Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 237
Despite his never having been charged, her husband, who worked as a
handyman at a number of apartment complexes in the area, had lived
under a cloud of suspicion for years. Which wasn’t exactly surprising—
in most murder cases, the husband is the first and foremost suspect
investigators look at.
Even though the DNA under Vicki’s fingernails wasn’t her husband’s,
investigators always found it suspicious that he’d spent so
much time at the couple’s home before telephoning police.
In 2003, investigators input a profile of that DNA sample into a
recently created national database containing the genetic information
compiled on hundreds of thousands of known criminals. They never
found any samples in the registry that matched, which did nothing
more than confirm to Landwehr and his detectives that the man they
were looking for wasn’t catalogued in any DNA database—nor had he
been a known suspect in the case.
Within hours of realizing that the letter was authentic, Landwehr
contacted the FBI and soon began consulting with my former unit to
create a proactive strategy to reel the killer in. And, just as I’d first envisioned
back in 1984, they created a super-cop to become the human
face of the investigation—Landwehr. They couldn’t have picked a better
man for the role, although Landwehr admitted that he was hardly
thrilled with the suggestion.
“I told them I didn’t think the head of an investigation should be
holding press conferences,” he recalled. “I knew too much about the
case, and I knew that if some reporter asked me a question, no matter
what I answered they’d be able to read my body reaction. But they
didn’t want to hear about that. They kept telling me, ‘Just stand up
there, read your script and walk away. Don’t get into any interplay with
the reporters.’ ”
Six days after BTK’s envelope arrived in the offices of the Wichita
Eagle, Landwehr stood up in front of a bank of microphones in the
fourth-floor briefing room of the city building and held the first of his
twenty-two press conferences, none of which lasted more than four
minutes. He definitely looked a bit uncomfortable up there in his dark
suit, staring straight into the TV cameras, reading the press release
crafted by the Wichita police chief’s assistant.
But that hardly mattered. In fact, it only made Landwehr’s performance
all the more convincing. Somewhere out there, he knew the
man he’d been hunting since 1984 was watching his every move, hanging
on every word he spoke.