Rader would close his eyes and masturbate, imagining himself to be right there in the middle of whatever scene he’d just read about. He’d always be the bad guy, and he loved the way the women in these magazines would watch his every move, the way their little eyeballs would dart about in their sockets, never blinking, following him as he walked about the room with his ropes and knives. He was the one with all the power, all the control. There was no denying that. He was in charge. It was sheer ecstasy. He couldn’t get enough of it.
Winter came early that year. The ground froze up hard as concrete, and the sky always looked gray. Paula was the one bringing home the bacon now. Rader didn’t like thinking about that. It made him feel weak. Some mornings after dropping Paula off at work, he’d write in his journal, something he continued to do on an erratic basis for the remainder of his life as a free man. Lately, his entries had begun to detail his newfound habit of driving the streets of Wichita, allowing his mind to drift from one dark thought to the next.
He’d begun noticing things in a way he never had before—coeds from the local university, mothers and little girls, women walking by themselves on the sidewalk. They were all his for the taking, he told himself. And that made him feel good. Sometimes he’d park his car and watch them stroll past his window. Other times, he’d follow them home, paying close attention to where they lived. Up until then, he’d always felt somewhat ashamed of all those thoughts he used to have, but something was different now. The gloves were off. He was sick of pretending. There was a comfort that came with all this thinking, a sense of belonging, of being part of a universe where he called the shots. He didn’t need to hide his thoughts and feelings anymore, to be embarrassed. He could go for hours at a stretch and not do anything but let that TV set between his ears play and play and play. Oh, the places it took him.
One morning, after arriving back at the house, he pulled his old typewriter out of the closet in the back bedroom and rolled a piece of paper into it. Over the past few days, he’d been starting to notice that the buzz he got by looking at his magazines wasn’t enough anymore. He’d begun to grow bored reading about all the grand adventures all those other guys were having. He decided it might be nice to create a story of his own, one in which he, not somebody else, got to be the bad guy. He’d certainly never considered himself to be much of a writer, but now it seemed as though the words and sentences were bursting out of him so quickly that he wondered if he’d be able to peck them out on his typewriter quickly enough. It almost felt as though someone were dictating them to him.
According to an entry I read in his journal, the first time he tried it, he sat there for a moment and thought about what he wanted to write, what he needed to say. He’d never done that sort of thing before. Yet he had so much going on inside his head that he needed to get out. So he started off by coming up with a title—if he could just get the right title, the rest of the story would come to him.
So he typed out the words, THE CHILD KILLER WHO DRESSED LIKE A WOMEN.
Something about the word women didn’t look right to him, he later told my source, but he couldn’t figure out why. Lord knows he had to be one of the world’s worst spellers. Nevertheless, he liked the way his headline floated there at the top of the page. It looked professional, he told himself.
Then, all at once, the story he needed to write exploded inside his brain. He began typing:
It was suppertime in Wichita, Ks. The streets were nearly deserted. The scene presented, peaceful winter setting for to young girls walking down the street. There was no reason for concern as the two girls walk along happy with Christmas thought only a few day away. And neither girls notice the yellow two door Chevy following them. Inside the Chevy, a woman or someone dressed like a woman peered nervously from the steering wheel and fingered the cold steel handcuff on the seat next to her. Inside her pants suit a small revolver was cocked and fitted with a silentier. She adjusted her sunglass and move forward toward the girls. When the girls reached the corner of the street she pulled up and rolled the window down, “Girls do want a ride up the street?” The two girls look at each other for the answer, but since this was a woman driving they felt that no harm would come to them. “Sure,” they both answer at about the same time, and slid in. Jessica reached out and shut the door, and the car sped away.
The story was catalogued on the disc in my computer. Rader’s creation went on for four single-spaced pages. He had yet to finish page one when his main character pulled a pistol out from his waistband and thrust it against Amelia’s temple. Rader wrote that the killer commanded her in a gruff voice to fasten a pair of handcuffs around her friend’s wrist, then fastened the other cuff around her wrist. The car sped off into the darkness that was dropping over the city like a shroud. Next stop, a deserted farm on the edge of town.
Neither girl uttered a word during the drive. They both knew they’d been tricked by the man who dressed like a woman. Eventually, the group ended up inside a dusty old tack room located in a corner of an empty barn. The two girls were chained to a post. Next, Rader had his cross-dressing main character retrieve a suitcase from the trunk of his car. From it, he pulled a hemp rope.
The girls were seated on a hay bale, whimpering, while the man went into the main part of the barn and tied a slipknot in the rope and threw the other end over a thick wooden beam. He watched as the rope dangled in space, six feet above the hard-packed dirt floor, then returned to the tack room clutching a knife and ordered Amelia to remove her clothes. Rader wrote that the girl froze with fear, but the sharp end of the knife persuaded her to do as she was told. He placed a red gag in her mouth and bound her wrists with nylon cord. She began sobbing. He did the same thing to Jessica, then took pictures of the two frightened girls with his camera.
