Inside the Mind of BTK

The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

John Douglas, Johnny Dodd, John E. Douglas

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780470325155, 9780787984847
• eBook ISBN: 9780470437681
• Edition: 1

A dramatic and compelling true-crime psychological thriller

This incredible story shows how John Douglas tracked and participated in the hunt for one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history. For 31 years a man who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, sexually assaulting and strangling a series of women, taunting the police with frequent communications, and bragging about his crimes to local newspapers and TV stations. After disappearing for nine years, he suddenly reappeared, complaining that no one was paying enough attention to him and claiming that he had committed other crimes for which he had not been given credit. When he was ultimately captured, BTK was shockingly revealed to be Dennis Rader, a 61-year-old married man with two children.

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, Dennis 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 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.”

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 j...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• ACT ONE - My Lifelong Hunt for BTK
• ACT TWO - The Capture and Arrest of BTK
• ACT THREE - Meeting BTK: AN Exclusive Interview
• About the Authors
• Photo Insert
• Index