Introducing . . . The Poet
6/24/20262 min
Coming soon to the Binge is The Poet!
In 1977, during the BTK Strangler’s reign of terror in Wichita, a woman named Ruth Finley receives a threatening phone call from an unidentified man. He’s blackmailing her about a secret from her past. The harassment escalates to letters, then poems, then attacks. The Wichita police wonder if this is the work of BTK. But the deeper their investigation goes, the darker and stranger the questions become.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 1· Soundbite0:01
He finally got her. Oh my God, he got her.
Speaker 2· Soundbite0:03
He thought she was dead.
Rachel Brown· Host0:04
For years, a deranged man in Wichita known as the Poet stalked Ruth Finley. He sent her letters, gifts, and poems.
Speaker 4· Soundbite0:16
You know in your [censored] up mind you are going to die. You don't know when, but you do know why.
Rachel Brown· Host0:24
The Wichita Police put everything they had into Ruth's case.
Speaker 5· Soundbite0:29
The Poet was always two steps in front of us, and we just didn't know why.
Speaker 6· Soundbite0:34
It just kinda became the local story of terror.
Rachel Brown· Host0:39
And the city was already living in fear. A serial killer was cutting people's phone lines and murdering them in their homes, binding, torturing, killing them. He called himself BTK, and he had a thing for poetry.
Speaker 2· Soundbite0:56
Could we really have two different people, or is this the same guy?
Rachel Brown· Host1:01
Then the Poet took his violence into the real world.
Speaker 5· Soundbite1:06
This guy comes up to her and stabs her. She's got three stab wounds in her back and her side.
Rachel Brown· Host1:12
But no one could have guessed how this would end.
Speaker 6· Soundbite1:16
That's one of those Hitchcock endings that we did not expect.
Rachel Brown· Host1:20
Did one of history's most notorious serial killers have it out for an unassuming wife and mother from Wichita?
Speaker 1· Soundbite1:29
She's not what