The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - The Poet | 3. The Stabbing

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

The Poet makes a brazen attempt on Ruth’s life. The attack sets off a media firestorm, with all of Wichita hunting for the assailant. Criminal profilers are brought in to figure out who they’re up against. Want the full story? Binge every episode of The Poet ad-free now by subscribing to The Binge+. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to GetTheBinge.com. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. The Poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ruth is driving as fast as she can. She just escaped the poet. He attacked her in the mall parking lot. She got away, but now as she drives, she notices a growing pain in her side. Turning the wheel became a real struggle for her. That's reporter Fred Mann. She could sense it like somebody poured something down her back,

hot and wet and sticky. as she drove, she kind of reached back there and she could feel the handle of a knife. A knife handle sticking out of her side, the poet had stabbed her. He could still be following her, trying to finish the job. But she knows she needs help now.

So she pulls off the road. She went into the parking lot of a convenience store, which had some phones on the outside. and she calls Bernie Dorozzi's number, but Dorozky wasn't in. Police Captain Al-Timmish took the call. She called me in my office and said, I've just been stabbed. Somebody was after her. From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media,

This is The Poet. Episode 3, The Stabbing. Four months earlier, in the summer of 1979, the poet had gone quiet. After Ruth's abduction, there was a flurry of letters. Then, nothing. Had he finally given up? Months would go by, nothing would happen, and everybody was sort of okay again. Some of the cops said, he's done playing his game.

He's gone. Every summer, Ruth and Ed go on a trip to Colorado. While packing for this year's trip to a dude ranch, Ruth realizes she needs a new pair of jeans. So after dinner, she shouts to Ed, who's in the middle of a yard project, that she's headed to the mall. Ed stops her. Is that a good idea? Since the abduction, he'd been going with her on all her errands, but that was nine months ago. And sure, they've still been getting letters from this creep, but they haven't even had one of those in a month.

So they decide, it's a quick errand, and it's still light out at 7 p.m. in August. She should be fine to go alone. Ruth gets to the mall without a problem. She buys her jeans. And just as she's about to head back, she remembers that the little candy jar she keeps at home is empty. So she heads back into the mall for that one last thing. As she's coming back out with her candies, the sun is lower in the sky. There aren't a lot of cars left in the parking lot.

Hey, Ruth. I didn't think you'd make this so easy. A hand clamps down on her wrist. She fought with him. She wrestled her way to the car. She had the key to the ignition in her hand, but that wasn't going to work on the door, which was locked. So she had to fumble for the keys.

She's frantic to get into her car, but he's on top of her now. She manages to get the door open, and he starts forcing his way in, trying to get into the back seat. All the while, he's muttering in her, you're breathing on her. I'm going to take you to this road. out east of the town, and I'm going to kill you there. He throws a brown paper bag in the back.

Ruth knows she can't let him into the car. If she does, she's done for. He tries to shove her head down into the car. He pulls out a knife and stabs her in the back. But finally, she gets a foot in the car and shoves him away. Ruth was able to square arm free and get in the car and shut the door on. during the struggle he had bashed her head against the window and that had knocked the

window down a little bit the man reaches through as Ruth frantically cranks the window up at the last second he pulls his arm out but his brown glove gets trapped dangling from Ruth's window she speeds out of the parking lot and makes it to a phone bank I was in my office on the sixth floor and And she called, said, I just got stabbed. She holds it together to tell him what's happened. She was in a controlled hysteria. I hollered at Burnin and said,

Burnham, get out there and see what's going on. Captain Timish tells Ruth to stay put. He'll send an ambulance. But Ruth is still worried the guy could be following her. She tells Timish she's going to drive home. She gets back in her car, and Captain Timish calls. calls Ed to warn him she's coming.

And Ed was waiting in the front yard. And Ed got her out of the driver's seat, had to move her, take her around the back of the car to get into the passenger seat. And now he saw the knife, and Ed drove like a bat to the nearest hospital. Sitting in the passenger seat, wedged sideways to accommodate the knife sticking out of her.

Ruth starts to slip in and out of consciousness. And she was really tired and woozy now. She began to remember pools of water when she was a kid. She used to the lakes and swim. And she looked at the sky now, an inviting pool of water. She wanted to get into this water and fall asleep. And Ed kept yelling at her, stay awake. Stay awake.