Outside, a full moon hung in the dark sky. The man who dressed like a woman walked out to his car and fetched a shovel from his trunk. A moment later, he stood in a nearby field, awash in the incandescent glow of moonlight, and dug two three-foot-deep holes in the cold Kansas earth, one beside the other. He returned the shovel to his trunk and wrapped it in a plastic bag, then grabbed the kerosene heater he’d brought with him and carried it into the tack room, to make it warm for the two shivering girls.
He unchained Amelia and marched her into the barn, prodding her with the tip of his knife. But she couldn’t see the rope he’d prepared for her because of the darkness. After forcing the trembling child onto the ground, he tied her ankles together and pulled the slipknot over her head.
“Fear then struck her and she twisted in her rope and cried,” he wrote.
She was still struggling to get free when he carried her over to the hay bale and drew the slack rope tight. She froze with fear and closed her eyes as he dropped his pants, wrapped her panties around his penis, then kicked the hay bale out from beneath her. Instantly, her head turned slightly upward and to the side, her legs kicked, her body twitched. The killer took a few pictures of her swinging back and forth in the cold barn, then he cut her down and carried her warm corpse out to the grave he’d just dug. Before rolling her into the hole, he removed Amelia’s blouse and training bra.
By the end of the story, the killer who dressed like a woman encircled a loop of baling wire around Jessica’s throat and ordered her to perform fellatio on him. “Suck badly on it real hard,” Rader wrote. “Do you understand me pronto, he screamed.”
Eventually, the killer garroted the girl, marveling at how her face became bloated with blood and the wire buried itself beneath her flesh. He tossed her into grave beside her friend, tidied up the barn, then drove home. A few days later, after reading about the disappearance of the two girls in the newspaper, he was able to track down where their parents lived. The killer mailed them their daughters’ panties, which he enclosed with a little note.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL,” Rader wrote. “As the letter went on, to say, he hope this small present of goodwill will brighten your day up, for now you know that the girl i
n not in her pants, so where is she? Have a good day.”
As an extra touch, Rader had his main character sign his letter with four capital letters—DTPG, which stood for Death To Pretty Girls.
End of story.
Over the next few days, Rader mused in his journal about his curiosity over what it would be like to take that next step. True, he’d often thought about that sort of thing, but now he was fantasizing about it in a different way. It all seemed so within the realm of possibility now, so close to happening. As if all he’d have to do is reach out his hand; he could wrap his fingers around it and squeeze. It was his for the taking now. His entire life had prepared him for this moment—all those drawings he’d been making since he was a kid, all those daydreams, all those cats and dogs out in the barn . . .
The fire inside him seemed to be growing hotter, igniting everything around it. Such a fine line seemed to exist between creating a fantasy in his head and unleashing one in real life.
Christmas came and went. None of the things he used to do could put out that fire now. He’d never wanted something so badly before. He’d crept up to the edge of the abyss and peered over so many times that he told himself he was finally ready now. All he needed was the right situation, and he’d know exactly what to do and how to do it.
According to his journal, one night after Paula went to sleep, he crept out of the house and drove into the sticks, parked his car, and walked to an all-night grocery. He pretended to be talking on the telephone, but he was really studying the women who wandered into the store and then emerged a few minutes later carrying a sack or two of food. It was 11:30 by the time he finally spotted the woman he wanted. She’d parked her car in the corner of the lot and walked into the store. He waited for her to disappear inside, then hung up the phone and casually walked over to her vehicle and tried opening the back door. It wasn’t locked.
Only the Lord knew how desperately he wanted to climb inside and lie down on the floor in the shadows, behind the front seat. He’d rehearsed it over and over again in his mind. Inside his head, it always played out the same way. She’d place her groceries in the front seat, start the car, and pull out onto the highway, and he’d surprise her by pressing his .22-caliber handgun against her temple.
“Drive out into the country,” he yearned to order her.
Once they arrived at that perfect spot he had in mind, he’d bind her, rape her, strangle her, and dump her body out into a culvert. But as he stood there in the parking lot of the market, he suddenly realized there were variables he’d never considered before that moment. What if she spotted him lying there and started screaming? What if she asked a clerk to help load her groceries into the car? He’d never get away with it, he told himself. So he walked back down the highway to his car and drove home.
But that was hardly the end of it. He now understood that he needed to be much more systematic in his planning. If he was going to pull off a bold crime, he needed to anticipate every single worst-case scenario imaginable. Nothing could be left to chance. All those guys he read about in the detective magazines—they might have pulled off big rapes, kidnappings, and mass murders, but they’d all gotten caught because of some foolish mistake. They were lazy. He vowed not to let that happen to him. He would be different. He was always an organized guy—a detail freak. He couldn’t help himself. He was the type of guy who would walk into a room and want first thing to straighten it up, organize it, put everything back in order. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could use this trait to his advantage. He’d use his love of order to help him kill. The devil, he thought, really was in the details.
