The Poet | 6. Buried

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The binge. Feed your true crime obsession. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know

“this episode deals with mentions of self-harm and suicide”

in crimes involving children.

Good evening. There appears to be a major break in the poet case. What you talk police at this hour are interrogating a suspect in the case. TV10 News has learned that that suspect is Ruth Finley herself. Ruth's story had gone public. Covered here on local news station, cake TV by reporter Larry Hattberg.

Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to her self-police and the media. The case had become one of the most expensive in Wichita history, totaling more than $370,000. The equivalent of more than a million dollars today. Police chief Richard Lemunian thinks Ruth should be held to account in a court of law. He wants to charge her with perjury and filing a false police report.

Ruth is in the psychiatric ward in the hospital on an involuntary hold. She's been put on suicide watch. The prospect of going to trial is almost too much for her to bear.

She's never even had a traffic ticket before. She's disoriented and terrified,

too scared to even go to the bathroom. And it's in this state that she meets psychologist Dr. Andrew Pickens. She was anxious. I mean, not out of control, but she was nervous. Tense, a soft spoken, wasn't talkative, but you know, she paired like a normal person in an abnormal situation. Dr. Pickens doesn't know much about the case. He didn't read the coverage in the papers.

What he does know is this middle aged woman in front of him has perpetrated a four-year-long campaign terrorizing herself. It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of it. Ruth can't quite wrap her mind around the idea that she was the poet.

“She tells Dr. Pickens that she doesn't remember much about the poet's actions.”

Here's Jean Stone. She's saying that, yes, I must have, they proof of me doing it. They've shown me pictures of it. So I did it. She can only recall short glimpses, like sitting by her washing machine and writing letters. Clearly, something was going on under the surface here, and it was up to Dr. Pickens to uncover it.

But this wasn't going to be like any regular case. Dr. Pickens was working against a ticking clock. He has 90 days to make a psychiatric evaluation. The court is counting on him to answer two big questions. Did Ruth know what she was doing?

And should she be brought to trial? From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, I'm Rachel Brown. And this is the poet, episode 6, buried. Andrew Pickens was destined to be a shrink. When he was 12 years old, he saw the movie that inspired his life's purpose.

That movie was the 1948 Psychological Thriller, the Snake Pit. The Snake Pit reference, a large psychiatric hospital, where many of the patients were psychotics. My head hurts. There's something to matter with my head. Come on, darling, let me help you for you.

The patient featured in the movie, she was initially thought to be psychotic by the people who were

was a psychoanalytic kind of therapy. And it made sense to me, and that I thought that that's what

“I wanted to do. I wanted to be like that psychiatrist in the movie.”

The caption beneath his photo and his high school yearbook reads, "Little Man, Big Brain, Future Psychiatrist." And so he went on to study psychoanalysis. The work of Sigma Freud, focusing on childhood experiences and repressed emotions through intense dialogue or talk therapy. It's like the work that a detective does to find a lost child and save the lost child. Because you can the process of finding out something that the patient doesn't

either know and help them know it. In those first meetings, Ruth continually tells Dr. Pickins

that she feels crazy. Pickins assures her, "This is not the case." She was never crazy. She just wasn't.

She wasn't psychotic, she wasn't even close. Dr. Pickins' initial determination is that Ruth had been in a state of massive repression. Maybe the most intense case of repression he'd ever seen. Here's an excerpt from Dr. Pickins' early report only a few days into his work with Ruth. Mrs. Finley has utilized repression in a massive way ever since childhood to effectively bury unacceptable feelings and wishes. She was able to maintain the repression

until stressed by her husband's illness about four and a half years ago.

The night when Ed was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack scare and Ruth was home alone.

Whatever it was that Ruth had been subconsciously repressing manifested itself into the poet and called her up on the phone. But Dr. Pickins didn't know what she was repressing, and either did Ruth. He knew they needed to do more digging to find that out, but the clock was still ticking on his diagnosis. He had to determine how much control Ruth had over the poet.

“Through their sessions, he becomes convinced. Ruth not only couldn't remember,”

but she was not even aware of her actions as the poet. She really believed it, and that's hard for a lot of people to believe. She really believed that she was being chased. She really believed that someone else wrote those letters. Those poems. So with this information, he's able to come up with a diagnosis to submit to the court. He determines that Ruth has a dissociative disorder.

It's like an alternate self. I guess the closest thing for the average person would be like sleepwalking. You still have the ability to write to send letters to mail them, to compose them, all of that kind of thing, in that altered state of consciousness. The poet wasn't a separate identity from Ruth. What we used to call a split personality, but she was able to dissociate so deeply that she had stabbed herself.

