Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (2 page)

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Authors: John Douglas,Johnny Dodd

BOOK: Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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Finally, I would like to pay tribute to my mother, Dolores Douglas, who died in an accident while I was writing this book. She was my biggest fan and supporter, and I miss her dearly.
 
—JOHN DOUGLAS
 
 
An extra special thanks to Liza Dawson, the best agent an ink-stained wretch could ask for. To John Douglas for his patience and trust in allowing me to tell his story. To Alan Rinzler and his editorial cat o’ nine tails (the scars have almost healed). To Kris “It’s So Over” Casarona for literally everything. To Ken Landwehr, Larry Welch, and Bernie Drowatzky for all their help. And to all those who knew Dennis Rader (or thought they did) for agreeing to share their stories with me.
 
A shout-out of gratitude to Evan and the staff at Peet’s at 14th and Montana. To Bill “Deer Hunter” Lischak and Diamond Joe Bruggeman for always being there with an open ear and a shoulder. To Ron Arias for his words, wisdom, and advice. To Lizz Leonard for once again being so absolutely Lizz Leonardesque. To Diana for picking up the domestic slack and then some. To Mother Antonia for her prayers of protection, her insight, and her lorca. To my various friends who spent fourteen months listening to my rants and nightmares. To Jamie Lee for her wordsmithing. To Champ Clarke, Oliver Jones, and Lorenzo Benet for allowing me to constantly pick their gray matter. To T-lu for her motherly advice and proofreading prowess. To Julie for helping me shape every single word. And to Christian and Ella, my two little rays of sunshine: remember always to do your best.
 
—JOHNNY DODD
 
Introduction
It began in the autumn of 1974 while I was working as a “street agent” in the FBI’s Milwaukee field office. I was twenty-eight years old and had spent the past three years working with the bureau. One afternoon while I was chewing the fat with a couple of homicide detectives from the Milwaukee Police Department, somebody mentioned a serial killer in Wichita, Kansas, who called himself “the BTK Strangler.”
 
BTK. Just those initials. What did they stand for? I didn’t know then, but the moment I heard them I felt a little jolt of electricity shoot through me. I yearned to know everything I could about this murderer. Little did I realize how far my search for answers would take me and how entwined my life would become with this violent, elusive killer.
 
It was during this period of my life that I started on my quest to understand what motivated someone who seemed to enjoy perpetrating acts of violence upon complete strangers. This was what made serial killers so difficult to identify—they rarely killed anyone whom they knew intimately, and their crimes often appeared to have no motive.
 
As a young FBI agent, I made it my personal mission to find out what drove these vicious, heartless killers. I wanted to know how they viewed the world, how they perpetrated their crimes, how they selected their victims. If I could get the answers to those questions, I told myself, I’d one day be able to help police around the nation identify serial killers long before they got the chance to leave a long, bloody trail in their wake.
 
So after work that evening back in 1974, I went digging through the Milwaukee Public Library and located some old newspapers from Wichita. I read every word that had been written about the quadruple homicide this killer had committed in January 1974 and learned that BTK stood for “bind, torture, and kill.” His self-chosen nickname perfectly summed up his modus operandi. He somehow managed to waltz his way into his victims’ homes, tie them up, and torture them in the same way a schoolboy might torment an insect. Then, when it suited him, he snuffed out their lives. He was an equal opportunity killer who had claimed the lives of a man, a woman, and children.
 
That was a hectic, busy time in my career. When I wasn’t working bank robberies and fugitive and kidnapping cases, I could be found at the University of Wisconsin, where I’d enrolled in graduate school, studying educational psychology, pushing myself to understand what made someone like BTK perpetrate such heinous, brutal acts.
 
Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, “Who the hell is this BTK? What makes a guy like this do what he does? What makes him tick?”
 
At the time, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) was operated out of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. It served primarily as an academic unit. The word
profiling
had yet to find its way into the bureau’s investigative vocabulary. But it would one day soon—I just knew it. And I promised myself that after I earned my graduate degrees, I would transfer into the BSU and spend my days profiling the minds of violent serial offenders full-time.
 
By June 1977, I did just that. I was selected and transferred to the FBI Academy as an instructor for the BSU and quickly began teaching courses in hostage negotiation and criminal psychology. Most of my hours were spent working as an instructor, but I occasionally thought about BTK, wondering if he’d ever been identified and arrested.
 
One afternoon in March 1978, while researching another case, I again dug up what I could on BTK and was surprised to learn that since 1974, he had somehow still eluded police and now claimed responsibility for seven murders. By this time in 1978, he’d already sent two taunting letters to local newspapers—the first in October 1974, the second in February 1978—daring the police to try to catch him.
 
By 1979, I was in the midst of my serial murder research program, conducting what would eventually become in-depth interviews with three dozen serial killers, including Charles Manson, Arthur Bremmer, Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam), and others, each of whom had murdered three or more victims with some sort of cooling-off period between their crimes.
 
In the autumn of 1979, the phone rang in my office, which at that point was located in the basement of the FBI Academy library. On the other end of the line was a homicide detective with the Wichita Police Department. “I heard about the work you’ve been doing out there,” he said. “Was wondering if you could help us on a case we’ve been working on.”
 
“Tell me about it,” I said.
 
“We got a serial killer out here,” he said. “Goes by the name of BTK. You heard of him?”
 
“Only what I’ve read in the papers.”
 
Over the next few minutes, he walked me through the BTK murders, detailing the twists and turns of the investigation and reiterating his claim that police would welcome any assistance the FBI’s BSU could lend.
 
“If you can get out here,” I told him, “I can give you a day. Bring everything you’ve got. We can go through it, and I’ll put together an analysis for you.”
 
One week later, Wichita police lieutenant Bernie Drowatzky arrived at Quantico. I walked him upstairs to a quiet corner of the library, and Drowatzky spread his crime scene photos across the table. “Let’s go through this murder by murder,” I said. “The only caveat is that you can’t tell me about any potential suspects you might be looking at.”
 
The veteran cop frowned and, in a subdued voice, said, “We don’t have any suspects.”
 
Drowatzky remained silent as I thumbed through the grisly photos. The fact that he’d traveled all this way to seek my help told me one thing: the Wichita Police Department was grasping for anyone or anything that could help steer them in a direction they hadn’t thought of.
 
“We’ve never run across anything like this before,” Drowatzky said. “We normally solve our murders in Wichita.”
 
 
At the time, my colleagues and I were trying to acquire answers to the formula of Why + How = Who that I believed could help investigators crack these often frustrating, hard-to-solve cases.
 
Why, we wondered, would someone want to kill multiple victims over a period of days, months, and, in the case of BTK, many years? Why do they target certain types of victims? How do they prepare for their crimes? What sort of impact do their actions have on them?
 
Are they born to kill? Did some childhood trauma warp them, causing them to turn violent? Or is their homicidal appetite a combination of these two factors? What factors led to their identification and arrest? Did they get sloppy, or was their capture a result of stellar detective work? Our interview protocol involved thousands of questions and stretched fifty-seven pages in length. The insight we gleaned from these killers provided us with a priceless understanding of how the mind of a serial killer worked.
 
From what police had been able to piece together from BTK’s crime scenes, it was clear that this killer maintained a high level of control over his victims. This form of dominance over another person appeared to be a big turn-on for BTK. He tied his victims up, using rope or whatever else was handy at the scene. When it came time to kill, his preferred method involved either a garrote or a plastic bag tied over the head. He often arranged the bodies of his victims in poses reminiscent of a detective magazine cover. Before fleeing, he would sometimes masturbate on or near his victims.
 
Among other things, in the pages of the analysis I wrote in 1979, I emphasized to police that BTK’s ego would eventually lead to his downfall. Their job, I wrote, was to stroke his ego in public whenever possible, to show him the respect he craved, in the hopes that he would continue to communicate with them. The way I saw it, the best chance that law enforcement had to get a handle on this killer was to keep him talking. Exactly what police did with my analysis, I have no idea. I had to jump to the next case on the front burner. If they needed me, all they had to do was pick up a phone and call me.
 
 
In October 1984, the Wichita Police paid a second visit to my office. Seven years had passed since BTK’s last known murder, and police still weren’t any closer to taking this sick killer off the street.
 
The Wichita Police Department had recently formed an eight-person BTK task force, known as the Ghostbusters. The longtime chief was retiring, but before leaving his post, he wanted the case solved and closed. So he assembled a team of six crack investigators, a captain, and a lieutenant and instructed them to reopen the files and sift through the mounds of crime scene photos, witness statements, police and autopsy reports, and even the analysis I’d written on the case five years earlier. After three months, they were desperate to ensure that the investigation didn’t hit another brick wall, so they reached out again to our BSU. A week after telephoning to ask if my unit could offer any assistance, two task force detectives—Paul Dotson and Mark Richardson—arrived at the FBI Academy toting several pounds of new crime scene photos and various reports. I met them in the lobby of the forensic science building, where my office was located. At the time, I oversaw a staff of six criminal profilers.
 
“Let’s go to the conference room,” I told them. “Several of my colleagues are waiting there for you. I want you to walk us through the case.”
 
As Dotson and Richardson passed out the grim, gritty eight-by-ten photos and readied the slide projector, I explained just how far we’d come with our criminal profiling program since the last visit by a Wichita homicide detective. Then, for the next eight hours, they outlined the basic facts of the case, describing the victims, communiqués the killer had sent, medical examiner’s reports, and the various neighborhoods where the murders had occurred.
 
 
I listened to their presentation, yet when they’d finished I had many more questions than answers. Despite being considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on serial murderers, I’d never encountered a case quite like BTK’s.
 
Six years had passed since he had written to police, gloating over one of his murders. How, I wondered, was this publicity-starved psychopath able to go underground for so many years? Was he still killing? What specifically did he do sexually, physically, and psychologically to his victims? Why hadn’t he been apprehended?
 
Together with four of my colleagues, I ingested the information from our briefing. A few days later, we sat down with the detectives again, and, during a marathon skull session, we provided them with a detailed verbal profile of what we had concluded about BTK, given the limited information we had at that point, along with some proactive ideas that we believed might work to flush him out.
 
The Ghostbusters task force was disbanded in 1987. Because BTK was only one of thousands of cases I worked on during those years, I never learned exactly how many of the ideas generated from our analysis were actually ever used in the investigation. But one fact was frustratingly clear: by the time I retired from the FBI in June 1995, the unknown subject (UNSUB) in Wichita had yet to be identified. Was he dead? Was he incarcerated for another crime? Had he moved away from Wichita? Or was there another reason to explain why he’d gone underground?
 
I’d begun to believe that I’d never get the answers to my questions until one evening in March 2004, when a former colleague telephoned. At the time, my wife, Pam, and I were living together with our oldest daughter, Erika, twenty-nine, who was living at home, studying to become a nurse. Her sister, Lauren, twenty-four, was finishing up her third year of law school. My son, Jed, eighteen, was getting ready to graduate from high school. My family had just finished dinner, but I was seated at my desk in the study, talking to a rape victim who had contacted me through my Web site. No sooner had I ended my conversation with that sobbing, shell-shocked woman than my phone rang.

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