The Poet | 4. Ruth Under Siege

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Have a surprise for you in the lobby Ruth.

Ruth is at work at the southwestern bell telephone company when a call comes in from the poet. He's in the lobby. She immediately calls the police. The cops had been on tender hooks all

“Christmas, looking out for a gift the poet might send Ruth for the holiday. Was this it?”

Officers burst in but he's already gone. They searched the lobby for the poet's surprise. Fearing it could be a bomb. But then they spot something strange tucked in the lobby's phone booth. A butcher knife, 12 inches long, wrapped in a red bandana.

Two witnesses tell police they saw a man who looked like the sketch of the poet

they saw on the news. But the man was gone before the police got there. A few days later, back at home, Ruth receives a letter. There was a female named Ruth who thought nothing of calling a sleuth. I have no doubt my call was checked out. I didn't tell you your present was an abuse. It's only January, but already 1980 isn't looking promising for Ruth or her investigators.

And the frenzy has only just begun. Soon, the poet takes their correspondence from private to public. Businesses around which a target hit with letters from the poet, requesting Ruth's gas be turned off. Her driveway ripped up. Her driver's license taken away. Her bank account emptied. And her locks changed. All in an attempt to humiliate and terrorize her. He sends a particularly awful one to the health department.

This is an anonymous tip. There is a female spreading VD. Venereal disease. What we now call a sexually transmitted infection. Not only has the poet stalked, kidnapped, and stabbed Ruth, now he's trying to ruin her reputation.

“This is no longer about blackmail for an old secret. He is trying to destroy her completely,”

like a cat playing with its prey, wearing her down before the final strike. One more letter comes in. The poet writes to the local mortuary, asking about its services for dead bodies, which he writes, "Ruth would need soon." From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, this is the poet. I'm Rachel Brown. At the start of the new year, which atop police Lt. Bernierwatsky receives a big promotion.

He's been leading the poet investigation since the beginning, befriending the finlies along the way. But his new role means he'll be much less involved in the poet case, so Captain Mike Hill takes over in his place. Hill is a hard-nosed, no-nonsense cop who'd been involved in the BTK serial killer investigation. Even before his briefing, Mike Hill reads the case files from cover to cover. He's going to

reconsider every possible suspect, starting at the top of the pile, BTK. His BTK and the poet, the same person, because it proved it or disproved it.

that her stabbing injuries could not have been self-inflicted. And it's Dr. Watsky, who

assures Hill that Ed would never hurt his wife. But Hill, known for his skepticism, is going to

do things differently from Dr. Watsky. I don't get close to people. You can't get close because that affects your thinking. You can get professionally close, but not socially close.

“So did you have to tell Ed and Ruth specifically that there were no longer going to be kept in the”

loop about the investigation like they had been before? Did you tell them that directly? No way. Didn't have to tell. They knew that they were in the loop because they weren't being told anything. That's why she didn't like me. Ruth and Ed were not happy about this change.

Dr. Watsky had become someone they came to rely on not only for information and updates,

but reassurance and friendship during their darkest times. Ed complains about Mike Hill's tight-lipped approach to Dorotsky, who tells Ed he can't do anything about it. Hill isn't even keeping him up to speed on the case either. Within days of taking over, Captain Mike Hill gets a

“letter, almost as if the poet was in his twisted way, welcoming him into the fold.”

The embarrassment for the police department piles on as the media, including KGTV and TV10 News, followed the poets every move. Public pressure is mounting. The police are already getting an overwhelming number of tips from concerned citizens largely through a tipline they'd set up. Wichita is scared and their faith in their police force is at risk. It's time to think outside the box. So the cops decide to go fishing and their bait is Ruth herself.

