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[00:01]
Car Buyer
Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
[00:08]
Carvana Representative
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
[00:11]
Car Buyer
You what?
[00:11]
Carvana Representative
Yeah. Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
[00:15]
Car Buyer
So there's no.
[00:16]
Carvana Representative
No, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
[00:20]
Car Buyer
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
[00:25]
Carvana Representative
Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
[00:27]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our 7 day return policy@carvana.com. 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. The Binge. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know. This episode deals with mentions of self harm and suicide and crimes involving children. Good evening.
[01:09]
Carvana Representative
There appears to be a major break
[01:11]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
in the Poet case.
[01:12]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Wichita police at this hour are interrogating a suspect in the case. And TV 10 News has learned that that suspect is Ruth Finley herself.
[01:20]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth Finley admitted Ruth's story had gone public, covered here on local news station Cake TV by reporter Larry Haddeberg.
[01:29]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to herself, police and the media.
[01:37]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The case had become one of the most expensive in Wichita history, totaling more than $370,000. The equivalent of more than a million dollars today. Police Chief Richard Lamunion 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. 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.
[02:29]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[02:44]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[02:58]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of It.
[03:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[03:17]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
She's saying that, yes, I must have. They have proof of me doing it. They're showing me pictures of it, so I did it.
[03:27]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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? From Sony Music Entertainment and New welcome to New Metric Media. I'm Rachel Brown and this is the poet. Episode 6 Buried. Andrew Pickens was destined to be a shrink. When he was 12 years old, he saw the movie that inspired his life's purpose. That movie was the 1948 psychological thriller the Snake Pit.
[04:41]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
The Snake Pit is based on the
[04:43]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Snake Pit referenced a large psychiatric hospital where many of the patients were psychotic. My head hurts.
[04:51]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
There's something the matter with my head.
[04:53]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Come on, darling.
[04:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Let me help you. Who are you? 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 that I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be like that psychiatrist in the movie.
[05:25]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[05:47]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[06:03]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
In those first meetings, ruth continually tells Dr. Pickens that she feels crazy. Pickens assures her this is not the case.
[06:12]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
She was never crazy. She just wasn't. She wasn't psychotic. She wasn't even close.
[06:18]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. Piggins 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, Ed, Ruth, was home alone. 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.
[07:37]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[07:54]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[08:05]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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, the
[08:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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 KAKE tv to deliver his decision.
[08:58]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
I can find that there's no legitimate reason of the stake in pursuing a criminal prosecution against her concerning any of
[09:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
the involvement in this poet incident. 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.
[09:34]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[09:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[09:51]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
And then she started having flashes of memories talking about, I keep thinking about a bandana. I don't know what that is.
[09:59]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[10:17]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's that little window before everything gets busy again. And I always end up doing a bit of a reset for me that you usually starts with my closet. I love quints because they make getting dressed so much easier. They focus on really beautiful, high quality essentials. Things like organic cotton, breezy linen and Mongolian cashmere that you can wear over and over without feeling like you're sacrificing style. I've been wearing their 100% cotton fisherman cruise sweater lately and it's perfect for this time of year. It's lightweight enough for cool summer nights, but it will carry you right into the fall. I keep it in the car or toss it in a bag because here in California you never know when the temps start to dip a little bit. The best part, Quints keeps their prices 50 to 80% lower than similar luxury brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. So you're getting incredible quality without the luxury markup. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com crimes for free shipping on your order and three 65 day returns now available. Available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com crimes evening buyer's remorse.
[11:37]
Car Buyer
Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
[11:41]
Carvana Representative
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
[11:44]
Car Buyer
You what?
[11:45]
Carvana Representative
Yeah, Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no, no, no buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
[11:53]
Car Buyer
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
[11:58]
Carvana Representative
Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
[12:00]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. Doctor 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.
[12:21]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
It is not like what therapy is today. This was very much a more Freudian therapy where Ruth is indeed lying on a couch.
[12:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
That's Jean Stone, the journalist and author who spent time with Ruth and Dr. Pickens while writing his book on the case.
[12:36]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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, 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.
[12:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
This was all part of Dr. Pickens approach.
[12:59]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
The best way to get information is to let there be silence.
[13:07]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
During those early sessions, Ruth begins to open up.
[13:11]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[13:16]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[13:36]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
She kept thinking about a bandana, and then she had thought about it being around her face. And she was very uncomfortable talking about it. And it triggered a lot of anxiety.
[13:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
She remembers a neighbor, a family friend, who lived on a property down the road. He wore a red bandana around his neck.
[13:57]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
I had this flash, I flashed that something was on my face, on my mouth, and I was scared.
[14:06]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[14:17]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Started off with just some games, putting a key in her pants.
