Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (52 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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“I always felt you had to have had a camera in order to remember all that detail,” I said. “You must have an amazing memory.”
Rader turned his face away from the camera and stared off at a distant wall in the room where he was sitting. For all I knew he was daydreaming; perhaps he had just imagined wrapping a rope around Casarona’s throat. Rader had spent a lifetime doing just that sort of thing—fantasizing not only about murder and torture but also about being famous, powerful, influential, and superior to everyone. When he finally returned and once again made eye contact with the camera, he quickly went to work trying to hoodwink me into believing he was a changed man.
“I’m trying not to think those thoughts anymore,” he said. “I’m trying to have more control over my life, trying to stay away from all those fantasies. It’s the only way for me now. When I wake up each morning, that’s when the fantasies start—that was when they were always the most powerful and uncontrollable. Paula always got up before me, and I’d lay in bed thinking about all that stuff. But now I try and block out the images. I try and think about Paula and the kids and all the things I’m going to read and write for the rest of the day. And instead of drawing bondage pictures, I draw happy faces. And I read the Bible. Ask Kris. I often mention the Bible to her when we talk or when I write her letters.
“I’m a Christian, you know,” he went on. “Always have been. After I killed the Oteros, I began to pray to God for help so I could fight this thing inside me. My greatest fear, even more than being caught, was whether God would allow me into heaven or would I be condemned forever. All my life I thought about that—even before I killed anyone. I wonder if God might not accept me because of my deeds, no matter how many times I ask for forgiveness.”
All this blather about God, the hereafter, and forgiveness made me want to laugh, but I didn’t dare. Religion was part of his façade he had used to fool those around him. Most people were shocked when the news broke that Rader was president of his church congregation, but I wasn’t. When I learned about his longtime ties with Park City’s Christ Lutheran Church, I wanted to shout: “Of course he was!”
Our landmark ten-year study on serial killers revealed as much. We learned that if these guys could choose a profession, it would be minister, police officer, or counselor.
Why? Because of the perks, of course. The single most obvious one being that all these professions involve some type of power and control over others. It’s not surprising that in prison many violent offenders gravitate toward religion—not merely to be a member of a group, but rather to lead the group. Charles “Tex” Watson of the Charles Manson family and David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) are now jailhouse preachers.
But now I could sense that Rader had begun to loosen up, allowing himself to get comfortable with the idea of speaking to someone such as myself who represented the law enforcement community. According to Casarona, he still harbored resentment toward the cops, telling her he was upset with the way they allowed him to figuratively hang himself during his marathon interrogation session.
“I know about you,” he said, chuckling. “I know about what you think of me.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Somebody sent me the newsletter from your Web site, the one you wrote last winter,” he said. “You don’t like guys like me. You think that all of us make choices, so we have to take responsibility for our actions. You said I deserved the death penalty.”
He paused for a moment, chewed on his lip, then continued. “I believe in capital punishment too, you know. And I suppose I deserve the death penalty. But since I never killed anyone after 1994, I’m not eligible for it.”
“Is that what kept you from killing after Dolores Davis’s murder?” I asked, not completely convinced that he hadn’t taken another life after Kansas reinstituted capital punishment in 1994.
“No,” he said.
Rader’s words reinforced my belief that he knew exactly what he was doing when he committed his savage murders. It had nothing to do with any split personality, evil twin, or monster living within him. I thought back to how Rader’s pastor at Christ Lutheran Church wanted to attribute what happened to his parishioner as an example of how a demonic force can corrupt an otherwise healthy, caring, well-adjusted man. I suppose that was the difference between me and a man of the cloth like Rader’s pastor.
“It’s not so bad in here,” Rader went on, switching the subject. “They’ve got me in a twelve-by-nine cell. I have a little window that looks out over the fields. I can see robins out there in the grass. Sometimes I can even see butterflies. I watch a lot of sunsets, too. Every night I try and write up a little entry in my journal about the sunset I just watched.
“I do a lot of writing in here—letters mostly. I get a lot of mail. I miss being outside and getting to work in my garden. I had a pretty big garden at my house, out in the backyard. Maybe one day I’ll be able to go out into the yard, here. That might be nice. But I guess it could probably be dangerous too. So I don’t know . . .”
“You’d probably be a celebrity out in the yard,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” he smiled. “Kind of like a rock star, I guess.”
He paused again, bent down and wiped sweat—or maybe it could have been tears—out of his eyes, then continued. “This is Memorial Day weekend, isn’t it? . . . You know, ever since my dad died, I’d drive out to the cemetery and stick flowers on his grave. Good guy, my old man. I asked Kris to do it for me. To ask him to forgive me, to tell him he didn’t have anything to do with the way I turned out, to ask if he’d tell all my victims up in heaven to forgive me, but I’m not sure if Kris will.”
“She’s under a lot of pressure,” I told him.
“I know she is,” Rader said. “But I really like her. I really do. Not in a lover sort of way. It’s nothing like that. She’s had a hard time because of me, but she’s stuck in there for me.”
I clenched my teeth together. It amazed me how delusional this guy was. The only reason Casarona stuck in there with him was because she had no choice. The people suing her didn’t care if she broke her contract with Rader or not. In their eyes, she’d cast her lot with the devil, and those lawsuits were her just deserts. She could crawl into a corner and try to wish it all away (I’d lost count of how many times she’d claimed to have done that). Or she could keep going and attempt to somehow finish this book that had made her life even more unbearable than it already was. What did she really have to lose?
