The Wichita Eagle

WICHITA, Kan. – Dan Stewart drove to Resthaven Cemetery on Saturday, newspaper in hand.

He couldn’t wait to tell Pop the news.

He sat down beside the grassy plot where his father, Charles Stewart, was buried. He read the newspaper story aloud to the tombstone.

The marble gravestone has a police badge carved on one side, an Irish shamrock on the other.

Dan read the story about BTK out loud.

Then he looked the gravestone.

“They got him, Pop,” he said.

“They finally got him.”

His father, Charles Stewart, served as a police captain in 1974. He worked the scene after four members of the Otero family were brutally murdered.

He quit sleeping in his bed.

Every night afterward – until his children were grown – Charles Stewart slept by the front door.

Protecting his family.

He died in 1993 still wondering about BTK.

On Saturday, as Wichita celebrated the arrest of what could be Wichita’s most notorious serial killer, Dan Stewart went to Resthaven and read the paper to the stone.

In the distance, Dan heard noises, like people talking.

He looked up.

He realized what it was.

Radios.

The boogeyman first hunted among the residents of Wichita in 1974. For 31 years, in varying degrees, we feared him.

Some of us locked our doors, left our lights on, bought alarms.

We looked under our beds.

Cindy Duckett bought a gun.

For five years after BTK strangled Nancy Fox, Duckett seldom left her grandmother’s home except to work.

She locked all the doors behind her. Barricaded herself in her bedroom.

The cops who drove her home at night told her to get a gun.

She’d worked with Nancy Fox at Helzberg Jewelers at the Wichita Mall. On Dec. 8, 1977, she walked Nancy to her car after work, chatting about stuff she can’t remember, it was so inconsequential.

The police who pored over Helzberg’s records after Nancy died began to drive Duckett home at night, escorting her in case the killer stalked her, too.

“The officers were young, and they had wives, and they told me they told their wives to get a gun and learn how to shoot,” Duckett said Saturday.

She bought a .25 caliber pistol.

“I’d go out in the country and put pop cans up in tree limbs.”

She was only 21 when BTK killed Nancy.

“I began to look at faces in crowds,” she said. “I had trouble trusting men.”

She’d never looked at faces in crowds before.

She met Mike Duckett about a year after Nancy died. He worked at the Wichita Mall, too.

Cindy sat Mike down and told her story. And how she had trouble trusting men.

Mike said he understood.

They got married in 1979.

And then, five years after Nancy died, Cindy Duckett stopped living in fear.

She no longer wanted the boogeyman to win.

He wins when we cave in to fear, she thought.

She began once again to walk our streets.

She looked at our faces in crowds, looking, like always, for the face of the boogeyman.

But she no longer looked at those faces in fear. When she went off to shoot bullets at pop cans, it was merely to keep in practice.

News about the arrest didn’t change her mind about gun practice.

She’ll still do it, she says.

It’s not about fear, she says.

It means she refuses to live carelessly.

—

After the four Oteros died, Rebecca Macy would come home from school, day after day, and sit in the driveway in a car.

Her brother, Steve, 16, would not let her in the house. She would sit in the car and watch as Steven went inside, carrying a baseball bat.

She would sit there, waiting.

When he finished, he’d come tell Rebecca to come inside.

On Saturday, 31 years later, Rebecca Macy logged on to her computer, in her home in northern Illinois. She saw a Google News headline that said that BTK had been arrested.

She picked up the phone and placed a call to Lenexa, Kan.

No one answered, but the voice mail recording came on, and when the beep came, she yelled excitedly:

“They got that guy! They got him! They got him!”

She felt so gleeful.

Back in 1974, men all over Wichita bought guns, taught their wives and daughters and little sisters how to shoot. She heard about 9-year-old boys who sat down and thought up how they could protect their mothers from the monster.

Remembering this, she felt joy.

She felt a great joy about her big brother.

He’d gone into the house with a baseball bat day after day. To protect his sister. To fight the boogeyman.

Now he’d hear her voice when he got home:

“They got him!”

—

The ladies at Twin Lakes Hair Design broke out the television Saturday morning. Linda Turner dug it out of the back room, sat it beside the bonnet-style hair dryers and adjusted the antenna.

BTK captured.

Could it really be true?

“I didn’t think he’d ever be caught,” said Lou Ann Steadman, a stylist who grew up in Wichita. “It doesn’t seem real.”

This roomful of women – mothers and grandmothers – remember the fear BTK spawned. They learned to lock their doors and windows, trained daughters to do the same.

In 1986, Steadman worked at a hair salon on West 13th across from where Vicki Wegerle was murdered. They didn’t know it was BTK, “but of course there were rumors.”

And now a name, a suspect.

A photo? Where’s the photo?

The women watched the news conference, riveted but frustrated. They wanted a face.

And then finally, there it was.

“Oh!” Turner gasped. “He looks so normal.”

“After all these years, you have this picture in your mind,” Steadman said. “A monster, a horrible monster.”

“This guy,” Turner said. “He’s just like anyone you’d see on the street, or in church Sunday.”

As she combed a client’s hair, stylist Lynn Waldmeier marveled. After years of wondering, hearing noises, this could be it.

“I always knew he was going to get justice – if not in this life, it was gonna be the next one.”

—

Dan Stewart looked up from his father’s grave on Saturday because he heard radios playing.

He looked around.

He saw other families. They carried radios.

They were playing them to the tombstones.

It was just after 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Stewart realized, with awe, that the radios were broadcasting a news conference, in crackly tones.

It was the Wichita police, announcing that Dennis Rader had been arrested.

Stewart did not ask.

But he thinks those people playing radios to the other tombstones were families of other police officers who died, never knowing the answer to the mystery.

But now the radios played.

The radios said they got him.

—

(c) 2005, The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.).

Visit the Eagle on the World Wide Web at http://www.wichitaeagle.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-26-05 2126EST

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