Never So Cold: Spectacle and Loss in Wichita’s Infamous Butterworth Trial

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A Shudder in Wichita.

Précis:

Never So Cold presents an account of the 1987 murder of Phil Fager and his daughters, sixteen-year-old Kelli and nine-year-old Sherri, as well as the subsequent trial of Bill Butterworth, a well-liked local contractor who had been working in their home at the time they were killed. These events became an obsession for the citizens of Wichita, Kansas. The attention the case garnered resulted, first of all, from the shocking nature of the crime:a family slain in their home in a presumably safe neighborhood.

The unlikely defendant and his even more unlikely defense also fueled the furor over the trial: Butterworth claimed to be missing four days of his life. He underwent hypnosis and subsequently testified that he found two of the victims and fled in terror when he heard sixteen-year-old Kelli struggling against an unknown assailant.

The most significant cause for the case's notoriety evolved as the murders became tied to the city's most famous crime story: the saga of the self-named Bind-Torture-Kill Strangler or B.T.K. Following his capture, Dennis Rader admitted that he had sent a letter to the Fager widow. He has not claimed nor demonstrated that he committed the crime, yet speculation abounded during the Butterworth trial that the B.T.K. Strangler was the real killer, and such talk continues today.