[14:22]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The man would pretend he was playing a game with her and use looking for the key as a way to undress her.
[14:29]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
And that red bandana became an image that stayed in her mind, so it became almost a factotum for assault.
[14:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The man would gag her with it while sexually abusing her in a barn on his property. Here's Dr. Pickens again.
[14:52]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[15:12]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. 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.
[15:40]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[15:59]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
As a coping mechanism while the abuse was taking place. Ruth created a type of separate self. A little girl in a white dress.
[16:08]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[16:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And therefore burying the memory.
[16:26]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[16:48]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. I only remember some of them. Hickory Dickory Dock and Mary Had a Little Lamb and Jack and Jill, stuff like that.
[17:14]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I was really proud of that book.
[17:18]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And I carried it with me everywhere.
[17:22]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
And she loves poetry. And she starts making her own rhymes up. And she becomes, as a child, a little poet.
[17:30]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[17:47]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
When all of this comes back, that poetry is associated with this time. And then she starts writing in poetry.
[17:55]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Repression became a habit for Ruth. 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.
[18:14]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
And it was her last ditch attempt to not remember and to get some kind of support.
[18:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Support she never got when she was a child being abused.
[18:27]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[18:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And the terror Wichita was facing. Offered the perfect environment for Ruth's repressed memories to surface.
[18:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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 btk.
[19:11]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Larry Hadteburg, 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.
[19:21]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
She couldn't cope with reality, so she created a secondary individual to kill her. Because she couldn't kill herself as Ruth Findlay, but she could kill herself as the poet. And I think that's what she tried to do.
[19:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Jean Stone isn't sure it's quite that simple.
[19:40]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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. 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.
[20:14]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[20:32]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[20:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The stabbing remained a big mystery. At first, Ruth couldn't remember doing it at all. But then the memories started to clear up.
[21:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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 works with Dr. Pickens, all of those bugs eventually are removed.
[21:28]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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, you have to do it. You have to do it. She was able to piece the memories back together. It really was her. And now she was ready to acknowledge another truth.
[22:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[22:16]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Yes, because then that's actually the recognition that this is what Happened to herself, right?
[22:24]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[22:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
When she would dissociate, she would split herself into 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. 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. But it turns out many of these memories were implanted by social workers or psychologists. They weren't repressed. They were made up. 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.
[24:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[24:22]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
What is it that makes you land on the side of this being the truth or this being close to the truth?
[24:28]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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'd 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.
[24:52]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[25:25]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[25:39]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[25:51]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
What is a screen memory is 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.
[26:08]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[26:46]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
I was just as mad at Ruth Finley as I was the BTK Strangler.
[26:57]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's that little window before everything gets busy again and I always end up doing a bit of a reset. For me, that usually starts with my closet. I love quints because they make getting dressed so much easier. They focus on really beautiful, high quality essentials. Things like organic cotton, breezy linen and Mongolian cashmere that you can wear over and over without feeling like you're sacrificing style. I've been wearing their 100% cotton fisherman cruise sweater lately and it's perfect for this time of year. It's lightweight enough for cool summer nights, but it will carry you right into the fall. I keep it in the car or toss it in a bag because here in California you never know when the temps start to dip a little bit. The best part? Quints keeps their prices 50 to 80% lower than similar luxury brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. So you're getting incredible quality without the luxury markup. Upgrade your everyday Download the quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com crimes for free shipping on your order and three 65 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N c e.com crimes best thing
[28:14]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
that's ever happened to you financially.
[28:15]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Go easy.
[28:16]
Carvana Customer
Sold my car on carvana Amazing offer, really.
[28:20]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
I hit 200 on a scratcher.
[28:21]
Carvana Customer
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
[28:24]
Car Buyer
No.
[28:24]
Carvana Customer
How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once.
[28:29]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Okay, that's fair.
[28:30]
Carvana Customer
It's like the lottery, except you also always win.
[28:34]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Not like the lottery at all, actually.
[28:36]
Carvana Customer
Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply.
[28:45]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I'm not the type to befriend people really quick. But with her, it was just so natural.
[28:53]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[29:08]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
She was brilliant, witty, funny, God talented. She just had everything going for her. A good friend.
[29:19]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[29:32]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I wasn't sure if it was her or me that was staring at to begin with because it never occurred to me it was her. How would I know?
[29:41]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Emma hadn't followed the poet case closely and had no idea Ruth was involved in it. But Ruth never said anything.
[29:50]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
We would go to dinner on a Saturday. We'd go to her house and we would drink the boxed wine.
[29:57]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Emma and Ruth started traveling together, too. One time driving through Scotland, that's where Emma introduced Ruth to her sister.