“I want to thank you for the essay you wrote,” I told him. “Kris gave it to me last night. Very interesting. But I’ve got something to ask you. Beside that question about whether or not your mother was overbearing, you wrote the number one-half.”
“I can’t tell you any more about that,” he replied. “That’s for Kris’s book. I’m saving that for her. Are you going to help her get that published? She said you were.”
“Yes,” I assured him. “I’m going to try to help her. But I can’t promise anything. Publishing is a tough business.”
Rader’s gaze dropped to the floor. A scowl crept across his face. Silence. Casarona was correct: Rader looked depressed. His flat, monotone voice and his lifeless eyes were giveaways. Whatever rush he experienced by coming clean to the cops and from the media circus that ensued had begun to fade. The depression he’d grappled with for most of his life had no doubt returned, and now he had no way to hide from it.
I realized now that Rader hated himself with a passion. He always had. He may not have acted like it or revealed his self-contempt to another person, but deep down he loathed every molecule in his body. And because of that he was psychologically unable to love others or be loved. I’m confident that over time, he grew fond of Paula and his two kids, but the emotion he experienced when he was around them or thought of them had nothing to do with love. At best, it was a feeling of intense familiarity.
Rader was talking again, but the sound had gone screwy. I heard crackling coming out from my speaker, but I decided to keep talking until Rader indicated that he could no longer hear me.
“Something else I wanted to ask you,” I told him. “I had this theory about why you started to cry over the Nancy Fox murder during your sentencing hearing. None of your other kills seemed to affect you, but that one did. You want to hear what I think?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me.”
“I’ve heard of this sort of thing happening from other guys I’ve spoken with,” I told him. “Something happened during that murder. You always said Nancy Fox was your perfect victim, but after I watched you wipe away those tears, I figured it was because she said something to you, something that really got to you, and at that moment you suddenly didn’t want to kill her, but you knew you had to. You knew you’d gone too far to allow her to live.”
Rader scrunched up his face into the most serious look I’d seen all morning, appearing to mull over what I’d just told him. He stared into the camera, but somehow avoided looking at it with his eyes.
“I was pretty robotic during that whole day in court. I was on autopilot,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling much of anything. The reason I cried after Nancy’s father’s testimony was because I started thinking about Kerri, my daughter, and I thought about how I’d feel if something like what happened to Nancy Fox happened to her . . . That made me cry.”
24
I stared at Rader’s image on my screen. His mouth was moving, but the damn speaker appeared to have gone dead again. Because the only thing that ever came out of Rader’s mouth was emptiness cloaked in words, I tried to convince myself that the malfunctioning sound system didn’t matter. But I motioned for a guard to come over and fix it anyway. After a few moments spent shaking some wires and tapping the side of the TV monitor, the guard coaxed the speaker back to life, catching Rader in the midst of a ramble about what compelled him to commit his first murder.
“You already know what the precipitating event was,” he said. “It was all because of my getting laid off at Cessna. I wasn’t having any sexual problems with my wife or financial problems. It was all because of unemployment. It didn’t seem fair. It just didn’t seem fair. I really loved that job.”
“Back up a minute, “ I said. “The sound went on the fritz for a few minutes, just as you were about to tell me what it was that drove you.”
A tiny smile returned to Rader’s face. He seemed to be enjoying this.
“It was all psychological,” he said. “My whole thing when I went into someone’s house was based on a fantasy of bondage. I was especially into self-bondage. I wasn’t a sadist. I never pulled the fingernails or toenails out of anyone. Sex was never part of my fantasy, either. I wanted power. I guess that’s what I was really looking for. That’s why Nancy Fox was my most perfect victim. I got to spend plenty of time with her without any interruptions.”
“Tell me about your neighbor—Marine Hedge?” I asked, hoping to get him talking about his various murders. “You carried her to the basement of your church.”
Rader twisted his face into another one of his ridiculous pensive expressions. “Yes, she was a good one,” he said after a few moments of thought. “I really enjoyed that one. But you know what? Over the years, all the burglaries I began doing were almost as satisfying as the killing. I broke into a lot of houses, stole watches and jewelry and underwear. But it’s just like you wrote in your books. The fantasy is better than the crime—because in my fantasies, everything was always under control. I played the director and the lead actor. Like I told you before, it’s just like watching a movie. I see myself committing the crime, doing all the things I did in real life, only without all the headache or frustration. Because in real life things never quite turned out the way I wanted them to, the way I expected. My victims always seemed to react in ways I didn’t plan.”
Then Rader said, “You know, if there was one killer who I could identify with, it was Harvey Glatman.”
I knew whom he meant. I said, “Yes, he was into binding and psychologically torturing his victims just like you. He was also the first serial killer we know of who chronicled every aspect of his murders with a camera and later developed the pictures in his home darkroom.”
Rader’s smile grew larger. The memory of this kindred spirit appeared to have lifted his mood.
“Kris told me about the book,” I said. “Last night, she told me all about it.”
“You mean Glatman’s book, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Glatman’s book. You told her that if she really wanted to understand you, all she needed to do is read the back cover of the book, the last couple of sentences.”
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