Officers suit her up in a bulletproof vest and send her to walk around downtown Wichita, trailed by a handful of plain clothes officers and unmarked cars. By this point in the

“investigation, officers had been accompanying Ruth on every air in downtown, even walking with her”

on her lunch break. The poet knew so much about her, they figured he must be watching her. The police hoped that dangling her out in the open like this could draw him out, but he stayed in the shadows that day. So they get some new bait on their hook,

local journalist Fred Mann. By now Fred and the poet were basically pen pals, swapping poems

back and forth in the newspaper classifieds. Fred says he had an arrangement with the Wichita police where he'd communicate with the poet through these poems, and in turn, the police would give him scoops about the investigation. But then, the poet proposes something extreme to Fred. We had had enough of a relationship, apparently, to where he thought I would throw in with him. He wrote to me in a letter, another poem, but at the bottom he said, "I want you to come with

me and kill Ruth finally." And we're going to meet during the St. Patrick's day parade through downtown Wichita, and he asked me to pick a location where we can meet near the phone company. So I wrote an ad to him somehow telling him in rhyming verse that we would meet at the chrome horse, and I was referring to this chrome sculpture of a horse sound front of this bank building. The cops put Fred in a bulletproof vest. They didn't think about a gun at all,

the guy didn't do that. He didn't use a gun. And the only weapon he ever talked about was a knife. They didn't think he was a walk up to me and stabbed me or anything, but they felt better than I was in the vest just in case. It's an unseasonably warm March day, as the streets begin to fill up with parade goers, all in a sea of green. Fred arrives at the sculpture. And I waited for his guy to show up so he could go kill Ruth.

Only Fred knows there are about a dozen cops stationed nearby, keeping their eyes out for the poet.

He would pull the handkerchief out of his pocket if he made contact with the poet.

“The signal to the cops was okay at times, this is the guy.”

Dressed in the bulletproof vest, a sweater and a sport coat, Fred is boiling hot and starting to sweat. As he waits, one of his colleagues from the newspaper comes up to him and asks him what he's doing just standing there. I said, I'm just killing time. Sweat is dripping down his face by now. He is uncomfortably hot, but all he has is the white handkerchief. He's itching to pull it out and wipe his brow. But the cops would think his friend is the poet.

They were descended on my friend and arrested him right there, and if I had done that, I had to go home, wait a minute, no, no, no, don't do that. You just have to sweat it out, many eventually left. So Fred keeps on waiting. I was pretty sure he wasn't going to show up. That was his history. And waiting. And I look around. I'd look up in the sky, I'd go ahead up in the sky or

quit the while. Once the light turned and looking at the alley behind me, I never saw a cop.

By the end of the parade, the poet hadn't showed. And finally when the cops just drifted by, it said, you can go back to work, kept on walking, and it was over. And I said, okay, and I walked back to work. Defeated, the police called it a day and went back to the drawing board.

“I think that every detective goes into every case with the hope and the thought that they're”

going to be the one that's going to solve it. As a detective who worked in forgery, fraud, robbery, and homicides, Richard Vinro was no stranger to hard cases. And he was desperate to break this one open. Detective Vinro was

known around the department as someone who took his cases seriously, always willing to go the

extra mile. Some might say too far. I was told by one of my superior officers I needed to lighten up. And I would bring numerous cases home, set them up at a card table and work on them for hours, beyond the time that I was at actually at work. So it probably took it a little too seriously at times. Poet Mania had taken over Richard's talk with new tips coming in regularly. At one point, the Wichita police are getting more tips about the poet than BTK.

Vinro is all over town chasing down leads from people who were certain they'd spotted the poet in public. He'd follow up on people reporting their suspicious neighbors. Locals reported people acting or dressing strangely. I was also following up on reports that this individual had been seen at the Wichita library, where he had approached a woman in an elevator and she felt sure that this was the poet.

“This woman even saw the suspicious man seal and envelope. Was it a poet letter?”

