The New York Times reports today on the passing of Ken Landwehr, the Wichita homicide detective responsible for solving the case of the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) murders that had plagued the Wichita area for decades. He was 59.

The murders began in 1974, when the BTK killer, Dennis Rader, brutally tortured and killed four members of the Otero family. Over the next two decades he killed six more. Following the murder of Dolores Davis in 1991, Rader seemed to disappear. The case was cold.

The winds began to change following a 2004 report in the Wichita Eagle which speculated that all the years since a murder suggested that the killer was either dead or in prison. Seeking attention, Rader sent a letter to the Eagle, taking responsibility for an unsolved 1986 murder. Over the next year, he continued to send letters, puzzles, and other miscellany to local media outlets. Landwehr led the strategy of "exchanging coded messages placed in newspaper ads" to elicit more clues out of Rader.

Landwehr's big break came in early 2005 when Rader sent a message to a Wichita TV station inquiring about a package he claimed to have left at a Home Depot. An employee there told police that his girlfriend had found an odd package—a cereal box—in the back of his truck, but, not knowing what it was, they had thrown it away.