Introducing . . . The Poet

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. Binge all episodes of The Poet July 1st by subscribing to The Binge. Visit ⁠The Binge Crimes⁠ on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit ⁠GetTheBinge.com⁠ to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  We finally got her. Oh my God, he got her.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  He thought she was dead.

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  For years, a deranged man in Wichita known as The Poet stalked Ruth Finley. He sent her letters, gifts, and poems.

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  You know in your fucked up mind you are going to die. You don't know when, but you do know why.

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  The Wichita police put everything they had into Ruth's case.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  The poet was always two steps in front of us, and we just didn't know why.

• 0:35Speaker 04

  It just kind of became the local story of terror.

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  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.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Could we really have two different people, or is this the same guy?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Then, The Poet took his violence into the real world.

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  This guy comes up to her and stabs her. She's got three stab wounds in her back and her side.

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  But no one could have guessed how this would end.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  That's one of those Hitchcock endings that we did not expect.

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  Did one of history's most notorious serial killers have it out for an unassuming wife and mother from Wichita?

• 1:28Speaker 06

  She's not what people think she is.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Or was something far stranger going on here? That's kind of the moment when he said, you know, enough's enough.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  We're going to try to get to the bottom of this. He couldn't believe it, but it was true. That's when the case broke.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Newmetric Media, this is The Poet. I'm Rachel Brown, coming July 1st to The Binge. Search for The Poet wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes all at once, ad-free.