Initial thoughts about who the poet was was that he was probably an individual that was more of a street person, maybe a skid robot type. The card that he was using had windows that had been broken out. Car was battered. We were getting reports of him being seen down in the area where why nose were in that area of town. Vinro himself even went undercover. I was down town. I was growing a beard. I was wearing raggedy clothes. I was going to the

city library. I was going to skid robots or we were getting reports that this individual had been seen. This particular car being seen at different locations around town. One by one, these sightings were followed up on and ruled out. Either Ruth didn't recognize them or their handwriting didn't match the poets. Then in the early summer, Ruth receives a letter

that sparks a new line of inquiry. For the first time, the poet sends a letter from a location

outside of Wichita. This one has an Oklahoma city postmark. Within a couple days, three more letters from Oklahoma City are received across town. One to the Wichita city manager and two more to local new stations. There had been profiles that indicated that this individual could be a Vietnam vet. There was a postmark that also showed a Vietnam Veterans postmark on it. And being from Oklahoma

VA hospital down there and this individual. The profiles had suggested they look for a Vietnam vet.

And now they have a poet letter with a stamp honoring veterans. Then, Captain Mike Hill here's about an anonymous tip that points to a guy living near Oklahoma City on the Wichita National Wildlife Refuge. He checks off all the boxes. They're told the man is named Bill and is 49 years old. He's staying in a trailer near a reservoir. He looks like the sketch and fits a similar background in profile. With a name and an exact location, it's go time.

Oh no, I don't know where I'm going to go.

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Armed with an arrest warrant, Mike Hill, Richard Vinrow and the Wichita Assistant District Attorney drive two hours south to track this new suspect down. So we went to that location. We showed that composite to a lady that was at a small bait shop just next to the lake and she says,

“yeah, that's him. They head to Bill's trailer, a white and lime green mobile home. First,”

they stop by his neighbors and show them the sketch of the poet, too. And the neighbor said, yeah, that's our neighbor. After talking to him, he agreed to wave extradition. So Bill goes willingly back to Wichita for questioning. By this point, Ruth had seen her attacker a few times when he accosted her on the street when she was kidnapped and when she was stabbed. It was time to see if Ruth could pick her stalker,

kidnapper and attacker out of the lineup. One of them was an assistant district attorney that she would not have known. One was a police officer that agreed to be in the lineup and a couple other people that had no connection with it whatsoever. But the only one that she looked at was the gentleman that we brought back from Oklahoma. Ruth stares at the man from Oklahoma for a full minute. Then, Roe could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. When she came to him, she hesitated,

but she kind of quivered a little bit, started tearing up and then turned and said, no, that's not him. And she picked none of the other guys. No, I thought she was going to say yes, and then she said, no, it wasn't him. Which not police found a man in Clinton, Oklahoma, fitting a physical and psychological description of the poet. The latest developments hit the local and national news cycle from the Wichita Station cake TV to headlines and tabloids like the National Enquirer,

assistant DA Paul Clark hosts a press conference. It was the wrong man. We have now had Mrs. Finley look at that suspect and line up with a number of other individuals who appeared to be the same way and that is not her man. We wish it were, but it is not. And that's all we have at this time. In response to the news coverage, the poet sends a taunting letter to the DA. Do you think you

“make things better for man by wrongfully punishing an innocent, wrongly man?”

The poet seemed empowered by his ability to outsmart the police. It was very frustrating. Everything we were doing, we weren't getting anywhere. And things were about to get even worse for the Finley's. The battleground was about to hit home turf.

wrapped in another red bandana. Cutting phone lines is a classic BTK moves, but the bandana

is pure poet. Whether the poet is imitating BTK or is BTK himself, Captain Hill isn't interested in taking any chances. He orders a video camera being stalled in a fountain on the property, hit in a way, and they placed dummy phone lines in the backyard to trick the poet. Their life had changed dramatically. Here's reporter Fred Mann. They didn't live with the two of them who sit there and watch it and watch a monitor. In any time they were the muscle of

leaves or something as they would jump up. Sometimes they left the house to go look for somebody.

“He thought he's our shadow. That's how 10 things were for them now.”

Officers are now placed inside the house to go over the tapes and monitor the cameras.

Mark Heffner was one of the rookie cops who took those shifts waiting for the poet. So there was a constant escalation of surveillance and involvement with the police department resources and escalated to the point where we were watching her 24 hours a day. It was just more a mental thing for me or for us to be ready. When something happened, we'd be ready to take action. You know, we didn't want to have him show up and not catch him.

