Introducing “The Poet” from The Binge

**Hannah Maguire** (0:01)
Hello, listeners. We're Sruti and Hannah from RedHanded.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:04)
Today, we're sharing an episode of a new true crime series called The Poet. It's from The Binge, and you can listen to every episode right now at the link in the episode description. It wouldn't be from The Binge if you couldn't.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:17)
Hosted by journalist Rachel Browne, The Poet is a six-part investigation that drops you into Wichita, Kansas in 1977, where a woman named Ruth Finley is receiving threatening, obsessive poems from an unknown stalker. At the exact same time, police are trying to track down the notorious serial killer known as BTK.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:38)
Is Ruth's stalker the same person? Who knows? You will have to listen to find out.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:44)
In this episode, you'll hear the beginning of Ruth's story, how the poem started, how they escalated, and how a small town case became tangled up with one of the most notorious killers in American history.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:56)
Now, here's the episode.

**Rachel Browne** (1:05)
For the first time in a long time, Ruth Finley was home alone.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:11)
Killer locked the three children in the bathroom while he viciously attacked their mother inside their home.

**Rachel Browne** (1:17)
By the time Ruth and Ed, her husband of 27 years, were rarely apart. By the summer of 1977, they were empty nesters. Their two sons had grown up and moved away from Wichita, Kansas.
But earlier that day, Ed had suffered what they thought was a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital. And now doctors were keeping him overnight for observation. So Ruth was on her own.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:43)
The killer says a monster inside his mind drives him to kill. He signs off with the moniker BTK.

**Rachel Browne** (1:54)
The people of Wichita were on edge. BTK, a serial killer whose alias stood for bind, torture, kill, was actively hunting people in their city. Just months earlier, he'd killed a mother in her home at night. At around 1030 that evening, Ruth's phone rings.
Hello? In an interview Ruth later gave to Cake TV, she said the conversation was fine at first.

**Ruth Finley** (2:29)
The man started out friendly, like was I, Ruth Smock from Fort Scott.

**Rachel Browne** (2:36)
Ruth hadn't gone by her maiden name Smock since the 1940s, when she did, in fact, live in Fort Scott, Kansas.

**Ruth Finley** (2:44)
Then he started to ask me about this incident.

**Rachel Browne** (2:48)
The man on the phone asks, You still have your brand? Ruth had been assaulted by a stranger in her apartment when she was 16 years old, attacked, incapacitated, and branded with a hot iron.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:06)
Look, I know all about that night.

**Rachel Browne** (3:11)
The man who did it had never been caught.
The guy on the phone tells her he works for a construction company tearing down buildings. In his work, he'd found a newspaper clipping from 1946 about the attack. The newspaper had published Ruth's high school photo under the word branded. The coverage had humiliated her, making her private trauma the talk of her hometown.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:40)
I know where you work. If you don't do what I want, I might just leave that article where everyone can see it.

**Rachel Browne** (3:51)
She had told very few people in her life in Wichita about the attack.

**Ruth Finley** (3:55)
The jest of it was, he was going to want some money from me, or he was going to tell this again. He was going to bring it up again.

**Rachel Browne** (4:04)
He demands payment to keep the story quiet. She has three weeks. He says he'll call back then and expect her to pay up.
The caller's words didn't rhyme, but they soon would. This one call would set off a years-long manhunt, one of the most expensive in Wichita history, for a mysterious character who would spread fear throughout this Midwestern city.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:44)
The poet was always two steps in front of us, and we just didn't know why.

**Rachel Browne** (4:49)
It's a story about a seemingly normal middle-aged woman.

**Mike McKenna** (4:53)
Why is this person threatening her? Why is this happening to her?

**Rachel Browne** (4:59)
Targeted by a monster.

**SPEAKER_5** (5:02)
Hickory dickory dog, your face mounted on my claw.

**Rachel Browne** (5:06)
Whose story would become a media sensation.

**SPEAKER_9** (5:10)
We consider him extremely dangerous.

**SPEAKER_7** (5:13)
He was virtually a pathological person.

**SPEAKER_10** (5:15)
Verse, block printing and a piece of a red bandana.

**SPEAKER_9** (5:17)
There was a lot of terrifying things that were happening to her.

**Mike McKenna** (5:20)
We knew he was a very violent person.