Dr. Pickins tells the court. He doesn't believe Ruth consciously knew about the poet's actions. So now, it was up to the district attorney to decide if he was going to criminally charge her. District attorney Clark Owens holds a press conference covered by cake TV to deliver his decision. So I can find that there's no legitimate reason of the stake in pursuing a criminal cross-cushion gangster concerning any of the involvement in this poet incident.

Ruth was not going to be criminally charged. She was free. This must have been a huge relief for Ed and Ruth, but their new mystery had only just begun.

“Because here's the thing about dissociative disorders. They don't just come out of nowhere.”

In many cases, they're the result of prolonged, extreme psychological trauma. I said, "This is how we get rid of the pain and the more you can tell me the more we can get to the bottom of things." They needed to learn why Ruth had started dissociating in order to heal. Dr. Pickins recommends that Ruth received psychotherapy with him twice a week. And then she started having flashes of memories. Talking about I keep thinking about a bandana,

I don't know what that is. The red bandana had been the poet's signature. And now it was about to unlock a much larger mystery about what happened to Ruth and where

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“Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly, inexplicably good.”

Offers worth bragging about sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these may apply. And we got the telly right in front of him and six of us that ran out of it. And I also had a lot right, luck, luck, luck. Momentarily, they said, "We thought he knew." Listen to how to fail wherever you get your podcasts.

Dr. Pickins' office at the Wichita Psychiatric Center is a windowless room with no personal effects or photographs. Something he's done on purpose so that his patients don't learn too much about him. It is not like what therapy used today. This was very much a more Freudian therapy. Where Ruth is indeed lying on a couch. That's Jean Stone. The journalist and author who spent time with Ruth and Dr. Pickins while

writing his book on my case. Interestingly, one of the things that bothers the most is that there's a clock that she can't see, but he can and she doesn't think that's fair. And she also wonders sometimes, is he awake because part of what psychoanalytic psychotherapy involves is for the therapist not to talk or at least not to talk too much. This was all part of Dr. Pickins' approach.

“The best way to get information is to let their be silence.”

During those early sessions, Ruth begins to open up. She would tell me more. She'd tell me other families. She would tell me about her childhood. She'd tell me about her parents. They were strict and discouraged outward displays of emotion, but were decent parents. Even though she grew up poor during the depression, Ruth continually insists her childhood was

idyllic, but strange flashes of memory keep coming. She kept thinking about a bandana, and then she had thought about it being around her face, and she was very uncomfortable talking about it, and it triggered a lot of anxiety. She remembers a neighbor, a family friend who lived on a property down the road. He wore a red bandana around his neck.

I had this flash. I flashed that something was on my face on my mouth, and I was scared. She remembers this neighbor being asked to look after her when she was around three years old. Being left alone with the man when her parents were busy. He started off with just some games, but he could keep in her pants.

“The man would pretend he was playing a game with her, and use looking for the key as a way to undress her.”

And that red bandana became an image that stayed in her mind. So it became almost a factoredum for us old. The man would gag her with it while sexually abusing her in a barn on his property. Here's Dr. Pickins again. And these fragments starting to come out, and they were more and more. It was like

Paint by numbers, where there would be different points colored in. With the details of her feelings and her memories that had not been conscious, ever since she was three and a half years old.

That's an age when many of us have our first memories of eating a soft-serve ice cream cone,

of fighting over candy with a sibling. But for Ruth, her first memories were of being abused by her neighbor, someone her family had trusted. During her psychoanalysis, Ruth only spoke about her abuse in the third person, as if she were witnessing it. Here's how journalist Jean Stone understands it.

She would say the little girl's being heard, she's in trouble, somebody should help the little girl, a Ruth's way of dealing with such a horrific attack,

was to basically leave her body to act as if it wasn't her.

a little girl in a white dress.

She was just floating away, which is a form of dissociation. She just blocked out what she was feeling then as much as she could, the pain of it, and pretended she was floating in the heaven. And therefore burying the memory. One of the advantages of a dissociative personality disorder is that it doesn't become part of

your active memory. She didn't experience it. The little girl she watched experienced it. So it isn't part of her active recollection. She has no idea that this happened to her. Right around the time of the abuse, Ruth received a gift from her aunt, a book of poetry. She would sit outside on her front porch while her aunt read it to her. These are Ruth's words, read for us by an actor.