You know, spending all that and invest that time. So that was the main focus. But Ruth makes the best of it. Providing a constant stream of pies, cookies, and brownies

“to the officers during their shifts that often went late into the night.”

She loved the bake. She would often times have something for us to eat while we were there.

Ruth sat up with them during their late shifts and took an interest in their lives. What people don't know about this case is how special a person at Ruth is. Very nice lady. Like many officers assigned to the case, Heffner was in his 20s and new to the force. Ruth was kind of like a just as your typical mom. She was similar to the age, probably

of my mom or maybe a little bit younger. Here's Detective Arlin Smith. Ruth was a very nice woman. Of course she was old enough to be my mother and my partner's mother. Ruth was an empty nester by this point. Her son said moved out and she seemed to enjoy having a house full of people again. The cops cared about her and did whatever they could to keep her safe.

We took that extremely seriously. It's not just for them because they were good people. It was obvious that they were nice kind people, but it would have just been extremely disheartening as a police department to have had some forewarning of this and not be able to protect her. That would have been a failure of gigantic proportions. I can't even imagine what that would feel like. So there was a lot of diligence and a lot of effort put into protecting them.

At this time, the police are dealing with two cases that have major public scrutiny, the poet and BTK. They haven't cracked either. They're determined to solve one of them.

“Maybe that's why so many resources were poured into the thinly case.”

With traps laid around the home, the cops were certain it was only a matter of time before they caught the poet in the act. But the poet seems to taunt them, pulling almost childish pranks and plain sight. One summer morning, Ruth goes to the front porch to grab the mail. As she opens the door, a glass bottle topples over and spills on her feet. She picks up the bottle and takes a sniff. There's no doubt in her mind. This bottle is filled with urine.

Another morning, Ed goes outside to check the mail. In one mushy envelope is the unmistakable evidence, feces. Another night, Ruth and Ed see that a bunch of eggs have been thrown at their glass sliding doors. Some of them were wrapped in red band Dana fabric. Here's Detective Richard Vinrow. There had been numerous reports by Ruth that things had been moved or a bandana had been left in their backyard so that they knew because a bandana tended to be a symbol of the poet.

Police even placed a camouflaged camera in a birdhouse in the backyard and focused its lens on the dummy phone lines. The camera's shutter was rigged to go off if anyone tried to

When you sat in her house, nothing happened. When we put the camera in the birdhouse,

we didn't even see a bird move. And yet when we pulled it out within a week, we were getting reports from Ruth that the poet was back in her backyard. Nothing was ever seen. All of the times that we set up surveillance, nothing happened. One of the big questions was how is this person

“able to predict when we're going to be watching? How do they know that we no longer are in that house?”

Could they possibly live close by to where they can see us coming going? They could have

us seen us set up this birdhouse. But at the same time, the people that lived close by had all been

checked. They had all been interviewed by detectives and pretty much eliminated his possible suspects. If it wasn't the neighbors, who could have been close enough to the investigation to know all the cops moves? Detective Mike McKenna was the officer who went to Fort Scott early on in the investigation and left unconvinced by Ruth's story. And after watching the Finley's house under siege, he couldn't understand how all of these incidents were happening. It felt like we were

chasing ghosts. So he says he took his concerns to someone he thought might lend a sympathetic ear.

Bernie Jawatsky. I go back and I tell Bernie, I said, Bernie, I said, something just doesn't seem right. He says, what do you mean? I said, nobody ever sees anything at the house yet these things appear on the front porch. Nobody saw anything anywhere. I said, listen, between you and me, I think that somebody in here is either telling this damn poet what we're going to do next or he's got a bug in

“here and he can hear us talking about it. That's how he's finding out what Nick's plan of attack is.”

God, I love that guy. He looks at me. He says, get the hell out of my office. What? He says, get out. Just get out of my office. He says, I don't want to hear any more of it. But maybe Jawatsky needed to open his mind and the Wichita Police Department needed to look closer to home. One evening, Ruth and Ed come home from the symphony and find a beer bottle full of gasoline with an unlit Wich in their backyard. It's the poet's attempt at a Molotov cocktail.

