Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 235
Landwehr’s face went taut. “Yeah,” he said. “Gonna put that one
on my to-do list later today.”
The waitress returned, took our order, filled our cups with coffee,
and disappeared.
“So where were you when he resurfaced?” I asked. “I’m curious
what the hell you were doing when he poked his head up.”
Landwehr nodded at the waitress to come dump some more coffee
into his cup. He was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie.
He ran his fingers along his neck, just inside his stiff white collar. Then
he told me. The morning it happened, he was standing beside his
wife’s hospital bed. She’d just had stomach surgery, and he was waiting
for the anesthesia to wear off. It was March 17, 2004, the twentyseventh
anniversary of Shirley Vian’s murder.
“My phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a detective in my unit. ‘We
just got a letter,’ he said. ‘Looks like it could be from BTK.’ ”
“How’d that make you feel?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“Sick to my stomach,” Landwehr said. “I thought, ‘We could be in
a lot of trouble, here’ ...But the more I thought about it, the more I
realized we had a chance to finally catch this guy.”
A half hour later, he was holding the white envelope that had
arrived in the morning mail at the offices of the Wichita Eagle. The
sender’s name, typed in the upper left-hand corner, was listed as Bill
Thomas Killman. His return address—1684 S. Oldmanor—didn’t
exist on any map of Wichita.
Inside the white envelope was a single sheet of paper containing
three photocopied snapshots of a woman who appeared to be unconscious,
lying on a carpeted floor. A photocopy of a driver’s license
belonging to a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Vicki Wegerle,
whose 1986 murder had never been solved, also appeared on the page.
But the most chilling part of the letter were the letters B-T-K
scrawled at the bottom of the page. It was penned with the same
haunting, telltale flourish employed by the killer back in the 1970s—
the letter B had been fashioned into breasts.
At the top of the page was a string of seemingly nonsensical numbers
and letters. Police asked several experts to try to decipher the message,
but no one was ever able to figure out what it meant. It wasn’t
until after Rader’s arrest that they learned what the message, supposedly
written in a code used by the Germans in World War II, actually
said: “Let Beatty [sic] know for his book.” In other words, he wanted