Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 117
“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.