[30:06]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
My sister asked me when it was just she and I, does Ruth have a secret? I said, a secret? She says she's got a secret. Emma. She said, I don't mean this in a bad way, but there's something pathetic there and she's trying to hide it.
[30:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Their friendship went on for years before Ruth was ready to tell her best friend about the poet.
[30:39]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
When she told me who she was, I thought she was kidding me. I said, oh, you're joking, right? And she said, no, I wish I was.
[30:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
I said, oh.
[30:55]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
And she said, do you still want to be friends? Of course. I said, you don't ever have to worry about that. No, we can go on just like we were.
[31:09]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[31:48]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
The last poem, unlike all of the others, were completely in the words and syntax of an adult woman and 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.
[32:17]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Seven years after their first session together, Ruth walked out of Dr. Pickens office for the last time. 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.
[32:51]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
She caused totally unnecessary stress on so many detectives that their home lives, their kids lives, taking them away from family events.
[33:04]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[33:31]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
We call our story the Poet, the Final Verse.
[33:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth accepts an offer from Cake TV to do a sit down interview on camera with Larry Hatteberg. 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, but also
[33:58]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[34:08]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
In the Cake TV interview, Ruth explains the story of her abuse.
[34:13]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
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 and went off and left me. And of course I started to cry.
[34:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[34:40]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I started getting pullums from the Poet, 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.
[34:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The segment ends with Ruth reading one of her final poems.
[35:00]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I hope my venture penetrates every human heart dedicated to A little girl and an understanding doctor who let her start.
[35:10]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
The phones who normally ring during this time were absolutely silent during the airing of the show. Totally and completely quiet after the program ended.
[35:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
They waited for the reaction and after
[35:26]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
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.
[35:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The Cake TV segment was also shown in local public schools.
[35:45]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
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.
[36:17]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth then took that mission to destigmatize abuse to the biggest audience imaginable, the Oprah Winfrey show in 1994. And after years of therapy, Ruth Findlay
[36:29]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
was able to integrate back into one personality and is here today to talk about her years of self inflicted torment.
[36:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And by the end of the Larry Hatteberg 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.
[36:48]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
We can't learn too much from the BTK story, but the Ruth Findlay 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. How many other Ruth Finley's are out there? How many other Ruth Finley are ready to explode?
[37:28]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's that little window before everything gets busy again. And I always end up doing a bit of a reset. For me, that usually starts with my closet. I love quints because they make getting dressed so much easier. They focus on really beautiful, high quality essentials. Things like organic cotton, breezy linen and Mongolian cashmere that you can wear over and over without feeling like you're sacrificing style. I've been wearing their 100% cotton fisherman cruise sweater lately and it's perfect for this time of year. It's lightweight enough for cool summer nights, but it will carry you right into the fall. I keep it in the car or toss it in a bag because here in California, you never know when the temps start to dip a little bit. The best part? Quint keeps their prices 50 to 80% lower than similar luxury brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. So you're getting incredible quality without the luxury markup. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com crimes for free shipping on your order and three 65 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com crimes Ruth's story only really has one victim.
[38:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. 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.
[39:50]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Ruth Finley was bold. She was courageous. We learned 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 through her
[40:06]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
therapy and by coming forward publicly, she went from intensely private to someone who was on the world stage talking about her deepest shame.
[40:17]
Carvana Representative
Ruth and Anne, say hi to everybody in TV land. Ruth, what's your story?
[40:22]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I don't have one yet. I've been listening to her. Come back to me later.
[40:27]
Carvana Representative
Okay?
[40:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
This video of Ruth celebrating New Year's in 1987 was taken just months before, 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.
[40:51]
Carvana Representative
Say Ruth and Ed earlier this evening, we're here to give your 1988 resolutions. Okay, let's hear them again.
[40:58]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
Ruth oh, well, I just remembered his. I didn't remember mine.
[41:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
After Speaking about the poet on a global scale, Ruth turned back inward and lived life on her own terms. The poet never returned, and Ruth never again wrote another poem.
[41:20]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
So Ruth remembers what Elle had a real good time. You had what I want to have a real good time in 88.
[41:26]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Yeah.
[41:27]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Stop.
[41:28]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Stop the tape by pressing the red button.
[41:30]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
Oh, I'm sorry.
[41:37]
Zocdoc Spokesperson
At zocdoc, we know being a healthy adult is like living in a video game. Every day has side quests, taxes, laundry, birthdays. And just when you're leveling up, you have to book a doctor. The insurance portal crashes. They put you on hold. Your doctor does. Doesn't take your plan. Game over. We see you. So we made booking a doctor easy. Download Sockdoc. Search by specialty, insurance and availability. Book instantly. No cheat codes required. Find a doctor you love with Sockdoc.
[42:13]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The Poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, New Metric 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 New Metric Media. Our executive producer is Chris Kelly from Sony Music Entertainment. Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch from 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 Gene Stone. Fact checking by Maya El Hawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony and Austin Wong. Voice acting from Cassandra Sison, Morgan Murray and Antony McMahon. Special thanks to Andres Lara, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Emily Racik and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment. 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.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary: The Binge Crimes: The Poet

