Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (53 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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“Kris told you that?” he asked, looking alarmed that she would have leaked this bit of information to me.
“You remember what the back of the book says?” I asked. “Because I do. I memorized it.”
“You did?” he asked, obviously flattered that I’d gone to the trouble of memorizing something that I’d been told was so important to him.
“‘For decades,’” I said, reciting the copy from the back cover, “‘these infamous deeds would inspire television and movie plots. But until now, there has been no definitive account for the forces that drove one of America’s most legendary serial killers. And never before has it been explained why, for Harvey Glatman, his crimes weren’t about killing, raping and torturing at all—they were all about the rope.’”
Rader sat there, moving his lips as though he were repeating the words I’d just recited to him. I waited for him to say something, but he remained silent. So I spoke.
“So all you really cared about was binding your victims with rope?” I asked. “Was the hunting for victims, even the killing, just secondary? Your fantasy was to look at someone who you had totally immobilized and made powerless, someone who you were in total control of, free to do as you pleased.”
He nodded, listening to me as though I were a doctor describing some type of physical condition that had troubled him for most of his life.
“So you never really wanted to sexually assault them. That would almost be like cheating on Paula, and you certainly didn’t want to do that . . . What you wanted to do was masturbate as you looked down at the crime scene you’d created for yourself.”
I waited for Rader to say something, but he remained silent. Judging from the look on his face, I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know about himself. But he’d never heard it come from someone else’s mouth before, and he seemed almost stunned by it, as if I’d held up a mirror in front of his face and the image he glimpsed staring back confused him.
A few moments later, he stammered, “But I was a little bit different than Glatman. He didn’t communicate with the police and he didn’t have a wife, a family, and all my social obligations.”
Next, I brought in another serial killer, as I knew he loved the comparisons.
“I once mentioned your case to convince David Berkowitz, that Son of Sam guy, to speak with me.”
Rader’s face brightened when he heard that. “You used me to get to Berkowitz?” he asked. “When would that have been? What year?”
“That was in 1981,” I told him. “Back when you were still working for ADT.”
“You know a lot about me,” he said, smiling. “But you know Berkowitz was also different than me. He was after lovers in the park—and his crimes, like you wrote in one of your books, were impersonal. . . . You know they have another serial killer in here named John Robinson.”
“I know all about John Robinson,” I told him. “I wrote a book about him several years ago.”
“You did?” he asked. “I never saw that one.”
“Nobody did,” I said. “Nobody wanted to read about John Robinson.”
“He was sort of like me because of all the bondage stuff he was into,” Rader said. “But he was into that whole discipline and masochistic stuff which I’m not. He was more sophisticated than me when he chose his victims. He often used the Internet to lure them in . . . I found mine the old-fashioned way. I got in my car and started driving.
“You know, I used to love driving around with classical music on, looking for projects in areas where I felt comfortable, where I knew my way around and felt familiar with the streets. I can’t tell you how many times I cruised past the homes of my past victims over the years. I’d slow down and stare at the house and felt this feeling of accomplishment settle over me because that house was my trophy. It reminded me of what I’d gotten away with, of a secret I knew and nobody else did.”
“Did you ever visit the graves of any of your victims?” I asked.
“No, but I cut their obituaries out of the newspaper and read them over and over again. But I never went to the cemeteries, though. I’d read that the cops sometimes staked out those places, so it didn’t seem to be a safe place to go.”
“What about if the police had organized a community meeting for residents, in order to update them on the killings and ask for citizen volunteers. Would you have attended?” I asked.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d know for certain that the place would be filled with police just waiting for me to show up.”
I told him about my super-cop theory, explaining how the intended goal was to make the UNSUB identify with a single officer instead of an entire police force. As he listened, his eyes grew wide, and his tongue darted over his top lip as if he were trying to wet it.
“Yes,” he said, grasping what it was I was speaking about. “Ken Landwehr was kinda like that. For the longest time I really liked him. He seemed like a good cop, a straight shooter. The two of us would have had a lot to talk about. You know, before they caught me, I sometimes thought about what it would be like to sit down with him and have a good long talk about everything.
“But then he lied to me about the computer disk and called me all those names. Said I was a sick pervert and all that. I respected him, but I don’t respect him now . . .
“I think the guy I liked best was Richard LaMunyon. He was the chief of police back in the 1970s. Seemed like a real nice guy. I was hoping that he and I could sit down and have a cup of coffee at the jail after my arrest. But he never came.”
Amazing. Rader still believed that he and the police shared some sort of professional camaraderie. I’d suspected that BTK was a wannabe cop back when I first looked at the case in 1979, but until sitting here and listening to him speak, I hadn’t realized how entrenched his delusion was. If only we’d been able to better capitalize on this frailty of his, to use it against him. Part of me wanted to reach through the TV monitor and beat some sense into his brain. Talk about paradoxes. Rader was too savvy to visit one of his victim’s graves or attend a community meeting, yet he somehow believed that Landwehr or LaMunyon would actually sit down to have a cup of coffee with him and chew the fat.
“How did it make you feel when LaMunyon stood up at that press conference in 1979 and announced that the police had no leads in the killings?” I asked.
“That felt good,” he laughed. “No, that felt great. It meant the police didn’t know anything. It meant I could relax and stop looking over my shoulder every two minutes. That was tiring. But something I didn’t like was when that district attorney said I used to hang myself at Boy Scout outings. That’s just not true. I wish you could clear that up for me in your book. I never did that. I never would have done that. That’s one of the things that really bothers me. I love the Boy Scouts far too much to have ever done anything like that during a camp-out.”
