Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Poet | 3. The Stabbing About this episode 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
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are, and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
0:30 Speaker 01 Listen to every episode of The Poet ad-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.
1:00 Speaker 01 The Binge.
1:11 Speaker 01 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.
1:28 Speaker 02 Turning the wheel became a real struggle for her.
1:31 Speaker 01 That's reporter Fred Mann.
1:34 Speaker 02 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.
1:46 Speaker 01 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.
2:03 Speaker 01 So she pulls off the road.
2:06 Speaker 02 She went into the parking lot of a convenience store, which had some phones on the outside. And she calls Bernie Deroski's number, but Deroski wasn't in. Police Captain Al Timish took the call.
2:21 Speaker 03 She called me in my office and said, "I've just been stabbed. Somebody was after her."
2:32 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment and Newmetric Media, this is The Poet.
2:39 Speaker 01 Episode Three, The Stabbing.
2:51 Speaker 01 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?
3:04 Speaker 02 Months would go by and nothing would happen, and everybody was sort of okay again. Some of the cops said, "He's done playing his game. He's gone."
3:15 Speaker 01 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?"
3:36 Speaker 01 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 7:00 PM in August. She should be fine to go alone.
4:02 Speaker 01 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.
4:19 Speaker 01 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.
4:27 Speaker 04 Hey Ruth, I didn't think you'd make this so easy.
4:33 Speaker 01 A hand clamps down on her wrist.
4:36 Speaker 02 She fought with him. She wrestles her way to the car. She has the keys 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.
4:46 Speaker 01 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 backseat.
4:57 Speaker 02 All the while, he's muttering in her ear, breathing on her. "I'm gonna take you to this road out east of the town, and I'm gonna kill you there."
5:07 Speaker 01 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.
5:29 Speaker 02 Ruth was able to square her arm free and get in the car and shut the door on him. During the struggle, he had bashed her head against the window, and that had knocked the window down a little bit.
5:39 Speaker 01 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.
5:58 Speaker 01 She speeds out of the parking lot and makes it to a phone bank.
6:04 Speaker 03 I was in my office on the sixth floor, and she called, said, "I just got stabbed."
6:12 Speaker 01 She holds it together to tell him what's happened.
6:16 Speaker 03 She was in a controlled hysteria. I hollered at Bernie and said, "Bernie, get out there and see what's going on."
6:23 Speaker 01 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 Ed to warn him she's coming.
6:41 Speaker 02 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.
6:58 Speaker 01 Sitting in the passenger seat, wedged sideways to accommodate the knife sticking out of her, Ruth starts to slip in and out of consciousness.
7:08 Speaker 02 She was really tired and woozy. She began to remember pools of water. When she was a kid, she used to go to 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.
7:33 Speaker 01 They get to the hospital and the orderlies get Ruth on a gurney immediately. The pain has become unbearable. Lieutenant Jawwatsky arrives at the hospital along with some other cops. He rushes to Ruth in the ER.
7:51 Speaker 01 Ruth is in agony. She can barely speak. But she manages to tell Jawwatsky 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 begin 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.
8:29 Speaker 02 Eventually, it just sort of fell out, onto the gurney. She heard a clank of the knife falling out.
8:35 Speaker 01 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.
8:48 Speaker 02 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."
8:59 Speaker 05 The doctor's report said that yes, she'd been stabbed numerous times in her back, three times in her back inside.
9:07 Speaker 01 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.
9:25 Speaker 05 And you gotta admit, that's pretty convincing. She's telling the truth.
9:34 Speaker 01 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 backseat. 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.
10:03 Speaker 01 The day after surgery, Ruth feels slightly better, physically at least. The police send their psychologist, Dr. Donald Schrogg, and an amateur artist to talk to Ruth and create a sketch of the suspect.
10:17 Speaker 06 So, in the mid to late 1970s, Wichita Police Department didn't have a real police artist to do sketches of suspects and so on.