“I only remember some of them, Hickory Dickory Dog and Mary had a little lamb and Jack and Jill”

stuff like that. I was really proud of that book and I carried it with me everywhere. And she loved poetry and sisters making her own rhymes up and she becomes as a child a little poet. So these memories all swirled together. The trauma and the poems and the little girl in a white dress and they got pushed down for decades. That same swirl of memories then became a weapon she used against herself. When all of this comes back that poetry is associated with this time and

then she starts writing in poetry. Repression became a habit for Ruth. So why would Ruth subconscious create this tormentor? Maybe Dr. Pickens thought it was a cry for help. Not the attention-seeking some people might have believed, but as a way to call

“attention to her pain. And it was her last ditch attempt to not remember and to get some kind”

of support. Support she never got when she was a child being abused. She was totally helpless

and she believed that it was her fault and that she would be really totally rejected if she told anyone. They would tell her mother and her father and nobody would understand. And so it all had to be buried. And the terror which it all was facing offered the perfect environment for Ruth's repressed memories to surface. They horrific events surrounding the BTK killer. It seemed to give her unconsciously a way out if she could say if people were chasing her that people would

understand if it was like the TK. Larry Hadabirk, a local TV reporter who got to know Ruth, thought maybe the poet was a way for her to act on her desire to take her own life. She couldn't cope with reality. So she created a secondary individual to kill her because she couldn't kill herself as Ruth Finley, but she could kill herself as the

“poet. And I think that's what she tried to do. Jean Stone isn't sure it's quite that simple.”

She had all of these conflicting emotions. Things she didn't understand. Stuff was coming up that she had no idea what it meant. I think frankly if she'd wanted to kill herself, she would have. And certainly she thought about it. She talked about throwing herself off her bridge and such. But Ruth sees a survivor and she did survive through all of these things that happened to her through life. So I don't think Ruth was trying to enter her own life. I think she really was just

desperately trying to call attention to herself. I wish I could ask Ruth why she thinks her mind would create the poet. But she passed away in 2019 at the age of 89. She spent seven years working with Dr. Pickens to try to answer this question for herself. Here's Dr. Pickens again. There was a lost little girl writing those notes writing those letters and stabbing herself to the form of self abuse. That was evidence to me of the intensity of both her pain,

her anger and her anger though was turned against herself, punishing herself. The stabbing remained

a big mystery. At first Ruth couldn't remember doing it at all. But then the memory started to

everything's in your computer, but you can't always retrieve it because there's something wrong.

There were bugs in Ruth's mind that prevented a retrieval system from working until she was able to clear that up and then as she works with Dr. Pickens, all of those bugs eventually are removed. She remembered being in the parking lot opening her car door and struggling. Except this time instead of remembering a man trying to kill her, she was all alone.

“Ruth saw her own hands, holding a knife, her own voice, telling herself, "You have to do it,”

you have to do it." She was able to piece the memories back together. It really was her. And now she was ready to acknowledge another truth. One of the big moments in the therapy is when Dr. Pickens is able to get Ruth to say, "I'm in trouble. I'm being hurt. This is happening to me."

Yes, because then that's actually the recognition that this is what happened to herself. Right, and now she becomes a whole personality. She no longer has these repressed memories. She no longer is somebody who was nowhere of what happened in her past. She's now a full person who accepts and deals with this horrific incident of her childhood. When she would dissociate, she would split herself into parts, the little girl, the poet, and Ruth.

Being able to speak about her childhood trauma in the first person,

meant she had reintegrated these pieces of herself and fully recovered these repressed memories. The idea of repressed memories actually dates back to Sigmund Freud. He thought therapy could help people uncover memories they buried in childhood. But he cast that idea aside, worrying he planted false memories in his patients. The idea of repressed memories got a second wind in the 1970s and '80s.

There were hit books coming out about people recovering her horrific memories from their childhoods. Then, the satanic panic began. People around the US and the world were suddenly recovering memories about being abused in satanic rituals. But it turns out, many of these memories were implanted by social workers or psychologists. They weren't repressed, they were made up. Today, the scientific community is divided about the idea of repressed memories.

So, Ruth's memories imagined. Jeanne Stone, who spent extensive time with both Ruth and Dr. Pickens, doesn't think so. Like everything else about the human brain, we don't really know. I'm guessing that what Dr. Pickens said about Ruth is as close to the truth as can be, but there are many people who still would think that Ruth made it all up.

“What is it that makes you land on the side of this being the truth?”

