Cops couldn't catch creep who branded middle-class mom with hot irons and wrote her poison letters... then the cinema-worthy plot twist unraveled

By RUTH WALKER, U.S. BOOKS EDITOR Published: 04:32, 15 July 2026 | Updated: 04:33, 15 July 2026 Ruth Finley was uncharacteristically on edge the night she received the first phone call from a menacing stranger. The previous evening, her husband Ed had suffered what they thought was a heart attack. And while the prognosis was good, the hospital had kept him in overnight for observation. So Ruth was at home alone when she picked up the phone in the kitchen, assuming it was a family member checking on Ed's health. Instead, what she reported hearing that night in June 1978 sparked four years of psychological and physical torture, as Ruth told police she was relentlessly stalked, kidnapped, and stabbed by a tormentor who became known as the Poet. At one point, police even believed they might be dealing with the BTK strangler, whose reign of terror in Wichita, Kansas - where he bound and tortured his victims before killing them - was still unsolved. There were, they noted, some eerily similarities between both cases. But the truth, when it finally came out, was far more sinister - and almost impossible to comprehend. The case was made into a TV movie, The Killer Inside, starring Teri Hatcher as Ruth. And now a new book, The Pursued, by Corey Mead, can reveal exactly who the Poet was - and how he managed to evade justice for so long. 'I know all about that night,' the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line told Ruth. Ruth was portrayed by Teri Hatcher in the TV movie about her experience - The Killer Inside The story of Ruth's stalking made the news with the childish poems reportedly sent by 'The Poet' reproduced in local newspaper, the WIchita Eagle Ruth claimed to immediately know what the mystery caller was talking about. At the age of 16, while living in Fort Scott, Kansas, she claimed she had been attacked by a stranger who branded both her thighs with a hot iron. The man was never caught, and she had put the experience far behind her, her family agreeing that it wouldn't help to dwell on things. The following year, she met Ed.  'Ruth was shy and pretty, and Ed fell for her right away,' writes Mead in the book. 'Ruth couldn't say the same. Ed was tall and gangly, with large, bulging eyes and an already receding hairline.' They may have been physically mismatched, but they hit it off and dated for three years before getting married. They had two sons - now grown up and out of the house - and she worked at the local telephone company in Wichita. Life was good. But now this strange caller threatened to destroy the peace she had carefully built for herself. He began demanding money, saying that unless she paid up he would reveal details of the attack she had spent decades trying to forget. There were more calls - often the phone would go dead immediately after Ed or Ruth picked it up. Then, two months later, Ruth was out shopping in Macy's during her lunch break when, she said, a man grabbed her arm and snarled her name. Terrified, she managed to break free as he yelled obscenities after her. It was time to call the police. Initially they dismissed the case as a solitary crank who would soon grow tired of harassing Ruth. But then the threatening letters started. Written in childish language, filled with obscenities and primitive, nursery rhyme-style poetry, the police operation gathered pace. Then in November, five months after the first phone call, Ruth went missing in the middle of the work day. For five hours, two men - one of whom was the same man who had grabbed her in Macy's months earlier - drove her around Wichita demanding money. 'Ruth looked frantically for a means of escape, but the door handle on her side was broken,' writes Mead. Ruth (played by Teri Hatcher in the movie or the saga) was married to Ed (played by Tahmoh Penikett) and a mother of two adult sons when the calls and letters began Ruth shared her remarkable story in a television interview in 1988 She claimed that the poems and letters - scrawled in crude childish writing - came to her home for four years 'On the floor she saw a red gas can, pieces of concrete, chains, rags and a board.' At one point, she recalled, one of her abductors slammed a piece of concrete into her head in anger.  She claimed she only escaped when she insisted she needed to go to the bathroom, then ran off and hid behind a tree when she was taken to a local park. When a worried Ed finally saw his wife - in an interview room in the Criminal Investigations Bureau - he was both frightened and furious. 'She was wet and her clothes were disheveled and soiled,' writes Mead. 'She wore no shoes. Her hair clung like tentacles to her head. Her face was scratched and her right cheek was already showing a swollen bruise. 'Whoever did this to her is going to pay, Ed thought.' Investigators examined the letters for DNA evidence and fingerprints but came up blank. They had been unable to trace the kidnappers' car, and there had been no witnesses. But as other, more pressing cases began to occupy their time, Ruth's strange story became less of a priority, despite the continuing - though occasional - appearance of those childish, threatening letters. Then, in July the following year - just as they started to think their tormentor might have moved on - Ruth said she heard someone call her name as she approached her car in a deserted mall parking lot. Turning around, she later said, she found herself face-to-face with the grinning man who had been stalking her. There was a terrifying struggle as he attempted to force her into the car, before he stabbed her violently, three times - the last thrust leaving the knife sticking out of her back. Again, she was able to escape, but was seriously injured and in searing pain. When she got to hospital, doctors said she'd been extremely lucky. 'If she had been inhaling when she was stabbed, the knife would have punctured the lung.' Ruth and Ed's torment continued for four years. Once, someone cut the phone lines to their home. Another time, a bottle of urine was left on their porch; then a Molotov cocktail. The holiday wreath on their door was set on fire, blowing out the window and sending fragments of glass showering into their home. It was all getting too much for Ruth, who started to plan her suicide 'Every day she sat in her office thinking about ending things,' writes Mead. 'She'd buy a ticket to Oklahoma City… once there she would check into a motel, where she would spend the night under an assumed name. 'The following morning, she would find a store that sold knives. 'All she would have to do then was tie some heavy rocks to her body, wade into the water, stab herself, and vanish beneath the surface.' Ruth worked with investigators to come up with an artist's impression of the man, she claimed, had stabbed her Ruth told detectives that she had only escaped her kidnappers and hid behind a tree in a park  It was only in 1981, after a new detective was brought in to investigate the case, that the complicated - almost unbelievable truth - came to light. Ruth had sent herself the letters. She had staged the entire kidnapping herself. She had even stabbed herself. Through a series of questioning and psychiatric evaluation, it emerged that she had done it all during dissociative episodes. 'She could remember doing all that,' writes Mead, 'but it hadn't seemed real at the time.' Her actions, doctors concluded, 'had been partially conscious - but largely unconscious.' It's possible she also fabricated the initial branding attack.  Based on the doctors' reports, the District Attorney decided not to press charges against Ruth. She signed herself into a psychiatric ward - where she continued to be tormented by dreams and visions of her tormentor, the imaginary Poet, but also another man, smelling of tobacco, wearing bib overalls and raping a little girl. That little girl, it emerged through therapy, had been her. Aged three and a half she had been repeatedly raped by a neighbor, most likely with the knowledge of her own parents. 'Ruth had put the 'little girl' on hold for 45 years,' writes Mead, 'until the 'little girl' had burst forth as the Poet, screaming in rage for release. 'Ruth's intent as the Poet was to get help, just as she had wanted to get help for the little girl back in 1933. 'It's possible that she would have killed herself had the police not stopped her. In many ways, she had been trying to kill herself from the moment she was first raped.' Ruth Finley and Ed stayed together, and Ruth continued to receive therapy for many years after the Poet episode. 'Ruth returned to work shortly after her commitment and continued to work for the phone company until her retirement in April 1991,' writes Mead. 'She and Ed remained happily in Wichita, finally enjoying 'the best years of their lives.'' The Pursued: A True Story of Stalking, Memory, and Madness in America's Heartland by Corey Mead is published by Little A