The Poet | 6. Buried

After a confession, the only question is why. A new kind of detective uncovers the real meaning behind the red bandana, The Poet’s calling card. 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced, government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, "This is what I believe," while your neighbor

• 0:44Speaker 00

  says, "I believe something completely different." And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Listen to all episodes of The Poet ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed Your True Crime Obsession.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Before we get started, I wanted to let you know this episode deals with mentions of self-harm and suicide and crimes involving children.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Good evening. There appears to be a major break in the poet case.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Wichita police at this hour are interrogating a suspect in the case. TV 10 News has learned that that suspect is Ruth Finley herself.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Ruth's story had gone public, covered here on local news station Cake TV by reporter Larry Hatterberg.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to herself, police, and the media.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  The case had become one of the most expensive in Wichita history, totaling more than $370,000, the equivalent of more than $1 million today. Police Chief Richard Lemunyan thinks Ruth should be held to account in a court of law. He wants to charge her with perjury and filing a false police report.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Ruth is in the psychiatric ward in the hospital on an involuntary hold. She's been put on suicide watch. The prospect of going to trial is almost too much for her to bear. She's never even had a traffic ticket before. She's disoriented and terrified, too scared to even go to the bathroom. And it's in this state that she meets psychologist Dr. Andrew Pickens.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  She was anxious. I mean, not out of control, but she was nervous, tense, soft-spoken, wasn't talkative, but, you know, she appeared like a normal person in an abnormal situation.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Dr. Pickens doesn't know much about the case. He didn't read the coverage in the papers. What he does know is this middle-aged woman in front of him has perpetrated a four-year-long campaign terrorizing herself.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of it.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Ruth can't quite wrap her mind around the idea that she was the poet. She tells Dr. Pickens that she doesn't remember much about the poet's actions. Here's Jean Stone.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  She's saying that, "Yes, I must have. They have proof of me doing it. They've shown me pictures of it. So I did it."

• 3:57Speaker 01

  She can only recall short glimpses, like sitting by her washing machine and writing letters. Clearly, something was going on under the surface here, and it was up to Dr. Pickens to uncover it. But this wasn't going to be like any regular case. Dr. Pickens was working against a ticking clock. He has 90 days to make a psychiatric evaluation. The court is counting on him to answer two big questions. Did Ruth know what she was doing? And should she be brought to trial?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Newmetric Media, I'm Rachel Brown, and this is The Poet, Episode 6: Buried.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Andrew Pickens was destined to be a shrink. When he was 12 years old, he saw the movie that inspired his life's purpose.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  That movie was the 1948 psychological thriller The Snake Pit.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  The Snake Pit is based on the

