Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Poet | 4. Ruth Under Siege

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

A letter comes in that brings a promising new lead. Investigators set up shop in the Finley home, but The Poet keeps sneaking through their traps. 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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Pick up fees may a fly. Every episode of The Poet, add free right now when you subscribe to The Binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes, and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. The Binge. I was surprised for you in the lobby, Ruth. Ruth was at work at the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company when a call comes in from the poet.

He's in the lobby. She immediately calls the police. The cops had been on Tenderhooks all Christmas, looking out for a gift the poet might send Ruth for the holiday. Was this it? Officers burst in, but he's already gone. They searched the lobby for the poet's surprise, fearing it could be a bomb. But then they spot something strange tucked in the lobby's phone booth, a butcher knife,

12 inches long, wrapped in a red bandana. Two witnesses tell police they saw a man who looked like the sketch of the poet they saw on the news. But the man was gone before the police got there. A few days later, back at home, Ruth receives a letter. There was a female named Ruth, who thought nothing of calling a sleuth. I have no doubt my call was checked out. I didn't tell you your present was in a booth.

It's only January, but already 1980 isn't looking promising for Ruth or her investigators. And the frenzy has only just begun. Soon, the poet takes their correspondence from private to public. Businesses around Wichita get hit with letters from the poet, requesting Ruth's gas be turned off, her driveway ripped up, her driver's license taken away, her bank account emptied, and her locks changed, all in an attempt to humiliate and terrorize her. He sends a particularly awful one to the health department.

This is an anonymous tip. There is a female spreading VD. Venerial disease, what we'd now call a sexually transmitted infection. Not only has the poet stalked, kidnapped, and stabbed Ruth, now he's trying to ruin her reputation. This is no longer about blackmail for an old secret. He is trying to destroy her completely, like a cat playing with its prey,

wearing her down before the final strike. One more letter comes in. The poet writes to the local mortuary asking about its services for dead bodies, which, he writes, Ruth would need soon. From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, this is the poet. I'm Rachel Brown. Episode 4. Ruth Under Siege.

At the start of the new year, Wichita Police Lieutenant Bernie Drowatsky receives a big promotion. He's been leading the poet investigation since the beginning, befriending the Finleys along the way. But his new role means he'll be much less involved in the poet case. So Captain Mike Hill takes over in his place. Hill is a hard-nosed, no-nonsense cop who'd been involved in the BTK serial killer investigation. Even before his briefing, Mike Hill reads the case files from cover to cover. He's going to reconsider every possible suspect, starting at the top of the pile, BTK. Is BTK in the poet the same person? He got to prove it or disproved it?

He even looks at Ruth and Ed themselves. He can rule out Ruth because the medical records show that her stabbing injuries could not have been self-inflicted. And it's Drowatsky, who assures Hill that Ed would never hurt his wife. But Hill, known for his skepticism, is going to do things differently from Drowatsky. I don't get close to people. You can't get close because that affects your thinking. You can get professionally close, but not socially close. So did you have to tell Ed and Ruth specifically that they were no longer going to be kept in the loop about the investigation like they had been before? Did you tell them that?

that directly? No, I didn't have to tell them. They knew that they weren't in the loop because they weren't being told anything. That's why she didn't like me. Ruth and Ed were not happy about this change. Girwatsky had become someone they came to rely on not only for information and updates, but reassurance and friendship during their darkest times. Ed complains about Mike Hill's tight-lipped approach to Jarwatsky, who tells Ed,

he can't do anything about it. Hill isn't even keeping him up to speed on the case either. Within days of taking over, Captain Mike Hill gets a letter, almost as if the poet was, in his twisted way, welcoming him into the fold. Captain, oh, captain, is Iron Man. Lieutenant helps pitch his weak and when. In his hand-printed Valentine, the poet threatens to hang Finley. The earmarks of an authentic poet's letter and a piece of a red bandana.

The poet mailed an ice pick to Finley here at her office at the phone company in downtown Richmond. The embarrassment for the police department piles on as the media, including Cake TV and TV10 News, follow the poets every move. The suspect, the suspect is still, still a large. Tom Marshall, TV10 News. Public pressure is mounting. The police are already getting an overwhelming number of tips from concerned citizens, largely through a tip line they'd set up. Wichita is scared, and their faith in their police force is at risk.

