Smart or lucky?

“Dateline” first met former Wichita police chief Richard Lamunyon last year — before Dennis Rader was arrested — and he talked quite candidly about the failure to catch BTK on his watch.

"I think the community was probably as frustrated as I was," he said then. "And I don’t think they were mad. I think they had kind of the same feeling I did. 'Hey, they’re doing everything they can possibly do to catch this guy.'"

Lamunyon says they’d tried everything from old-fashioned detective work to some ideas that sounded downright nutty.

Lamunyon: We were trying to get this guy to communicate.

Magnus: Did you feel at the time like, I don’t care how wacky it sounds, let’s try it?

Lamunyon: Anything short of psychics, I wasn’t into psychics.

But he was into trying a technique that, as far as we know, has never been attempted by law enforcement before or since.  The police once arranged to have a subliminal message— one devised by profilers— inserted into a local evening newscast at KAKE-TV.

To viewers, the subliminal message looked like this: just a flash of light. But slow it down and there it was  “Now call the chief.”

Magnus: And you were hoping that perhaps your killer might see it?

Lamunyon: Yeah.

Magnus: Did you get any phone calls?

Lamunyon: No.

Magnus: Did anybody’s subconscious get tapped at all?

Lamunyon: No. We didn’t get anything out of it.

Wherever he was, the killer could not or would not be reached.

Even when the police got a break and were able to track down a letter BTK sent from a photocopier at Wichita State University, they still couldn’t catch him. Turns out Rader was a student there studying criminal justice.

Lamunyon: We tracked the communication he sent to us to that copy machine that was at the activity center.  And we had detectives go back to the Xerox company and they confirmed that’s where it came from. But he was on a list with several thousand others.  If you were a white male between 18 and 35, you were on that list.  But we couldn’t match him to any other list.

And they had the killer’s voice on tape, of course, from that time he’d boldly called 911 to tell them he’d murdered Nancy Fox.  In time the police were able to have the technical quality of that call enhanced and it was played repeatedly on radio and TV.

Lamunyon: He said it was probably mistake, but he liked it.  He liked the fact that it’s been played over and over and over for years and years.

Yet even with all that exposure, nobody recognized voice as that of a man named Dennis Rader. Another dead end. 

Rader: I think I was lucky.  I think I was lucky quite a bit.  Pretty lucky guy.  Yeah, I think they got close a couple times.  I was just lucky.

Incredibly so for a killer who may well have been seen several times: A handful of eyewitnesses helped police make sketches of how they remembered the suspect.  But the drawings weren’t especially helpful, because nobody could quite agree on what BTK looked like.

As DNA matching evolved during the 1980’s, the police tried to use that technology to catch their killer.  More than 200 samples were taken from men living near the victims who fit BTK’s profile and compared to the semen they’d preserved from several of the crime scenes.  Nobody matched.

Magnus: You had DNA evidence.

Lamunyon: Yes.

Magnus: You had his voice on tape.

Lamunyon: Yes.

Magnus: And you just couldn’t get him.

Lamunyon: Couldn’t get him.

Magnus: You had the best behavioral science minds in the country..

Lamunyon: Uh huh...

Magnus: helping you develop a profile of who he was and what he might do, and you couldn’t ever anticipate him.

Lamunyon: Could never anticipate him.

Still, Lamunyon says now that while they didn’t know anything about Dennis Rader they knew a lot about BTK.

Lamunyon: After he went dormant and stopped killing, the theory was, and everyone was saying, 'Well, he’s in prison,' or 'maybe he has an illness,' or 'something happened.' I never bought that. I was convinced that he was one of us. We had him pegged in terms of the type of individual we were looking for.  We had everything but a name.

In the jailhouse interview with the psychologist, which we showed Former Chief Lamunyon, Rader was openly scornful of local law enforcement and disdainful of all their years of effort.

Mendoza: You know, they traced a lot of stuff down. They traced the copier down, the copiers I used out at WSU, but they couldn’t make the connection from there.

Rader: They had 30 some years to break it and they couldn’t do it. The taxpayers who are paying the money for the Sedgwick County, they really need to have a sharper bunch. Although they tried and they tried and they tried. 

"I’m not offended by anything he says," says the former police chief. "It’s all about him.  I know that the police officers did everything in their power. I know that they finally caught him."

Magnus: With everything you know about him now, do you think that you should have been able to get him?

Lamunyon: I’d like to tell you yes.  I really don’t think we could’ve done anymore than we did.

Magnus: He called the Wichita Police "the Keystone Cops."

Lamunyon: [laughs]  I heard that. Again, that just Dennis Rader because what he was saying is to allow the Wichita police to catch him, you know, would be demeaning to him.  And it just bugs him. It just drives him crazy. So therefore he has to belittle the police department in order to elevate himself. 

Magnus: The conventional wisdom was that somehow he was smart because he always stayed one step ahead of the police.

Lamunyon: I don’t think he’s smart at all. We’re not talking about a genius here, you know.  We’re not talking about a Hannibal Lector-type of individual. I think he was just more lucky than anything in terms of what he did. Because he did it in such a random fashion and because there was no connection between them and because he did it alone and it was so sporadic, and it was over such a long period of time.

And probably most important, Lamunyon says, Rader apparently told absolutely nobody about what he had done.

Lamunyon: I don’t think he even joked about it.  I don’t think he said, “Oh, I could be a strangler” type thing. I don’t think so.

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