The Poet | 2. Where’s Ruth?

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Ruth Finley's tormentor wasn't letting up. A week after the first letter arrived, a second

“arrived in her mailbox. He had promised Ruth he'd send her his poetry, and here he was delivering.”

Before long, these poems would lead to him being nicknamed the poet. The latest letter here, read for us by an actor, said, "Ruth, how would you like to put about $100 in tablet under the seat in your husband's pee, you?" Ruth read that to mean her husband adds Ford pickup truck. The letter was full of these strange abbreviations. The writing was scribbles in erratic. What was clear was that he still wanted his payout. Don't tell no one. You can get that

much without your husband to know it. I can find that lieutenant name on your car. Don't tell him neither.

“You somehow knew that Ruth had gone to the police. I can tell if anybody is watching me.”

Don't be a dumb bitch, again, and below this. Despite the threat, Ruth called Lieutenant Bernie Jawatsky again. She read him the letter over the phone. Jawatsky asked her to bring it down to the station, so Ed hand-delivered it. At that same time, Jawatsky and his team were trying to decipher letters and poems from BTK. They were struck by the similarities, but they were also getting 30 tips a week.

So they let Ruth's letter sit there, collecting dust. Ruth didn't obey the poet's orders. She didn't put $100 in the pickup truck like he requested, and she took her letter to the cops, which he specifically warned her not to do. Clearly, Ruth was no wallflower. She wasn't going to do what this man wanted. She was going to put up a fight. But Ruth's disobedience only angered the poet further, and just one week later, he got his revenge.

Just two days before Thanksgiving, Ruth's sister Jean gets a call from Ruth's boss. He asks if she had eaten lunch with Ruth. Jean tells him she hadn't seen her sister at all that day. 45 minutes later, Ruth's boss calls Jean again. Have you heard from her? He asks, Jean again says no. Ruth's boss immediately hangs up and calls Ed to tell him.

Ruth hasn't come back from lunch. Ed always knew where Ruth was. Every second of the day,

and night, they were that close. Ed had been keeping close tabs on Ruth, trying to do everything in his power to keep her stalker, whoever he was, from harming her. The poems upset him. They were vile and demeaning towards the woman he loved. Ruth put on a brave face, but he could feel the toll it was taking on her. It was all too much. This was the first time in years that he did not know where his wife was. It had been two hours, he assumed the words.

Ed calls the police to report her missing. Under regular circumstances, the police wouldn't act on a missing person's report that early, but Ed insists something is very wrong.

From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, this is the poet. I'm Rachel Brown.

Episode 2, "Where's Ruth?" Ruth is at work at the phone company, South Western Bell, on the morning of November 21, 1978. The day of her disappearance. One of her colleagues was having a birthday celebration in the office and Ruth had forgotten to get her a birthday card. It was kind of cold windy, damp day, rainy at rain. Reporter Fred Mann was a young journalist working at the Wichita Eagle Beacon at the time.

She was kind of a lushie didn't know if she should leave, but she saw if she knew the card

stored in nearby. She didn't even take a coat. Although she was advised by goworkers, say it's

cold outside you better put something on. These are Ruth's words, read for us by an actor. The wind was blowing. My head was wetter on. I thought it would be too cool to walk.

“I think I'll go back. As she crosses the street to return to the office, Ruth gets this”

eerie feeling like someone's following her. That's when an old green beat-up Chevy Bel Air pulls up to the curb. One of the rear windows is missing, patched up with tape. One side of the car has been caved in. His car pulled up beside me. He got it, hopped out. He kicked me in the shins with sharp shoes.

He pushes Ruth into the back of the car. Get in.

The back seat of the car is missing. Ruth is thrown to the floor. You caught my money. Ruth looks up and realizes to her horror it's the same man who had grabbed her in the alley months earlier, her stalker. There's another man in the car in the driver's seat. He's got fuzzy hair poking out from under a wool cap. There's no rear view mirror, so Ruth can't

“see his face. As he starts to drive, he takes wicks of wine from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag.”

The entire car inside and out is a disaster. The dashboard seems to be kept together with tape and there's trash everywhere. And it had lots of big chains, just junk and had a board on top of it on the floor. She notices rags, stones, empty gas cans and other things that make Ruth wonder if they've come from a farm. She's frantic, but she tries to keep her cool and memorize what's around her and case those details could be useful if she survives this thing. The man next to her,

her stalker, talks incessently. He was talking about being a spy for the government, buildings and what all he had done, he babbled all the time. This talk about building struck Ruth could this be the construction worker who called her

“after finding that newspaper clip about her assault in Fort Scott?”