So he spent the next few days plotting, fantasizing. After dropping Paula off at work each day, he began hanging out in the parking lot of the Twin Lakes Mall, he later confessed, studying the girls as they walked to and from their cars. He’d lose himself in his daydreams, shutting his eyes and trying to imagine all the powerful things he could do with victims. He wanted one so badly.
One morning it came to him. He’d snatch the thirty-something-year-old brunette he’d often seen walking across parking lot, the one who he knew worked in a bank located in the mall.
“I can do this,” he told himself. “I can do this. People kidnap people and hold them for ransom all the time.”
Rader knew, however, that he wasn’t going to bother with any of that ransom nonsense. He’d bind her, force her to have sex with him, then garrote her. Afterward, he’d toss her body on the side of a highway outside of town. A few days earlier, he’d begun driving around with his bowling bag filled with his pistol, some ropes, and a hunting knife; he referred to the bag as his “hit kit” because that was the slang term that all those killers in his detective magazines used to describe the tools of their trade.
According to the entry I read in his journal, it was early evening when he finally decided to make his move. The brunette always seemed to depart the bank at about 5:35 P.M. and walk to her car. So he left his car on the other side of the parking lot, walked across to where she parked, and waited. When she appeared, he pulled the hood of his parka down over his head, walked up to her, and grabbed her, which was how everyone seemed to do it in the pages of his detective magazines. But everything went wrong. The moment he lay his hands on her, she began screaming and punching at him. He couldn’t control her arms. She’d gone insane on him. He didn’t realize that a woman could be so strong. So he shoved her down onto the asphalt and ran like hell back toward his car.
“That was a big mistake,” he muttered to himself while heading back home to Park City.
13
The conversations in my head had begun. After spending hours clicking my way through the digital remains of Dennis Rader’s secret inner life, I’d begun conversing with myself, giving myself instructions.
Fight it, I said. Fight the urge to hate Dennis Rader. You don’t have time for that. Just keep reading, keep moving downward through all his words. Think of those he killed. That’s really why you’re here, I reminded myself. Think of how he decided to make them suffer before stealing their lives away. Don’t think about how badly you’d enjoy burying your fist squarely into the middle of his face, hitting him with the type of punch that drives the cartilage of a man’s nose into the base of his brain, sending him packing to the next world.
Don’t think about those things, I ordered myself. It’ll only cloud your judgment, preventing you from glimpsing all the things you need to see, facts you might have overlooked decades ago. Your job now is to determine what you missed, what you could have done differently.
Then I shut the hell up and kept reading.
In an entry from early January 1974, Rader wrote that Paula didn’t like driving in the snow and ice. The stuff just made her nervous. So whenever the city got a dumping of snow or the streets were glazed with ice, Rader became the designated chauffeur, often carting her to and from work. He didn’t mind. Deep down, there was something soothing about sitting behind the wheel of a car. It made him feel more powerful, more in control. It was one of the few socially acceptable activities he could engage in that possessed the necessary juice to quiet his mind whenever all the clamor started.
According to his journal, it was during one of those drives in the first week of January 1974 that he first spotted them—a mother and three or four kids, climbing into a station wagon and backing out of the driveway. He couldn’t quite make out their nationality, but the moment he spotted their dark skin, his brain flew into overdrive. The fantasies started.
There was just something about dark-skinned people that turned him on, he told one of my sources. What was it? he wondered. Something about their dark eyes and dark hair. A few of the prostitutes he’d been with in the service were Hispanic, he recalled. Then again, some of his favorite detective magazines sported pictures of sexy-looking dark-skinned models on their covers. So maybe that was it?
According to what Landwehr told me, Rader was never quite sure why he’d targeted the Otero family—other than
that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whatever the reason, that next morning he drove back to their neighborhood, parked down the street from their house, and waited. It was almost 8 A.M. Sure enough, just like clockwork, the mother and children climbed into a station wagon and drove away. He began to daydream about all the terrible things he wanted to do with the mother and her daughter. A couple of days later, he followed the family station wagon on its morning drive to school and back. He did this for several days. One afternoon, he later admitted, he drove over to the public library and used a reverse directory to look up the Oteros’ phone number and identity. He even dialed their number a few times and listened to who answered the phone. He was desperate to figure out if any males lived at the residence. The last thing he needed was some guy to waltz onto the scene and ruin what was shaping up to be the perfect fantasy. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe he could overpower any man—that had nothing to do with it, he told himself. He just didn’t need the hassle.
And then one day it happened. He told himself that it would be OK. The dark-skinned woman with the three or four children offered the prime setup. From what I knew about these sorts of violent killers, I could almost read Rader’s mind. He convinced himself that it would be just she and the kids. Which was a good thing. It meant that she’d comply with his demands in order to protect her children. Even the location of her house was perfect: it was situated on a corner lot; there was a garage set off from the house, a fenced yard, and plenty of space between the neighbor’s house and the back door. This time, he told himself, things would turn out differently than they had a month before. This time everything would go down just as he’d planned.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 22
