Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 115
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 outthink
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.”