Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (25 page)
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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They all had gags in their mouths.
10
I couldn’t get over it. I’d never seen a stash of material like this. Not ever. As I clicked my way through the countless folders on the CD Landwehr had left in my hotel room, I realized that in all my years studying violent offenders, I’d never glimpsed a collection of diaries, journals, notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, drawings, and other confessional materials from a serial killer such as these. The only killer I could think of who came close to being such a prolific diarist was David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam. His journals documented the majority of the nearly two thousand “nuisance” fires he ignited in trash cans around New York City in the years prior to his homicidal spree.
But Rader’s writing was different, darker and more convoluted. Any time you read a diary or other type of personal writing, you’re more than likely being granted an intimate look into the subconscious of whoever wrote it. Some humans just seem to express their feelings, needs, and desires on paper more freely than they ever can to another person. Which is why they put those little locks on diaries. In fact, if anyone’s diary ever deserved to have a lock on it, it was Rader’s.
One of the things I learned from reading his words was that by the time high school rolled around, he had become quite adept at knowing how to stay just below the radar. He may not have been fully conscious of what it was he was doing, but by then he had emerged as an expert at fooling all the people all the time.
According to another of his friends who didn’t want their name to appear in print, Rader was one of that rare breed of youth who often caused the parents of other kids in his neighborhood to exclaim, “Why can’t you be like Dennis Rader?” His personality was so predictably even-keeled that many of his classmates at Wichita Heights High School wrote him off as hopelessly boring.
Clearly Rader did not fit the mold of the typical serial killer. In most of the cases I’ve looked at, teachers and neighbors often tell me that they were already predicting that a certain child would grow up to be a violent offender long before he was old enough to graduate high school. For generations, the mantra among mental health professionals has been, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Yet sometimes this dictum doesn’t hold true—at least not in the case of a burgeoning killer like Rader, who never allowed anyone to glimpse his real mind or his secret behavior.
The teenage Rader would much rather be boring than draw any sort of attention to himself. Trouble, it seemed, was for the careless. Rader didn’t have much time for that sort of sloppiness. As a kid, he’d gotten in a few tight scrapes, and they had left their mark on him. One of his friends told me about the afternoon Rader and some of the other neighborhood kids stuck pennies on the train tracks near his home. One of his pals got carried away and stuck a baseball bat on the tracks; this ticked off the railroad dicks, who hunted the kids down. They knocked on the Rader family’s front door and told his mother that if she couldn’t keep her boy in line, they’d be happy to do it. Their threat rattled Dorothea, and after that, I was told, Rader thought twice about pulling the kind of stunts that might land him in hot water. It wasn’t worth the hassle, he told himself.
In reading his journal, I began to sense his preternatural concern over his parent’s reaction to his behavior. This paranoia was wonderful training for the young serial killer, providing him with a skill that would come in handy after he began killing. It taught him to never let his guard down.
Yet I wondered just what caused him to be so hypervigilant. Was it due to respect, or was there some other cause? Over the course of reading through his journals and speaking with childhood friends, I have never been able to find any evidence of abuse—either sexual or physical—in the family. During his interrogation, Rader steadfastly denied that he’d ever been molested or beaten as a boy. Whatever the answer may be, he came across as a skittish youth, one who became a quick study in the fine art of maintaining a low profile. He rarely did the normal outlandish things kids do that cause others to pay attention to them.
But, of course, Rader didn’t need to. He had other outlets for all that crazy, pent-up energy percolating inside his teenage body. By then he’d become quite adept at conducting a secret life. He would creep out to one of the dilapidated old barns located a mile or so from his house. Sometimes he’d go there to tie himself up. Other times, he’d take a bit of rope from his collection and go hunting for a stray cat or the occasional dog, which he’d carry with him to the barn.
Once inside, he’d loop a stretch of rope around the animal’s legs, then cinch it tight and knot it off. If he didn’t do that, if he didn’t control the animal from the get-go, the damn thing would do its best to bolt. Even a four-legged critter with a brain the size of a walnut had enough sense to know that Rader was up to no good.
After a while, he began tie his victim to whatever post or beam looked sturdy enough to hold it. He found that to be the best way. It couldn’t move. He’d wrap it up like a mummy in rope, thrilled to observe the wild look that would come over the animal—its eyes wide open in watchful terror, waiting to see what he’d do next. It was just like what he imagined would happen to a person. Eventually, he’d encircle its neck with baling wire and slowly twist it tight—not enough to tear into its flesh, but enough to cut off the blood supply to its brain. He’d sit there in the dirt and watch the animal squirm, tightening the wire ever so slightly, loosening it up and then twisting it taut all over again.
I had a fairly good idea of what happened next. Other serial killers I have interviewed over the years have described to me the ritual they’d go through when killing an animal. Rader would be no different, I told myself. Because his crimes had a sexual component to them and were directed against women, he struck me as the type who would kill cats, as opposed to dogs. But if he really concentrated, he could transform the animal into something else. He’d stare into its eyes and watch as it changed itself into a human girl.
Then he’d whisper to it, telling it all the terrible things he was going to do to it. And as the animal’s brain slowly died from lack of oxygen, Rader would masturbate, then probably try to ejaculate on the body. When it was all over, he’d untie the animal and, on the way back to his house, toss it in a ditch or leave it on the side of the road. Leaving it strung up inside the barn would have been far too risky.
