Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

by Douglas, John

  “Are you going to do the same thing to me that you did to everyone else?” she asked.

  “No,” he lied. “Don’t worry about them. They’re all just asleep.”

  Picking her up, he carried her a few feet from the stairs, then lay her down on her back, directly beneath the pipe. The noose dangled overhead, and he pulled it down and pushed her head through the opening in the rope and pulled it tight. It suddenly dawned on him that it might be nice to record this moment, so he bent down and asked the girl, “You happen to know if your dad has a camera?”

  She shook her head no, then asked him a question: “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Dennis smiled. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said. “You’ll be in heaven tonight with the rest of your family.”

  All she did was stare at him. She never said another word. A split second later, he yanked the rope with all his might, hoisting her upright. She gasped, blinked several times as a shudder ran through her body. Then she died. Dennis lifted her shirt up again to get another look at her breast. With his other hand, he masturbated. After he finished, he reached out and touched her breast.

  He heard a sound from upstairs and quickly realized that it was a postal worker rattling around in the mailbox. It suddenly occurred to him that he had no real idea what sort of schedule the Otero household ran by. For all he knew, somebody—a friend, relative, or another of their kids—might walk through the front door at any minute. He switched off the lights, hurried up the stairs, and shut the door behind him.

  After gathering together his supplies, he cranked up the thermostat as high as it would go; he’d heard somewhere that this would make the bodies decompose faster, which would confuse the cops about exactly when the murders occurred.

  As he walked out to the garage, he noticed the sweat—his clothes were completely drenched with it. His rubber gloves were so full of perspiration that they felt like water balloons. So much for being a cool, calm master criminal, he thought.

  He climbed into the family’s station wagon and started it. The gas gauge revealed that the tank was nearly empty, which annoyed him. He figured he had enough fuel to get back to the mall parking lot. A few minutes later he arrived at the mall, killed the engine, and did a quick inventory of all his gear. He quickly realized he’d left his knife behind.

  “Damn it,” he seethed.

  If the police found it, he was screwed. So he raced back to the family’s house in his own car, sped up their driveway, and slammed on the brakes as he pulled into their garage. He ran into the house, searching for his blade. His head was spinning. After a few minutes spent retracing his steps and combing through every room, it finally dawned on him what had happened. He darted out the back door and spotted it lying in the snow, just beneath the phone line he’d cut. Rader figured that he must have dropped it in all the excitement of seeing the boy suddenly appear outside the kitchen door. Can’t lose control like that, he scolded himself. He grabbed it, wiped the snow off of it, and dropped it into his pocket. A moment later, he wrote, he was back in his car, driving toward his house in Park City.

  And in his journal I read his description of how his brain was on fire. How he tried to think, but nothing came.

  14

  I’d been drifting for far too many hours on Dennis Rader’s words and dark thoughts. I needed to feel something else move through me besides him and the terrible, curious images his writings caused to play out inside my head.

  I was a bit like that little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. I not only saw dead people—although, actually, they were corpses—but also people killing people. When I plunged myself into a case, I became someone else. I became the killer. I glimpsed the world through his eyes, seeing events I really had no business seeing.

  Once, during an interview with a man convicted of murdering six people (authorities suspected he’d been responsible for twice as many), I listened as he recounted his crimes, and suddenly the visuals began to unfold in front of my eyes. I saw everything—or at least just enough. After a few minutes, I began speaking in the first person when talking about his killings, as though I were the one who had committed the crimes just described to me.

  “Knock it off, man,” he shouted, looking unnerved. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, unaware of what I’d just done.

  “You’re not me. OK?” he said. “You’re not me. So stop pretending to be.”

  And as I read Dennis Rader’s notes about what happened after he returned home from murdering those four members of the Otero family, I began to sense a slight pressure behind my eyes. Which didn’t really surprise me, because Rader wrote that his head was killing him. When he returned home, he felt as though he’d gotten his head stuck in a vise and someone was cranking the hell out of it. At least that was how he described it.

  In all the stories he’d read about killers in his detective magazines, he’d never heard of this happening before. After an hour or two, he wondered just how much more of it he could take. Paula wasn’t home from work, which was good. He couldn’t find the Off switch for his brain. The cops were going to kick in the door at any minute, he convinced himself.

  His only chance, he told himself, was to pitch everything—his sketches, his stash of detective magazines, and all those stories he’d written. He combed through every blessed inch of his car, then cleaned out his desk and tossed everything into the trash pit in his backyard. He doused it with gasoline and flung a match on it. A few minutes later, the pile had been reduced to a mound of black ash.

  He changed his clothes; piled whatever he’d worn during the murders, including his shoes, into a paper bag; and drove back across town to his parents’ house. No one was home. He wanted to torch his clothes in their trash pit, but decided against it. Something about burning a pile of clothes in the middle of the day just didn’t make sense. How the hell would he explain that if somebody spotted him back there? Instead, he stashed everything up in the top of his folks’ decrepit backyard hen house. His stuff would be safe there, he reassured himself. He’d come back some other time and put a match to it. At the last minute, he decided not to pitch his parka—the bloodstains on it, he wrote in his journal, weren’t all that visible.