It's as if he's saying, I could have burned your house to the ground if I'd wanted. At 2am on another night, Ruth is awoken by a bang coming from the front yard,

“what sounds like a small explosion. Then later that day, she finds a bandana and remnants of”

firecrackers in her mailbox, another warning. Soon, the poet makes good on his threats. On December 21st, a few days before Christmas, Ed and Ruth are in the basement, watching some late night TV. The hero loud crash from outside. Ed runs upstairs and sees their Christmas wreath in flames. The noise was the picture window cracking from the heat. Ed yanks the wreath down and stomps on it to put the flames out.

He then grabs a pair of garden shears and sprints out onto the street in the freezing night air, cursing the poet. This was all becoming too much for Ruth to handle and it was taking its toll. Her headaches were getting worse to the point where interacting with people became difficult. You could see the stress honor. Sometime she'd get bad headaches and she'd go in and go to bed early and you could see the stress honor.

By the end of 1981, the Wichita Police Department was under overwhelming pressure from the city. Officers had collected 248 poet letters but no fingerprints and no usable blood typing. They've had zero success with handwriting comparisons. They have investigated and ruled out 406 suspects and checked a total of 3,534 potential suspect records within the state of Kansas and beyond.

Captain Mike Hill brings in Dr. Shrog the police psychologist to look at the newest developments.

“Shrog doesn't have any new theories. He just confirms that he thinks Ruth is credible.”

But he does rule out an old theory. Here's Mike Hill. BTT was dormant at this time when the bullet was going on and it was a philosophy of the psychiatrist that BTT had been arrested for some other crime and was serving time in a prison somewhere. Dr. Shrog told Captain Hill that his police force must already have BTK in custody. There was no other reason he had been inactive for this long and the M.O. no longer felt consistent.

BTK didn't pull pranks. BTK did not come back into our attention to after the thinly case was over with. Now they really had no suspects but then a letter arrives the morning of Friday, September 4th

“that turns the case on it's head. Dorotsky knows right away. He has to take it up the chain to his boss,”

the chief of police, Richard Lemunian. Lemunian was well-respected within the department, known for being a dedicated and dog-ed officer. He made history when he became the youngest chief to ever lead the department at age 36. As chief, Lemunian had been pretty hands-off during this investigation. Letting investigators do their work while he ran the whole department. Rootskase was just one of many.

Lemunian was amazing. You know, I'm a weird little gay New Yorker and he was this country sheriff from the right wing as far right wing promised keeper. We're gonna work great. This is journalist Jean Stone. He spent a lot of time with Lemunian while writing his book on Ruth's case. This was not looking good for the police department. First they had the BTK

killer who they never solved. Now they have the poet and they haven't solved it. So that put a lot

of extra pressure on Lemunian to make sure that the police department looked like it was efficient knew what they were doing. Dorotsky knocks on Lemunian's office door and tells him they've received another letter from the poet. "You don't want to make Richard Lemunian math. The poet offended him deeply." The poet says that after he's taken care of Ruth, he's going to go after Sharon.

Sharon has Richard Lemunian's wife. A wonderful woman, but you don't want to do something like that. From this letter, it's clear that the poet knows many personal details about Sharon Lemunian, the maker of her car, and the exact route to the city she drives from their home. This was personal now. "And Richard said I'm taking over the case." He gathers up all the poet files, 14 large binders, and takes them home for the long weekend.

Lemunian pours over every page from the case, jotting down notes, making charts, reworking all the events and incidents over and over in his mind. He develops a hypothesis. Now he needs to prove or disprove it.

“Lemunian returns to the office and calls a top secret meeting with select officers.”

He announces that he knows once and for all, who the poet is. Next time on the poet. "That's kind of the moment when he said, you know enough, so now we're going to try to get to the bottom of this be good, believe it. But it was true. And that's when the case broke. And that's the point in which the public judgment of Ruth changed." Don't want to wait for the next episode. You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of the poet

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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 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 Eljohari 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.