Don't fall asleep. Don't fall asleep. We're almost there. They get to the hospital and the orderlies get Ruth on a gurney immediately. The pain has become unbearable. Lieutenant Drowatsky arrives at the hospital along with some other cops. He rushes to Ruth in the ER. Ruth is in agony.

She can barely speak. But she manages to tell Drowatsky bluntly. He stabbed me. When he sees the handle of the knife still in her side, he whistles in surprise. This is no pocket knife. The handle alone is probably five inches long, wrapped in a red bandana. The hospital staff began to turn Ruth onto her front. That's when they realize this isn't one stab wound.

She has been stabbed three times, in the upper middle back and around her left torso. As they turn her over, the knife shakes loose. Eventually, it just sort of fell out onto the gurneyed. You heard a clank of the knife lying out. The police get a look at the knife now. It's a boning knife, something you'd use to gut a fish. The blade is eight inches, narrow and curved. Her injuries are deep.

The doctors told the cops, look, there was one wound there that was pretty deep that had nicked a kidney. And if she hadn't come in, she could have died. The doctor's report said that yes, she had been stabbed numerous times in her back, three times, in her back and sighed. That's Detective Mike McKenna. He'd been privately harboring doubts about Ruth since his trip to Fort Scott, wondering if she was really giving police the full story. But now, seeing the doctor's report and seeing this knife fall out of Ruth's side, he believes her.

And you've got to admit, that's pretty convincing. She's telling the truth. Now, the Wichita PD have more evidence to work with. The knife wrapped in the red bandana used to stab Ruth, the brown glove that was stuck in the window of her car, and the paper bag the assailant had thrown in her back seat. In that bag, they find a knife, a bottle of wine, a roll of tape, and a piece of rope.

It looks like a kill kit. The day after surgery, Ruth feels slightly better, physically at least. The police send their psychologist Dr. Donald Schrog and an amateur artist to talk to Ruth and create a sketch of the suspect. So in the mid to late

1970s, the Wichita Police Department didn't have a real police artist to do sketches of suspects and so on. This is Arlen Smith, a detective who investigated Ruth's case. There was a couple of ladies that were volunteers that would come down and do the best they could,

and then some of them were, We're not bad. But we didn't employ a police artist that just wasn't anywhere close to the budget. Smith & Wesson Company made a thing called the Identicit, which was just an overlay, a series of overlays. You know, you had like 500 noses and 500 sets of lips and 500 ears and hairstyles and you would overlay these things and ask your victim, you know, what do I need to change here and there?

But it wasn't really stellar. somewhere in there somebody came up with a composite of the poet. Ed Finley had drawn a sketch of the assailant the previous year after Ruth was abducted, and her description of the stalker remained the same. A white man, 45 to 50 years old, his hair is graying at the temples, and he wears gold or black-rimmed glasses. To me, he looked old and wrinkled, which was easier to say when I was 27. You know, there wasn't any real identifying mark.

It wasn't any big scar or missing teeth or nothing that really stood out about the guy, you know, kind of gaunt, maybe, had a rough life. But it wasn't anything to really make him stand out, so he couldn't really drive down the street and say, that looks like the guy. The description of BTK was similar and similarly nondescript. A white guy with dark hair. around the same height and in the same age range. Journalist Fred Mann was on the police beat that summer.

So in the meantime, the stabbing was in the media now. The newspaper did a story. It was not a page one story. It ran on the front page of an inside section. But now it was public. They named her. But did not get into the history at all. The cops released the new sketch of the attacker to the media.

And soon, it's everywhere. I would meet with Drozki daily, and one day I was sitting in Dorozky's office, and I said, okay, with anything, I'm stabbing. And I said, no, but he started telling me a little bit about, we got history with somebody here. And he started telling me about the letters and the, she bumped into this guy a couple of times. And there was a phone call. And apparently this woman had been attacked when she was teenagers. And he kind of started laying out this story, and I'm like, wow, this is something. So I came back and I wrote about it that there was some history here.

