Are the Findleys onto them? Ruth seemed to have picked up on some kind of shift, because in the middle of the surveillance, she reaches out to Fred Mann.

Ruth called me out of the blue and said, "What's going on? Do you know what's going on with the case?" And I was honest about it.

I said, "No, I don't know." She said, "Are they still interested? Because Mike," we're talking Mike Hill, "He's been really distant to me.

He's cold, and he doesn't seem too interested anymore." So I could honestly tell her, "No, I think they're still interested." [laughs] That was not a lie, and my, me telling her, "No, I didn't know what was going on," that was not a lie either, technically.

[laughs]

There were details of the investigation they'd mentioned to the Finleys, details that would later end up in poet letters.

Then there was more aggressive.

Who found the urine on the porch? Did you put that out there? He got kind of a little edge.

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 Finlay.

We're gonna 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, uh, telling him in rhyming verse that we would meet at the chrome horse, and I was referring to this chrome sculpture of a horse out in front of this bank building.

Here's reporter Fred Mann.

They, literally the two of them, would sit there and watch it, watch the monitor, and any time there was a rustle of leaves or something, Ed would jump up.

Sometimes he left the house to go look for somebody.

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 Finley.

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 out in front of this bank building.

The cops release the new sketch of the attacker to the media, and soon it's everywhere.

I would meet with Jarwatki daily, and one day I was sitting in Jarwatki's office and I said, "Okay, was there anything on the stabbing?" And he said, "No," but he started telling me a little bit about we got a history with somebody here.

And he started telling me about the letters and the, she'd bumped into this guy a couple times, and there was a phone call, and apparently this woman had been attacked when she was a teenager.

As he kinda started laying out this story, I'm like, "Well, wow.

[laughs] This is something." So I came back and I, I wrote about it, that there was some history here, and at that point, things started to blow up a little bit.

What did that first letter say?

Yeah, the first letter was a plan.

He came up with a plan for a meeting.

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What did that first letter say?

And he said, 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 was in it.

He said, you see, I'm not touching anything in the purse, so they can't get any fingerprints out of me.

He was really proud of that.

His whole attitude is, I'm better than you are.

I know what I'm doing.

Reporter Fred Mann again.

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 Drewotsky read the letter, and they waited, and they waited for his reaction, but he didn't show anything.

He didn't 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 him." And so then Ruth told them all about the branding incident in Fort Scott.

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 obscenities, the fact that he was a poet, he began to think, "Could we really have two different people, or is this 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 reread the letter, and then he started to take them very seriously.

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 Rothsky read the letter, and they waited, and they waited for his reaction, but he didn't show anything.

He didn't 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 him.

And so then Ruth told him all about the branding incident in Fort Scott.

And he knew the kinds of letters BTK had been sending, not just letters, but poems.

So when he read this guy threatening this woman with obscenities, the fact that he was a poet, he began to think, could we really have two different people? Or was this the same guy? We're not big enough to have two different people with this kind of obsession.