Richard LaMunyon '71/76, former Wichita Police Department chief; Norman Williams '84/86/00, Wichita's police chief since April 2000; Ken Landwehr '04, lieutenant in WPD's homicide section and a lead investigator in the case; Paul Dotson '81/02, former WPD detective now chief of Wichita State's campus police; and Randy Stone '87, detective serving in WPD's computer crimes division, are five of the dozens of Wichita State-educated criminal justice professionals who played specialized roles in the long yet ultimately successful investigation.
LaMunyon, who is now the city administrator for Maize, Kan., served as Wichita police chief from 1976-88. The September he took charge, there were four known BTK murders under investigation, all members of the Otero family. When he left office, there were seven. He recalls, "We were told by behavioral scientists that we were looking for someone who would stand out in a crowd — that he wouldn't fit in and wouldn't be able to develop any sort of lasting relationship. And if he wasn't killing in Wichita, he was probably killing somewhere else. We didn't think that that was right. We thought that our guy was here. We thought that he was able to fit in, and that he could turn his impulse to kill on and off."
On Feb. 10, 1978, it was LaMunyon who announced to the public that the 1974 Otero murders and the 1977 murders of Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox had been committed by the same man. And after years of investigative deadends, it was LaMunyon, in 1984, who oversaw the formation of a special investigative unit, which he describes as a "select group of detectives, officers and technicians who were put together specifically to identify, if possible, and arrest the BTK Strangler." Fresh perspectives and new technologies, the thinking went, might crack the case.
Advancing Technologies
The unit's objective was not initially known by anyone outside the group, whose members included Landwehr and Dotson. They worked in secrecy and were dubbed "Ghostbusters" by some of their fellow officers. Team members centralized information, reviewed every detail and, sadly, added another name to BTK's victim list: Kathryn Bright, who had been stabbed, not strangled, in 1974.
Team members consulted with top members of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Va., and shared theories and observations with members of the Green River Killer Task Force in Seattle. But, Dotson reports, nothing solid came of those efforts.
Before turning silent in 1979, BTK taunted police in messages to Wichita media, including The Wichita Eagle. The missives were rife with grammatical errors and misspellings, and some believed that they had been purposefully "dumbed down." One profiler suggested that the killer was very likely highly educated and would be found in a home filled with books.
Wanting to computerize their growing body of data, the Ghostbusters consulted WSU mathematician Stephen Brady. Brady was familiar with recent advances in the crime-fighting use of computers. An example is AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification systems then being used in Japan, by Scotland Yard and in some U.S. cities. VICAP is another. First funded by Congress in 1982, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Project is a nationwide database designed to collect, collate and analyze the details of violent crimes. The project began with data entered from only two cases, a solved serial killer case from Atlanta and an unsolved one, Wichita's BTK case.
Groundbreaking advances were also being made in the realm of forensic science, including DNA testing. Wichita police collected biological evidence from at least two different BTK crime scenes. The dna evidence was carefully stored, awaiting the right suspect.
Those advances, LaMunyon says, fueled the officers' confidence that BTK would be caught. "We were confident all along that what we were doing would eventually allow this person to be identified," he says. "We knew BTK was keeping trophies, that he wouldn't get rid of them and that at some point that was going to catch up with him."
"I think we knew," adds Landwehr, who's been named Officer of the Year 2005 by the WPD, "that if he ever struck again, technology would probably solve the case." But investigators had to wait for technology to evolve. Time
ticked on.
Seasons of Silence
Although the Ghostbusters unit was dismantled by 1988, Landwehr still worked the case, following leads as they came in. The once-vocal killer had not been heard from for almost a decade. "I wasn't sure what had happened to him," the soft-spoken investigator says. "We didn't know that he was raising a family. That was important to him and that's why he said he didn't kill during that time. He had commitments."
In November 1988, LaMunyon retired from the WPD. He says he didn't think much about BTK as he said his goodbyes: "There was a lot more to my job than that investigation. I was police chief for 13 years and was on the department for 26. I had great investigators who worked with and for me. When I left, I was confident we'd done everything we could do, and I was confident that the person would be identified — exactly how, I didn't know, but I was confident of those two things."
Time passed, and Dotson, in 2002, retired from the WPD, the BTK case stone cold. "When you don't solve a case," he reports, "it's like an albatross around your neck."
Vocal Again
In January 2004, The Eagle published an article about BTK on the 30th anniversary of the first murders. The article reported that Wichita attorney Robert Beattie '86 was writing a book about the serial killer. In March, The Eagle received a letter containing a photocopy of 1986 murder victim Vicki Wegerle's driver's license and photos of the crime scene. The letter had all the markings of a BTK message. After police and FBI confirmation, it was publicly announced: BTK was back.
Recalling the day he heard of the killer's reemergence, Dotson says, "When I left homicide, I knew that I would never be able to solve that case. As a defense mechanism, I guess, I decided that BTK must have died. When I saw there was a new correspondence, it was as though I had come over the top of the first hill of a roller coaster and started plunging down — that feeling of weightlessness. I never wanted to be back in an investigation more in my entire life."
A case that had been cold for some 20 years was suddenly the hottest investigation in years. Everyone wanted answers. "At first we didn't have enough resources," says Landwehr. "It's very difficult to put together an operation like this, but it was a priority to all of us –– the KBI the FBI and the Wichita Police Department. We were going to finish this job."
