Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (6 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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Your advantage in this case is that his very strong self-centered attitude will be his downfall. He will provide information to a friend or an acquaintance in a local tavern concerning information that he knows about the case. He may even pretend to be an officer working the case. If the BTK Strangler reads police detective magazines, he probably sent away for a “police badge” that he carries on his person. In fact, he may even use this MO to gain admittance into his victims’ homes. He probably flashes his badge whenever opportunity lends itself. (Example paying for a drink in a tavern.) His egocentricity keeps him in your city and he will probably kill again.
Reading an analysis I’d written five years before was nerve wracking. Of course, it was just a thumbnail sketch of what I’d told police when I’d contacted them on the phone, shortly after I’d sent it back to Wichita in 1979. Even though I firmly believed I’d nailed this guy dead-on, I was constantly asking myself if I’d missed something or placed too much the emphasis on the wrong bit of evidence. The pressure to get it right was overwhelming. Knowing that what I wrote could send investigators off in the wrong direction, which could indirectly result in more dead bodies, weighed heavily on me. It was one of the reasons I was so obsessive about my work.
The key to writing the kind of analysis that actually helps investigators do their job is deceptively simple, but it’s something that takes years to teach. In fact, it was only after five years of in-depth training and analysis that I considered one of my wannabes to be an expert. The most important thing is not just to regurgitate back to the police the data they already know.
My profiles were rarely more than five pages. I always ended them with a simple request that investigators pick up the phone and call me. This was why I never inserted any proactive techniques—on how to catch the bad guys—into our reports. I feared that whatever I wrote might get leaked to the press.
In this case, however, I had a hunch that the best use of my expertise would be to develop some proactive recipes to flush this killer out of the woodwork. He’d manipulated the police and the community long enough. The time had come to return the favor and begin messing with his mind. The only question was,
How the hell do we do it?
How the hell do we do it?
I decided to skip lunch, gather up all my notes on the case, and walk over to the third floor of a nearby building on the FBI campus. This was where the bureau’s legal unit did all its research, and I loved to sit up there in the library and gaze out through the massive windows at the green, rolling Virginia countryside. The view of all those oak and maple trees, along with all that sunlight, was definitely a hell of a lot more conducive to clear thought than an often foul-smelling office in the forensic science building. Up there, surrounded by all that blue sky and those green treetops, things just felt different.
I organized the crime scene reports and my extensive notes in front of me in neat piles on the table—one stack for each series of murders. I knew that somewhere within those stacks of paper there existed a single, simple fact, a piece of evidence—either physical or verbal—that I might be able to use against the UNSUB. It wasn’t enough for me to simply serve up some ideas that I believed might prove useful in the case. I was consumed by the idea of helping police find a way of taking this killer down. Before coming up with an effective proactive strategy, I wanted to force-feed all the gruesome, mundane details of the case into my brain one last time. The white eight-by-twelve-inch piles bulged off the table, resembling four freshly dug graves covered with snow.
The first thing that came to mind was that the cops in Wichita had done everything right. They’d interviewed thousands of people and tracked down countless potential suspects (including a former police officer), none of whom turned out to be the right guy. For the past four months, the department’s recently assembled task force, composed of six detectives, had sifted through the mountains of old case files that had accumulated over the last decade, familiarizing themselves with every convoluted twist and turn the case had taken.
One thing was certain: our UNSUB was in the driver’s seat. Not only that, he had grown smarter with every kill and seemed to enjoy toying with the police. But perhaps the most unnerving thing about BTK was how he seemed to defy so much of what we took for granted about serial sexual killers. The one thing different we knew about him now that we didn’t in 1979 was that three months after the Otero homicides, he had been responsible for the messy, nearly botched murder of Kathryn Bright.
Kathy Bright’s brother, Kevin, who miraculously survived the attacked despite being shot twice in the face, described how his sister’s killer attempted to convince them that he was a fugitive. He would, of course, need to tie them up, BTK told them. But all he really wanted was some food, money, and their car keys. Then he’d be on his way. Rader lived only a short distance from Kathy and Kevin, and had no intention of leaving them unharmed.
Having a living witness provide a firsthand account of the killer’s technique for calming and lulling his potential victims into allowing him to tie them up gave us a priceless bit of insight into how the UNSUB carried out his crimes. His homicides were difficult to pigeonhole because they possessed elements of both organization and disorganization. He was a control freak who came prepared, often arriving at the homes of his victims with rope, gags, guns, and a knife. He didn’t use force to convince his victims to go along with him. He used bullshit. He pretended to be a relatively harmless thug, using words to manipulate his victims into allowing themselves to be tied up, usually without any struggle.
But he also left some things to chance. If his intended victim wasn’t available, he would strike the next best target he could find. On several occasions, it appeared he had difficulty controlling his victims. And he was hardly the neatest killer I’d encountered, leaving behind semen near the bodies of two of his kills.
Then there was his peculiar way of posing his victims. I’d never come across another killer who did it the way he did. He primped and preened the bodies in erotic positions, clothing, and bindings as fuel for his masturbatory fantasies. But he had also laid out and displayed nearly all the bodies of his victims—except for Kathy Bright, who died of stab wounds—for the investigators who arrived at his crime scenes long after he’d fled.
It was as if he positioned the corpses the way a florist might arrange flowers. He wanted to shock, yet his visual statements were also fairly tame and modest—at least in terms of the work I’d seen other sociopathic serial killers leave behind. Compared to those maniacs who left severed heads propped up on TV sets or their victims spread-eagled on the floor with various objects inserted into their vaginas or rectums, UNSUB was downright juvenile and soft core. Nevertheless, he used his victims as inanimate props, posing them to resemble a scene out of the pages of a detective magazine, leaving them out in the open so that the first person to discover the body would practically trip over it when entering the front door of the victim’s home.
Without a doubt, BTK was a sadist who inflicted unfathomable horrors upon his victims. Yet he also differed from all the other sexual sadists I’d studied, guys who needed to inflict physical torture in order to be sexually satisfied. He got off by employing a form of torture that was predominantly mental, not physical. Although he seemed obsessed with physical torture, it wasn’t part of what’s referred to as his “signature,” which is what a killer must do to satisfy himself psychologically. BTK’s signature was bondage—not physical torture.
BTK never penetrated any of his victims. It would have been easy to interpret this type of behavior as though he were trying to say
You’re not even good enough for me to rape.
But I knew better.
You’re not even good enough for me to rape.
But I knew better.
His decision to not rape his victims or engage in necrophilia actually told me that despite BTK’s sexual obsessions, deep inside his mind he felt hopelessly inadequate. His opinion of himself was so low—and his fear of women so great—that he could never bring himself to thrust himself so intimately into any of his victims. They were used purely as props. Masturbation was the only sexual activity he enjoyed during his binding, torture, and killing.
When I thought of the UNSUB as a boy, I couldn’t imagine that he had ever raped anyone, which was unlike a lot of sexual predators. I did imagine him learning his craft as a Peeping Tom. If nothing else, this youthful pastime gave him a priceless crash course in surveillance techniques. Monitoring and studying his victims were absolutely crucial to him. He seemed to love the thrill of the hunt probably even more than the actual killing. By the time he actually did strike, he’d spent so much time fantasizing over what he intended to do to his victim that he’d convinced himself that he controlled every aspect of their environment.
As for his victims, he told police in the handful of taunting communiqués he’d sent over the years that he chose them based on both planning and spur-of-the-moment opportunity. His intended victims had to be available when the overpowering urge to kill struck. If they weren’t, he moved on to another target.
There was something else: judging from the way he managed to keep his crime scenes so relatively free of fingerprints and other incriminating evidence, he was an extremely well-organized person, someone fixated on detail. Inwardly he was an insecure, self-hating wreck. Outwardly, however, he exuded a pompous attitude that made it appear as though he possessed a grandiose opinion of himself. It was another one of his crazy, sick paradoxes.
What I also found interesting were those communications he’d sent police over the years, boasting of his prowess as a killer and his ability to elude law enforcement. From the language he used, he was obviously both fascinated by cop subculture and investigative procedure and quite familiar with them. I was convinced that he was either employed in some form of law enforcement, probably low down in rank or status, like a security guard or parking violation officer, or just got off dreaming about the power such a job could bestow on him.
As is often the case with serial killers, his slayings were the most important undertakings of his life, imbuing his otherwise empty existence with meaning. From his letters, it seemed obvious that he was a nobody who, because of his unfathomable savagery, suddenly felt like a celebrity. He’d become addicted to seeing his crimes written about in the newspaper and discussed on TV. I bet that hearing others discuss his killings proved almost as thrilling and satisfying as committing the crimes themselves.
Although he had killed men and children, it seemed obvious that women were his primary targets. Everyone else just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I believed that deep down, he loathed women. Whatever conflicts he’d had with them, as well as with society, were released through the murders he committed. Within his troubled mind, he took no responsibility for his actions. He was clearly in some state of depression, unable to genuinely love or be loved. As a result, his life was one in which he must seek out excitement and drama in order to feel alive. And although he was able to put up a good front to others, the world he lived for—and lived in—had nothing to do with reality. It was based purely on the sadistic fantasies inside his brain.
By his own admission, BTK took trinkets from the homes of his victims. He used them as fuel for his fantasies. I felt confident that they were one of the few things that quieted his head, which is why he needed to collect and preserve the trophies of his conquests, taken from his crime scenes. Having the personal possessions of his victims reminded him of his “glory days.” I imagined that all he needed to do to relive one of his kills was hold his victim’s belongings in his hands. Each homicide brought with it a psychological high that would quickly evaporate, always leaving him alone with his depressed thoughts. His trophies and keepsakes no doubt proved a bit more effective at keeping the depression away. But the peace these ghostly mementos brought never completely removed his feelings of depression and anxiety.
The question that stumped me and everybody else involved in the case was this:
Why had so many years lapsed since his last murder?
I couldn’t understand it. Every time I pondered the question, I came up with another theory. All of them made sense. None of them I could prove.
Why had so many years lapsed since his last murder?
I couldn’t understand it. Every time I pondered the question, I came up with another theory. All of them made sense. None of them I could prove.
Perhaps he’d been picked up on some unrelated charge and was now rotting in a prison cell or mental institution? Or could the police have gotten too close to him during one of the various phases of their investigation? Maybe they even interviewed him as a potential suspect, and the experience might have proved too unnerving for this otherwise unflappable sociopath?
One thing was certain—serial sexual predators don’t wake up one morning, decide to turn over a new leaf, and start their lives over. For all I knew, he could have been killed in a car wreck, although I had a hunch that we weren’t going to get off that easy. Someone as sick and dangerous as BTK will stop killing only when he is killed or gets locked behind bars. My research had proven to me that this is the only way to rein in these guys. Rehabilitation is a fairy tale.
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