Inside the Mind of BTK

118 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
“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.