Two days after Christmas, on December 27, 1987, Mary K. Fager returned to her home from a brief visit with relatives in Emporia, Kansas. Mrs. Fager’s husband, Melvin, was a successful CPA and a financial analyst for the Boeing company. They had two daughters—Kelli, 16, and Sherri, 9.
As she went through the front door of their upper-middle-class house in east Wichita—located a little over a mile northeast of the Otero house—Mary Fager was horrified to discover the body of her husband dead on the floor of the entry foyer. He had been shot twice at close range, once in the back. It appeared that the shooting had taken place just after he’d come home; he was still wearing his overcoat.
Downstairs in the basement, Mary discovered the bodies of Kelli and Sherri. Both of them were in the family hot tub. Sherri had been bound with black electrical tape; it appeared that she had been strangled first, then drowned in the tub. Kelli had also been strangled, but she’d died hours after her sister.
Semen was found at the scene.
The Eagle raised the specter of BTK in its initial reporting on the awful murders, drawing parallels to the Otero killings more than twelve years earlier. But Police Chief Richard LaMunyon discounted any links, although he said the possibility would have to be investigated.
It wasn’t long, however, before the detectives focused their attention on a man who had been doing some construction work at the Fager house. The man seemed to be missing. Police discovered his van not far from the house. They also realized that a Fager family car, a three-year-old Volkswagen was missing. An all-points bulletin was issued for the arrest of the construction worker, who soon surfaced in Florida—driving the Fager car. The man was arrested and charged with the Fager murders. He denied any involvement and said that he’d had some sort of amnesia—he had no idea of what had happened, or how he’d come to be in Florida.
The police did not believe this. They brought him back to Wichita to stand trial for the Fager murders.
Then, on January 5, Mary Fager received an envelope in the mail.
The envelope contained a typed poem, and a crude drawing of a young woman whose hands were tied behind her, with her ankles tied together. The poem was all in capital letters.
OH GOD HE PUT KELLI SHERRI IN THE TUB
A NOTHER ONE PROWLS THE DEEP ABYSS OF LEWD
THOUGHTS AND DEEDS
AND WHILE HE BUILT THE SPDUTAL [SIC] AND
TENSION WASHING REAL . . .
The poem continued, comparing the murders of Mary Fager’s daughters to Aztec human sacrifices.
The crude drawing had all the stylistic tics of the Nancy Fox drawing—except for the accuracy. And in case anyone missed it, in the lower right-hand corner, the artist had drawn a version of the BTK logo.
It seemed very clear that the person who had sent the BTK letters of the 1970s had also sent this typed poem. But it was likewise clear that the person had not been in the Fager house—the drawing was all wrong.
What could be concluded from this? That BTK, if he existed, still existed. That he was still in Wichita. That he had probably not killed the Fagers, but that the acts of the murderer had thrilled him. That he was a very sick individual was evident merely from the fact that he’d had the heartlessness to send Mary Fager this awful poem and drawing only a week after her family had been wiped out.
Later, Beattie was able to obtain a copy of the drawing and poem. The type looked very much like it had come from the same machine used in the 1970s BTK letters and poems, and of course, the logo was a dead giveaway—that had never been published or broadcast by anyone. Like the earlier communications, the Fager letter had been photocopied multiple times in order to blur the idiosyncrasies of the typewriter used, such as chips and cracks. This would make it difficult to trace the letter to any specific typewriter.
When he began his research into the BTK case in 2003, Beattie was very troubled by the police decision in 1988 to withhold public announcement of this letter. Indeed, all the way up until 2004, police had contended that the last time anyone had received a communication from BTK was in 1979. That was plainly not true. To Beattie, it was Exhibit A of the case against the police: they had deliberately withheld the information that the killer was still in Wichita—and if the police had had their way, the public would never have been informed about the killer, right from the beginning. It was, Beattie contended, a thirty-year-long pattern of withholding vital information from the public.
“The Wichita police withheld, or tried to withhold, information about BTK’s existence from the public in 1974, 1988, and 2004,” Beattie said, when interviewed for this book. “This failure to inform the public of this danger struck me as a staggering disregard of what is in the public’s best interest. I can see that they could argue that the letters may have been hoaxes, that BTK may not exist, and they could argue that BTK may not commit any more crimes, so there is no reason to get the public in an uproar. But, by that reasoning I suppose they’d argue we should not warn the public of possible incoming tornadoes or hurricanes, because there is nothing that the public could do to stop them.”
In June 1988, the construction worker accused of the Fager murders was brought to trial. There were inconsistencies in his story, and in that of the prosecution’s theory of the crime. For one thing, his DNA did not match the semen found at the hot tub. The man’s lawyer sought to introduce the letter apparently sent by BTK to Mary Fager as evidence that BTK might have committed the murders, but the judge ruled it inadmissible.
In the end, a jury found the man not guilty, and the failure to convict became the main issue when a very attractive, energetic, talkative deputy district attorney named Nola Foulston decided to take on her boss in the next election for DA, and won.
Fifteen years later, it would be the same Nola Foulston who would have the pleasure of prosecuting the real BTK. The Fager letter would be used as evidence, not that he had committed those murders, but instead, of his unspeakable cruelty.