It's time to think outside the box. So the cops decide to go fishing, and their bait is Ruth herself. Officers suit her up in a bulletproof vest and send her to walk around downtown Wichita. Tcha-tah, trailed by a handful of plainclothes officers and unmarked cars. By this point in the investigation, officers had been accompanying Ruth on every errand downtown, even walking with her on her lunch break. The poet knew so much about her, they figured he must be watching her. The police hoped that dangling her out in the open like this could draw him out, but he

stayed in the shadows that day. So, they get some new bait on their hook, local journalist Fred Mann. By now, Fred and the poet were basically pen pals, swapping poems back and forth in the newspaper classifieds. Fred says he had an arrangement with the Wichita police where he'd communicate with the poet through these poems, and in turn, the police would give him scoops about the investigation. 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 and added to him somehow telling him in rhyming verse that we would meet with the chrome horse. And I was referring to this chrome sculpture of the horse out in front of this bank building. The cops put Fred in a bulletproof vest. They didn't think about a gun at all. The guy didn't do that.

He didn't use a gun. The only weapon he ever talked about was a knife. They didn't think he was to walk up to me and stab me or anything. But they felt better that I was in a vest just in case. It's an unseasonably warm March day as the streets begin to fill up with paradegoers, all in a sea of green. Fred arrives at the sculpture. And I waited for this guy to show up so we could go kill Ruth. Only Fred knows there are about a dozen cops stationed nearby keeping their eyes out for the poet,

and for Fred's signal. I had a white handkerchief in my sport coat. He would pull the handkerchief out of his pocket if he made contact with the poet. The signal that the cops was, okay, it's on. This is the guy. Dressed in the bulletproof vest, a sweater, and a sport coat, Fred is boiling hot and starting to sweat. As he waits, one of his colleagues from the newspaper

comes up to him and asks him what he's doing just standing there. I sort of said, nothing, just, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just killing time. Sweat is dripping down his face by now. He is uncomfortably hot, but all he has is the white handkerchief. He's itching to pull it out and wipe his brow. But the cops would think his friend is the poet. They would have descended on my friend and arrested him right there. And if I had done that, I had to go, oh, wait a minute, no, no, no, no, don't do that.

You just have to sweat it out. And then he eventually left. So Fred keeps on waiting. I was pretty sure he wasn't going to show up. That was his history. And waiting. And I look around. I'd look up in the sky, I'd kind of glance up with the sky,

I'd once in a while I'd turn and look in the alley behind me, I never saw a cop. By the end of the parade, the poet hadn't showed. And finally, one of the cops just drifted by and said, you can go back to work, kept on walking, and it was over. And I said, okay, and I walked back to work. Defeated, the police called it a day and went back to the drawing board. I think that every detective goes into every case with the hope and the thought that they're going to be the one that's going to solve it.

As a detective who worked in forgery, fraud, robbery, and homicides, Richard Vennro was no stranger to hard cases, and he was desperate to break this one open. Detective Vindrault was known around the department as someone who took his cases seriously, always willing to go the extra mile. Some might say too far. I was told by one of my superior officers I needed to lighten up, and I would bring numerous cases home, set them up at a card table, and work on them for hours

beyond the time that I was actually at work. So it probably took it a little too seriously at times. Poet Mania had taken over Wichita with new tips coming in regularly. At one point, the Wichita police are getting more tips about the poet than BTK. Vennro is all over town, chasing down leads from people who were certain they'd spotted the poet in public. He'd follow up on people reporting their suspicious neighbors. Locals reported people acting or dressing strangely.

I was also following up on reports that this individual had been seen at the Wichita Library, where he had approached a woman in an elevator, and she felt sure that this was the poet. This woman even saw the suspicious man seal an envelope. Was it a poet letter? Initial thoughts about who the poet was was that he was probably an individual that was more of a street person,

maybe Skid Row bum type. The car that he was using had windows that had been broken out. car was battered. We were getting reports of him being seen down in the area where winos were in that area of town. Van Rowe himself even went undercover. I was downtown, I was growing a beard, I was wearing, you know, raggedy clothes, I was going to the city library, I was going to Skid Row bars, or we were getting reports that this individual had been seen, this particular car being seen at different locations around town. One by one these sightings were followed up on and ruled out.