Episode 6: "Buried"
Date: August 5, 2026
Host: Rachel Brown (Sony Music Entertainment)
Main Guests: Dr. Andrew Pickens (Psychologist), Jean Stone (Journalist & Author), Emma Dillinger (Friend), and archival audio from Ruth Finley (Voice Actor), plus local reporters and law enforcement.

Episode Overview

Episode 6 of "The Poet" delivers the emotional and investigative crux of the Ruth Finley saga. With Ruth under suspicion and facing public scrutiny, the narrative turns inward, exploring the psychological roots of her actions as "The Poet," her confrontation with repressed trauma, the profound journey of therapy, societal response, and her eventual reclamation of her story. The episode is a riveting examination of dissociation, trauma, memory, and the complexities of mental health against a backdrop of fear generated by other violent crimes (notably BTK) in Wichita.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ruth Finley Exposed as the Poet

[01:12–01:36] News breaks that Ruth is the prime suspect; she has admitted to sending herself and others the threatening poems.
- Quote: "Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to herself, police and the media." – Local reporter
[01:36–02:29] Ruth is involuntarily hospitalized, on suicide watch, terrified and disoriented. She meets psychologist Dr. Andrew Pickens, who begins her evaluation.

2. Dr. Pickens' Evaluation & The Nature of Ruth’s Disorder

[02:29–03:16] Ruth is bewildered by the evidence of her actions, unable to reconcile with the reality that she was "The Poet."
- Quote: "It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of it." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [02:58]
[03:16–04:40] Ruth only has fragmentary, dissociated memories of her actions. The police and court want to know: did Ruth know what she was doing? Should she be brought to trial?
[04:53–06:11] Dr. Pickens' background in psychoanalysis shapes his approach: "The best way to get information is to let there be silence." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [12:59]

3. Diagnosis: Dissociative Disorder

[06:17–08:23] Ruth’s repression emerges as extreme—a psychological defense since childhood, triggered by the stress of her husband's heart attack years prior.
- Quote: "Mrs. Finley has utilized repression in a massive way ever since childhood to effectively bury unacceptable feelings and wishes." – Dr. Pickens report [07:17]
[08:23–08:57] Dr. Pickens testifies Ruth dissociated so deeply she had no conscious awareness, even inflicting self-harm and believing it to be attacks.
- Quote: "She really believed it... she was being chased. She really believed that someone else wrote those letters, those poems." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [07:36]

4. No Charges; Search for the Trauma’s Source

[08:57–09:33] Ruth is not charged; focus shifts to understanding the origins of her dissociation.
[09:40–12:16] Therapy sessions begin, employing classic Freudian analysis, with sessions twice a week. Ruth begins recalling flashes of childhood—specifically a red bandana.

5. Uncovering Childhood Trauma

[13:16–16:47] Ruth remembers her neighbor, a trusted family friend with a red bandana, who sexually abused her as a three-year-old in a barn.
- Quote: "She kept thinking about a bandana, and then she had thought about it being around her face…. I had this flash… something was on my face, on my mouth, and I was scared." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [13:36],[13:57]
[16:08–16:47] Ruth dissociated during abuse, observing herself in the third person—a little girl in a white dress: "She was just floating away. Which is a form of dissociation." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [16:08]
[16:47–17:21] The abuse became repressed; poetry, a childhood comfort, was swept up in this swirl of hidden pain.

6. The Poet as a Cry for Help

[17:46–18:23] Dr. Pickens and journalist Jean Stone interpret Ruth’s actions as an unconscious cry for help, not attention-seeking or malingering.
- Quote: "It was her last-ditch attempt to not remember and to get some kind of support." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [18:13]

7. Brutal Self-Harm, Recovery, and Reintegration

[20:31–22:40] Ruth eventually remembers it was her own hand wielding the knife. In a breakthrough, she acknowledges, for the first time, her pain in the first person:
- Quote: "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.'" – Jean Stone [22:06]
[22:40–24:21] By recovering her own history, Ruth "becomes a whole personality" for the first time.

