The Call

I'm Sanju Basque, this week, sitting in for Simon Mayo. And I'm Mark Kermode, this week, sitting in for Mark Kermode. And Mark, what films will you be reviewing this week? We have suburban dinosaurs in the end of Oak Street. We have a restaurateur biography in Tony and Lady, with our very special guest, Sean Clifford. exclusive bonus episodes and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe. Or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The binge. Feed your true crime obsession. For the first time in a long time, Ruth Finley was home alone. Killer locked the three children in the bathroom while he viciously attacked their mother. Inside their home by the time. Ruth and Ed, her husband of 27 years, were rarely apart. By the summer of 1977, they were empty nesters. Their two sons had grown up and moved away from Wichita, Kansas. But earlier that day, Ed had suffered what they thought was a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital. And now, doctors were keeping him overnight for observation. So Ruth was on her own. The people of Wichita were on edge. BTK, a serial killer whose aliased stood for bind, torture, kill, was actively hunting people in their city. Just months earlier, he'd killed a mother in her home at night. At around 1030 that evening, Ruth's phone rings. In an interview, Ruth later gave to cake TV. She said the conversation was fine at first. The man started out friendly like a Rosario. Ruth's smart from four skyline. Ruth hadn't gone by her maiden name, Smock, since the 1940s. When she did, in fact, live in Fort Scott, Kansas. Then he started asking me about this incident. The man on the phone asks, Ruth had been assaulted by a stranger in her apartment when she was 16 years old. Attacked, incapacitated, and branded with a hot iron. The man who did it had never been caught. The guy on the phone tells her he works for a construction company tearing down buildings. In his work, he'd found a newspaper clipping from 1946 about the attack. The newspaper had published Ruth's high school photo under the word "branded." The coverage had humiliated her, making her private trauma the talk of her hometown. "I know where you work. If you don't do it, I want. I might just leave that article where everyone can see it." She had told very few people in her life in Wichita about the attack. "The jest of it was, he was going to want some money for me, or he was going to tell us again. He was going to bring it up again." He demands payment to keep the story quiet. She has three weeks. He says he'll call back then and expect her to pay up. The caller's words didn't rhyme, but they soon would. This one call would set off a year's long manhunt, one of the most expensive in Wichita history, for a mysterious character who would spread fear throughout this Midwestern city. The poet was always two steps in front of us and we just didn't know why. It's a story about a seemingly normal middle-aged woman. "Why is this person threatening her? Why is this happening to her?" Targeted by a monster. "He'd read jickery dog. Your face mounted on my cloth." Whose story would become a media sensation. "We consider him extremely dangerous. He was virtually a pathological person." "Lock printing and a piece of a red band dance." "There was a lot of terrifying things that were happening to her." "We knew he was a very violent person." "Haker and jickery dog." From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, this is The Poet. I'm Rachel Brown. Episode 1. The Call. I'm an investigative reporter. I cover cases dealing with cults, serial killers, all things true crime. And the story of Ruth Finley and her tormentor caught my attention because of how strange and extreme it got. It's the 1970s, at the dawn of the serial killer era, when criminal profiling has just been invented. A middle-aged woman from middle America has a stalker, a stalker who writes her poetry. But then the story twists and turns and gets caught up in a media tornado that goes well beyond Kansas, even ending up on the Oprah Winfrey show. But Ruth's peaceful life was disrupted when an unknown man vowed to kill her. I've been trying to untangle this whole thing from my home in Toronto, but I knew I had to go see where it all happened to really understand it, even though nearly 50 years had passed since that first threatening phone call. So I hopped on a plane to Wichita. I knew I would never get to talk to Ruth Finley. She passed away years before. But I needed to talk to the people closest to Ruth to understand. Who was she? And was there anything about her that could have helped them anticipate the wild events to come? Ruth Finley, I always thought it was kind of like my mom. In 1977, Ruth was in her late 40s, a mother, a wife, a secretary at the telephone company. Not somebody you'd expect to have enemies or big secrets. She is this woman who went to work every day because she wanted to make something of herself. She's this woman who raised a family. She was an everyday woman and average woman. Most people I spoke with told me, Ruth and her husband Ed were normal. Even for Wichita, very, very normal. Just your average couple in a middle-aged couple. She was just a sweet lady. She made cakes and pies and she fed everyone in the homicide section