mother. He played the beagle Snoopy in a high school production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. He made Eagle Scout in 1971, the year before he graduated, but drank to excess on Fridays. He liked school. He liked mysteries, especially the stories about Sherlock Holmes.

  Kenny Landwehr was still a teenager, not yet a deeply reflective soul, but he knew why he liked those stories: Holmes solved murders, the hardest crime to solve because the best possible witness was dead.