Either Ruth didn't recognize them or their handwriting didn't match the poets. Then, in the early summer, Ruth receives a letter that sparks a new line of inquiry. For the first time, the poet sends a letter from a location outside of Wichita. This one has an Oklahoma City postmark. Within a couple days, three more letters from Oklahoma City are received across town, one to the Wichita City Manager, and two more to local news stations. There had been profilers that indicated that this individual could be a Vietnam vet. There was a postmark that also showed a Vietnam veteran's postmark on it.

And being from Oklahoma City, it was felt that there was a chance that there could be some connection between the major VA hospital down there and this individual. The profiles had suggested they look for a Vietnam vet, and now they have a poet letter with a stamp honoring veterans. Then, Captain Mike Hill hears about an anonymous tip that points to a guy living near Oklahoma City on the Washita and a person. National Wildlife Refuge. He checks off all the boxes. They're told the man is named Bill and is 49 years old. He's staying in a trailer near a reservoir. He looks like the sketch and fits a similar background and profile.

With a name and an exact location, it's go time. 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. You've been looking forward to this all week. And with Cutwater's cocktails, this took only seconds because tonight's about catching up, not catching the server. Whether it's our Cutwater, Lime Margarita, Lemon drop martini or rum mitai.

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and the Wichita Assistant District Attorney drive two hours south to track this new suspect down. So we went to that location. We showed that composite to a lady that was at a small bait shop just next to the lake, and she says, yeah, that's him. They head to Bill's trailer, a white and lime green mobile home. First, they stopped by his neighbors and showed them the sketch of the poet, too. And the neighbor said, yeah, that's our neighbor.

After talking to him, he agreed to waive extradition. So Bill goes willingly back to Wichita for questioning. By this point, Ruth had seen her attacker a few times, when he accosted her on the street, when she was kidnapped, and when she was stabbed. It was time to see if Ruth could pick her stalker, kidnapper, and attacker out of the lineup. One of them was an assistant district attorney

that she would not have known. One was a police officer that agreed to be in the lineup and a couple other people that had no connection with it whatsoever. But the only one that she looked at was the gentleman that we brought back from Oklahoma. Ruth stares at the man from Oklahoma for a full minute. Venro could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. When she came to him, she hesitated. She kind of quivered a little bit, started tearing up,

and then turned and said, no, that's not him. And she picked none of the other guys. No. I thought she was going to say yes, and then she said, no, it wasn't him. In Clinton, Oklahoma, fitting the physical and psychological description of the poet. The latest developments hit the local and national news cycle, from the Wichita Station Cake TV to headlines and tabloids like the National Inquirer. Assistant DA Paul Clark hosts a press conference. It was the wrong man. We have now had Mrs. Penley look at that suspect and line up with a number of other individuals. who appear to be the same way, and that is not our man.

We wish it were, but it is not. And that's all we have at this time. In response to the news coverage, the poet sends a taunting letter to the DA. Do you think you make things better for man by wrongfully punishing an innocent roaming man? The poet seemed empowered by his ability to outsmart the police. It was very frustrating. Everything we were doing, we weren't getting anywhere. And things were about to get even worse for the Finley's. The battleground was about to hit home turf. The Finley's phone lines are cut for a second time. In the backyard, police find a pair of pliers

wrapped in another red bandana. Cutting phone lines is a classic BTK move, but the bandana is pure poet. Whether the poet is imitating BTK or is BTK himself, Captain Hill isn't interested in taking any chances. He orders a video camera be installed in a fountain on the property, hidden away,

and they place dummy phone lines in the backyard to trick the poet. Their life had changed dramatically. Here's a report. Porter Fred Mann. They either literally the two of them would sit there and watch it, watch a monitor. And any time there were the rustle of leaves or something, as he would jump up, sometimes he left the house to go look for somebody. He thought he saw a shadow.

