During most of his time in high school, Rader put in long hours at Leeker’s Family Foods, working as a bagboy, trying to save up enough money for a car. Working was hardly a sacrifice, as deep down he never felt particularly comfortable hanging out with the other kids. It required too much effort. Yet on some occasions, he actually enjoyed the company of others.
Sometimes at night, Rader and a buddy would drive out to the city dump and blast rats with their .22s. This sort of hunting required plenty of patience, because rats are easily spooked. So the first thing they’d do after shutting off the engine was to kill the headlights. According to the friend, they’d sit there in the darkness, waiting for the city’s vermin to delude themselves that all was safe, that the danger had passed and it was OK to come out of hiding. While passing the time, the two friends would talk about things, whispering—so that the rats couldn’t hear them—about what they wanted to do with their lives.
Like any other teenager, Rader had dreams and ambitions—although to his friend who reported this to me, they sometimes seemed a bit unrealistic for someone with his lackluster student record. For a while there, he was telling his buddies that he wanted to be a rocket scientist when he got older, a profession that seemed so beyond his capabilities that it was hard not to laugh. To most people who knew him, he seemed most likely to end up being some sort of city worker, perhaps a bus driver. If he got lucky and knew someone, maybe he could get hired on somewhere as a cop, they thought.
One of his friends said that by the time high school was finishing up, Rader was contemplating becoming a game warden—which made sense to those who thought they knew him. After all, he certainly seemed to be fond of animals. He was also an avid outdoorsman, the kind of guy who appeared at home in the woods with a shotgun or fishing rod in his hands, just happy to be out there walking through the mud, surrounded by all those elm and poplar trees. Whenever he was hunting for dove, quail, or rabbit, one hunting buddy said, he was the type who always took the “kill” shot. He went out of his way to make sure that none of the animals he shot suffered. And over the years, he’d matured into one of those hunters who didn’t just venture out into the woods in order to bag as many birds as his permit would allow.
Sure, he still loved to hear his gun go boom. And he still enjoyed getting a good shot in from time to time. But more than anything else, Rader just appeared to have an ease about him when he put on his hunting jacket and flannel cap. According to a friend, he didn’t need to be killing something in order to appear content when he traveled into the woods. It was enough to just be out there with his shotgun, going through the rituals of a hunter.
They usually had to wait only about twenty minutes before the rats would come scurrying out into the open. To become a proficient rodent killer, you had to trust your gut and work with your partner as a team. You had to sense exactly when to hit the headlights, which would cause the pupils of any rodent within their reach to glow red as the tip of a cigarette.
Then, for a few brief, glorious moments, time would slow down, and the animal, surprised by the blinding burst of light, would freeze. And it was at that moment the two friends would pull the triggers on their rifles, then scramble out of the car and go poking through the piles of rubbish, plucking out the bloodied carcasses. Afterwards, they’d climb back inside, kill the headlights, and wait for the rats to return.
Rader was good at the waiting part, his friend told me. That type of patience came naturally to him. What his friend didn’t know at the time was that this trait would serve Rader well when he began hunting other things besides rats.
11
My computer screen pulsed and glowed. Hours had seeped by, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away.
The hotel room had long ago grown dark, so I sat in the blackness. The only light was leaking out from the disturbing words and images on my monitor. My vision had begun to grow blurry, so I stood up, turned on a lamp, and walked to the bathroom to fetch a washcloth. I allowed the warm water from the sink to flow over the cloth, then I wrung it out and pressed it over my eyes, hoping to wash away the residue of what I’d just read. But I knew it wouldn’t work. And deep down, I didn’t want it to. After all, I’d come to Wichita to wallow in Dennis Rader, to open up his sick head and dive into his swamplike mind in order to answer the questions I’d begun asking decades before.
“You’ve got miles to go before you sleep, buddy,” I mumbled to myself. “Now get back at it.”
I tossed the washcloth in the sink, trudged dutifully back to my computer, and resumed reading.
Shortly after graduating from Wichita Heights High School in June 1963, Dennis Rader yearned to feel it. He was desperate to experience that sensation he’d been wondering about for all those years, and he figured the time had finally come to up the ante just a bit and do something that involved a bit more risk.
Pulling off a bold crime was something he later confessed to fantasizing over ever since he’d heard about how those two guys walked into the Clutter family farmhouse, tied up mom, dad, and the two kids with ropes, then blew everyone away with a shotgun. The killings took place in Holcomb, Kansas, just two hundred miles down the road from Wichita. Rader was fourteen years old when it happened. From time to time he’d read about the matter in the local paper or hear people talking about it on the radio. Two years after Rader graduated, Truman Capote would explore every facet of the Clutter murders in his harrowing classic In Cold Blood.
The summer after earning his high school diploma, Rader began to wonder how it would feel to strike deep into enemy territory like those two guys did when they broke into the Clutter farmhouse. They just waltzed in there and took charge. That had to be a wonderful feeling, he told himself. After all, it was one thing to strangle a cat in an old run-down barn or start an occasional fire in some random dumpster. The risk was fairly low that he’d ever get caught doing something like that. And even if he did, he figured that nobody would probably give a damn.
“He’s just going through a phase,” they’d say. “That’s all it is. Boys can be like that.”
But those murders in Holcomb, now that was plain bold with a capital B. He just couldn’t shake it loose from his mind. And once he’d graduated, Rader figured he had nothing to lose anymore. He’d managed to fool everyone for all those years, and now nothing could hold him back. So he cooked up a little stunt that he told himself might hold a bit of promise. It wasn’t anything like what those killers in Holcomb did. But still, it had its merits.
For much of that summer, he went to work rehearsing every element of it, over and over again in his head, plotting out every move, every variable that he might encounter. Sometimes, in an introspective moment, he’d ask himself why he’d want to do something like this. And, as he told police after his arrest in February 2005, he’d hear himself answer: just for the hell of it.
But deep down, part of him knew that wasn’t the full reason. Deep down, he knew that this was the only way he could feel the excitement, the rush.
One night he up and did it. On his way home from work at Leeker’s, he parked his car a few blocks away from his old high school and went for a walk. A few minutes later he arrived outside his former alma mater. The place looked pitch black inside. He walked around the building, just to make sure that no janitors were lurking around the property. When he finally decided that all was safe, he clambered up onto the roof, popped open one of the skylights, and jumped down into the darkness. The moment his shoes hit the floor, a wonderful sensation coursed through his body. It made him feel like a spy, an interloper, the ultimate invader who had dared to go somewhere he didn’t belong. He walked through the darkness for a while, soaking up the feeling. It was indescribable, vaguely sexual. Eventually, he wandered into one of his old classrooms, managed to locate a piece of chalk in the nearly pitch-black room, and scribbled some profanities on the board.
A half hour later, he was back home and getting ready for bed.
It was in the first few months of 19
65 that one of his acquaintances convinced him that if he ever wanted to do anything in life other than work as a clerk at Leeker’s, he needed a college degree. Rader realized that he was probably right. By that point, he’d grown so frustrated and restless since graduating from high school that he began looking at colleges. But instead of opting to attend one of the lower-priced state schools in the region, he picked Kansas Wesleyan, a four-year college run by the Methodist Church, located ninety miles north of Wichita in Salina. I never was able to ascertain exactly how someone with Rader’s lackluster high school GPA could have gotten accepted to a school like Wesleyan. But something told me that Rader’s longtime involvement with his church youth group might have helped convince school administrators that what he lacked in smarts he made up for in faith. Whatever the reason for his admission, Rader soon realized that he had made a bad choice.
Because his parents could afford to cover only a portion of the relatively steep tuition, Rader was constantly strapped for cash. He was so desperate for money to live on that he would drive ninety miles back to Wichita in order to work his old job at Leeker’s, always earning just enough to barely get him through the next week of school. Before long, he began sneaking around at night and jimmying open soda machines and stealing the pop bottles. After dumping the pop out, he’d drive around to area groceries and collect the deposit money on the bottles. Although he enjoyed the covert nature of his scam, breaking into soda machines definitely lacked the buzz that his earlier brush with crime provided.
Nevertheless, escaping the insular atmosphere of Wichita was good for Rader. Even though his grades were just shy of abysmal, his year-and-a-half-long stint at Kansas Wesleyan did help him acquire one of his most sorely needed qualities: how to be an extrovert. He joined a fraternity and quickly became a regular fixture at the beer parties around campus. Before long, he started to enjoy the feeling of allowing himself to emerge from the shell he’d constructed around himself.
As much as it frightened him to give up that kind of control, he assured himself it would be okay. No one really knew him on campus; no one knew the Dennis Rader who’d grown up in Wichita. To everyone concerned, he was a blank slate, a young man with no past. And it was always fascinating, he told himself, to see how his peers reacted to whatever it was he decided to write on that slate. So much of high school was spent trying to hide what was inside of him. He had always been on the defensive. Now he was on the offensive. Despite all the admonitions against doing so, people truly did judge books by their covers. And he was creating the perfect cover.
All he needed to do was smile and laugh, and people just naturally assumed him to be the kind of guy who always smiled and laughed. They were such sheep. At times, he felt like a painter—only instead of creating illusions on canvas, he used his face. For the first time in his life, he began consciously constructing a cover for himself that was far different than the one he’d assumed back in his home-town, back where everyone knew him only as Dennis Rader, the perpetual face in the crowd, the guy who blended in with any background he happened to stand up against. In a few short months, he transformed himself into something of a third-rate midwestern bon vivant. Even more important, his new guise was just one more thing in his empty life that he could control and have power over—which is what he loved most of all.
How easy it was to do and how utterly simple to pull off. All he need do was crack a goofy smile, and nobody was the wiser, nobody had a clue about all the dark things festering inside his head. Why hadn’t he thought about doing something like this before?
It wasn’t too long before he summoned up enough nerve to ask out a few of the Wesleyan coeds, although nothing much happened on his dates—at least not from his perspective. Because when it came to sex, Rader was an inexperienced rube. Despite spending so much of his life intensely daydreaming and fantasizing about it, despite all his drawings and writings about the things he yearned to do to women, despite his occasional Peeping Tom sessions in the bedroom and bathroom windows around town, . . . despite all that, Rader was clueless about the nuts-and-bolts workings of how to be intimate with a woman.
Back in high school, he later confessed, the only advice his father had given him on the subject was, “If you’re ever alone with a girl, don’t lie down on the sofa with her.”
For Chrissake, he often thought to himself, what was that supposed to mean? He never had the nerve to ask any of the guys he ran with about it. So he just went back to his world of journals and drawings, filled with imaginary torture rooms, populated with scantily clad sobbing young girls all begging for their lives, pleading for him to make the pain go away. If sex was anything like that, he told himself, he couldn’t wait to try it. Yet even someone as dense as Rader understood that he was going to be hard pressed to find a partner who would allow him to tie her up and torture her—at least in Salina or Wichita it would.
Getting away from the confines of Wichita also emboldened Rader to begin thinking bigger thoughts when it came to his world of fantasy. Because much of his mental energy was consumed by the need to scrounge up spending money, he had yet to act on one of his most powerful desires—stalking women. And he had many other secret fantasies. By 1966, Rader had begun referring to all the petty crimes he desperately yearned to undertake as “projects.” It wasn’t long before he’d put together an entire list of them.
His so-called Project Mountain No. 1 emerged as his boldest crime to date. With it, he hoped to re-create the rush he experienced several years before when he crept into his old high school. This time, however, he picked out a home in Salina. When he was sure the owners were gone, he broke inside.
Wandering through the house, he was euphoric over the way he was violating someone else’s space. But he was also nervous, which added to his excitement. Being in this place where he shouldn’t be felt vaguely sexual. It also made him feel strong because, just by being there, he imagined himself to be stealing power from the people who owned this house. As he walked from room to room, he sensed the stirrings of that fluttery thing inside his stomach he’d first felt long ago as a boy.
He was becoming aroused. In one of the bedrooms, he spotted a dresser and began rifling through the drawers until he found exactly what he’d come looking for—a stash of women’s underwear. He snatched a handful out from the drawer and stuffed them in the pocket of his jacket. As he was leaving, he spotted some car keys lying on a table near the sofa. He grabbed them, walked out the front door, and within minutes was speeding down the street in a car that didn’t belong to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so alive—every molecule in his body seemed to be ablaze. He wanted to explode. Before leaving the car on a side road outside of town, he masturbated in the front seat, then hoofed it back to his ’58 Chevy.
As oblivious as Rader could sometimes be when it came to the world around him, not even he could ignore the mess unfolding on the other side of the world in Viet Nam. Because the military needed young bodies to go fight the Viet Cong, the draft had begun to kick into high gear. Rader knew that with his dismal grades—consisting of mostly D’s and C’s—he might as well hang a sign on his back that read: Draft Me. Getting drafted was the last thing he wanted to have happen. Because deep down Rader was a coward. Of course he loved violence. But, I knew, just like others with his twisted psychological hardwiring, he enjoyed only the kind of violent encounters where he stood no chance of getting hurt. His later crimes would reflect this when he went out of his way to target small children and older women over whom he could have dominance with little struggle. Nearly all the serial killers I’d interviewed were psychologically weak individuals who picked the most vulnerable victims they could find.
He loved the kind of violence where his victims were weaker than he was. From what he knew about war, it was a frightfully messy, unpredictable business, filled with all sorts of uncertainties. He may have been drunk with dark fantasies, but he clearly understood the difference between make-believe and reality. (If he ha
dn’t, he wouldn’t have gone to such lengths hiding his fantasies away from those around him.) Besides, for a pathological control freak like Rader, war was to be avoided at all costs. He’d love to shoot someone, but if there was a chance that the other guy might shoot back, forget it. Let some other guy go crawl through the jungle and bayonet communists; he had other fish to fry.
So one afternoon in August 1966, he drove down to the local Air Force recruiting station and signed up. Better to enlist and have some say over which branch of the military he went into than be drafted. Because he didn’t intend to be a pilot, chances were he wouldn’t end up seeing any real fighting. Not long afterward, he underwent basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. In October, he was sent to Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he attended technical school, specializing in radio communications. Before long he was clambering up 120-foot-high radio towers, adjusting antennas and fixing malfunctioning radio equipment. After another stop at Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama, he launched into a three-year globe-trotting odyssey, living out of a suitcase while traveling from one base to the next in Turkey, Greece, Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and Japan.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 20