Are this being close to the truth? I grew to know Ruth pretty well. She went through many years of therapy. It was difficult for her. It was painstaking. It was ugly. She hated it. I think if she had made all of this up, she wouldn't have done that. There'd be no need. She could have said after a year. Okay, I get it. I'm done.

But she was relentless in trying to cure herself and work with Dr. Pickens. There's of course no way for us to fact check Ruth's accounts of what happened to her as a kid.

And there's another big piece of this story we'll never be able to verify.

The branding that happened to her in Fort Scott. Police officers at the time doubted her.

“And some of the Wichita police investigating the poet did too. Was that real?”

Or was it another memory manufactured by her dissociative disorder? Dr. Pickens believes that in the end it might not matter. My conclusion about Fort Scott, the in terms of her treatment and understanding what she needed and what was the cause of her behaviors. Fort Scott had nothing to do with it. Dr. Pickens says the Fort Scott incident could have been what he calls a screen memory

and not something that directly gave rise to the poet in 1977. What is a screen memory? Is something that a person has that happened to them that was upsetting in some way and they focus on it to block out something that's worse. You know, somebody broke my arm versus somebody cut my arm off.

really happened. What's clear is that something very traumatic occurred in Ruth's childhood which somehow led to the poet emerging later in life. We also know that through Dr. Pickens diagnosing Ruth with a dissociative disorder and treating it as such, Ruth was able to overcome the poet. But even though Ruth had confronted her trauma and gotten rid of the poet, Wichita had neither forgiven nor forgotten what she did.

I was just as mad at Ruth family as I was the BTK Strangler. Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go, easy, sold by Caron Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit 200 on the scratcher. Did the scratcher

“come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that?”

I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery

except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly, inexplicably good.

Offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. Hello, it's Elizabeth Day from How to Fail here. My next guest is the actual Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. I think I have a little bit of time. You might be coming up down next street. So we got right and we got the telly right in front of him and six of us stood around him. And I also had a lot right, luck, luck, luck. Moments are at least days at we thought he knew.

“Listen to how to fail wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not the type that befriend people”

really quick. But with her, it is just so natural. Emma Dillinger moved to Wichita in the early 1980s from Scotland. Emma and her husband bought into a new housing development at the same time that Ruth and Ed did. They all became neighbors and fast friends. She was brilliant. Whitty, funny, god talented. She just had everything going for her. I go trend. Emma and Ruth started hanging out, going for meals downtown. But whenever they were out in public, Emma couldn't help but notice

strangers staring at them. I wasn't sure if it was her or me that was staying at. To begin with, because I've recruited to meet with her. I would I know. Emma hadn't followed the poet case closely

and had no idea how Ruth was involved in it. But Ruth never said anything. We would go to dinner

on a Saturday. We'd go to her house and we would drink the boxed wine. Emma and Ruth started traveling together too. One time driving through Scotland, that's where Emma introduced Ruth to her

“sister. My sister asked me, but it would just chain eye. Did Ruth have a secret?”

It's a secret. She says, "She's got a secret, Emma." She said, "I don't mean us in the bad way, but there's something pathetic there." And she's trying to hide it. Their friendship went on for years before Ruth was ready to tell her best friend about the poet. When she told me who she was, I thought she was kidding me. I said, "Oh, you're joking, right?" And she said, "No, I wish I was." I said, "Oh." And she said, "Do you still want to be friends?"

Of course. I'll see you wherever after worry about that. No, we can go on just like we were.

Poetry came to have a third chapter in Ruth's life. First, it was a tool for comfort as a child.

Then it became a tool for self-harm as the poet. And finally, it served as a tool for healing. Ruth started writing about her abuse in therapy, oftentimes in between sessions with Dr. Pickens. Sometimes, she wrote poems describing the abuse she endured in the voice of her three-year-old self. And as her therapy progressed, her poems did too. By the time she was ready to end her therapy, Ruth was writing in her present voice. The last poem, unlike all of the others,

were completely in the words and syntax of an adult woman. And was about how she was healed.

but because of therapy, she could do that. She was no longer fearful in the way she had.

“She became self-confident. She became not ashamed of herself.”

Seven years after their first session together, Ruth walked out of Dr. Pickens' office for the last time.

Ruth's final hurdle was to fully reintegrate into society. A society that felt she was a liar, an attention seeker, or thought that she'd wasted valuable police time and money during the most terrifying time in Wichita history when BTK was running rampant. Detective Mike McKenna was one of the many people who hadn't forgiven her. She caused totally unnecessary stress on so many detectives, their home lives, their kids' lives, taken them away from family events.