That's how tense things were for them now. Officers are now placed inside the house to go over the tapes and monitor the cameras. Mark Hefner was one of the rookie cops who took those shifts waiting for the poet. So there was a constant escalation of surveillance and involvement with the police department resources and escalated to the point where we were watching her 24 hours a day. It was just more, I guess, a mental thing for me or for us to be ready. When something happened, we'd be ready to take action. And, you know, we didn't want to have him show up and us not catch him, you know,

spending all that and invest that time. So that was the main focus. But Ruth makes the best of it, providing a constant stream of pies, cookies, and brownies to the officers during their shifts that often went late into the night. She loved to bake. She would oftentimes have something for us to eat while we were there. Ruth sat up with them during their late shifts and took an interest in their lives. What people don't know about this case is how special a person that Ruth is. very nice lady. Like many officers assigned to the case,

Heffner was in his 20s and new to the force. Ruth was kind of like just as your typical mom. She was similar to the age probably of my mom or maybe a little bit younger. Here's Detective Arlen Smith. Ruth was a very nice woman. Of course, she was old enough to be my mother and my partner's mother. Ruth was an empty nester by this point. Her sons had moved out.

And she seemed to enjoy having a house full of people again. The cops cared about her and did whatever they could to keep her safe. We took that extremely seriously, not just for them, because they were good people. It was obvious that they were nice, kind people. But it would have just been extremely disheartening as a police department to have had some forewarning of this and not be able to protect her. That would have been a failure of gigantic proportions.

I can't even imagine what that would feel like. So there was a lot of diligence and a lot of effort put into protecting them. At this time, the police are dealing with two cases that have major public scrutiny, the poet and BTK. They haven't cracked either. They're determined to solve one of them. Maybe that's why so many. resources were poured into the Finley case. With traps laid around the home, the cops were certain

it was only a matter of time before they caught the poet in the act. But the poet seems to taunt them, pulling almost childish pranks in plain sight. One summer morning, Ruth goes to the front porch to grab the mail. As she opens the door, a glass bottle topples over and spills on her feet. She picks up the bottle and takes a sniff. There is no doubt in her mind. This bottle is filled with urine. Another morning, Ed goes outside to check the mail. In one mushy envelope is the unmistakable evidence, feces. Another night, Ruth and Ed see that a bunch of eggs have been thrown at their glass sliding doors. Some of them were wrapped in red bandana fabric. Here's Detective Richard Vindrault.

There had been numerous reports by Ruth that things had been moved or a bandana had been left in their backyard so that they knew because a bandana tended to be a symbol of the poet. Police even place a camouflaged camera in a birdhouse in the backyard and focus its lens on the dummy phone lines. The camera shutter was rigged to go off if anyone tries to try to. to tamper with the wires. But after installing the camera, the activity in the backyard suddenly stops.

When you sat in her house, nothing happened. When we put the camera in the birdhouse, we didn't even see a bird move. And yet, when we pulled it out, within a week, we were getting reports from Ruth that the poet was back in her backyard.

Nothing was ever seen. All of the times, that we set up surveillance, nothing happened. One of the big questions was, how is this person able to predict when we're going to be watching? How do they know that we no longer are in that house? Could they possibly live close by

to where they can see us coming and going? They could have seen us set up this birdhouse. But at the same time, the people that lived close by, had all been checked, they had all been interviewed by detectives, and pretty much eliminated as possible suspects. If it wasn't the neighbors, who could have been close enough to the investigation to know all the cop's moves? Detective Mike McKenna was the officer who went to Fort Scott early on in the investigation and left unconvinced by Ruth's story. And after watching the Finley's house under siege, he couldn't understand how

all of these incidents were happening. It felt like we were chasing ghosts. So he says he took his concerns to someone he thought might lend a sympathetic ear, Bernie Drowatsky. I go back and I tell Bernie, I said, Bernie, I said, something just doesn't seem right. He said, what do you mean? I said, nobody ever sees anything at the house,

yet these things appear on the front porch. Nobody saw anything anywhere. I said, listen, between you and you. me, I think that somebody in here is either telling this damn poet what we're going to do next, or he's got a bug in here, and he can hear us talking about it. That's how he's finding out what Nick's plan of attack is. God, I love that guy. He looks at me, he says, get the hell out of my office.

I said, what? He says, get out. Just get out of my office. He says, I don't want to hear any more of it. But maybe Drowatsky needed to open his mind. And the Wichita Police Department needed to look closer to home. There's no shortcut for saving time. But saving money is simple.