8. Repressed Memory Debate

[24:21–25:50] The episode explores scientific skepticism over repressed memories, referencing how many professionals believe such memories can be influenced or even invented.
- Quote: "Like everything else about the human brain, we don't really know.... But she was relentless in trying to cure herself and work with Dr. Pickens." – Jean Stone [24:27]

9. Aftermath, Stigma, and Restitution

[26:46–29:18] Public backlash in Wichita persists. Ruth loses trust, friendships, and must rebuild a public identity tarnished by association with the case.
- Quote: "I was just as mad at Ruth Finley as I was the BTK Strangler." – Detective Mike McKenna [26:46]

10. Life After Therapy & Community Response

[29:49–31:26] Ruth becomes close with new friends like Emma Dillinger, who at first does not know her secret.
- Quote: "When she told me who she was, I thought she was kidding me. I said, oh, you're joking, right? And she said, no, I wish I was." – Emma Dillinger [30:39]
[31:08–32:16] Poetry transforms again into a tool for healing. Ruth writes about her trauma directly for the first time.
- Quote: "The last poem... was completely in the words and syntax of an adult woman and was about how she was healed." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [31:47]

11. Public Disclosure & Advocacy

[33:31–36:17] Ruth goes public on TV (Cake TV and later Oprah), sharing her story to help others and battle stigma.
- Quote: "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." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [33:58]
[35:45–36:17] Ruth's story inspires real-world change—school counselors witness many young people opening up about abuse after viewing the interview.
- Quote: "Many young women... said the same thing or something very similar happened to me... And that alone for me made it all worthwhile because you were helping people." – Larry Hatteberg [35:45]

12. Reflections on Impact and Legacy

[36:48–39:49] The story closes by emphasizing lessons for society: the mind’s ability to protect and destroy, the urgency of compassion for trauma survivors, and the reality that Ruth only harmed herself in the end.
- Quote: "We can't learn too much from the BTK story, but the Ruth Finley story, it has legs. It has a future..." – Larry Hatteberg [36:48]
[39:49–41:04] Ruth is remembered as brave for speaking out and helping others, moving from a hidden, shamed self toward wholeness and fulfillment in her remaining years.
- Quote: "She went from intensely private to someone who was on the world stage talking about her deepest shame." – Narrator (Rachel Brown) [40:05]

Most Memorable Quotes

"She was anxious. I mean, not out of control. But... she appeared like a normal person in an abnormal situation." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [02:29]
"She was never crazy. She just wasn't... she wasn't psychotic. She wasn't even close." – Dr. Andrew Pickens [06:11]
"She caused totally unnecessary stress on so many detectives... taking them away from family events." – Detective Mike McKenna [32:51]
"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." – Larry Hatteberg [35:45]
"Ruth Finley was bold. She was courageous. We learned from Ruth to talk, to get it out... We're better people for Ruth, telling her story." – Local news commentator [39:49]

Key Segment Timestamps

[01:12] – Ruth identified as the Poet suspect on TV
[02:29] – Dr. Pickens begins psychiatric evaluation
[07:36] – Pickens diagnoses Ruth as having a dissociative disorder
[09:50] – Therapy and memory flashes begin
[13:36] – Bandana and abuse memories emerge
[16:08] – Description of Ruth’s dissociation
[22:06] – Breakthrough moment: Ruth acknowledges her pain
[31:08] – Poetry as a tool for healing
[33:31] – Ruth’s public interview and positive community reaction
[35:45] – School counselors see impact among youth
[36:48] – Hatteberg’s reflection on Ruth’s wider legacy
[41:04] – Ruth’s years after recovery, remembered with joy by friends

Final Reflection

The episode poignantly demonstrates the real-life costs of misunderstood mental illness while powerfully highlighting the potential for healing and advocacy. Ruth’s story is not just a true crime oddity, but an enduring cautionary tale about compassion, memory, trauma, and transformation.

Content Advisory:
The episode contains references to childhood abuse, dissociation, self-harm, and suicide.