And at that point, things started to blow up a little bit. Headlines in the Wichita Beacon and other newspapers declared, Woman Stabbed Resisting Abduction, mall attacker known to woman, and victim received threats in the mail before stabbing. Ed's boss even puts up a $3,000 reward for information. Every part of Ruth's harrowing ordeal becomes public knowledge. The cops didn't dare tell the terrified public

that they were still wondering if this was BTK. But even still, a middle-aged woman being stabbed multiple times by a stalker was enough to send Wichita reeling. The case just went up several notches. Larry Haddeburg was a TV news correspondent for Cake TV at the show. the time. Because now we have a woman who's actually been assaulted by the guy who said he wanted to kill her. And it's terrible because all of the other women out there say that could be me. That could be happening to me. And so it's a terrorist threat, really, for the community.

It was a huge story. And we wanted to make sure that we were a force for good in the story to do anything we could to help catch this maniac. Ruth spent nine days recovering in the hospital before doctors approved her release. Sending her home put the investigators on high alert. At the hospital, Ruth had been easy to protect. At home, she's at risk. Her stalker knows where she lives. Ed picks up Ruth from the hospital and Drowatsky follows them home in an unmarked car.

He scopes out the house, the yard, the whole neighborhood. He even goes to the trouble of deputizing Ed, giving him a more official role in the investigation. Police teach Ed how to clear the house himself and how to shoot a gun in the proper police stance. Since the attack, Ruth had been feeling fragile and depressed. She's become resigned to the idea that her stalker is going to win, so her community rallies around her to celebrate her recovery. And there was kind of a big welcome home party from Roe. It's gathered.

You know, they had some fried chicken. Drowatsky was even there. He and his wife were now in the Finley's inner circle. Then, Drowatsky gets a call. He has a hushed conversation on the phone. Then returns to the group to report back. And he said, Ruth, somebody came to the hospital looking for you. Drowatsky had just learned that a man had come to the hospital

and asked the attending nurse if there was a Ruth Finley. there. She told him Ruth had gone home, and he'd turned around and left in a hurry. Ten minutes later, that nurse happened to look at the newspaper, where she saw the artist rendering of Ruth's stalker. It looked just like the guy she'd turned away, same relative age and height, same graying hair and wire-framed glasses. Jurotsky reports all this to Ruth. And he said it looks like the guy. And Ruth got sick and she ran a bathroom and threw up. Jarotsky realizes if the poet came to the hospital and learned that Ruth had been discharged,

he was probably on his way to the Finley home now. They were no longer safe where they were. If you want a deeper look behind cut, color kill, now is the time. Join our free newsletter at patreon.com slash the binge. and you will get exclusive story details you can't get anywhere else. Again, join me at patreon.com slash the binge. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat.

I can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Dr. Banner? I didn't know you could get that big.

Spider-Man, brand new day. In theaters, July 31st. Dratky gets Ruth to hide in the backseat of a car, and he puts a blanket over her. He drives her across town to her sister's house to stay. He comes back to the Finley's house to wait for the stalker to show up. He stakes out their house for two days, but the man never shows. Eventually, Diorotsky lets Ruth move back into her home.

Back at the police station, all of the evidence from the paper bag in Ruth's car had been processed, but there were no usable prints. The police needed some new leads. So they set up a tip line for people to call if they recognize the sketch of Ruth Stocker. Tips flood in with people calling to report men they've seen who fit the description. Two workers at the mall where Ruth had been stabbed, recognize the sketch as a regular shopper. That man is questioned by police at the mall,

and they get a handwriting sample. Others call in to point fingers at men they've seen around town acting strangely. Someone called and told us that they had seen an individual matching the description. Believe it or not, we found this guy. I was amazed and surprised that we found somebody that looked like the drawing.

And this individual looked like like he posed for it, and he lived in Winfield, Kansas, which is a small town south of Wichita, but he had an iron-tight alibi. It was not him. Around this time, the Wichita police were getting creative with their BTK serial killer investigation. The trail had gone cold. There hadn't been any action in the case since Anna Williams was stocked and sent a poem. With Leeds running dry, the police release a recording, a recording of BTK's voice that they'd capture two years earlier on a 911 call. The clip circulated on local radio and TV with its own hotline for people to call if they

recognize the voice. They get a smattering of leads for BTK, but even this line gets a bunch of tips about Ruth's stalker. Even the public seems to think they could be one in the same. Ed and Ruth continued to live in fear, always wondering what this guy's going to do next. Then, Ed gets an idea. He writes directly to the stalker in the classified section of the Eagle Beacon.