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with an unlit wick in their backyard. It's the poet's attempt at a Molotov cocktail. It's as if he's saying, I could have burned your house to the ground if I'd wanted. At 2 a.m. on another night, Ruth is awoken by a bang coming from the front yard, what sounds like a small explosion. Then later that day, she finds a bandana

and remnants of firecrackers in her mailbox. Another warning. Soon, the poet makes good, on his threats. On December 21st, a few days before Christmas, Ed and Ruth are in the basement watching some late-night TV. They hear a loud crash from outside. Ed runs upstairs and sees their Christmas wreath in flames.

The noise was the picture window cracking from the heat. Ed yanks the wreath down and stomps on it to put the flames out. He then grabs a pair of garden shear. and sprints out onto the street in the freezing night air, cursing the poet. This was all becoming too much for Ruth to handle, and it was taking its toll. Her headaches were getting worse to the point where interacting with people became difficult. You could see the stress on her. Sometimes she'd get bad headaches, and she'd go in and go to bed early,

and she could see the stress on her. By the end of 1981, the Wichita Police Department was under overwhelming pressure. from the city. Officers had collected 248 poet letters, but no fingerprints and no usable blood typing. They've had zero success with handwriting comparisons. They have investigated and ruled out 406 suspects and checked a total of 3,534 potential suspect records within the state of Kansas and beyond. The case has been exhausting and expensive. Captain Mike Hill brings in Dr. Schrag,

the police psychologist, to look at the newest developments. Shrog doesn't have any new theories. He just confirms that he thinks Ruth is credible. But he does rule out an old theory. Here's Mike Hill. BTK was the poet was going on. And it was the full. philosophy of the psychiatrist that BTK had been arrested for some other crime and was serving

time in a prison somewhere. Dr. Shrog told Captain Hill that his police force must already have BTK in custody. There was no other reason he had been inactive for this long. And the ammo no longer felt consistent. BTK didn't pull pranks. BTK did not come back into our attention until after the Finley case was over with. Now they really had no suspects.

But then a letter arrives the morning of Friday, September 4th, that turns the case on its head. Jarotsky knows right away, he has to take it up the chain to his boss, the chief of police, Richard Lemunion. Lemongian was well respected within the department, known for being a dedicated and dogged officer. He made history when he became the youngest chief to ever lead the department at age 36. As chief, LeMunion had been pretty hands-off during this investigation, letting investigators do their work while he ran the whole department.

Root's case was just one of many. La Munion was amazing. You know, I'm a weird little gay New Yorker, and he was this country sheriff from the right wing's far right wing promise keeper. We got along great. This is journalist Gene Stone. He spent a lot of time with LeMunion while writing his book on Ruth's case. This was not looking good for the police department.

First they had the BTK killer who they never solved. Now they have the poet and they haven't solved it. So that put a lot of extra pressure on LeMunion to make sure that the police department looked like it was efficient and knew what they were doing. Gerotsky knocks on LeMunion's office door and tells him they've received another letter from the poet. You don't want to make Richard LeMunion mad. The poet offended him deeply. The poet says that after he's taken care of Ruth, he's going to go after Sharon. Sharon is Richard LeMunion's wife.

A wonderful woman, but you don't want to do something like that. From this letter, it's clear that the poet knows many personal details about Sharon LeMunion, the make of her car, and the exact route to the city she drives from their home. This was personal now. And Richard said, I'm taking over the case. He gathers up all the poet files, 14 large binders, and takes them home for the long. weekend. Lemunion pours over every page from the case, jotting down notes, making charts, reworking all the events and incidents over and over in his mind. He develops a

hypothesis. Now he needs to prove or disprove it. LeMunion returns to the office and calls a top secret meeting with select officers. He announces that he knows once and for all, all, who the poet is. Next time on the poet. That's kind of the moment when he said, you know, enough's enough. We're going to try to get to the bottom of this. He couldn't believe it, but it was true.

And that's when the case broke. And that's the point in which the public judgment of Ruth changed. Don't want to wait for the next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of The Poet early. and ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. And it doesn't stop at The Poet. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series

on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Search for The Binge on Apple podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to GetTheBinge.com to subscribe directly. 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 El-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 Andreslaura, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison,

Allison Haney, Emily Rassick, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment. Before you knew what a stock was, You traded snacks, cards, turns. That instinct to trade didn't disappear. It just grew up. With no minimums, no monthly fees, and 100 free trades,

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