  When he made it back to his house, he felt a bit calmer. Just to play it safe, though, he hid all his weapons around the house—his pistols, hunting rifles, knives, even the hatchet he’d stolen back when he’d gotten laid off at Cessna. If the cops really were going to come for him, he’d be damned if they were going to take him without a fight.

  But the cops never did come, and by February life slowly returned to normal. The paranoia had begun to ease. Before he knew it, his appetite had returned, and he’d begun looking for another victim.

  Rader’s reaction was typical of the feelings other serial killers had described to me. After a brief wave of intense paranoia, they begin to realize how easy it is for them to get away with murder—even if their MO was somewhat sloppy. Rader must have known that picking strangers as victims made it terribly difficult for police. The so-called smoking gun cases, involving family members, friends, or associates, are the easy ones to crack. But crimes without any apparent motive are tough to solve, particularly when they are well planned and thought out in advance by the perp.

  One afternoon in March, Rader wrote in his journal, he was driving to lunch with his wife when he spotted a young woman with long blonde hair pulling some letters out of a mailbox on the front stoop of her house on 13th Street. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the young woman’s name was Kathy Bright. The moment he saw her, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. All during lunch, the image of her jean jacket and beaded purse burned a black hole into his brain, he wrote in his journal. Later that afternoon, he climbed back in his car to try to locate her, but failed. Instead, he drove back to her house and looked it over. He liked what he saw. The place was situated by a vacant lot. On the other side, the neighbor’s house looked
deserted.

  He parked a few blocks away, then walked back to the house with a dark stocking cap pulled down over his ears. In his pockets he carried a knife. Tucked into his belt was his .22-caliber pistol. It was hardly a menacing-looking weapon, I thought, the kind of firearm that—if he had to use it—would make a minimal amount of noise.

  In his journal, Rader described pounding his fist on the front door, but no one answered. So he walked back to his car, telling himself he’d return some other time. Weeks passed. He was never quite sure how many. But every day he reviewed his “hit plan” in his head, going over every detail just as he imagined it unfolding.

  “Little by little,” he wrote, “my heart raced as the hit came into focus.”

  He was never quite sure how many women lived in the house, but he had a hunch that there were at least two. On April 4, he decided to make his move after his morning classes at WSU. He later claimed to have been so excited during math class that he couldn’t focus on anything the professor said. Yet, at the same time, he was “tensely aware” of everything going on around him—the other students dutifully scribbling notes, sunlight streaming in through the window, the sound the chalk made as it slammed against the blackboard. Never before had he felt so focused. Sweat drenched his clothing.

  After class, he decided it was time to take action. He made one last pass of the house, to check out the location of the phone line and the back door. In front of the house sat the blonde girl’s green Pinto, which led him to believe she was inside. He parked a few blocks away, then walked a meandering route back to the house. Tucked inside his heavy ski jacket were his ropes, cords, gags, knife, and two pistols.

  As luck would have it, by the time he reached the house and pounded on the front door, no one was home. He walked around back, cut the phone line, and broke the glass on the back door with his wire-cutters. The place was empty, but he told himself he’d stick around awhile and wait for her to return. After a few minutes, he decided to check out the inside of the house, walking from bedroom to bedroom, plotting out exactly where and how the crime would all go down. He eventually decided that he’d tie her up in a back bedroom, using some of the panty hose and clothes he’d located in the house.

  Then he sat down in a chair and waited for the woman with the long blonde hair and the beaded purse to arrive back home. His head was filled with all the images he’d created about what he wanted to have happen. The moment she walked inside, he envisioned choking her into unconsciousness, then dragging her into the bedroom. Once there, he’d tie her naked to the bed and rape her. When she awoke, he planned on either plunging an ice pick into her heart or strangling her. But on that particular morning as he waited for his victim, he couldn’t stop thinking about what he later referred to in his journal as “anus intercourse.” Perhaps he’d try that?

  His daydream was cut short when he heard a car door slam. He raced to the front room and hid by the door. A second later, it swung open, and his victim’s nineteen-year-old brother walked in. Thinking he was alone, Rader stepped out to confront him, brandishing his pistol. But a split second later, the young woman whose image he couldn’t get out of his mind walked in. It was a bad moment, he later recalled. His whole plan seemed on the verge of being blown.

  “She could have turn and run out screaming down the road,” he wrote in his journal. But she didn’t, and Rader quickly launched into his story about being a wanted felon in California and how he needed their car, money, and food in order to get to New York.

  The combination of his bogus story and his pistol convinced them to go along with his demands. After tying the two up in separate bedrooms, Rader racked his brain trying to figure how he was going to handle this glitch in his plan. Once again, he hadn’t foreseen the possibility of a man being at the house.