Loading summary

Transcript172 lines

[00:01]
Car Buyer
Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
[00:08]
Carvana Representative
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
[00:11]
Car Buyer
You what?
[00:11]
Carvana Representative
Yeah. Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
[00:15]
Car Buyer
So there's no.
[00:16]
Carvana Representative
No, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
[00:20]
Car Buyer
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
[00:25]
Carvana Representative
Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
[00:27]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our 7 day return policy@carvana.com. 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. The Binge. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know. This episode deals with mentions of self harm and suicide and crimes involving children. Good evening.
[01:09]
Carvana Representative
There appears to be a major break
[01:11]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
in the Poet case.
[01:12]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Wichita police at this hour are interrogating a suspect in the case. And TV 10 News has learned that that suspect is Ruth Finley herself.
[01:20]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth Finley admitted Ruth's story had gone public, covered here on local news station Cake TV by reporter Larry Haddeberg.
[01:29]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to herself, police and the media.
[01:37]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The case had become one of the most expensive in Wichita history, totaling more than $370,000. The equivalent of more than a million dollars today. Police Chief Richard Lamunion 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. 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.
[02:29]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[02:44]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[02:58]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of It.
[03:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[03:17]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
She's saying that, yes, I must have. They have proof of me doing it. They're showing me pictures of it, so I did it.
[03:27]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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? From Sony Music Entertainment and New welcome to New Metric Media. I'm Rachel Brown and this is the poet. Episode 6 Buried. Andrew Pickens was destined to be a shrink. When he was 12 years old, he saw the movie that inspired his life's purpose. That movie was the 1948 psychological thriller the Snake Pit.
[04:41]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
The Snake Pit is based on the
[04:43]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Snake Pit referenced a large psychiatric hospital where many of the patients were psychotic. My head hurts.
[04:51]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
There's something the matter with my head.
[04:53]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Come on, darling.
[04:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Let me help you. Who are you? 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 that I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be like that psychiatrist in the movie.
[05:25]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[05:47]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[06:03]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
In those first meetings, ruth continually tells Dr. Pickens that she feels crazy. Pickens assures her this is not the case.
[06:12]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
She was never crazy. She just wasn't. She wasn't psychotic. She wasn't even close.
[06:18]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. Piggins 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, Ed, Ruth, was home alone. 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.
[07:37]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[07:54]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[08:05]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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, the
[08:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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 KAKE tv to deliver his decision.
[08:58]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
I can find that there's no legitimate reason of the stake in pursuing a criminal prosecution against her concerning any of
[09:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
the involvement in this poet incident. 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.
[09:34]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[09:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[09:51]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
And then she started having flashes of memories talking about, I keep thinking about a bandana. I don't know what that is.
[09:59]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[10:17]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's that little window before everything gets busy again. And I always end up doing a bit of a reset for me that you usually starts with my closet. I love quints because they make getting dressed so much easier. They focus on really beautiful, high quality essentials. Things like organic cotton, breezy linen and Mongolian cashmere that you can wear over and over without feeling like you're sacrificing style. I've been wearing their 100% cotton fisherman cruise sweater lately and it's perfect for this time of year. It's lightweight enough for cool summer nights, but it will carry you right into the fall. I keep it in the car or toss it in a bag because here in California you never know when the temps start to dip a little bit. The best part, Quints keeps their prices 50 to 80% lower than similar luxury brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. So you're getting incredible quality without the luxury markup. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com crimes for free shipping on your order and three 65 day returns now available. Available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com crimes evening buyer's remorse.
[11:37]
Car Buyer
Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
[11:41]
Carvana Representative
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
[11:44]
Car Buyer
You what?
[11:45]
Carvana Representative
Yeah, Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no, no, no buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
[11:53]
Car Buyer
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
[11:58]
Carvana Representative
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[12:00]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. Doctor 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.
[12:21]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
It is not like what therapy is today. This was very much a more Freudian therapy where Ruth is indeed lying on a couch.
[12:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
That's Jean Stone, the journalist and author who spent time with Ruth and Dr. Pickens while writing his book on the case.
[12:36]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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, 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.
[12:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
This was all part of Dr. Pickens approach.
[12:59]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
The best way to get information is to let there be silence.
[13:07]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
During those early sessions, Ruth begins to open up.
[13:11]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[13:16]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[13:36]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
She kept thinking about a bandana, and then she had thought about it being around her face. And she was very uncomfortable talking about it. And it triggered a lot of anxiety.
[13:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
She remembers a neighbor, a family friend, who lived on a property down the road. He wore a red bandana around his neck.
[13:57]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
I had this flash, I flashed that something was on my face, on my mouth, and I was scared.
[14:06]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[14:17]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Started off with just some games, putting a key in her pants.
[14:22]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The man would pretend he was playing a game with her and use looking for the key as a way to undress her.
[14:29]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
And that red bandana became an image that stayed in her mind, so it became almost a factotum for assault.
[14:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The man would gag her with it while sexually abusing her in a barn on his property. Here's Dr. Pickens again.
[14:52]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[15:12]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. 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.
[15:40]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[15:59]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
As a coping mechanism while the abuse was taking place. Ruth created a type of separate self. A little girl in a white dress.
[16:08]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[16:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And therefore burying the memory.
[16:26]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[16:48]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. I only remember some of them. Hickory Dickory Dock and Mary Had a Little Lamb and Jack and Jill, stuff like that.
[17:14]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I was really proud of that book.
[17:18]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And I carried it with me everywhere.
[17:22]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
And she loves poetry. And she starts making her own rhymes up. And she becomes, as a child, a little poet.
[17:30]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[17:47]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
When all of this comes back, that poetry is associated with this time. And then she starts writing in poetry.
[17:55]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Repression became a habit for Ruth. 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.
[18:14]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
And it was her last ditch attempt to not remember and to get some kind of support.
[18:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Support she never got when she was a child being abused.
[18:27]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[18:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And the terror Wichita was facing. Offered the perfect environment for Ruth's repressed memories to surface.
[18:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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 btk.
[19:11]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Larry Hadteburg, 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.
[19:21]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
She couldn't cope with reality, so she created a secondary individual to kill her. Because she couldn't kill herself as Ruth Findlay, but she could kill herself as the poet. And I think that's what she tried to do.
[19:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Jean Stone isn't sure it's quite that simple.
[19:40]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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. 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.
[20:14]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[20:32]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[20:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The stabbing remained a big mystery. At first, Ruth couldn't remember doing it at all. But then the memories started to clear up.
[21:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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 works with Dr. Pickens, all of those bugs eventually are removed.