10:29 Speaker 01 This is Arlen Smith, a detective who investigated Ruth's case.
10:33 Speaker 06 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 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 Identikit, which was just an overlay, a series of overlays, you know, that 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. But somewhere in there, somebody came up with a composite of the poet.
11:17 Speaker 01 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.
11:35 Speaker 06 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. There 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 you couldn't really drive down the street and say, "That looks like the guy."
12:02 Speaker 01 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.
12:18 Speaker 02 So, in the meantime, the stabbing was in the media now. The newspaper did a story. It was not a Page 1 story. It ran on the front page of an inside section. But, you know, it was public. They named her, but did not get into the history at all.
12:34 Speaker 01 The cops released the new sketch of the attacker to the media, and soon, it's everywhere.
12:40 Speaker 02 I would meet with Drodzki daily, and one day I was sitting in Drodzki's office, and I said to him, "Okay, was there anything on the 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.
13:19 Speaker 01 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.
13:39 Speaker 01 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.
14:00 Speaker 06 The case just went up several notches.
14:03 Speaker 01 Larry Hattlerberg was a TV news correspondent for Cake TV at the time.
14:08 Speaker 06 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 this story, to do anything we could to help catch this maniac.
14:41 Speaker 01 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.
15:00 Speaker 01 Ed picks up Ruth from the hospital, and Jawatzky 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.
15:25 Speaker 01 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.
15:40 Speaker 02 And there was kind of a big welcome home party. Some relatives gathered. You know, they had some fried chicken.
15:46 Speaker 01 Jawwatski was even there. He and his wife were now in the Finley's inner circle.
15:54 Speaker 01 Then Jawwatski gets a call. He has a hushed conversation on the phone, then returns to the group to report back.
16:04 Speaker 02 And he said, Ruth, somebody came to the hospital looking for you.
16:09 Speaker 01 Jawwatski 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 turned around and left in a hurry. 10 minutes later, that nurse happened to look at the newspaper, where she saw the artist rendering of Ruth Stocker. It looked just like the guy she turned away. Same relative age and height, same graying hair and wire-framed glasses. Jawwatski reports all this to Ruth.
16:43 Speaker 02 And he said, it looks like the guy. And Ruth got sick, and she ran to the bathroom and threw up.
16:51 Speaker 01 Jawwatski 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.
17:08 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are, and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
17:43 Speaker 01 Dzirwacki 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, Dzirwacki 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 recognized the sketch of Ruth's stalker.
18:27 Speaker 01 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 recognized 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.
18:50 Speaker 05 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 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.
19:18 Speaker 01 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 stalked and sent a poem. With leads running dry, the police released a recording of BTK's voice that they'd captured 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 recognized 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.
20:05 Speaker 01 Ed and Ruth continued to live in fear, always wondering what this guy is going to do next. Then Ed gets an idea. He writes directly to the stalker in the classified section of the Eagle Beacon.
20:21 Speaker 02 Ed took out an ad in our personal fiction, saying, "Poet, tell me what you want."
20:27 Speaker 01 Ed calls him "The Poet."
20:29 Speaker 02 And that gave the case its name.
20:32 Speaker 01 The media picked up on this nickname, and so did the poet himself.
20:36 Speaker 02 And the poet responded to the ad, to 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.
20:50 Speaker 01 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."
21:05 Speaker 02 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.
21:24 Speaker 01 He's taunting them, and they have nothing. Ruth is still getting threatening poems, and so was Jawatzky, the police station, and even news reporters.
21:35 Speaker 02 I started getting the letters.
21:37 Speaker 01 What did that first letter say?
21:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, the first letter was a plan. He came up with a plan 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, whore, 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 as 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.
22:16 Speaker 01 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.
22:32 Speaker 02 They asked me to take out an ad of my own in rhyming couplets to kind of get on his wavelength. And they became the hardest things I had to write. I could write my other stories just fine, but coming up with two lines that rhymed and to say what we needed to be said, that became a chore.