  “How do you do away with one without the other knowing it?” he later wrote.

  The next fifteen minutes were pure chaos. He was running back and forth from bedroom to bedroom, trying to keep control of a situation that was quickly deteriorating. Absolutely nothing was going according to his carefully rehearsed plan. In an attempt to kill the boy, he ended up shooting him two times in the head. His nerves were so frayed that he accidentally fired an additional round through the bathroom wall. He tried to strangle the young woman, but it seemed to be taking too long, so he grabbed his knife and began stabbing her. “I drove one in her back below the rib cage, hoping to hit the lungs,” he wrote. Blood splattered everywhere. Rader later commented that he was amazed at how slick it felt when it got on his fingertips.

  Just as he was just preparing to jab the blade into the woman’s neck, he heard the front door open. He ran to the front window in time to see the young man he’d shot stumbling down the street, trying to flag down a car. In a flash, Rader grabbed his gear and ran like hell out the back door.

  This time, Rader didn’t bother to write what happened in the hours after the murder. In an entry penned weeks later, he did explain that he once again believed it to be just a matter of time before the police nabbed him.

  He confessed to his journal that he’d been transformed into a nervous wreck. He couldn’t recall ever reading about such a botched crime that didn’t end with the guy who did it going to jail. But the cops never came. Even after weeks and months passed, Rader was still on edge.

  One afternoon in October 1974, a high school buddy named Bobby Ormston picked up the phone and dialed Rader’s phone number. I’d first heard about Ormston after a law enforcement source familiar with the details of Rader’s interrogation passed his name on to me. Apparently, Rader told the cops that during the final days of his letter writing campaign in 2004-2005, he’d toyed with the idea of convincing the authorities that Ormston was BTK. He thought it would be funny to trick the police into kicking in Bobby’s front door, then dragging him away in handcuffs. I spoke to Ormston on the phone a few days before hunkering down in this Wichita hotel room with Rader’s journal.

  Ormston told me that when he phoned Rader in 1974, nearly ten years had passed since they’d seen each other, and he was dying to catch up with him. During that time, Ormston had moved away from Wichita to attend college, earned an engineering degree, and gotten married, and was now in the midst of a divorce.

  He and Rader chatted for a few minutes on the phone. Ormston recalled thinking that Rader’s voice sounded just as flat and serious as it had back in high school. By the time he hung up, they’d agreed to meet at the Blackout, a local tavern near the WSU campus, and catch up on life over a pitcher of beer.

  It was around 5:30 in the afternoon when Ormston showed up at the bar. Dennis was already there, sitting at a table in the back, nursing his beer. He’d positioned his chair so that he was facing the door, allowing him to glimpse whoever entered long before they would be able to spot him. Ormston grabbed a glass and joined him at the table, excited to hear what he’d been up to over the past decade. But the moment he sat down, he was shocked at what he encountered.

  “There was just this incredible hostility about him,” he told me over the phone one afternoon a few weeks before my arrival in Wichita. “It made me real uncomfortable. A couple of times I thought he was going to come across the table at me. He was just so tense. Never in my life had I seen Dennis like that. It was like he was sitting on a spring and was ready to pop out of his seat. I’ve been around people who have been high on meth, and that look that he gave me had that same kind of teeth-gritted intensity to it.”

  Ormston explained to me that he tried his best to ignore the tension and listened as Rader described his life since graduating from high school.

  “He told me how he’d just gotten married and was big into the church and big into Jesus,” his friend recalled. “I don’t have anything against Jesus, it’s just his fan club I sometimes have a problem with. Dennis knew that about me, and he also knew I was going through a divorce, so I figured that all the hostility I’d been sensing was on account of him thinking I was some wayward sinner.
I chalked it all up to that.”

  Over three decades later, Ormston began sobbing when recounting that awkward meeting with his friend.

  “I couldn’t understand why he’d treated me that way,” he said. “Even though I thought the world of him as a kid, I had no desire to see him again after that. That’s how much he frightened me. I never could understand it. On the surface, he looked the same. But underneath his skin, something I’d never seen before had taken him over. Whatever it was, it scared me.”

  The two never spoke again, he told me.

  In July 1975, Paula gave birth to the couple’s first child, Brian Howard Rader. By then, Dennis had already landed a job as a construction and installation supervisor with ADT Security, a firm that specialized in burglary alarms for residences and businesses. Three years later in June 1978, a daughter was born—Kerri Lynn Rader.

  If Rader truly enjoyed the role of being a father—as many who thought they knew him said he seemed to—he certainly never mentioned it in any of his journals. In fact, in the countless pages of his writings, he makes reference to his family only a half dozen times at most. And even when he does write about them, it’s only in the briefest, most cursory manner. Perhaps there was a good reason for this: his diaries focused on the most passionate loves in his secret life—bondage and death.