[21:28]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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, you have to do it. You have to do it. She was able to piece the memories back together. It really was her. And now she was ready to acknowledge another truth.
[22:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[22:16]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Yes, because then that's actually the recognition that this is what Happened to herself, right?
[22:24]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[22:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
When she would dissociate, she would split herself into 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. 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. But it turns out many of these memories were implanted by social workers or psychologists. They weren't repressed. They were made up. 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.
[24:07]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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.
[24:22]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
What is it that makes you land on the side of this being the truth or this being close to the truth?
[24:28]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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'd 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.
[24:52]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[25:25]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[25:39]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[25:51]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
What is a screen memory is 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.
[26:08]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[26:46]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
I was just as mad at Ruth Finley as I was the BTK Strangler.
[26:57]
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[28:14]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
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[28:15]
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[28:16]
Carvana Customer
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[28:20]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
I hit 200 on a scratcher.
[28:21]
Carvana Customer
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
[28:24]
Car Buyer
No.
[28:24]
Carvana Customer
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[28:29]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Okay, that's fair.
[28:30]
Carvana Customer
It's like the lottery, except you also always win.
[28:34]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Not like the lottery at all, actually.
[28:36]
Carvana Customer
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[28:45]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I'm not the type to befriend people really quick. But with her, it was just so natural.
[28:53]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[29:08]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
She was brilliant, witty, funny, God talented. She just had everything going for her. A good friend.
[29:19]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[29:32]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
I wasn't sure if it was her or me that was staring at to begin with because it never occurred to me it was her. How would I know?
[29:41]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Emma hadn't followed the poet case closely and had no idea Ruth was involved in it. But Ruth never said anything.
[29:50]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
We would go to dinner on a Saturday. We'd go to her house and we would drink the boxed wine.
[29:57]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Emma and Ruth started traveling together, too. One time driving through Scotland, that's where Emma introduced Ruth to her sister.
[30:06]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
My sister asked me when it was just she and I, does Ruth have a secret? I said, a secret? She says she's got a secret. Emma. She said, I don't mean this in a bad way, but there's something pathetic there and she's trying to hide it.
[30:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Their friendship went on for years before Ruth was ready to tell her best friend about the poet.
[30:39]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
When she told me who she was, I thought she was kidding me. I said, oh, you're joking, right? And she said, no, I wish I was.
[30:54]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
I said, oh.
[30:55]
Emma Dillinger (Friend of Ruth)
And she said, do you still want to be friends? Of course. I said, you don't ever have to worry about that. No, we can go on just like we were.
[31:09]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[31:48]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
The last poem, unlike all of the others, were completely in the words and syntax of an adult woman and 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.
[32:17]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Seven years after their first session together, Ruth walked out of Dr. Pickens office for the last time. 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.
[32:51]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
She caused totally unnecessary stress on so many detectives that their home lives, their kids lives, taking them away from family events.
[33:04]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[33:31]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
We call our story the Poet, the Final Verse.
[33:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth accepts an offer from Cake TV to do a sit down interview on camera with Larry Hatteberg. 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, but also
[33:58]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
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.
[34:08]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
In the Cake TV interview, Ruth explains the story of her abuse.
[34:13]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
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 and went off and left me. And of course I started to cry.
[34:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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.
[34:40]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I started getting pullums from the Poet, 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.
[34:56]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The segment ends with Ruth reading one of her final poems.
[35:00]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I hope my venture penetrates every human heart dedicated to A little girl and an understanding doctor who let her start.
[35:10]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
The phones who normally ring during this time were absolutely silent during the airing of the show. Totally and completely quiet after the program ended.
[35:23]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
They waited for the reaction and after
[35:26]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
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.
[35:40]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The Cake TV segment was also shown in local public schools.
[35:45]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
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.
[36:17]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
Ruth then took that mission to destigmatize abuse to the biggest audience imaginable, the Oprah Winfrey show in 1994. And after years of therapy, Ruth Findlay
[36:29]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
was able to integrate back into one personality and is here today to talk about her years of self inflicted torment.
[36:36]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
And by the end of the Larry Hatteberg 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.
[36:48]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
We can't learn too much from the BTK story, but the Ruth Findlay 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. How many other Ruth Finley's are out there? How many other Ruth Finley are ready to explode?
[37:28]
Quints Brand Spokesperson
Does anyone else feel like August is the Sunday of summer? It's that little window before everything gets busy again. And I always end up doing a bit of a reset. For me, that usually starts with my closet. I love quints because they make getting dressed so much easier. They focus on really beautiful, high quality essentials. Things like organic cotton, breezy linen and Mongolian cashmere that you can wear over and over without feeling like you're sacrificing style. I've been wearing their 100% cotton fisherman cruise sweater lately and it's perfect for this time of year. It's lightweight enough for cool summer nights, but it will carry you right into the fall. I keep it in the car or toss it in a bag because here in California, you never know when the temps start to dip a little bit. The best part? Quint keeps their prices 50 to 80% lower than similar luxury brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. So you're getting incredible quality without the luxury markup. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com crimes for free shipping on your order and three 65 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com crimes Ruth's story only really has one victim.
[38:47]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
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. 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.
[39:50]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Ruth Finley was bold. She was courageous. We learned 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 through her
[40:06]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
therapy and by coming forward publicly, she went from intensely private to someone who was on the world stage talking about her deepest shame.
[40:17]
Carvana Representative
Ruth and Anne, say hi to everybody in TV land. Ruth, what's your story?
[40:22]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
I don't have one yet. I've been listening to her. Come back to me later.
[40:27]
Carvana Representative
Okay?
[40:29]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
This video of Ruth celebrating New Year's in 1987 was taken just months before, 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.
[40:51]
Carvana Representative
Say Ruth and Ed earlier this evening, we're here to give your 1988 resolutions. Okay, let's hear them again.
[40:58]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
Ruth oh, well, I just remembered his. I didn't remember mine.
[41:05]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
After Speaking about the poet on a global scale, Ruth turned back inward and lived life on her own terms. The poet never returned, and Ruth never again wrote another poem.
[41:20]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
So Ruth remembers what Elle had a real good time. You had what I want to have a real good time in 88.
[41:26]
Jean Stone (Journalist and Author)
Yeah.
[41:27]
District Attorney Clark Owens / Detective Mike McKenna / Larry Hatteberg (Reporter)
Stop.
[41:28]
Dr. Andrew Pickens
Stop the tape by pressing the red button.
[41:30]
Ruth Finley (Voice Actor)
Oh, I'm sorry.
[41:37]
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[42:13]
Narrator (Rachel Brown)
The Poet is a production of Sony Music Entertainment, New Metric 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 New Metric Media. Our executive producer is Chris Kelly from Sony Music Entertainment. Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch from 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 Gene Stone. Fact checking by Maya El Hawari and Alexis Green. Our lawyers are Daniel Henry, Garland Anthony and Austin Wong. Voice acting from Cassandra Sison, Morgan Murray and Antony McMahon. Special thanks to Andres Lara, Patrick McConnell, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Emily Racik and the rest of the team at Sony Music Entertainment. 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.

