31 years of the BTK killer

BTK's bid for publicity

It was February 1978 and then TV news director Ron Loewen was reading with disgust and revulsion a letter that arrived in his newsroom at KAKE-TV.

In a two-page, single-spaced letter, Rader — using the name BTK—again announced himself as a serial killer. He then went even further in his bid for publicity:  Comparing himself to “Son of Sam” in New York, Jack the Ripper in London, and the “Hillside Strangler” in Los Angeles, claiming they were all driven to kill by what he called Factor X. “It seems senseless but we cannot help it,” he wrote. “There is no help, no cure except death or being caught and put away.”

Ron Loewen: He was making it clear that he wanted to be elevated to the serial killer hall of fame. This is the league that he said he should be in. He listed 15 to 17 additional serial killers, infamous serial killers.

Magnus: Through the ages?

Loewen: Through the ages. BTK is a student, that was the first thing that flashed through my mind.

Along with a lurid description of the Otero killings, Loewen says the killer was literally begging for ink, with lines like: "A little paragraph in the newspaper would have been enough?" and “How many people do I have to kill until I get the recognition I deserve?” 

Loewen: I’ve always thought that he had the misfortune, given his aspirations, to live in a small media market. He never got the attention because he lived in Wichita. If he’d done any of this in Los Angeles, it’d been a different story.

Even more chilling, the killer threatened he was bearing down on murder victim number eight.  

Loewen: He was stalking someone now, he’s picked his victim. He indicated how he was going to kill that person. And then the last sentence was, “Maybe it’s you.”

Magnus: He was trying to frighten people?

Loewen: Oh definitely. And he succeeded.

It turned out the Wichita police had been intentionally denying BTK publicity for some time: Profilers had warned them against caving in to the killer’s demands for attention, on the grounds that if he got it, he’d kill again.  But that tactic clearly hadn’t worked, BTK had kept on killing anyway.  Now, faced with the strangler’s written threat to take yet another life, the police abruptly changed strategy. 

Richard Lamunyon: At that point we need to step up and say, "Yes we recognize you as BTK, and we do have a serial killer here."

A  TV news director becomes bait
Police chief Richard Lamunyon and news director Ron Loewen appeared on TV that February 1978 side by side. It was Loewen himself who broke the story of BTK to the community — which was highly unusual.  During that newscast, Loewen, who never talked publicly about these events before discussing them with “Dateline,” became in effect, live bait.

Lamunyon: The police said, I guess based again on their talk with their behavioral people, that this is a cry for help.  This guy has more that he wants to say. We’d suggest that you do the story so that it has someone he might choose to communicate with again.

Magnus:  How did you feel about offering yourself up as someone who would be willing to communicate with this deranged mass murderer?

Lamunyon: Well, you know, you want to help. So if he wanted to write letters and they came to my attention, why not?

It was quite a risk: BTK had already murdered seven people and Loewen could end up getting far more than just a letter in the mail. But there he sat, asking questions of Chief Lamunyon for which there were no good answers.

Loewen: It was horrific news. Everything changed for me. And everything changed for everyone in Wichita.

Loewen says the effect of the bombshell announcement on this gentle, family-oriented city was instantaneous.

Loewen: He absolutely terrorized the community. Everyone was a suspect. Girlfriends were concerned about their boyfriends. There were parents who turned in their children. The fear was palpable.

Hoping BTK would contact him, the police brought Loewen inside the investigation. Loewen was provided a photo of a possible suspect, and a police revolver.

Loewen: And that gun creeped me out. It was the tangible reminder that there was a killer out there and that at some level the police thought that he might be coming to see me. 

In 1979, Ron Loewen received yet another package from BTK. This one, which arrived in Loewen’s TV newsroom more than a year after BTK had last been heard from, was announcing not another murder, but a failed attempt.

The intended victim, a 63-year-old woman Rader had been stalking unexpectedly spent the night out which saved her life.  But Rader made sure everybody knew he was still primed to commit murder—sending the media that package containing some personal items he’d stolen from her home, and including one of his trademark poems.

Loewen: Which was a poem of death. He said that he was disappointed she didn’t come home, that he intended to kill her.

Rader now claims in this interview with the psychologist that that woman wasn’t the only one that got away.

Mendoza: Is it safe to say that there are at least a few lucky people out there?

Rader: There’s a lot of lucky people out there.

Mendoza:  Who you didn’t kill?

Rader:  Yeah, didn’t make it to the house, they come home or for some reason I didn’t go. There’s a lot of lucky people out there, yes. There would have been more probably if I had succeeded.  Yeah, you’re almost guaranteed it.

After that failed murder attempt, Wichita’s most famous and sought-after strangler would disappear from the scene.

After five years and 7 bodies, he stopped communicating in 1979.  And the police simply couldn’t find him, despite a manhunt unprecedented in scope that went on for years.

Lamunyon: We spent a lot of their money working this and no one complained. Not one bit.

Year after year went by and the once-hot BTK investigation eventually became a cold case. By the mid ‘80s, the elite police unit created to hunt down the killer closed up shop. Once the city’s public enemy #1, BTK became part of Wichita legend.

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