We're going to go party, we're going to have a party you and me. There was something alarming about their suggestion of a party. Ruth hears fragments of their conversation and picks up that the driver's name is Buddy. She doesn't hear what her kidnapper is called. She thinks about trying to escape, but the door handle on her side is broken and she worries she'll hurt herself if she leaps from the car. She notices a red bandana lying on the floor.

When the men aren't looking, she picks it up and talks it away. They cruise around town with Ruth for what feels like hours. She hopes someone will report the Chevy, which is noisy and falling apart, totally not fit for the road. At one moment, Ruth spots a police cruiser. She's silently praised for the cop to pull them over, but he just keeps on driving.

That is when he had me open my purse and he said, "Well, what you got in there?" And I had a check and a bond. He told Buddy, hey, we've hit the jackpot. He had her go through the purse to show him what's in it. He said, "You see, I'm not touching anything in the purse, don't you can't get any fingerprints out of me?" He was reprited that. His whole attitude is "I'm better than you are. I know what I'm doing.

You know, I've got you." Ruth is careful to comply and shows him every item in her purse, except for one, her can of mace.

He's angry that Ruth is still talking to the police.

“He got very mad. He pulls up a hunk of something hard.”

Looked like a piece of concrete. He walked me with it. He hits Ruth in the head. The driver, Buddy, gets upset at this and tells him to leave Ruth alone. It was getting dark and he said, "We would go home. Get some beer and go home." And then I panicked, you know. I thought there was no way I was going home with him. I told him I had to go to the bathroom.

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Quince.com/crimes. There are a lot of true crime podcasts out there and I have 30 seconds to

“come into you while you should check out crime lines. Crime lines is one of those shows that just”

lays it all out there. The backstory, the legal context, and details of cases you haven't heard before. If you hear about a true crime case and want to know what happened and why, you're my kind of listener. You can check out crime lines wherever you get your podcasts, that's crime lines one word and get ready to dive deep. Ruth gets an idea. She tells her captors she's feeling sick. She warns the men that if she doesn't get to a bathroom quickly

that she will throw up all over the car. I tried to gag and irritated the driver. So they said pull in here and they pulled in by that kind of playground there on 21st Street by the river. The stalker tells Ruth to go down by the river. He tells her he'll watch her as she goes to the bathroom. He forces her to take off her shoes and sweater so that she doesn't try running off. By now, it's dark and cold and the ground is wet. The man walks Ruth now barefoot

through the grass toward the bushes. He wasn't paying attention. He had a hold of my arm. Ruth reaches into her purse. I got the mace and shot him in the face and he coughed and I ran. Ruth hides in the bushes and keeps quiet. I heard him calling one of them. I don't know which one. If I would come back they would give me my sweater and my shoes. She could tell they were furious. Ruth stays hidden. Not quite sure exactly where she is.

After a while, the men give up and leave. She's free. Ruth spots a liquor store across the street and runs to it. She bursts through the door still barefoot and shivering from the cold. Someone's after me. She tells the store owner. He asks if he should call the police. Ruth says yes and asks him to call Ed too. Meanwhile, at home, Ed had been panicking and in constant contact with Ruth's boss,

Ruth had now been gone for more than four hours. When Ed's phone rings,

he immediately assumes the liquor store owner is her kidnapper and demands to speak with Ruth. She comes on the line and tells Ed she's okay but to please hurry down there. Which atop police detectives bring Ruth down to the police station? This kidnapping rocketed is somewhat lower priority stocking case right to the top of the pile. Now they had proof. Someone was directly targeting Ruth's life.

Ed and Ruth's sister Jean arrived at the police station. They find Ruth still clutching her mace. When Ed got to her, he saw his wife was just a mess. She was strange. Her hair was all over for Ed. Her clothes were wet. She was not crying. She was not hysterical. She had been

“telling the story as calm as she could to the cops. She describes what she can remember about”

the men to the police. The man who grabbed her is in his forties or fifties with black hair that was graying around the temples and he wore wire-framed glasses. He's the same man who accosted her a few months ago but this time she got a better look at him. She says he's around five foot eight to five foot ten and very skinny around 145 pounds. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans. The driver was called buddy. Ruth didn't get a good look at him so she couldn't provide

much of a physical description. The kidnappers got away with her payroll check, a savings bond, and some stationary from her purse. She got away with the red bandana from the car. She shows it to the cops who examine it. Detectives head down to the spot where Ruth fled from her

“kidnappers in search of clues. At the river they find Ruth sweater and shoes but that's it.”