The Poet | 6. Buried

The Poet | 6. Buried

Podcast Summary: The Binge Crimes: The Poet

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ruth Finley Exposed as the Poet

2. Dr. Pickens' Evaluation & The Nature of Ruth’s Disorder

3. Diagnosis: Dissociative Disorder

4. No Charges; Search for the Trauma’s Source

5. Uncovering Childhood Trauma

6. The Poet as a Cry for Help

7. Brutal Self-Harm, Recovery, and Reintegration

8. Repressed Memory Debate

9. Aftermath, Stigma, and Restitution

10. Life After Therapy & Community Response

11. Public Disclosure & Advocacy

12. Reflections on Impact and Legacy

Most Memorable Quotes

Key Segment Timestamps

Final Reflection

Podcast Summary: The Binge Crimes: The Poet

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ruth Finley Exposed as the Poet

2. Dr. Pickens' Evaluation & The Nature of Ruth’s Disorder

3. Diagnosis: Dissociative Disorder

4. No Charges; Search for the Trauma’s Source

5. Uncovering Childhood Trauma

6. The Poet as a Cry for Help

7. Brutal Self-Harm, Recovery, and Reintegration

8. Repressed Memory Debate

9. Aftermath, Stigma, and Restitution

10. Life After Therapy & Community Response

11. Public Disclosure & Advocacy

12. Reflections on Impact and Legacy

Most Memorable Quotes

Key Segment Timestamps

Final Reflection