Communication Clues
Before 2004, Chief Williams had had no direct involvement in the BTK investigation. But for roughly 12 months, he would think and speak about the case daily, amassing a thick booklet of memos and plans regarding the case.
One plan, he explains, was that Landwehr would be the sole party to communicate with BTK in public. Every press conference the lieutenant appeared at was designed to feed the killer's ego and bring him further out of hiding. "He enjoyed sending us communications, whether it was letters, packages. It was all critical to us," Williams says. "We wanted to go on the offense with him."
BTK's communications with media and police increased. By early 2005, his sordid messages, one of which mentioned Landwehr, had been found in a city park, a UPS drop box and in two cereal boxes: one placed near a north Wichita business, the other left north of town. Though not yet linked to BTK, the bodies of Marine Hedge, in 1985, and Dolores Davis, 1991, had been found north of Wichita.
"The behavioral science people said, ‘Keep communicating. He's going to make a mistake,'" says Landwehr. "The press strategies were not aimed at the press; they weren't aimed at the public; they were aimed at him. When he started moving north of town, I felt like we were getting close. He was operating in a new comfort zone."
The Unmasking
But BTK was now treading in unfamiliar territory. DNA testing is a routine part of police work today, and computers not only connect police but also retain subtle markers of a user's identity. The killer didn't seem to know this when he asked police if he could be identified by using a floppy disk to communicate. "Be honest," he typed. After police assured him he couldn't be traced, he sent them a disk, via KSAS Fox 24 News. It was turned over to computer-crime specialist Stone — who uncovered the partial identity of the person who created the file in less than an hour.
Stone explains, "Since I knew he was probably using Microsoft documents, I knew that those usually contain some kind of owner identification." Using forensic software, he searched the files and located several deleted ones as well as the name of the church to which the software was registered. The name Dennis appeared on the disk, and a quick Google search using that name and the name of the church yielded a webpage listing Dennis Rader as the president of the congregation.
Stone's work was a determing factor in BTK's unmasking, but he stresses that "it was 31 years of work that led to the capture of BTK. It was the work of many man-hours and of hundreds of officers and detectives."
Police arrested Rader at 12:15 p.m., Fri., Feb. 25, as he left his job as a compliance officer in Park City, just north of Wichita. The father, husband, church member and Boy Scout leader had been hiding in plain sight.
Out In the Open
Faced with computer, DNA and other evidence identifying him as BTK, the suspect confessed June 27, and Aug. 18 was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms. For Landwehr, it was the end of the longest and highest-profile case of his career. When he came face to face with the subject of his search, he met not the brilliant Hannibal Lecter variety of serial killer, but more of a bumbler who had narrowly escaped both serious injury and capture during his crimes. "Meeting him was kind of disappointing," Landwehr reports. "He's very juvenile. He wasn't a skilled criminal. He did a lot of things wrong and is not as smart as we always envisioned. He's intelligent in some ways, but as a mastermind criminal, a Hannibal Lecter? He's nothing like that at all."
Looking back over the case, Williams says, "Ten people lost their lives. Ten families were forever impacted, and now there's another family –– Rader's family. Eleven families were forever impacted. Yes, we made an arrest, and, yes, we should feel good about it. But people died. It's hard to find joy in anything about the case knowing that."
Dotson says, "For me, it ended when Ken called and said BTK had confessed. I congratulated Ken. As soon as I hung up, I thought, ‘Had I been smarter, if I knew in 1984 what I know now, would we have crafted a better methodology?'" Such questioning is, as Dotson explains, "consistent with the passion that some of us have in homicide investigations."
That passion and the collective determination of all the investigators stand as the determining factors in the BTK case.
Media Player
Serial killers often play to the media, none more than BTK, about which Wichita State alums in the field offer some observations:
CATHY HENKEL '70, sports editor, The Seattle Times, was reporting for the now-defunct Wichita Sun when she received a copy of the first letter from BTK. She broke the story, but never revealed her source. "When the article ran in 1974, I received threatening calls. Were they cranks, or was BTK now stalking me?" When BTK was arrested and his identity revealed, Henkel googled him. "I found photos of him on the Internet. He has a face now. But the letter still burns in my hands."
LARRY HATTEBERG fs '68, co-anchor, KAKE-TV, knows why KAKE was BTK's favorite: As a youngster, he visited the station to see the Deputy Dusty Show and Rin Tin Tin. Hatteberg was one of the people BTK called from jail. "He told me he'd started communicating with the media again because he knew Robert Beattie was writing a book about BTK, and he wanted to make sure ‘his side' was portrayed accurately." Hatteberg notes that BTK enjoyed playing with, and to, the media — and that reciprocity finally got him caught. "Beyond some good police work," Hatteberg says, "I think that if it hadn't been for the media, BTK would still be out there."
ROBERT BEATTIE '86, attorney and author of Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler, remarks, "BTK's obsession with communication is fascinating. He communicated with the public and the police through the press. While that's not unusual, what is unusual is that his relationship with the media was quid pro quo. For instance, in 2004, KAKE-TV's Larry Hatteberg spoke directly with BTK, who had asked in a postcard if the station had received a message. Hatteberg told him on the air that it had been received and passed on. The station presumed that BTK was watching, and he was."
- Kat Schneider '72