• 5:13Speaker 04

  The Snake Pit referenced a large psychiatric hospital where many of the patients were psychotic.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  My head hurts. There's something the matter with my head. Come on, darling, let me help you. Who are you?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  The patient featured in the movie, she was initially thought to be psychotic by the people who were treating her, and she wasn't. And the therapist who treated her, I realized retrospectively, was a psychoanalytic kind of therapy. And it made sense to me. And that, I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be like that psychiatrist in the movie.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  The caption beneath his photo in his high school yearbook reads, "Little man, big brain, future psychiatrist." And so he went on to study psychoanalysis, the work of Sigmund Freud, focusing on childhood experiences and repressed emotions through intense dialogue, or talk therapy.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  It's like the work that a detective does to find a lost child and save the lost child. Because you're in the process of finding out something that the patient doesn't even know and help them know it.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  In those first meetings, Ruth continually tells Dr. Pickens that she feels crazy. Pickens assures her this is not the case.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  She was never crazy. She just wasn't. She wasn't psychotic. She wasn't even close.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Dr. Pickens' initial determination is that Ruth had been in a state of massive repression, maybe the most intense case of repression he'd ever seen. Here's an excerpt from Dr. Pickens' early report, only a few days into his work with Ruth. "Mrs. Finley has utilized repression in a massive way ever since childhood to effectively bury unacceptable feelings and wishes. She was able to maintain the repression until stressed by her husband's illness about four and a half years ago." The night when Ed was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack scare and Ruth was home alone.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Whatever it was that Ruth had been subconsciously repressing manifested itself into the poet and called her up on the phone. But Dr. Pickens didn't know what she was repressing, and neither did Ruth. He knew they needed to do more digging to find that out, but the clock was still ticking on his diagnosis. He had to determine how much control Ruth had over the poet. Through their sessions, he becomes convinced Ruth not only couldn't remember, but she was not even aware of her actions as the poet.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  She really believed it, and that's hard for a lot of people to believe. She really believed that she was being chased. She really believed that someone else wrote those letters, those poems.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So with this information, he's able to come up with a diagnosis to submit to the court. He determines that Ruth has a dissociative disorder.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  It's like an alternate self. I guess the closest thing for the average person would be like sleepwalking. You still have the ability to write, to send letters, to mail them, to compose them, all of that kind of thing, in that altered state of consciousness.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  The poet wasn't a separate identity from Ruth, what we used to call a split personality. But she was able to dissociate so deeply that she had stabbed herself. Dr. Pickens tells the court. He doesn't believe Ruth consciously knew about the poet's actions. So now, it was up to the district attorney to decide if he was going to criminally charge her. District Attorney Clark Owens holds a press conference covered by Cake TV to deliver his decision.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  I can find that there's no legitimate reason of this state in pursuing a criminal prosecution against her concerning any of the involvement in this poet incident.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Ruth was not going to be criminally charged. She was free. This must have been a huge relief for Ed and Ruth. But their new mystery had only just begun. Because here's the thing about dissociative disorders. They don't just come out of nowhere. In many cases, they're the result of prolonged, extreme psychological trauma.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  I said, "This is how we get rid of the pain, and the more you can tell me, the more we can get to the bottom of things."

• 10:10Speaker 01

  They needed to learn why Ruth had started dissociating in order to heal. Dr. Pickens recommends that Ruth receive psychotherapy with him twice a week.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  And then she started having flashes of memories, talking about, "I keep thinking about a bandana. I don't know what that is."

• 10:29Speaker 01

  The red bandana had been the poet's signature. And now it was about to unlock a much larger mystery about what happened to Ruth and where the poet came from.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us: the freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not, and it surely isn't about having one forced, government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, "This is what I believe,"

• 11:31Speaker 00

  while your neighbor says, "I believe something completely different." And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 11:48Speaker 01

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• 12:22Speaker 01

  Dr. Pickens' office at the Wichita Psychiatric Center is a windowless room with no personal effects or photographs, something he's done on purpose so that his patients don't learn too much about him.

• 12:36Speaker 07

  It is not like what therapy is today. This was very much a more Freudian therapy, where Ruth is indeed lying on a couch.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  That's Jean Stone, the journalist and author who spent time with Ruth and Dr. Pickens while writing his book on the case.

• 12:50Speaker 07

  Interestingly, one of the things that bothers the most is that there's a clock that she can't see, but he can, and she doesn't think that's fair. And she also wonders sometimes, is he awake? Because part of what psychoanalytic psychotherapy involves is for the therapist not to talk, or at least not to talk too much.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  This was all part of Dr. Pickens' approach.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  The best way to get information is to let there be silence.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  During those early sessions, Ruth begins to open up.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  She would tell me more. She'd tell me about her family. She would tell me about her childhood. She'd tell me about her parents.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  They were strict and discouraged outward displays of emotion, but were decent parents. Even though she grew up poor during the Depression, Ruth continually insists her childhood was idyllic, but strange flashes of memory keep coming.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  She kept thinking about a bandana, and then she had a thought about it being around her face. And she was very uncomfortable talking about it, and it triggered a lot of anxiety.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  She remembers a neighbor, a family friend, who lived on a property down the road. He wore a red bandana around his neck.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  I had this flash. I flashed that something was on my face, on my mouth, and I was scared.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  She remembers this neighbor being asked to look after her when she was around three years old, being left alone with the man when her parents were busy.