very well. This is from a home video of Ruth celebrating New Year's with her friends. Well, actually, the story is about Ruth. That's the voice of her best friend, Emma Dillinger, who told me Ruth was a ton of fun. A good friend. A funny friend. Hilarious at times. Because she was smart and quick, quick-witted. At the New Year's party, you can see Ruth sitting on a couch next to her husband Ed joking around. "Say, Ruth and Ed, earlier this evening we were here to give the resolutions. Yeah, yeah. Let's turn them again. I want to have a real good talk." Ruth and Ed had met in Fort Scott, Kansas in the late 1940s. Fell in love, married, then moved a few hours away to Wichita and had two sons in two years. "He was honest. Fourth right? Smart." "What was he like for Ruth?" "Oh, they were in a good match." Ed worked as an accountant. Ruth had taken some time off when raising their boys, then returned to work as a secretary at the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. Life was simple. Until it wasn't. Ruth was at work at the Telephone Company, checking the office mail as usual when she saw her own name on an envelope. There was no address, no room number, just Ruth Finley in crude, blocky handwriting. The letter must have been hand delivered. Inside is a yellowed clipping from the fourth Scott Tribune newspaper about her assault, just as the man on the phone had threatened her with. She hadn't seen this article since she was 16. At the time of Ruth's assault, in 1946, there were many articles published about her attack. The Fort Scott Tribune at the time wrote, "Branded by a hot flat iron, Ruth Smock, 16-year-old Fort Scott High School girl was resting today, following an attack upon her early last night by a man whom Fort Scott police called a sex maniac." In high school, Ruth had moved to a neighboring town for a better education, where she lived alone in an apartment and worked a part-time job at the phone company in Fort Scott. She had been on her dinner break when she was attacked. She had come home and a man had followed her in close behind. He grabbed her and she fought back. Here's Fred Mann, a journalist who covered Ruth's story extensively in the 1970s. She remembers that he put a lot of chloroform under her nose and held it against her. She was screaming, fighting, crying. He was wrestling with her and she remembered passing out. She woke up on the kitchen floor, seeing the man above her, heating a hot iron on the stove top. He at one point grabbed the iron off of the stove and brought it down, came under her skirt and pressed this hot, flat iron against one of her thighs. Now she screamed and then passed out again. Her memory comes in flashes as she's in and out of consciousness. She remembered that he had had a knife out and he was slashing her legs with his knife. Just bang, bang, bang. He was chewing tobacco and some of it was starting to run out of his mouth. Then he stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth and she was gagging on that. Eventually she woke up again and the man was gone. She had a deep wound on her inner thigh from the hot iron. After being treated by a doctor, Ruth's parents reported the incident to the police who interviewed her. They were doubtful, which really hurt her, embarrassed her. And at one point one of the cops, she was sitting in a chair telling him this, another cop who was sitting opposite her, reached out with one of his legs and he had boots on and he reached under her ankle and lifted up her leg to look under her skirt, to look at the brand, try to confirm the brand and that humiliated her. Not only was the police interrogation mortifying, the newspapers took her story and ran wild with it. At 16, her name and home address were published in the paper alongside her high school photo. It's hard to imagine a paper today publishing a teenager's name and photo, not to mention her address. Ruth was a minor and the victim of a crime. This is like the 1940s era version of doxing. Ruth's family's response was to pretend the assault hadn't happened. Her mother took her back home and put her up in her bedroom with a door closed for a week. Her mother was sort of the opinion that the less said that better. Ruth will be okay because we were trained to trust our problems to God. That's how her family approached it. But outside her home, the attack was whispered about all through the community. And once you went back to school, there were a lot of kids who talked about it with her and she kind of got in a little trouble in school because of that. There was a time, Fred said, when a different girl named Ruth had been caught drinking with some boys and the school officials assumed it was our Ruth. It wasn't fair, but the branding attack had cost her her reputation. "Ruth had this aura about her having been attacked and doubted that she was somehow not a good person, not a good girl." She was humiliated and traumatized. She said that for weeks after she'd throw up when she entered her apartment. Ruth was in so many ways unsupported. Her parents, her school, her community. They doubted her and questioned her character, not her attackers. Soon after, Ruth moved out of that apartment. She found a new place in Fort Scott in a rooming house. There, she met Ed, the man who would become