One of the things Rader would have enjoyed best about killing animals was how powerful he felt afterward, how high it made him. Because he had no other way to achieve that rush of power, he had to steal it away from others. So he started with animals. He loved the sensation of it. It made up for all the ways he felt different from the other kids. It not only leveled the playing field but made him feel better than everyone else.
Over the years, I’ve learned that many serial killers escalated their violence, moving from inanimate objects to animals and then to people. In fact, torturing and killing animals is a type of prep school for potential sex offenders and killers.
Despite his love of violence, Rader wasn’t much of a fighter. This wasn’t because he was scared to trade blows with other kids. His reticence had more to do with his always seeming to have other uses for his energy. Besides, from what he’d observed in the past, fights rarely went down the way they did in the movies. Physical altercations were messy affairs. In a fight, one risked losing control—the last thing Rader would ever want to have happen. He’d worked far too hard, spent far too much time crafting his image, to let down his guard like that.
Most of the time, Rader was content to use words instead of his fists. Years later, as BTK, he used this same approach when convincing victims to go along with him and allow him to tie them up. He used words rather than a blitz attack because he wanted his victims to be conscious when he played out his bondage fantasies.
One of his high school chums told me about the time when another student cut in front of Rader in line; he never lost his cool. One morning when everyone was lined up in front of the cafeteria for lunch, the school’s biggest jock butted in front of Rader and his buddies. One of Rader’s pals recalled how the group quickly decided not to make a big deal out of the incident. But Rader wasn’t the type to ignore such an obvious infraction of the social code. So he tapped the guy on the shoulder and informed him, in the most matter-of-fact way, that he didn’t like the jock’s cutting in front of him. Rader didn’t have a mean look on his face, said the friend. And he never raised his voice. But before anyone knew what had happened, the interloper mumbled a terse apology and walked to the back of the line.
Rader would also do the same thing to anyone who bothered his youngest brother, Paul, who his friends all referred to as Paulie. If there was ever a time when Rader’s softer side came out, it was around Paulie, who was always a small child. That was why his older brother often seemed to have him at his side. He reportedly couldn’t stomach the thought of the other kids razzing Paulie because of his size. On more than one occasion, Rader walked straight up to one of Paulie’s tormentors and, with his usual calm and level voice, stared unblinkingly into his foe’s eyes and said, “I don’t appreciate you teasing Paulie . . . You need to stop now, or I’m going to have to do something about it.” After a while, kids no longer bothered teasing the youngest Rader boy. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to endure Rader’s unnerving, matter-of-fact routine.
There may have been another reason why Rader’s words seemed to carry such weight. The other kids understood that if he had no alternative, Dennis actually did know how to use his fists. According to a friend, back when Rader was in grade school, his father gave him a bit of advice about how to handle those clowns who seemed hell-bent on picking a fight. If he ever encountered one of those guys, old man Rader instructed his eldest son, he needed to learn how to defend himself. So one afternoon, he showed his son how to punch and where to aim his blows on the other guy’s body.
It wasn’t long after that, when Rader was in eighth grade, that the class bully set his sights on the him. All morning long, he picked on and badgered Dennis, calling him names and shoving him around in front of the other kids. Rader finally snapped shortly after lunch, after retreating into a restroom with a buddy, partly to get away from the bully who had decided to make his life hell. It wasn’t long before his tormentor discovered him and quickly resumed picking on him. And it was then, according to one of his childhood friends, that Rader remembered his father’s advice.
He balled up his fists and announced, “That’s enough.”
The fight reportedly didn’t last long, but Rader matched the kid blow for blow. And after all the punches had been thrown, nobody had won or lost, but nobody else ever picked on Rader again.
Back when Rader was in grade school, Friday nights were always a big deal for him. That was the night the local TV station, KAKE, played all those old horror movies. The show was called
Rodney and the Host,
and it centered around a guy who looked like Boris Karloff, known as the Host, and Rodney, who resembled some sort of a hunchback.
Rodney and the Host,
and it centered around a guy who looked like Boris Karloff, known as the Host, and Rodney, who resembled some sort of a hunchback.
According to his friends, Rader loved being scared. Back then, there were nights when he and his buddies would see who could stand being scared the most. Rader always seemed to win. The other guys would be forced to shut their eyes, but Rader couldn’t get enough. The next week at school, when his friends would still be having nightmares, Rader would be carrying on about all the monsters and evil doctors he’d watched on that previous Friday night. For the rest of the week, he was beside himself trying to imagine what horrors Rodney and his sidekick would serve up for their next show.
A few years later, when high school rolled around, his buddies no longer wanted to spend their Friday nights watching horror flicks. By then, they’d moved on to other pursuits, such as the regular Friday night ritual of hanging out at a place known as “The Big Spot.” That was where a lot of the guys in town would end up after telling their parents they were spending the night at a buddy’s house. They’d drive out to a shallow bend on the Little Arkansas River, build a big bonfire, and drink beer. Often a bunch of local girls would join them. Around midnight after the girls went home, the guys would drink more beer, shoot the shit, then fall asleep on the sand.
But friends recall that Rader never seemed interested in showing up at the popular hangout, which at the time didn’t seem all that odd because he was always working at a nearby grocery. Then again, there was something peculiar about his absence, because he certainly would have been welcome there. After all, Rader wasn’t one of those typically hopeless social basket cases. Although he certainly did seem . . . well, different. He was one of those guys you could convince yourself you knew. But deep down, if you ever bothered to really think about him, you’d have to admit that you had no idea who he really was—and that was just the way he liked it.
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