• 14:31Speaker 07

  It started off with just some games, putting a key in her pants.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  The man would pretend he was playing a game with her and use "looking for the key" as a way to undress her.

• 14:44Speaker 07

  And that red bandana became an image that stayed in her mind. So it became almost a factotum for assault.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  The man would gag her with it while sexually abusing her in a barn on his property.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Here's Dr. Pickens again.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  And these fragments starting to come out. And there were more and more. It was like paint-by-numbers, where there would be different points colored in with the details of her feelings and her memories that had not been conscious ever since she was three and a half years old.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  That's an age when many of us have our first memories: of eating a soft-serve ice cream cone, of fighting over candy with a sibling. But for Ruth, her first memories were of being abused by her neighbor, someone her family had trusted.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  During her psychoanalysis, Ruth only spoke about her abuse in the third person, as if she were witnessing it. Here's how journalist Jean Stone understands it.

• 15:55Speaker 07

  She would say, "The little girl's being hurt. She's in trouble. Somebody should help the little girl." Ruth's way of dealing with such a horrific attack was to, basically, leave her body, to act as if it wasn't her.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  As a coping mechanism while the abuse was taking place, Ruth created a type of separate self: a little girl in a white dress.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  She was just floating away, which is a form of dissociation. She just blocked out what she was feeling then as much as she could, the pain of it, and pretended she was floating into heaven.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And therefore burying the memory.

• 16:41Speaker 07

  One of the advantages of dissociative personality disorder is that it doesn't become part of your active memory. She didn't experience it. The little girl she watched experienced it. So it isn't part of her active recollection. She has no idea that this happened to her.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Right around the time of the abuse, Ruth received a gift from her aunt: a book of poetry. She would sit outside on her front porch while her aunt read it to her. These are Ruth's words, read for us by an actor.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  I only remember some of them. "Hickory, dickory dock," and "Mary had a little lamb," and "Jack and Jill," stuff like that. I was really proud of that book, and I carried it with me everywhere.

• 17:36Speaker 07

  And she loves poetry. And she starts making her own rhymes up, and she becomes, as a child, a little poet.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  So these memories all swirled together: the trauma, and the poems, and the little girl in a white dress. And they got pushed down for decades. That same swirl of memories then became a weapon she used against herself.

• 18:01Speaker 07

  When all of this comes back, that poetry is associated with this time, and then she starts writing in poetry.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Repression became a habit for Ruth.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  So why would Ruth's subconscious create this tormentor? Maybe, Dr. Pickens thought, it was a cry for help, not the attention-seeking some people might have believed, but as a way to call attention to her pain.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  And it was her last-ditch attempt to not remember and to get some kind of support.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Support she never got when she was a child being abused.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  She was totally helpless, and she believed that it was her fault and that she would be really totally rejected if she told anyone. They would tell her mother and her father, and nobody would understand. And so it all had to be buried.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And the terror Wichita was facing offered the perfect environment for Ruth's repressed memories to surface.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  The horrific events surrounding the BTK killer, it seemed to give her unconsciously a way out. If she could say, if people were chasing her, that people would understand if it was like the TK.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Larry Hadaberg, a local TV reporter who got to know Ruth, thought maybe the poet was a way for her to act on her desire to take her own life. She couldn't cope with reality, so she...

• 19:38Speaker 06

  She created a secondary individual to kill her because she couldn't kill herself as Ruth Finley, but she could kill herself as the poet. And I think that's what she tried to do.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Jean Stone isn't sure it's quite that simple.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  She had all of these conflicting emotions, things she didn't understand, stuff was coming up that she had no idea what it meant. I think frankly, if she'd wanted to kill herself, she would have. And certainly she thought about it. She talked about throwing herself off a bridge and such. But Ruth, she's a survivor. And she did survive through all of these things that happened to her through life. So I don't think Ruth was trying to end her own life. I think she really was just desperately trying to call attention to herself.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I wish I could ask Ruth why she thinks her mind would create the poet. But she passed away in 2019 at the age of 89. She spent seven years working with Dr. Pickens to try to answer this question for herself. Here's Dr. Pickens again.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  There was a lost little girl writing those notes, writing those letters and stabbing herself. It's a form of self-abuse. That was evidence to me of the intensity of both her pain, her anger, and how her anger, though, was turned against herself, punishing herself.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  The stabbing remained a big mystery. At first, Ruth couldn't remember doing it at all. But then the memories started to clear up.