Police jump into action to try to find more leads. Going so far is to run a check on every Chevy model that matched Ruth's description of the kidnappers vehicle. The police thought the car was so beaten up and distinctive that surely somebody would have noticed it. So they cruise that whole area for days, looking for the car, talking to people who may have seen her during the introduction. But there are no witnesses. The trail goes cold.

Ed and Ruth stay on high alert. Fearful that Ruth could be taken again at any time. Detective Arlen Smith of the Wichita Police recalls how things changed for the couple. She lived in fear that she would be kidnapped again. She tried to watch for people following her when she went to and from work. She and her husband changed their habits about where they ate and and when they went out when they came home and they come home and they checked the house carefully.

The headache she had been getting ever since she received the first poet phone call,

became an everyday occurrence now. She begins to suffer from intense stomach cramps. And there was little Ed felt he could do to protect his wife. He felt helpless and frustrated. But Ruth had been able to describe the man in detail. Ed was an artist, he liked to paint, so he put his skills to use and came up with a sketch of the guy with wire-rimmed glasses and graying hair. The police took his sketch and sent it in a special bulletin to all officers on the

force and even posted it around town. Lieutenant Druatsky and his team remain vigilant. He sends two police detectives to surveil Ruth at work following her at a distance on the street during her lunch breaks. Druatsky and the finlies were working together closely, keeping each other in the loop on developments and theories. Druatsky and his wife even start socializing with the finlies going to the same church. Druatsky and old school kind of cop usually kept his distance from

the people involved in his investigations. But Ed and Ruth were so kind and generous that he and his wife fell into an easy friendship with them, even having dinner with them some evenings. But there was still one theory that Lieutenant Druatsky wasn't telling the finlies. That her stalker could be BTK. A new poet letter detailed killing a fox was this a reference to

“BTK's murder of Nancy Joe Fox? Was BTK trying to tell them this was him?”

But BTK had never kidnapped anyone before. He always waited until his victims were safe at home

pattern and carrying out his violence in public. Then, just a few weeks after Ruth's kidnapping,

“Lieutenant Druatsky himself receives a letter from the poet. Though the Wichitaop PD and local”

newspapers and TV stations had received numerous letters from BTK over the last few years. This was

the first time Druatsky had received a letter like this addressed to him personally, taunting him.

Is long and rambling and accuses Druatsky of "protecting a horror from death." Druatsky was known to have a bit of a temper and this gets under his skin. He's going to solve this thing. So he goes back to the beginning. In the first call Ruth had received, the man told her he found the newspaper clipping about her attack while demolishing buildings. If this was a construction worker who would become obsessed with Ruth, he might still be working in Ford's Scott.

“Wow, that's easy. The first thing I can do is automatically. I'm so excited. Hold your”

money to get up and get a 30-year-old daughter. What? You can't be excited with her. I'm so excited. Lieutenant Druatsky sent the relatively new officer Mike McKenna to Ford Scott, only a few hours from Wichitaop. McKenna took the thinly-soulong to search for clues from Ruth's past that could lead them to her tormentor and perhaps BTK himself. Their first stop is the house where Ruth was living in 1946. It's where she was attacked

and branded on her inner thigh with a hot iron. Her attacker was never caught. We got there.

We went to where the address was where the house was supposed to be. The house had been torn down.

“Demolished, sometime in the '70s. So there was no house to look at.”

Detective McKenna and the other officers connect with the local police in Ford Scott. We asked the police department to look at the report on Ruth Finlay. Her smock as her name was at that time. And we asked for the file or the case jacket.

They hope that a fresh look at the file might reveal something about the man who is targeting Ruth,

but those hopes are quickly dashed. The police department in Ford Scott Kansas told us that they had destroyed the case files of any cases that had happened before 1953 or 54. So that was a dead end. Well, yeah. The only details that remained were those found in sensationalist media coverage in the person's son and the wichita eagle under headlines like

sadist mutilates high school girl and chloroform fiend brand's fort Scott girl with flat iron. The police cast a wide net looking for anyone who knew Ruth at the time who might have known something about the attack. We looked for classmates that could tell us and we just kept coming up with C-Ros. Nobody remembered it. They asked around to different local construction companies to see if Ruth's description of the man who kidnapped her fits anyone working in demolition in

Ford Scott. People who may have employed this guy and couldn't really couldn't find anybody. Ed, Ruth and the cops come back to wichita empty handed. Another dead end. But Mike McKenna isn't ready to let up just yet. After a bit of digging in property records, he learns that Ruth's fort Scott landlord at the time was actually living in a nursing home in wichita. He goes to visit her on his own without Ruth in Ed.