Ed took out an ad in our personal section saying, poet, tell me what you want. Ed calls him the poet. And that gave the case its name. The media picked up on this nickname, and so did the poet himself. And the poet responded to the ad, to the... the newspaper. And we would take the ad to the cops, and we knew to put it in an envelope, and one of us would take it to the cops, and they would process it. The letters from the poet picked right back up, as if he was relishing in the attention,

and his new moniker. The poet responds to Ed with taunting rhymes and signs his correspondences, the poet. The poet expanded his writing to include TV stations, the newspaper, as well as the police and Ruth. So a TV station, for example, would get these rambling poems threatening Ruth Finley and all this. They'd go to the cops, what's going on, and it built like that. He's taunting them, and they have nothing. Ruth is still getting threatening poems, and so was Drowatsky, the police station, and even news reporters. I started getting him letters. What did that first letter say?

Yeah, the first letter was a plan. He came up with a plan for. for a meeting. He wanted to meet and he said, we're going to go meet at the bridge. I'll give you details later. You know, she's an awful female, horror, all this. And at that point, the police came to the newspaper and said, we think he's trying to communicate. We see an opportunity to use somebody's a go-between. Maybe somebody to confide in. Maybe instead of these random poems, he'll send some notes that'll lead somewhere. And it's always kind of a delicate situation where cops and the media work together. But they come to an arrangement.

Fred gets access, and all he has to do is befriend the poet. The police ask Fred to write back to the poet via the classifieds and to speak to him in his language, poetry. They asked me to take out and out of my own in rhyming couplets to kind of get on his wavelengths, and they became the hardest things I had to write.

I could write my other stories. It's fine, but coming up with two lines that rhymed, and to say what we needed to be said, that became a chore. Do you remember what you wrote? The first one was, I've done what you ask, as you can see, if you want anything else, feel free to contact me. Yeah, it was just an ad in the paper, and the poet wrote back right away and said, thanks, Fred.

I knew it counted you. I bet you hate females, too. You're a man. This is going to be man to man. They wait for the poet to arrange a time and a bridge to meet on. He'd never follow through that. That happened a couple of times. The police ramped up their efforts to keep Ruth safe. They surveilled her on her lunch breaks. She'd sometimes go out accompanied by a female police officer.

When she walks downtown, they wire her up for sound, just in case the poet approaches. her on the street again, but they didn't get anything new. And yet, the letters keep on coming. Thoughts of me and your fucked up mind makes you perspire. Your fucked up brain wants me to retire. Your fucked up head knows I will win this war. So far, the poet did have the cops on their back foot. But they were about to bring in a new kind of expert to help them crack the case.

Criminal Profilers There are a lot of true crime podcasts out there, and I have 30 seconds to give in to you why you should check out crime lines. Crime Lines is one of those shows that just lays it all out there, the backstory, the legal context, and details of cases you haven't heard before. If you hear about a true crime case and want to know what happened and why, you're my kind of listener. You can check out Crim Lines wherever you get your podcasts. That's crime lines, one word, and get ready to dive deep. At this time, the idea of criminal profiling was just becoming mainstream.

Five years earlier, the FBI's behavioral analysis unit was formed, and police forces around the country are starting to think about serial offenders having patterns or MOs. The poet investigators need help to get an idea of who this guy really is and what he might be capable of. First, they get an analysis from Dr. Shrog, the local psychologist who interviewed Ruth at the hospital. He says Ruth's story is truthful, and her memory of the events is sharp. He thinks the poet is withdrawn, secretive, suspicious. There was also the suggestion at this time that the poet may be a Vietnam veteran and might have a service-related injury.

Then, police collect all the letters from the poet together. that had been sent to Ruth, Jarwatsky, Fred Mann, and others. By this point, there are over two dozen of them. And they mailed them out to Dr. Murray Myron for psychological analysis. Myron is a big deal. He's a criminal psycholinguist who the FBI consulted on the son of Sam's serial killer case, among other high-profile criminals. He writes back with a profile.