22:49 Speaker 01 Do you remember what you wrote?
22:51 Speaker 02 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 I'd count on you. I bet you hate females, too. You're a man. This is going to be man to man."
23:13 Speaker 01 They wait for the poet to arrange a time and a bridge to meet on.
23:21 Speaker 02 He never followed through with it. That happened a couple of times.
23:25 Speaker 01 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.
23:46 Speaker 01 And yet, the letters keep on coming.
23:50 Speaker 04 Thoughts of me in 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.
24:10 Speaker 01 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.
24:26 Speaker 05 Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10" once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com.
24:56 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are, and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
25:27 Speaker 01 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. Shrogg, 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.
26:08 Speaker 01 There was also the suggestion at this time that the poet may be a Vietnam veteran and might have a service-related injury.
26:18 Speaker 01 Then, police collect all the letters from the poet together that had been sent to Ruth Jawatzky, Fred Mann, and others. By this point, there were over two dozen of them. And they mail them out to Dr. Murray Myron for psychological analysis.
26:36 Speaker 01 Myron is a big deal. He's a criminal psycholinguist who the FBI consulted on the Son of Sam 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.
26:52 Speaker 07 I have rarely seen as deteriorative a set of communications as these. Unsub is clearly and severely psychotic.
26:59 Speaker 01 Unsub being the word at the time for "unknown subject."
27:03 Speaker 07 The volume of his projections, the regressive infantilism, narcissism, and word plays are all characteristically definitive of schizophrenic psychosis. Such disorder can produce the sort of "edefix."
27:14 Speaker 01 Meaning "an unstoppable preoccupation of the mind."
27:18 Speaker 07 Which makes the subject's victim a persistent target of his attention, which cannot be expected to cease or improve.
27:25 Speaker 01 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.
27:38 Speaker 07 He can be expected to spend long hours in solitude and to be a loner.
27:43 Speaker 01 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.
27:58 Speaker 07 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.
28:13 Speaker 01 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.
28:43 Speaker 07 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.
28:54 Speaker 01 He finds 107 unusual terms in the letters, like "consentaneous," "damify," "obligate," and "puissance."
29:04 Speaker 07 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.
29:18 Speaker 01 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.
29:35 Speaker 07 Generally speaking, both his rhyming and meter come out extremely awkward.
29:40 Speaker 01 Eli's analysis of the poet letters leaves them with a warning.
29:44 Speaker 07 There is little doubt that his mental condition and control factors are deteriorating rapidly, and that he will make an overt attempt on Ruth Finley's life.
29:57 Speaker 01 The police gathered all the information from their new profiles and tried to connect the dots. Here's Detective Mike McKenna.
30:06 Speaker 05 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 gonna get paid back what he felt he was owed.
30:29 Speaker 01 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.
30:41 Speaker 06 We consider him extremely dangerous. He's virtually a pathological person. That's what the doctors say. 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.
31:05 Speaker 07 The 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.
31:21 Speaker 01 Christmas decorations up around the house nestled in for the night. The Findleys 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 victims' 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.
32:02 Speaker 01 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 Findley 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 Findley residence becomes the site of Ruth's torment.
32:34 Speaker 05 Then things started happening at the house that were unexplainable.
32:39 Speaker 01 And the police get a break in the case.
32:43 Speaker 06 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.
33:04 Speaker 01 The Poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, Newmetric 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 Newmetric 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, Jean Stone.
33:41 Speaker 01 Fact checking by Maya Elhawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony, and Austin Wong. Voice acting from Cassandra Sisson, Morgan Murray, and Anthony McMahon. Special thanks to Andres Lara, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Emily Rassik, and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment.
34:09 Speaker 00 At Edward Jones, we believe rich means opening yourself to new possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, helping you move forward with confidence. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
Previous The Poet | 2. Where’s Ruth? Next The Poet | 4. Ruth Under Siege Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated