Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (38 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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The following Sunday, after attending church, he wrote about shoplifting a book on a serial killer who lived in Hawaii. The next morning, he went to work with a redhead in the seat beside him. On Tuesday, she’d been replaced with a woman whom he would describe only as “the bitch.” For the rest of that afternoon, he daydreamed that she’d kidnapped him, trussed him up in cord, placed a leather collar around his neck, and laid him out on a bed covered with red satin pillows.
 
A week later, in an effort to drum up some orders for the annual Boy Scout popcorn drive, he dropped by a church not far from his office. On his way back out to his truck, he happened to glance at a young boy and his sister playing in the grass by the parking lot. All at once, the telltale urge seemed to well up from deep inside him.
 
“The sexual predatory instinct kicks in,” he wrote. His head was flooded by thoughts of “getting” the two young children. By the time he climbed inside his truck and started the engine, the kids had vanished, and he spent the next ten minutes cruising the streets around the church hoping to catch another glimpse of them. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would have done if he had spotted them, but by this point in the day his head was going crazy with wild possibilities. He steered his truck toward the neighborhoods where his last two victims had lived before he’d paid them a late night visit, driving up and down the streets that surrounded their homes, letting his mind wander.
 
The need to take another life was rising up inside him, threatening to burst out. On the first weekend in December 1990, he attended an out-of-town Boy Scout camp with his son. Packed away in his truck was his hit kit, complete with plastic gloves, knife, .25-caliber pistol, mask, and cord. Exactly what he intended to do, he never specified in his journal, although he did write that he arrived at the camp “too late and was too tired to try anything.”
 
A week before Christmas, he wrote that he and Paula had had sex for the first time “in a long time.” For a guy who often filled page after page with detailed accounts of his imagined sexual conquests, he devoted precious little ink to the real thing. His only comment in his journal was that his session with his wife “felt very good and satisfying.”
 
My sources insist that when it came to his carnal fantasies, Rader never crossed the line with his daughter.
 
“She was his best friend, and he claims it never crossed his mind to think those things about her,” I was told. “But Kerri’s friends . . . well, that was a different matter. They were definitely fantasy material for him.”
 
Like plenty of violent offenders I’d spoken with, Rader had a boundary he wouldn’t cross, and that gave him comfort. He told this same source that pornography nauseated him, that he was bewildered that anyone could think he might be a homosexual, and that it made him feel good to know that he never “cheated” on Paula by having sex with any of his murder victims.
 
During this period of his life, Rader lived for his so-called motel parties. According to his journals, he’d drive out of town, check into a room, lock the door, and spend hours alone, fondling the belongings of his victims, dressing in their clothes, wearing wigs and masks he’d prettied up with lipstick and mascara, then binding himself in ropes and tying plastic bags over his head.
 
Sometimes he’d cover the bed with scantily clad Barbie dolls, set up his camera on a tripod, and squat down beside the dolls. He’d position the camera far enough away so that when the shutter snapped he appeared to be the same size as the dolls—all of which he imagined were his real-life victims. It just didn’t get any better than that, as far as he was concerned, because the Barbie doll was the symbol of the perfect female. I’d seen this type of behavior in men who would hang dolls, blow them up with M-80s, and smear red dye all over them to simulate blood. Surprisingly, some of these guys never progressed past the stage of torturing dolls. They seemed to sense what Rader later found out—that the fantasy, where they are forever in control, is always better than the actual crime.
 
 
One evening in October 1995, Rader took several decades’ worth of drawings he’d sketched of women in the midst of being stabbed, drowned, buried alive, hung, strangled, shot, and tortured on various homemade devices of his own design, then spread them across the room. The collective image of all these nude, gasping, wincing, terrified women and girls covering the room was horribly breathtaking, he thought.
 
As he gazed at the drawings, it reinforced his belief that he definitely didn’t want anything to happen to his cache of artwork. A few months earlier, he’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and at that time it had begun to occur to him that he needed to stop being so careless with his drawings, along with the rest of his cache of memorabilia. So he began to concoct a plan of how to copy his sketches over to three-by-five cards, then stick the original drawings in a safe-deposit box that he’d reserve by using the fake name “Johnson.” The way he envisioned it, the box wouldn’t get opened until months after he died. Whether or not the bank employee who found it was able to piece together what the contents alluded to didn’t concern him, he told Landwehr.
 
Because he had so much material to catalogue during that autumn night in 1995, he decided to organize it into categories, such as hangings, strangulations, torture devices, and so on. In his journal, he bitched that it “took a lot of work checking dates and sorting,” but his recent milestone birthday had convinced him that the last thing he wanted to do was die and leave a “skeleton in the closet.” It wasn’t until late 2004 that he began digitizing his archives and copying them onto CDs. But the project was fraught with headaches because the CD burner on his decrepit home computer was broken. Even more frustrating was the fact that he didn’t have a scanner at home, so he had to use the one at the office, which meant he had to do everything on the sly. By the time police caught up with him, he’d been able to transfer only a small handful of material onto discs.
 
His duties as an archivist soon sent him combing through his journals and scores of yellowed clippings from the
Wichita Eagle,
detailing BTK’s various murders and efforts to catch him. For the first time since he’d begun killing, he suddenly realized that his cache of memorabilia could get him in trouble; he wrote, “[it would be] bad news for me if found, yet I can’t let it go.”
 
One of the reasons Rader couldn’t let it go was because four years had elapsed since his last—and what would prove to be his final—murder. He desperately needed his various mementos to curb his lust for death, to sustain and recharge him.
 
 
Just as he had with his countless other projects, Rader had spent a couple of months driving past the home of Delores “Dee” Davis, a sixty-two-year-old retired secretary at an oil and gas company. Before long, he decided that she seemed to have everything going for her—all the qualities he required of his victims. For weeks on end during the closing months of 1990, he’d lie in bed and fantasize about all the things he wanted to do to her.
 
One afternoon in mid-January 1991, the fantasies had grown so real that he decided it didn’t make sense to wait any longer. A few nights later on January 18, shortly after attending a Boy Scout function with his son, he changed out of his scouting uniform at a Baptist church near his home, then drove out near her house on North Hillside Street in Park City. He parked a couple miles away.
 
It was so cold outside that the only thing that kept him warm on that moonless night during his twenty-five-minute walk to her house were the thoughts of what he was on the verge of doing.
 
Davis’s bedroom light was still on when he arrived in her front yard. She was inside reading. He paced around in the darkness, waiting for her to go to bed. It occurred to him that he didn’t have a clue about how he was going to get inside. The locks on her doors were all sturdy. It would come to him, he told himself. He just needed to be patient. It made him crazy to know that his victim was inside, oblivious to the wolf that lurked just beyond her walls.
 
After what felt like an eternity, Davis switched off her bedside light and climbed into bed. Rader waited for another thirty minutes, then decided the time had come to make his move. If there was some neat and orderly way to get inside, he couldn’t figure out what it might be. He decided to wing it. He’d never done that before with one of his projects—at least not to gain entry. But, as he would later tell Landwehr, he was “hell bent for leather, and Factor X had kicked in.”
 
According to his journal, he stood there in her backyard looking around for something, anything he could use to help him get inside. When he finally spotted a cinder block lying near the patio, he knew exactly what he needed to do. After slicing through the outside phone line, he picked up the block, gripping the sides of it firmly with his hands; he crept up on the back porch, then heaved the block through the large sliding-glass door. The sound of the glass shattering made one helluva loud noise.
 
Davis came running out of her bedroom to see what had happened and discovered Rader standing in her family room. She thought a car had slammed into the side of her house, but he quickly set her straight, telling her he was ex-con on the run.
 
“It’s cold outside,” he said. “I need some warmth, a car, and some food.”
 
Then he told her to lie down on the bed; he pulled handcuffs out from a pocket in his coat and slipped them over her wrists. Davis began to panic, but Rader told her to relax. He explained that if she’d only tell him where her car keys were, he’d be gone in no time. He grabbed a pillowcase, went into the kitchen, and began filling it with cans of food, making as much noise as possible. This seemed to calm Davis down.
 
His journal detailed how he checked out where she kept her car, then got everything ready for what would happen next. In his mind, he felt confident that Davis believed he was preparing to leave. Next he walked back into the bedroom, unlocked her cuffs, and tied her wrists with rope. Once again, he apologized for breaking into her house, assuring her that he’d be gone in a minute and that someone would probably find her shortly. As she lay there on her stomach on the bed, he opened the drawer to her dresser and pulled out a pair of panty hose. She spotted him, but he once again attempted to convince her that everything would be okay; the last thing he wanted was for her to begin panicking.
 
“Are you comfortable?” he asked. “I need these to tie you a little more.”
 
And that was when he decided there was no reason to wait any longer. In one quick motion, he looped the hose around her throat.
 
“Please,” she pleaded. “I have children.”
 
So did Rader, I thought. They were both home asleep in their beds, just down the hallway from his wife. But that didn’t seem to matter. He pulled the hose tight and later wrote that it took her between two and three minutes to die. Rivulets of blood trickled from her nose, ears, and mouth. As he stared down at her body, the thought occurred to him that the moment he savored most when he killed happened at that instant when his victims had been bound and realized they were doomed. He could live off that moment for years, he wrote afterwards.
 
Rader later told police that he didn’t masturbate at the scene, and because no traces of semen were found in the house, he might have been telling the truth. From the sound of it, he had other things on his mind, because after watching the life seep out of Davis, he wrapped her body in a blanket from the bed and dragged her out to the trunk of her car. Afterwards he darted back inside the house, grabbed some jewelry, lingerie, and a camera, then headed out to a remote highway several miles outside Park City and rolled Davis’s corpse into a culvert, then hopped back in her car and found another spot beneath a highway maintenance shed to stash the various trinkets he’d stolen from the house, along with his hit kit. He’d come back for that later, he told himself. First, he needed to switch vehicles before any more time passed.
 
After returning the car to Davis’s garage, he walked the two miles back to his truck. In his journal, he described how he felt cold, thirsty, and tired. His clothes were drenched in sweat.
 
Thirty minutes later, he was driving back out to the spot where he’d just deposited Davis, and retrieved her body. Fog had begun to roll in as he continued on to a remote part of the county, where he pulled over long enough to drag Davis’s body beneath a tiny concrete bridge located beside an expanse of empty farmland. As he drove back home, he wrote that thoughts of sex and bondage flooded his brain. Knowing that the sun would be up in a few hours made him feel like a vampire, he later wrote.
 
 
As horrific as these Dear Diary confessions were, they didn’t shock or surprise me. His words merely confirmed something I’d discovered years before: serial killers like Rader aren’t human. They look like us, they train themselves to act like us, but just below the surface they are hideously different. That was why I expected nothing else out of a monster like Rader. All I felt was a terrible, heavy sadness for Delores Davis, along with the rest of Rader’s victims. They didn’t deserve any of this.

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