Here's a selection of what he wrote, read by an actor. I have rarely seen as deteriorate of a set of communications as these. Unsub is clearly and severely psychotic. Unsub being the word at the time for unknown subject. The volume of his projections, the regressive infantilism, narcissism, and wordplays are all characteristically definitive of schizophrenic psychosis. Such disorder can produce the sort of Edéphix. Meaning an unstoppable preoccupation of the mind.

Which makes the subject's victim a persistent target of his attention, which cannot be expected to cease or improve. He went on to note that schizophrenia as a diagnosis would not alone make this person a danger, but that this unsub was attacking even in moments of lucidity, exaggerating his symptoms. He can be expected to spend long hours in solitude and to be a loner. Dr. Myron believes the poet would not be capable of holding a job, but that he was a prolific reader, especially of psychological materials. He said the assailant was unpredictable and highly likely to act again.

As we approach the Christmas holidays, I believe that Unsub will not be able to resist the urge to attempt to provide a gift for his victim. In my opinion, this subject should be considered extremely dangerous. Myron's profile suggested that the poet was educated, even referencing academic textbooks in his letters. So they recruited the most literary member of the police department. to do an analysis of the poet's vocabulary. Robert C. Eli was the Wichita Police's chaplain, the spiritual leader for the police. He found there was a distinct evolution in the poet's writing.

Here's a selection of the chaplain's profile read by an actor. In later letters, the author becomes very bold in revealing the breadth of his vocabulary to us and seems to take special pleasure in working these sophisticated terms into his poetry. He finds 107 unusual terms in the letters, like Consentaneous, Damify, Objugate, and Puisance. In the earlier letters, there is almost a complete absence of such terminology, and the vocabulary and sentence structure remains quite simple and crude,

as though the author was making deliberate attempts in that direction. He thinks the poet is intentionally trying to underplay his intelligence in the letters. For example, the poet will write his letter N backwards, but not consistently. Though he notes, as you also might have noticed, that the poetry is pretty amateur. Generally speaking, both his rhyming and meter come out extremely awkward. Eli's analysis of the poet letters leaves them with a warning. There is little doubt that his mental condition and control factors are deteriorating rapidly, and that he will make an overt attempt on Ruth's.

Finley's life. The police gathered all the information from their new profiles and tried to connect the dots. Here's Detective Mike McKenna. The criminal profile of the poet was an individual that may have been in the military or always wanted to be in the military. Felt that society owed him something and that in this case with Ruth Finley, he was going to get paid back what he felt he was owed. A member of the Wichita Police Department

leads a press conference filmed by Cake TV to reveal to the public what they'd learned and to make an appeal to the poet himself. We consider him extremely dangerous. He's virtually a pathological person. That's what the doctor's saying. He probably spends long hours in solitude, probably a loner.

the outward appearance is probably a friendly type person. But the man has a psychological problem. He's sick. We could still get help for him if he'd just come forward. Unsub will not be able to resist the urge to attempt to provide a gift for his victim. He will make an overt attempt on Ruth Finley's life. Christmas decorations up around the house nestled in for the night. The Finleys are hosting their family. It's Christmas Eve.

Their youngest son, Bruce, goes to make a phone call and finds the line is dead. This is especially alarming because this was BTK's MO. He would cut his victim's telephone lines so they couldn't call for help when he attacked. Wichita residents were told to check their phone lines whenever they returned home. If the line was dead, they were told to get out. Ruth and Ed race outside. In their backyard, they see that their telephone line has been crudely cut. They report the incident to the police who rush over.

They take the cut phone line into evidence. Detectives are placed inside the Finley home on 24-hour surveillance. They are going to make sure, no matter what, that Ruth gets through Christmas alive. Next time on The Poet, the Finley residence becomes the site of Ruth's 24-hour. Then things started happening at the house that were unexplainable. And the police get a break in the case. So we went to that location. We showed that composite to next door neighbor.

And the neighbor said, yeah, that's our neighbor. That's him. The poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, New Metric Media, and Muse Entertainment. The show is hosted by me, Rachel Brown. The series is written and produced by Pippa Johnstone 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. For 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, Gene Stone. Fact-checking by Maya L. Hawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony, and Austin Wong. Voice acting from Cassandra Cissan, Morgan Murray, and Anthony McMahon. Special thanks to Andres Laura, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney,

Emily Rassick, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment.