Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (56 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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But seated there in the sweltering late morning heat, I realized something. On the far right side of the building, completely opposite to where Rader’s office was located, sat the headquarters of Park City’s ten-officer police force. As often as Rader told himself that he loved his job as a compliance officer, deep down he knew it was an ill-fitting substitute for what he truly yearned to be doing: working as a cop. Every morning, instead of heading to the right side of the building, to the police station, Rader was forced to follow the little sidewalk that stretched to the left, to his job as a dogcatcher. It was just one more disappointment in a life filled with disappointments.
The drive to Rader’s house took only about three minutes. To get there, I drove past the city’s tiny public library, located in a run-down mini-mall, where he often did much of his research for his final barrage of communiqués to police.
Rader’s neighborhood felt like a cemetery. At this hour, the sun burned so hot overhead that nobody bothered watering their lawns. Hours would pass before the hoses and sprinklers were turned on. I parked, walked up Rader’s cracked, crumbling concrete driveway, and noticed a sign in the plate-glass window of his neighbor’s house advertising piano lessons. Could this be the same neighbor mentioned in his journal? I wondered. The one he fantasized over as she clipped evergreen boughs from her shrubs to make a holiday wreath?
There was nothing out of the ordinary about his place. It was roughly the same size as all his neighbors’ homes and—besides having an overgrown yard—resembled every other residence on the street. People always seem surprised whenever I tell them how unremarkable the home of a killer can be. Of course, it’s only human nature to want anything associated with a monster to stand out, much as everyone wanted Rader to resemble some sort of hideous ghoul with blood dripping from his teeth, someone who could be easily plucked out of a crowd.
The problem is, they look like us and to some degree can act like us. The only time they don’t occurs during those horrifying few moments when they morph into their true identity as a secret killer. But precious few people ever get a glimpse of that side of the killer’s personality. And those who do seldom live long enough to tell anyone about it.
I made my way to Rader’s backyard and stood there in the middle of the brown, dead grass, surveying the space that stretched off behind Rader’s house. I’ve always felt that if you wanted to understand someone, all you need do was spend some time in his backyard; it is there, hidden by the façade-like front of his home, that a person dares to act out all those things he keeps hidden away from the rest of the world.
The yard was large and comfortable, roughly the area of two tennis courts laid side by side. Tall, leafy hickory trees bordered much of the perimeter of the yard, but in the center the sun had baked the ground into hard clay. When I spotted Rader’s empty, battered aluminum storage shed, I poked around inside, searching for something I figured I’d know when I saw it. But the shed had long since been picked over—no doubt by the police or someone looking to make a few bucks on eBay. I made a note to myself to check the Web site to see if any of his belongings turned up there.
Rader kept his fishing gear back there in that shed, a source had told me, but it was gone now—except for a few hooks scattered on the floor, a couple of sinkers, and a tiny ball of knotted-up nylon fishing line. Standing there, it occurred to me that this was perfect fishing weather, and I found myself wondering if Rader was standing at the window of his prison cell, looking out across the prairie, thinking this exact same thought.
I recalled another story I’d heard from Casarona about Rader that happened on a day similar to this one. He was gazing out his cell window, daydreaming about God only knows what. He noticed a prison employee picking up trash in a stretch of grass near one of the many fences that encircled the facility. Rader’s attention turned toward the man’s slow, languid movements as he picked his way across the tough, wind-burned blades of grass. His head was fairly quiet. Rader wasn’t thinking about much of anything, but suddenly everything turned to shit, just the way everything did in his life. Because when the garbage man turned and spotted the familiar-looking visage of Dennis Rader staring at him through one of the prison’s thick bullet-resistant windows, it was clear that he didn’t like what he saw one bit.
In the time it took Rader to blink his eyes, the garbage man held up his middle finger, flipping Rader off. This rubbed Rader the wrong way.
Who the hell did that guy think he was?
Rader heard himself think.
That idiot is an employee of the state’s Department of Corrections. His behavior certainly isn’t the type of conduct taxpayers should tolerate. It’s not only disrespectful; it no doubt violates some sort rule of conduct for state employees.
Rader heard himself think.
That idiot is an employee of the state’s Department of Corrections. His behavior certainly isn’t the type of conduct taxpayers should tolerate. It’s not only disrespectful; it no doubt violates some sort rule of conduct for state employees.
So Rader turned away from his prairie vista and put out a call for a guard. When the guard arrived at Rader’s cell, Rader told him what had just transpired and how he didn’t much appreciate being flipped off. The guard wrote up a report and disappeared. A few minutes later, Rader heard the cellblock’s speaker system crackle to life.
“Whoever flipped off BTK,” the voice intoned, “needs to stop. He finds it disrespectful . . . Again, whoever flipped off BTK, please stop this disrespectful behavior at once.”
Rader smiled and shook his head.
That ought to take care of that,
he told himself. A split second later, the cellblock exploded into a cacophony of laughter, jeers, and whistles. Before Rader knew it, he was laughing too.
That ought to take care of that,
he told himself. A split second later, the cellblock exploded into a cacophony of laughter, jeers, and whistles. Before Rader knew it, he was laughing too.
It was a peculiar image, I thought. Because at first glance it almost appeared that Rader was laughing at himself. But he wasn’t. This would have been impossible for an egomaniac like Rader. He would never have mentioned this incident to Casarona if he had understood that those other inmates were laughing at him. Instead, he interpreted the event as yet another example of how, for a brief instant, he’d become the center of the universe, the guy everybody was thinking and talking about.
He was BTK, he told himself. Even in prison, he was the guy giving orders, and, narcissistic sociopath that he was, he expected special treatment.
I poked around the backyard a bit longer, kicking at the dirt and dead grass, checking out what remained of Rader’s vegetable gardens, where he claimed to enjoy futzing about on summer evenings after work. His two black plastic compost bins were nearly covered over by vines and weeds. Of all the low-life psychopaths in whose lives I’d immersed myself, Rader had his role down pat. No wonder it took police so long to catch him. He could out-normal even the most normal person. If they gave out awards for alter egos, he’d be a contender for an Oscar.
I tried to imagine Rader back here, playing with his kids, pushing his daughter, Kerri, on the now rusted swing set or sitting up on the now splintered planked floor of the treehouse with Brian. No matter how I attempted to picture a scene out of an idyllic Norman Rockwell painting, the images of Rader interacting with his family always lapsed into something hellish, terrifying, something resembling a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. The vision caused me to experience yet another deep pang of pity for Rader’s wife and kids. What could compel a man to play charades like that with the three people who trusted him most?
The rickety aluminum and wood bench sat in a corner of the yard near the swing set, facing away from the house. I dropped down on it, feeling it nearly collapse beneath my weight, then closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the pulsing sounds the locusts made in the hot, still air. Off in the distance to the west, I could see a bank of dark storm clouds forming.
I thought back to that sweltering afternoon in August 2005 when millions of Americans glued themselves to their TV sets as BTK detailed his murders. Listening to how calculated and planned each of his homicides were, hearing him discussing his crimes like a chef discussing a menu, sickened me—even with all my experience with guys like this. I’ve often wondered about the impact it must have had on regular folks. Standing there in that Sedgwick County courtroom in the suit he’d last worn to church, Rader became our nation’s newest, darkest anticelebrity.
Tucked away in the front pocket of my shirt was the letter I’d found in my room last night. I rubbed my fingers over the fabric to make sure it was still there before pulling it out, unfolding it, then spending the next few minutes reading over the three pages of text again.
I wondered if Paula ever sat out here on those Saturday mornings when, I was told, Dennis used to shoo everybody out of the house so that he could “tidy” the place up, leaving him alone to rummage through his stash of mementos from his kill.
I wondered if this might have been where she went the first time she caught her husband hanging himself in drag. I tried to picture her out here, confused, hurt, wondering how the man who always told her he loved her could do such a thing. In her own way, Paula Rader performed a minor miracle. Although this is of no consolation to the families whose relatives her husband murdered, when Paula stumbled on Dennis hanging from the bathroom door, she inadvertently forced him to go into a type of low-grade hibernation. Outside of being arrested or killed, this was potentially the best thing that could have happened to Rader, preventing him from killing with even greater frequency. Who knows how many lives Paula may have saved?
It was nearly one in the afternoon. I had a night flight to catch back to Dulles International that left from Kansas City, so I decided it was time to start my four-hour drive to the airport. Walking back across Rader’s yard, part of me wanted to put a match to his house, to erase this ugly monument to the lie he lived for decades. I doubted any of his neighbors would care.
But, as interesting as I’d always found arson to be from a criminology standpoint, I hurried to my car, climbed inside, and cranked up the air conditioning. A few minutes later I was speeding past Wichita, making my way back to the interstate that would take me to Kansas City. Fields of wheat and corn rushed past my window for nearly an hour before I noticed the message light flashing on my cell phone.
I looked at the numbers and saw that Casarona had just called, so I retrieved the message.
“I can’t take this anymore,” she moaned. “Last night, I talked to Dennis. I swear to God half the time I feel like I’m talking to a little boy, not the monster I know he is.
“You know what he tells me? He tells me that he’s felt depressed all day and says, ‘I know I have no room to say this, but I really miss McDonald’s. I really miss their hamburgers and fries.’ I almost dropped my phone. Can you believe that? He killed ten people and he feels bad that he can’t have a cheeseburger and fries. What do you say to that? I wanted to throw up. I made myself stay calm. I felt like his mother or something.
“I said in this really patient voice, ‘Dennis, you really need to remember why you’re in there. You need to remember that.’
“He got all silent after that, then he said, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ I can’t take this anymore, John. Why did I ever write him that damn letter? I have no idea how can you stand doing this . . .”
Casarona’s voice faded away. I figured I must have hit a dead zone.
I continued my trek east as my head churned through everything I’d absorbed over the past few days. Ten people were dead; countless other lives had holes torn out of them, holes that would forever remain empty.
All because of one man.
For just over three decades, I’d been trying to understand the man who called himself BTK. I’d now spent the past year immersing myself in his world, interviewing the cops who tracked him, talking to his friends, reading his journals, pouring through the words and images he left behind on paper. Here was what I had learned:
What was his motive?
Initially, Rader’s motive for killing was simply to act out his bondage fantasies with a victim, then kill her. Nothing too complicated about that. But his reasons for killing began to evolve when he realized what effect his actions had on the men and women of Wichita. The adrenaline rush proved intoxicating. The community feared him. Overnight, he’d gone from being a pathetic nobody to an all-powerful puppet master. He pulled the strings and everybody danced. Before long, terrorizing the community and outwitting the police became as satisfying as acting out those dark fantasies on his victims.
Initially, Rader’s motive for killing was simply to act out his bondage fantasies with a victim, then kill her. Nothing too complicated about that. But his reasons for killing began to evolve when he realized what effect his actions had on the men and women of Wichita. The adrenaline rush proved intoxicating. The community feared him. Overnight, he’d gone from being a pathetic nobody to an all-powerful puppet master. He pulled the strings and everybody danced. Before long, terrorizing the community and outwitting the police became as satisfying as acting out those dark fantasies on his victims.
How did he pick his victims?
What Rader really sought were women who were vulnerable. Nothing more. His victims could be any age. All that mattered was that he could bind and dress them exactly the way he wanted. Rader really didn’t care what his victims looked like, because once he’d taken their lives, they became virtual entities existing only his mind, where he could sexually assault them over and over again, embellishing all the details of the crime or their physical features in any way he wanted.
What Rader really sought were women who were vulnerable. Nothing more. His victims could be any age. All that mattered was that he could bind and dress them exactly the way he wanted. Rader really didn’t care what his victims looked like, because once he’d taken their lives, they became virtual entities existing only his mind, where he could sexually assault them over and over again, embellishing all the details of the crime or their physical features in any way he wanted.
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