her husband. Ed was her lifeline during that time, which created the foundation for their close, long-lasting marriage. But now, in 1977, as she sees this familiar newspaper headline fall out of an envelope onto her work desk, the shame comes rushing back. Ruth quickly shoves the clipping in her desk drawer and throws it out before anyone can see it. There was no note with the clipping, but the message was clear. If you don't pay up, I'll tell everyone about your branding. This was an escalation. A call to her home was one thing, but now he was coming for her at work. She hadn't mentioned the call to Ed before while he was recovering at the hospital, but now that he was better, she decides to tell him everything. She turned to Ed and said, "If a man calls, I want you to talk to him." And he said, "What do you mean?" And she told him this story about this fooling call. He was talking about her brands wanting money to keep quiet about them, and sort of an aura of threat about him. Ed is concerned, but at this point, they think they can handle it. They decide they won't pay this man any money. Maybe if they ignore him, he'll go away. Man, they didn't go to the police. It was sort of loud. Let's see what happens. But what happens next makes the situation a lot harder to ignore? In the months after receiving the ominous envelope at work, Ruth received six more calls. Always hanging up the moment she heard his voice. As she's leaving work one Friday to meet Ed for a ride home, a man walking down the street bumps her shoulder. And this guy started talking to her and the first thing he said to her was, "You did a good job at work this week. You can take the weekend off." The crosswalk light changes and the man falls into step with Ruth as she crosses the street. He's a tall guy in his forties with wire-framed glasses and dark hair that's graying at the temples. He tells Ruth he knows she works at the telephone company. He walks closely alongside her, babbling in her ear about cameras, winning money in Las Vegas, on and on. He seems unwell, unhinged even. She finally got to the store where she really met Ed and he stopped at that point. She turned to him and he looked at her and he said, "I'm going to see you again." "I'm going to see you again." Some people fantasies or other people as nightmares. And he turned to walk away. Soon after, Ed picks Ruth up. As soon as she gets into the car, she tells Ed about this weird interaction. Here's journalist Fred Mann again. "She came across this very stoic, very quiet, very. here's something weird that happened to me just now. You know, she was not hysterical, she wasn't crying. None of that." Ruth is stoic. She holds her cards close to her chest. But I'd be unnerved if someone approached me on the street this way. And there was something familiar to Ruth about this guy. His voice. Is this the same guy who called the house? She asks Ed who says he doesn't think so. He thinks this is just some weirdo looking for a last minute date for the weekend. But Ruth isn't so sure. And what does it mean if the caller has now found her on the street? Is he following her? "Then, more calls come to the house and they don't stop." If Ruth answered, she'd hear the man's voice and would immediately hang up. If Ed answered, he'd only hear a dial tone. Once, a call came in on a Saturday as Ruth and Ed were having lunch. He heard dead air, but this time, stayed on the phone, yelling and yelling for a response. After nearly an hour, a voice suddenly responded. A man on the other end said he was walking by a public phone downtown by the post office and heard Ed shouting down the line. Someone had left the phone hanging off the hook. The calls went on like this, intermittently, for nearly a year. All that time, Ruth and Ed didn't go to the cops. Probably hoping this guy would give up and go away. But in the summer of 1978, Ruth's stalker shows his face again. She had run an errand to Macy's on her lunch break. On her way back to work, she passes an alley and a hand reaches out and grabs her wrist. With horror, she realizes it's the same man who had accosted her on the street a year earlier. Ruth wrenches her arm free, breaking her watch band in the process. Get back here, you stupid bitch! She bolts into Macy's and rushes up the escalator. And now she was, there was panic now in her. And she waited up there until enough time had passed where she sought to invent her downstairs. Finally, she calls Ed to come get her and he races over. At this point, Ed wanted to go to the police. That was too much for Ed. And Ruth said, "No, no. She didn't want to deal with police because of what had happened to her in Ford Scott." So Ed goes to the police station and files a report alone. He tells them about the unsettling encounters on the street and the phone calls. The officer he speaks to doesn't seem to take his concern very seriously. He just tells him to be cautious. And it was actually kind of offended. This office through his social, his simple minded and so Ed left. The Wichita police do not seem to think that Ruth getting harassed, stalked even, warrants their attention. After all, at this point, they've got bigger fish to fry. B.T.K. was still out there and obviously they had their own other crimes to deal with. So they dismissed it