Landwehr, a detective,hunted serial killer

Published 12:00 am Thursday, January 16, 2014

Lt. Ken Landwehr, a homicide detective in Wichita, Kan., who played a pivotal role in the capture of the serial killer known as BTK, whose terrorizing spree went unredressed for more than 30 years, died at his home Monday in Wichita. He was 59.

The cause was kidney cancer, said Joel Vanatta, who is married to the lieutenant’s stepdaughter.

Landwehr, whom the city’s mayor, Carl Brewer, called “the Dick Tracy of Wichita,” served on the Wichita police force for more than 30 years. He was commander of the department’s homicide unit from 1992 until his retirement in 2012, by which time he’d had a hand in more than 600 murder investigations, the department said.

They included a pair of unrelated quadruple murders that occurred within eight days in 2000 and the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in 1990.

But by far, his most prominent case was that of Dennis Rader, who killed 10 people from 1974 to 1991 and who, in communications with the news media and the police, called himself BTK, an abbreviation of his working method: bind, torture, kill.

An egotist who enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse with the police, Rader bragged of his crimes and taunted the police with letters, poems and packages delivered to local news agencies and left in public places.

After his final murder — he strangled Dolores Davis, 62, in her Wichita home in 1991 — he vanished. But he resumed sending messages to newspapers and television stations in 2004.

He was finally caught in 2005. Landwehr and Rader had been exchanging coded messages placed in newspaper ads when the detective tricked him into using a floppy disk for his next communication, falsely telling him that the disk could not be used to track him down.

A few weeks later, Rader sent such a disk to a local television station. It was quickly traced to a computer at the church where Rader was a congregation leader. He was arrested days later, confessed to his crimes and was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms, which he is serving at El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kan.

Born Jan. 23, 1954, Kenneth Landwehr grew up in Wichita, where local news reports said he was an Eagle Scout, a high school debate champion and a devotee of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, — but also a drinker and an occasional brawler as a teenager. His father, Lee, worked at Cessna, the aircraft company; his mother, Irene, was a homemaker.

By his own admission he was a poor student at Wichita State University, although he excelled in algebra and criminal justice and considered applying to join the FBI. He decided to pursue a career in law enforcement in 1977, after the store where he was working as a clerk was robbed.

He and others in the store were tied up, and one robber stood over him, loading a pistol. No one was killed, but the episode gave Landwehr the experience of being a victim and fostered compassion for crime victims and their families that he said became his prime motivation in doing his job.

He was known among friends and colleagues for taking cases personally.

“When I did my interview to get on the police department, they always ask you one question, ‘How far do you want to go in the department?’, and at that interview, I said, ‘I want to command homicide,’” Landwehr said in a television interview.