Amid this lingering hostility and misunderstanding, Ruth needed to face her biggest fear and tell her story, not knowing how it would be received. Members of the media had been trying to get her

on the record for years, but she was never ready. But finally she decided she needed to take her story back.

We call our story the poet, the final verse. Ruth accepts an offer from cake TV to do a sit-down interview on camera with Larry Hadberg. This was a big moment for her. She'd hated the attention the case got. It was really anxious about going public with her darkest, most traumatic memories. But Dr. Picken said she knew her story could potentially help people. But also to underscore that she was not ashamed and she had nothing to be ashamed about.

Another people shouldn't be ashamed if they've been abused and gotten treatment. In the cake TV interview, Ruth explains the story of her abuse. For some reason, he picked me up and took me to their bedroom and tied me to the end of the bed with a rope and went off and left me. And of course, I started to cry. This was a remarkable thing for her to do, especially given how discussions of sexual violence

remained taboo today and were even more so back then in the 1980s.

“I started getting poems from the poet, which I think we've all decided. I wrote them all.”

But yet, there were a lot of them. I don't know where and how I did all this. The segment ends with Ruth reading one of her final poems. I hope my venture penetrates every human heart, dedicated to a little girl and an understanding doctor who let her start. The foams who normally ring during this time were absolutely silent during the airing of the show, totally and completely quiet. After the program ended,

they waited for the reaction. And after the show aired, the foams lit up.

And I would say 99 percent of the phone calls at that time were positive.

“I think thank you for telling us about this. Thank you for putting this on the air.”

The cake TV segment was also shown in local public schools. After it was shown at many of the schools, many young women came up to the counselors and said the same thing or something very similar happened to me. And this is the first time I've ever been able to talk about it, but I want to talk about it with a counselor. And that alone for me made it all worthwhile because you were helping people.

Ruth then took that mission to destigmatize abuse to the biggest audience imaginable. The Oprah Winfrey show in 1994. And after years of therapy, Ruth Finley was able to integrate back into one personality and is here today to talk about her years of self-inflicted torment. And by the end of the day. Larry Hadberg says that while more people know about BTK than the poet case today, what happened with the poet and how Ruth dealt with it

has a different kind of impact. We can't learn too much from the BTK story, but the Ruth Finley's story, it has legs, it has a future. And the more that people learn about it because it teaches us

you're three and a half years old, the mind remembers that the mind keeps it and then all of a sudden

when you're in your 50s, it explodes and nearly destroys your life. How many other Ruth Finley's are up there? How many other Ruth Finley's are ready to explode? Queen Carvania stood halo by the morning sun and army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana to a lovely SUV and inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we faced!

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Ruth's story only really has one victim. She never hurt anyone but herself.

And she never implicated anyone else either, even when she had the chance to point fingers.

“The only thing she was guilty of was pulling other people into her delusions.”

Her family and the police and the city of Wichita. But I believe it wasn't intentional or malicious. I believe this was a true case of a mind breaking under the weight of unresolved childhood trauma and acting out in ways no one spotted. And in the end, Ruth became the hero of her story. She took back the narrative and broke the stigma around talking about abuse. At that time, this was a huge risk, but she did it to help others.

Today, that risk is still there. I'm sure there are people who might hear Ruth's story and think it's a case of a woman making false claims about abuse, which is exceedingly rare.

“But I think Ruth's story isn't a liar. Ruth finally was bold. She was courageous.”

We learn from Ruth to talk, to get it out, to talk to people, to talk from the heart. We're better people for Ruth telling her story. Through her therapy and by coming forward publicly, she went from intensely private to someone who was on the world stage talking about her deepest shame. This video of Ruth celebrating New Year's in 1987 was taken just months before she wrapped up therapy

with Dr. Pickens. She's there laughing with Ed and her best friend Emma. All of them have since passed away, but this is how I like to picture her. Joyful and at peace. Surrounded by people who love her. We're here to give her a lucky name. There are solutions.

“Okay, let's turn again. Ruth. Oh, I've just remembered. Here's what I didn't remember why.”

After speaking about the poet on a global scale, Ruth turned back inward and lived life on her

own terms. The poet never returned. And Ruth never again wrote another poem.

You had a wife? I wouldn't have a real good time. In any of you. Yeah, stop. 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 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.

help is available. Call or text a hotline like the National Alliance on Mental Health. Call 1-800-950-N-A-M-I, or text N-A-M-I to 626-4-O.