and sort of left Ruth and Ed to kind of try to figure it out for themselves. No one from the police calls the finlies to update them or follow up on this report. On a weekend that fall, Ruth is at home, baking pies for the church bake sale. Her English bulldog Sherman rolls over, his signal that the mailman has come. She collects the mail from the front porch and as she sorts it, she notices one strange envelope tied with string and tape. It has her name and block letters. The writing's familiar, that same crude almost childlike handwriting she'd seen on the envelope that contained the clipping about her assault. She tears the envelope open. The letter inside is handwritten as well, covered in ramblings on both sides. Fuck you, fuck the police, fuck the telephone company. He said, "I write poems. I'm a really good poet. I'm essentially some poems. I'm going to get to you, I'm going to see you, and then there were some more threats. Sort of vague, weird things. It wasn't a poem, but it was obviously really a disturbed letter." The letter goes on to demand again that Ruth pay him, but gives no specifics. This time, he threatens to hurt her if she doesn't comply. When Ed returns home, Ruth shows him the letter. They agree that it's time to go back to the police. This time, when Ed and Ruth show up to make their report, they bring the letter with them. At this time, they're escorted immediately to the Major Crimes Division. This is a very different reception than the brush off Ed had gotten the first time he'd reported Ruth's harassment. That was because the police knew something Ruth and Ed didn't. This long, rambling, threatening message had all the hallmarks of another case they were deeply invested in. The police believe the person behind this letter might be the BTK killer. "Do you see any patterns of BTK's conduct? We have an individual who apparently has the uncontrollable desire to kill at times." The local media covered it obsessively, like this segment from KKTV where they interviewed the police. And how could they not cover something so horrifying? This man liked to tie up and torture people before taking their lives. "What kind of leads do you have?" "Very honestly, we have no shot at leads at all." I'm Sanju Baskar this week sitting in for Simon Mayow. And I'm Mark Kermot this week sitting in for Mark Kermot. We have a restaurateur biography in Tony and Lady with our very special guest, Sean Clifford. It was late in 1978 by the time Ruth brought her letter to the police. By then, the BTK killer had been terrorizing Wichita for nearly five years. He would bind, torture, and kill his victims, usually women, often in their homes. The young officers of the Wichita Police Department were struggling under mounting public pressure. They had no leads. And BTK had claimed responsibility for seven victims. "I always enjoyed law enforcement." Detective Mike McKenna was a rookie in the Wichita Police Department in the '70s. He loved the job. "There were times I thought to myself, 'I can't believe they're paying me to do this.' If I was physically capable and young enough, I would still be doing it today." And in fact, Detective McKenna's two sons are now both officers in the Wichita PD. But back in 1974, he was in his first year on the job. And that was the year the BTK horror began. It started with the infamous murders of the Otero family. "When their son got home from school, Charles Otero and found his parents along with his brother and sister, that had all been murdered." BTK had broken into a family home, strangling the parents, Joseph and Julie, and two of their children. This crime terrified Wichita. A family murdered in their home and the crime was sexually motivated and sadistic. And just three months later, he struck again. "Then after that, Catherine Bright was killed and her brother Kevin was wounded." BTK stabbed Catherine to death. Her brother was shot in the head, but survived. At first, the Otero and Bright crimes weren't connected. It just felt like random violent crime was on the rise in Wichita. The police were scrambling, with little to go on beyond vague descriptions of a dark-haired man. Following a promising lead, they took suspects into custody, triggering BTK to take credit for the Otero murders, and write his first letter to the media. He wasn't going to let someone else get credit for his kills. "Since sex criminals do not change their ammo, or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine." BTK's writing was full of grammatical and spelling errors, long and rambling. In that same letter, he gave himself his moniker, writing, "The code words for me will be, bind them, torture them, kill them. BTK. They will be on the next victim." But then, the killing stopped. From 1974 to 1977, BTK went quiet. Wichita waited to see if the terror was over. In 1977, BTK returned. First, 24-year-old Shirley Vianne was strangled in her home. And nine months later, 25-year-old Nancy Jo Fox suffered the same fate. Again, killed in her own home. "What was it like being in the newsroom when all this is unfolding in town?" "Well, it was, uh, a heck of a year's worth exciting, but there was a real buzz on about all of this. Every time there was a BK incident of some sort of letter or a phone call or a report of a new murder, you