The fact that Rader strangled his neighbor during a Boy Scout camp-out didn’t bother him in the least. Like every criminal, violent and nonviolent, he had his own twisted code of ethics. Murder was one thing. He just didn’t want anyone to think he was the type who might do something weird like hang himself during a Scout outing.
Rader, of course, didn’t know what I knew about him. I’d read an entry in his journal detailing his late-night exploits in the back of his truck during a camp-out during the mid-1980s. On that autumn night, Rader didn’t wrap a rope around his throat, but he did strip off his clothes, pull on a pair of women’s underwear and a bra, wrap himself up in ropes and dog collars, and clamp a pair of handcuffs over his hands. Problem was, the damn lock got jammed, and he couldn’t remove the cuffs. So he lay there in the back of his truck, thrashing and grunting, sweating like a pig as he desperately tried to free himself.
He wrote in his journal that at one point he feared he might have to begin shouting for one of his young Scouts to help extricate him from his bindings. But then, at the last moment, all that perspiration lathering his body allowed his wrists to slide out of his cuffs. He removed the rest of his bindings, cleaned himself up, then returned to the campfire to listen to ghost stories and instruct whoever might be interested on some advanced knot-tying tips.
Rader’s mouth was primed and ready now. Even if he didn’t want them to, the words had begun to spill out of his mouth. I could push a bit harder, lean on him with just a little more force in order to get him to take me where I wanted to go.
Next I decided to ask him about his earliest victims—the animals. Since his arrest, Rader had flip-flopped over the issue of whether he bound, tortured, or killed any animals while he was growing up. His diaries touched on the subject. During his marathon gabfest with police, he confirmed as much, explaining that he’d often take the animals to a barn near his house and kill them. But lately Rader had changed his tune, telling Casarona that he never would have taken the life of an animal because he loved them far too much.
“Tell me about the animals, Dennis,” I said. “How did you kill them, and why always in the barn?”
The face of the man on my TV monitor went stern. His thick, bushy eyebrows arched downward.
“I know where you’re going with this,” he said. “It’s part of that homicidal triangle—along with bedwetting and starting fires. But I never killed any animals. I would never have done that. You know, at one time I wanted to be a vet? So I just couldn’t do something like that to an animal.”
I knew he was lying. But I also knew that I didn’t dare call his bluff. All I could do was try to salvage a part of the truth. “OK, so you didn’t kill them, but you tied a few dogs and cats up, right?” I asked. “And why always in barns? What was it about barns?”
For the first time all morning, he looked almost embarrassed. In his mind, torturing and killing humans was one thing, but performing the same atrocities on animals was something else altogether.
“I just always felt safe in a barn,” he said. “Just something about them. Maybe because barns are always detached from the house, separate, off away by itself. You can do things in a barn and no one will interrupt you. It’s more private than a basement, and I always liked basements. Did a lot of stuff in my parents’ basement.”
He stopped talking. Judging from the angle of his eyes in relation to the video camera in front of him, he was once again staring at the floor. He looked ashamed.
“I never killed any animals,” he said. “But I did tie some up and then I masturbated next to them.”
Why wouldn’t he cop to it?
I wondered.
Why couldn’t he admit to torturing and killing an animal?
Part of the answer had to do with the contradictory, unsettling nature of violent criminals. They’ll elaborate on the goriest details of a case, but then turn evasive over some minor point. In other words, Rader was embarrassed. I’d spent enough time working on farms in high school, hoping to earn school credits to get into a vet school, to know what sort of unspoken things sometimes occurred on a farm when no one was watching.
I wondered.
Why couldn’t he admit to torturing and killing an animal?
Part of the answer had to do with the contradictory, unsettling nature of violent criminals. They’ll elaborate on the goriest details of a case, but then turn evasive over some minor point. In other words, Rader was embarrassed. I’d spent enough time working on farms in high school, hoping to earn school credits to get into a vet school, to know what sort of unspoken things sometimes occurred on a farm when no one was watching.
At Montana State University, where I spent a few years as an undergraduate, the coeds had a motto that went something like “Montana State. Where men are men and sheep are nervous.”
That pretty much summed things up. Seeing Rader’s shamed expression, I not only realized that had he killed his share of animals as a youth but also wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d engaged in a bit of sexual experimentation with them as well.
That was what led me to my next question: “Tell me about your fascination with autoeroticism,” I asked.
Rader’s green eyes did a double take. His face went blank. “What’s that—autoeroticism?” he asked. Once again, I realized we’d given him far too much credit. He appeared to have no idea that the activity he performed with a rope during his “motel parties,” out in the privacy of the woods, or down in his parents’ basement actually had a name. For all he knew, when I used the term “autoeroticism,” I was talking about inserting a portion of his anatomy into the exhaust pipe of a car. So I explained the clinical definition of the term, and Rader once again shook his head back and forth, claiming he’d never hung himself because it was too risky.
“I just wouldn’t do that,” he said, his head now turned sideways. “That’s far too dangerous. People die doing that sort of stuff, and that was the last thing I wanted to have happen.”
He was lying, of course. Not only had several reliable sources confirmed as much, but I also knew that he’d written about this activity far too many times in his journals for it not to be true.
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