It started with a whisper on the phone... then the eggs on the porch... then the ice pick in her ribs. In 1977 Wichita, the city already lived in terror of BTK. But for Ruth Finley, the real monster wasn't outside her window-he was inside her mind. Imagine waking up to find you've written a death threat... to yourself. Imagine staging your own kidnapping, stabbing yourself with an ice pick, and mailing your own hair to your husband-yet having no memory of any of it. This is the chilling true story of *the Poet*-a stalker who sent over 600 rhyming letters, demanded $250,000, and left a severed finger in a Valentine's box. Except the stalker wasn't real. Ruth Finley created him. And she fooled an entire city for four years. Now, for the first time, the sealed police files, therapy tapes, and Ruth's own handwritten journals reveal the shocking truth: a repressed childhood trauma, a crumbling marriage, and a mind fractured by menopause and empty-nest despair.