I couldn't believe it. So I drove over there and I went in to see this woman. Her name was Flora Hale and she was 96 years old and I spoke to Flora in her room and

in one of her room houses in Ford Scott when a woman named Ruth Smock lived there.

“And I said, do you remember one afternoon and a repeated story that a guy came into the apartment,”

rented her unconscious and branded her with iron on her thighs? And this lady looked at me and she said, nothing like that ever happened at my apartment. And I said, you're sure. She said, yes, I'm quite sure. I would have known that, or something like that would have happened. Mike McKenna records her saying this, then heads right to Drawatsky's office and plays it back to him.

He listened to Flora. No nothing like that ever happened at my apartment. When it was over,

he said, she doesn't know what she's talking about. She's seen her. I said, burning this woman has as much sense as you are me. Maybe more. But she knew that nothing like that had ever happened. She was insistent on it. No, no, he just wasted your time. I said, okay. So McKenna, a loyal officer, continues on with the investigation.

“But he starts to wonder, what actually happened in Ford Scott?”

After Ford Scott, the letters keep coming. There once was a slut. I met on the street,

who thought to all men she need not be sweet. And just like BTK's letters, these are misogynistic and perverse. Ed hand delivers each one to the cops down at the station. Reporter Fred Mann again. They were hand printed. Sometimes he would start off a letter with the writing style alternates between nearly incoherent ramblings and sophisticated vocabulary. Words like "Objugate" and "Damify". I'll disparage all horrors,

“in victim words, scatter, adopting that home in the morning in my peace, shatter.”

Ruth, ever the secretary, types out the letters and gives them to the cops. She would even add indefinitions at the fancier words, and her guesses at what some of the abbreviations could mean. She'd sometimes include a handwritten note to the officers. "Has Ruth, I don't know if you want this or not. Since I put out the effort, you're getting it anyway." Young detective McKenna was a puzzler, a problem-solver. He was determined to unearth any clues

he could find in the letters. "I would zerox them and take them home and read them at night, trying to find a clue in the letter that might fit together with some other letter that we have, and figure out who this guy is." In June of 1979, as Ruth's letters kept coming, another woman in which a talk received a letter. The same letter arrived at cake TV.

Both were signed "DTK." The letter included a poem called, "O Anna, why didn't you appear?" The letter goes, "Alone again I trot in past memory of mirrors, and ponder why you number eight was not. Away, why didn't you appear?" The recipient "Anna Williams" learns from this poem that she only just escaped being BTK's eighth victim. He broke into her home, then got impatient and left before she returned. The Wichita P.D. are now hard at work, stretching their poetry analysis skills

on two cases, and coming up short. They start to wonder if they should look to the relatively new world of criminal profiling for some help, if they really want to understand who this guy is, and what he's capable of. Then, one poem arrives in the Finley's mailbox that ups the ante.

"Of course, fondants from the Salem kept raising the bar going from simply I want money to

I'm going to kill you."

“The police dig in, spending more time and resources surveilling Ruth.”

And then in July, more than a year into this ordeal, the letters to Ruth seem to slow down. "There would be periods of nothing happening. Everybody would think, maybe it's over. A month would go by, nothing would happen, and everybody would sort of okay again. Some of the cops said he's done playing his game, he's gone." "Did it work? Has their presence scared him away?" "If I knew that police were involved, I'd

got to the hell out in there."

Maybe Ruth's nightmare is finally over.

But just as they thought they were out of the woods, the police get an alarming call. Ruth has been rushed to the hospital. She has been stabbed. Next time on the poet. "This guy comes up to her and stabs her. She's got three stab wounds in her back and her sign."

“She told her, "I think it's stabbed, and he said, "This week there will get an ambulance through you."”

"And of course, I said some nasty words, and said he got her. We finally got her."

"Oh my God, it got out of her." "Don't want to wait for the next episode. You don't have to." Unlock all episodes of the poet early and add free right now by subscribing to the binge. And it doesn't stop at the poet. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the

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Search for the binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple, head to getthebinge.com to subscribe directly. The poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, new metric media, and muse entertainment. The show is hosted by Meet Rachel Brown. The series is written and produced by Pippa John Stone and Rachel Brown. From new metric media, our executive producer is Chris Kelly. From Sony Music Entertainment,

our executive producers are Katherine 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 Elhoari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony, and Austin Wong.

Voice acting from Cassandra Season, Morgan Murray, and Anthony McMahon. Special thanks to Andre's Lara, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Emily Rassick, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment.