Ruth Finley: The Poet

Ruth Finley was a 47-year-old secretary in Wichita, Kansas. In the summer of 1977 a caller began raising an attack she had survived as a teenager and demanding money, and letters in clumsy rhyming verse followed. Her husband Ed nicknamed the writer “the Poet.” The city was already frightened by the unsolved BTK murders, so when the couple went to police in November 1978 the threats were taken seriously.

The campaign escalated: cut phone lines, filth left in the yard, a Christmas wreath set alight. Late in 1978 she reported an abduction, and in August 1979 she said the Poet stabbed her in a mall parking lot, leaving wounds in her back and side. Detectives watched her home and mail for three years without seeing an intruder. Then a letter described the police chief’s own wife. Chief Richard LaMunyon reread the file and ordered surveillance, and in the autumn of 1981 officers photographed Finley mailing a Poet letter addressed to herself. On October 1 she admitted writing them all and inflicting the stab wounds.

The Sedgwick County district attorney declined to charge her after a psychiatric evaluation. Finley said she had no conscious memory of any of it, and years of therapy traced her behavior to abuse she suffered as a small child. She lived quietly in Wichita and died in June 2019 at 89.