• 21:21Speaker 07

  So all of a sudden, it's like the retrieval system on a computer, you know? Everything's in your computer, but you can't always retrieve it because there's something wrong. There were bugs in Ruth's mind that prevented her retrieval system from working until she was able to clear that up. And then as she worked with Dr. Pickens, all of those bugs eventually are removed.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  She remembered being in the parking lot, opening her car door and struggling. Except this time, instead of remembering a man trying to kill her, she was all alone. Ruth saw her own hands, holding a knife, her own voice telling herself.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  You have to do it. You have to do it.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  She was able to piece the memories back together. It really was her.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And now she was ready to acknowledge another truth.

• 22:21Speaker 07

  One of the big moments in the therapy is when Dr. Pickens is able to get Ruth to say, I'm in trouble. I'm being hurt. This is happening to me.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yes, because then that's actually the recognition that this is what happened to herself.

• 22:38Speaker 07

  Right. And now she becomes a whole personality. She no longer has these repressed memories. She no longer is somebody who wasn't aware of what happened in her past. She's now a full person who accepts and deals with this horrific incident of her childhood.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  When she would dissociate, she would split herself into parts. The little girl, the poet, and Ruth. Being able to speak about her childhood trauma in the first person meant she had reintegrated these pieces of herself and fully recovered these repressed memories.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  The idea of repressed memories actually dates back to Sigmund Freud. He thought therapy could help people uncover memories they'd buried in childhood. But he cast that idea aside, worrying he'd planted false memories in his patients. The idea of repressed memories got a second wind in the 1970s and 80s. There were hit books coming out about people recovering horrific memories from their childhoods. Then the satanic panic began. People around the US and the world were suddenly recovering memories about being abused in satanic rituals.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  But it turns out, many of these memories were implanted by social workers or psychologists. They weren't repressed. They were made up.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Today, the scientific community is divided about the idea of repressed memories. So were Ruth's memories imagined? Jean Stone, who spent extensive time with both Ruth and Dr. Pickens, doesn't think so.

• 24:22Speaker 07

  Like everything else about the human brain, we don't really know. I'm guessing that what Dr. Pickens said about Ruth is as close to the truth as can be. But there are many people who still would think that Ruth made it all up.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  What is it that makes you land on the side of this being the truth or this being close to the truth?

• 24:42Speaker 07

  I grew to know Ruth pretty well. She went through many years of therapy. It was difficult for her. It was painstaking. It was ugly. She hated it. I think if she had made all of this up, she wouldn't have done that. There would be no need. She could have said after a year, okay, I get it. I'm done. But she was relentless in trying to cure herself and work with Dr. Pickens.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  There's of course no way for us to fact-check Ruth's accounts of what happened to her as a kid. And there's another big piece of this story we'll never be able to verify. The branding that happened to her in Fort Scott. Police officers at the time doubted her, and some of the Wichita police investigating the poet did too. Was that real? Or was it another memory manufactured by her dissociative disorder? Dr. Pickens believes that, in the end, it might not matter.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  My conclusion about Fort Scott, that in terms of her treatment and understanding what she needed and what was the cause of her behaviors, Fort Scott had nothing to do with it.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Dr. Pickens says the Fort Scott incident could have been what he calls a screen memory and not something that directly gave rise to the poet in 1977.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  What is a screen memory? It's something that a person has that happened to them that was upsetting in some way, and they focus on it to block out something that's worse. You know, somebody broke my arm versus somebody cut my arm off.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I'm not here to litigate whether or not the Fort Scott event or any of Ruth's childhood abuse really happened. What's clear is that something very traumatic occurred in Ruth's childhood, which somehow led to the poet emerging later in life. We also know that through Dr. Pickens diagnosing Ruth with a dissociative disorder and treating it as such, Ruth was able to overcome the poet. But even though Ruth had confronted her trauma and gotten rid of the poet, Wichita had neither forgiven nor forgotten what she did.

• 27:01Speaker 07

  I was just as mad at Ruth Finley as I was the BTK Strangler.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbor says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Because your beliefs are yours and theirs are theirs.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  I'm not the type that befriend people really quick. But with her, it was just so natural.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Emma Dillinger moved to Wichita in the early 1980s from Scotland. Emma and her husband bought into a new housing development at the same time that Ruth and Ed did. They all became neighbors and fast friends.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  She was brilliant, witty, funny, talented. She just had everything going for her. A good friend.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Emma and Ruth started hanging out, going for meals downtown. But whenever they were out in public, Emma couldn't help but notice strangers staring at them.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  I wasn't sure if it was her or me they were staring at, to begin with, because it never occurred to me it was her. How would I know?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Emma hadn't followed the poet case closely and had no idea Ruth was involved in it. But Ruth never said anything.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  We would go to dinner on a Saturday. We'd go to her house and we would drink the boxed wine.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Emma and Ruth started traveling together too. One time, driving through Scotland. That's where Emma introduced Ruth to her sister.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  My sister asked me, when it was just Jen and I, does Ruth have a secret? I said, a secret? She says, she's got a secret, Emma.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  She says, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but there's something pathetic there. And she's trying to hide it.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Their friendship went on for years before Ruth was ready to tell her best friend about the poet.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  When she told me who she was,

• 30:42Speaker 02

  I thought she was kidding me. I said, "Oh, you're joking, right?" And she said, "No, I wish I was." I said, "Oh." And she said, "Do you still want to be friends?" "Of course." I said, "You don't ever have to worry about that." "Mm-mm. No, we can go on just like we were."

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Poetry came to have a third chapter in Ruth's life. First, it was a tool for comfort as a child. Then it became a tool for self-harm as the poet. And finally, it served as a tool for healing. Ruth started writing about her abuse in therapy, oftentimes in between sessions with Dr. Pickens. Sometimes she wrote poems describing the abuse she endured in the voice of her three-year-old self. And as her therapy progressed, her poems did too. By the time she was ready to end her therapy, Ruth was writing in her present voice.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  The last poem, unlike all of the others, were completely in the words and syntax of an adult woman. It was about how she was healed. She talked about that, how all her life she had difficulty speaking up for herself. But because of therapy, she could do that. She was no longer fearful in the way she had. She became self-confident. She became not ashamed of herself.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Seven years after their first session together, Ruth walked out of Dr. Pickens' office for the last time.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Ruth's final hurdle was to fully reintegrate into society, a society that felt she was a liar, an attention seeker, or thought that she'd wasted valuable police time and money during the most terrifying time in Wichita history, when BTK was running rampant. Detective Mike McKenna was one of the many people who hadn't forgiven her.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  She caused totally unnecessary stress on so many detectives, their home lives, their kids' lives, taking them away from family events.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Amid this lingering hostility and misunderstanding, Ruth needed to face her biggest fear and tell her story, not knowing how it would be received. Members of the media had been trying to get her on the record for years, but she was never ready. But finally, she decided she needed to take her story back.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  We call our story "The Poet: The Final Verse."

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Ruth accepts an offer from Cake TV to do a sit-down interview on camera with Larry Hadaberg. This was a big moment for her. She'd hated the attention the case got and was really anxious about going public with her darkest, most traumatic memories. But Dr. Pickens said she knew her story could potentially help people.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  But also to underscore that she was not ashamed and she had nothing to be ashamed about. And other people shouldn't be ashamed if they've been abused and gotten treatment.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  In the Cake TV interview, Ruth explains the story of her abuse.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  For some reason, he picked me up and took me to their bedroom and tied me to the end of the bed with a rope

• 34:21Speaker 02

  and went off and left me. And of course, I started to cry.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  This was a remarkable thing for her to do, especially given how discussions of sexual violence remain taboo today and were even more so back then in the 1980s.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I started getting poems from the poet,

• 34:44Speaker 02

  which I think we've all decided, I wrote them all. But you know, there were a lot of them. I don't know when or how I did all this.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  The segment ends with Ruth reading one of her final poems.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  "I hope my venture penetrates every human heart, dedicated to a little girl and an understanding doctor who let her start."

• 35:09Speaker 04

  The phones, who normally ring during this time, were absolutely silent during the airing of the show, totally and completely quiet.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  After the program ended, they waited for the reaction.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  And after the show aired, the phones lit up. And I would say 99% of the phone calls at that time were positive, saying, "Thank you for telling us about this. Thank you for putting this on the air."

• 35:40Speaker 01

  The Cake TV segment was also shown in local public schools.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  After it was shown at many of the schools, many young women came up to the counselors and said the same thing or something very similar happened to me. And this is the first time I've ever been able to talk about it, but I want to talk about it with a counselor. And that alone, for me, made it all worthwhile because you were helping people.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Ruth then took that mission to de-stigmatize abuse to the biggest audience imaginable, the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1994. And after years of therapy, Ruth Finley was able to integrate back into one personality and is here today to talk about her years of self-inflicted torment. Larry Hadaberg says that while more people know about BTK than the poet case today, what happened with the poet and how Ruth dealt with it has a different kind of impact.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  We can't learn too much from the BTK story. But the Ruth Finley story, it has legs. It has a future. And the more that people learn about it, because it teaches us about the power of the mind. It teaches us that even though something can happen to you when you're three and a half years old, the mind remembers it, the mind keeps it. And then all of a sudden, when you're in your 50s, it explodes and nearly destroys your life.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  How many other Ruth Finleys are out there? How many other Ruth Finleys are ready to explode?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Ruth's story only really has one victim. She never hurt anyone but herself. And she never implicated anyone else either, even when she had the chance to point fingers. The only thing she was guilty of was pulling other people into her delusions, her family and the police and the city of Wichita. But I believe it wasn't intentional or malicious. I believe this was a true case of a mind breaking under the weight of unresolved childhood trauma and acting out in ways no one spotted. And in the end, Ruth became the hero of her story. She took back the narrative and broke the stigma around talking about abuse.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  At that time, this was a huge risk, but she did it to help others. Today, that risk is still there. I'm sure there are people who might hear Ruth's story and think it's a case of a woman making false claims about abuse, which is exceedingly rare. But I think Ruth's story is an outlier.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Ruth Finley was bold. She was courageous. We learn from Ruth to talk, to get it out, to talk to people, to talk from the heart. We're better people for Ruth telling her story.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Through her therapy and by coming forward publicly, she went from intensely private to someone who was on the world stage talking about her deepest shame.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Bye-bye.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Bye-bye. Ruth and Ed, say hi to everybody on TV. Ruth, what's your story?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  I don't have one yet. I've been listening to her. I'll come back to me later.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Okay. This video of Ruth celebrating New Year's in 1987 was taken just months before she wrapped up therapy with Dr. Pickens. She's there laughing with Ed and her best friend, Emma. All of them have since passed away. But this is how I like to picture her, joyful and at peace, surrounded by people who love her. Say, Ruth and Ed? Earlier this evening, we heard you give your 1988 resolutions. Okay, let's hear them again. Ruth!

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I just remembered his. I didn't remember mine.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  After speaking about the poet on a global scale, Ruth turned back inward and lived life on her own terms.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  The poet never returned. And Ruth never again wrote another poem. So Ruth remembers what Ed--

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I'm gonna have a real good time.

• 40:36Speaker 07

  You had a what?

• 40:37Speaker 02

  I'm gonna have a real good time.

• 40:39Speaker 07

  In 88?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Stop. Stop the tape by pressing the red button.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 40:50Speaker 01

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• 41:26Speaker 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. Fact-checking by Maya Elhawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony, and Austin Wong.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health or is in crisis, help is available. Call or text a hotline like the National Alliance on Mental Health. Call 1-800-950-NAMI or text NAMI to 62640.