know, everybody was a buzz of chorus." In 1977, Fred Mann was a young reporter. He's in his late 70s now, but still has that sharp, inquisitive nature. You can just picture him as a young reporter in a bustling newsroom while everyone is scrambling to cover this serial killer. This was when the idea of serial killers was still pretty new. The FBI's behavioral science unit, the BSU, and the idea of criminal profiling was just getting mainstream. And the profile for BTK was alarming. Psychologists thought he could be anyone, just a regular functioning member of their community. BTK wrote another letter taking responsibility for his two newest victims, and claiming he'd now killed seven people. In this letter, he wrote his first poem. It was about his victim, Shirley Vianne, and began, "Surely locks, surely locks, will thou be mine?" And warned that a poem for Fox, his newest victim, was next. Now, Wichita knew for sure that they were under the watch of a serial killer with a taste for bad poetry. And people were very scared. Detective Mike McKenna again. People were locking their doors and buying guns. BTK was known to stalk his victims, and wait for them inside their homes. He would often cut his victim's phone lines before an attack. People were warned that the moment they returned home, they should pick up the phone. If the line was dead, they were told to run. Cops were at the ready. The community was quite guarded, and on evenings or whatever, when it was windy or there was a storm coming through, or the trash cans rattled or the dogs barked. They would call us constantly to come check their homes. We rode over time, putting extra police power on the streets. People were very quick about calling. Somebody was outside their house. They thought it was BTK. But in the Wichita Police Department's major crimes unit, one officer was about to find a new lead. Ruth Finley's letter. That officer was Lieutenant Bernie Jawatsky. And Jawatsky was. He was a real cops cop. Fred Mann knew him. He had no nonsense. A real tough guy. He looked apart. He had a slicked back here. He had a scarred face. He looked tough. And he had had pretty good history as a cop. He was a guy who was pretty relentless. Fred says Jawatsky was known as a bit of a hothead. He didn't like bad guys getting away. And now, Ruth and Ed Finley were in the major crimes division in front of this tough cop. They showed him their strange, threatening letter and told him about the other suspicious behavior over the last year. So they told him about these incidents downtown about the phone call. They had Rosski read the letter and they waited. And they waited for his reaction. But he didn't show anything. Did you show any signs of anything? Just read it calmly. And then he said, "What's this about the brands?" And then Ruth looked at Ed and Ed said, "Yeah, better tell them." And so then Ruth told them all about the branding incident towards Scott. Ruth told him in her typical stoic way. Jawatsky listened, sizing Ruth and Ed up. He thought that they were two average people from Wichita. You know, what disturbed him was the letter. Jawatsky knew the BTK case very well. He was part of the investigative team. And he knew the kinds of letters BTK had been sending, not just letters, but poems. So when he read this guy's threatening this woman with the identities, the fact he was bought, he began to think, "Could we really have two different people?" Or, "This is the same guy." We're not big enough to have two different people with this kind of obsession. He didn't tell them that though. He didn't bring up BTK to them. But when they left, he went back and we read the letter. And then he started to take them very seriously. And the letters to Ruth wouldn't stop. They were vile. The whole world bore her guilt in her bed of slime. Filled with violent imagery and degrading sexist language. From selling her ass and not charging a dime. And they evolved from threatening to extort her or expose her secret to threatening her life. Here's to you, attend her a valentine. Tormenting Ruth at every turn and taunting the police and media. Red with blood and tide with slime. Soon, this poet was no longer stopping at letters. He was ready to take action. Next time on the poet, Ruth is missing. We've had kidnappings, but nothing that resembled this. An ed comes to face his worst fear. He put everything together, thought, "This guy got her. He thought she was dead." The poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, New Metric Media, and Muse Entertainment. The show was hosted by me, Rachel Brown. The series is written and produced by Pippa Johnstone and Rachel Brown. From New Metric Media, our executive producer is Chris Kelly. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. From Muse Entertainment, our executive producer is Courtney Dobbins. Sound design and original music by Mark Angley. Nathan Howe is our story editor and associate producer. Consultant Jean Stone. Fact checking by Maya El-Hawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony, and Austin Wong. Voice acting from Cassandra Cieson, Morgan Murray, and Anthony McMahon. Special thanks to Andre Zlara, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Emily Rassick, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment.