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

by Douglas, John

  Rader later told police that he didn’t masturbate at the scene, and because no traces of semen were found in the house, he might have been telling the truth. From the sound of it, he had other things on his mind, because after watching the life seep out of Davis, he wrapped her body in a blanket from the bed and dragged her out to the trunk of her car. Afterwards he darted back inside the house, grabbed some jewelry, lingerie, and a camera, then headed out to a remote highway several miles outside Park City and rolled Davis’s corpse into a culvert, then hopped back in her car and found another spot beneath a highway maintenance shed to stash the various trinkets he’d stolen from the house, along with his hit kit. He’d come back for that later, he told himself. First, he needed to switch vehicles before any more time passed.

  After returning the car to Davis’s garage, he walked the two miles back to his truck. In his journal, he described how he felt cold, thirsty, and tired. His clothes were drenched in sweat.

  Thirty minutes later, he was driving back out to the spot where he’d just deposited Davis, and retrieved her body. Fog had begun to roll in as he continued on to a remote part of the county, where he pulled over long enough to drag Davis’s body beneath a tiny concrete bridge located beside an expanse of empty farmland. As he drove back home, he wrote that thoughts of sex and bondage flooded his brain. Knowing that the sun would be up in a few hours made him feel like a vampire, he later wrote.

  As horrific as these Dear Diary confessions were, they didn’t shock or surprise me. His words merely confirmed something I’d discovered years before: serial killers like Rader aren’t human. They look like us, they train themselves to act like us, but just below the surface they are hideously different. That was why I expected nothing else out of a monster like Rader. All I felt was a terrible, heavy sadness for Delores Davis, along with the rest of Rader’s victims. They didn’t deserve any of this.

  The night after the murder, Rader returned to the bridge to snap photos of Davis’s partially nude body. Her feet, hands, and knees were still tied with panty hose. The first thing Rader noticed on arriving was that some sort of animal—perhaps a coyote, a rat, or a raccoon—had begun chewing on her body. Because he carried one of those clear plastic Halloween masks in his hit kit, which was still in his car, he retrieved it and placed it over her face. He smeared lipstick on it, trying to make her look more presentable, then snapped a few more photos. He would have stayed longer, but it was so bloody cold out that he decided to head home.

  Besides, Paula would probably be wondering about him.

  Two weeks later, a fifteen-year-old boy chasing a stray dog stumbled on what remained of Davis. The next day, a story about the murder appeared in the Wichita Eagle. Rader clipped it from the newspaper and placed it in his stash. Not long afterward, he picked up his pen and confided to his journal that he wanted Davis to be his last kill—although he seemed to realize quickly that this might be wishful thinking. He reminded himself that only two things could stop someone with his sort of appetite: incarceration or death.

  Writing in the third person, he explained what he intended to do next and why.

  “In the back of his brain a voice says, ‘You can’t quit. The drive is too strong. Cover your tracks and prepare for the next stalk.’”

  17

  The sun was coming up. I’d been at it all night. I was getting too old for this sort of thing, I told myself as I walked across the hotel room and opened a window, leaned my head out, and dragged a long, deep breath of the cool morning air into my lungs.

  The leaves, a little yellower than the day before, clung to the branches of the crabapple tree just outside my window. In a few more days, their tenuous grasp on the branches would weaken, causing them to tumble to the ground.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I caught myself studying the limbs, looking to see if any might be strong enough to hold the weight of a full-grown psychopath in a white satin evening gown with a rope tied around his neck. But none appeared to possess the necessary girth for the task.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, “his journals are changing the way I look at trees.”

  A moment later, I dumped some coffee grounds into the tiny percolator on a shelf by the closet, filled it with water, then walked back to my desk, listening for my coffee maker to gurgle to life.

  On my computer screen glowed a picture of a piece of notebook paper dated January 27, 1991. Rader was ruminating on how much he loved what happened after he killed. That feeling of being on edge, of running on pure adrenaline as he waited for the police to track him down was priceless, he told himself. It was as if every cell in his body were on red alert, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

  The murder of Dolores Davis was no different. Afterwards, he did what he always did when the memory of a kill was still fresh in his head. He tried his best to melt back into everyday life.

  “Don’t drop the bucket,” he urged himself in the pages of his journal. “Just keep going with the people around you.” This wasn’t all that difficult for Rader, because he imagined himself to be a wolf among sheep. A month after the murder, the paranoia passed, just as it always did. When the cops never showed up at his front door, he wrote of himself in the third person, “Maybe he was lucky again.”

  One afternoon, he penned an entry in his journal about the day he pulled out an old tape recorder he’d kept in the closet, popped in a fresh cassette, and spoke the details of his crime into the microphone. Before long, he realized that it felt good to talk all his fantasies out like that—so different than writing them down on a piece of paper. Verbalizing his kills and dark thoughts just made everything feel so much more real.

  It was easier, too. The spoken word flowed out of him in a way written words never had. He tried to understand why, and the only reason he could think of was that maybe it was because he’d never been able to say those words aloud before.

  He’d never before in his life dared let all those thoughts and memories—the ones he’d locked away inside his head—drift out of his mouth. The sensation proved so cathartic that after he finished speaking the memories of Davis into his tape recorder, he decided to forgo paper and begin chronicling his fantasies with his tape recorder. At least for most of the next year he did. But, like so many of his artificial substitutes for killing, recording his fantasies eventually grew boring. A few years later, he pitched his collection of cassettes into an incinerator—the same oven, he later told police, where he burned the bodies of dead cats and dogs during his stint as a compliance officer—and watched them melt away to nothing.

  The murder of Davis also marked another turning point in Rader’s life. The business of serial killing—which was how he referred to it in his journal and, after his arrest, to police—wasn’t for the lazy. Yet when he looked back over his last two kills, he had to admit that he had been doing just that—being lazy. Of course, there was an undeniable element of risk that came from pulling off a project so close to his home. But he also realized that he was possibly leading the cops right to his back door.

  After Davis’s murder, he told himself that if he “did another one” so close to his house, the cops would most certainly begin connecting the dots. He told himself that the one surefire way to throw the cops off his trail would be to leave them some bodies in some other cities.

  Before long, Rader was out trolling again, looking for other victims. In his notes, he likened himself to a seasoned tracker, combing the forest for game. All he really needed was patience and a good, sharp eye. He reminded himself that with ten victims under his belt, he couldn’t afford to get sloppy.

  He began to catalogue his projects with a fury: PJ (Project) Nails was a white female who often favored business attire and lived in the eastern portion of Wichita in a large house. PJ 2 Black involved two African American university coeds who lived a block away from Nails, the salon where Paula worked. PJ Mex was a Mexican family living on the south end of town. His list went on and on for good reason. To be a successful hunter, he
reflected in the pages of his journal, it was crucial to have a list of potential victims. Then all he needed to do was keep moving around, checking up on them and waiting until the nuances of their schedules began to fall in sync with his.

  Over the next few years, he had plenty of projects and just as many close calls. Project Twin Peaks involved an elderly couple who lived, appropriately enough, in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of Wichita. He spent close to a month staking them out, watching them. Then one day he decided it was time. That was back in the day when he wanted to use a shotgun in one of his hits. So he parked his car down the road, out in a field by a hedgerow, and started walking back toward their house. His gun was down at his side, and he was so focused on what was about to happen that he never even saw the “county mountie barging over the hill lickity split.”

  He had his lights off, and Rader figured the sheriff must have spotted him parking. All he could think was, “Man, I’m cold turkey.” He dove into a culvert beside the road.

  The sheriff roared past, no doubt in pursuit of someone else, and Rader climbed out of the mud, miffed that he’d scratched the barrel of his shotgun.

  He walked back to his truck and drove home, cursing himself over his rotten luck.

  Landwehr told me that Rader spoke of another so-called project that he called off at the last minute. It happened back one afternoon in August 1976, at a time when he’d begun locating potential victims by roaming through neighborhoods on the lookout for For Sale signs taped to an old car or a fishing boat in someone’s front yard. He’d knock on the front door, and if a woman answered, he’d inquire about whatever it was she was attempting sell. During the conversation, he’d check out the inside of the house, trying to figure out if she lived alone or, God forbid, shared her place with a male. If that were the case, he’d stay the hell away.

  One afternoon, he stumbled on a single mother with two or three kids, who had a Coleman trailer for sale in her driveway. They chatted for a few moments, then Rader quickly went on his way. She was perfect in every way. He wanted to take her so badly it hurt.

  A few days later he decided to strike. Late one morning, he stuffed all his gear inside his pockets and drove toward her house, parked his car nearby, and began walking back to Project Coleman’s house. He stood out front to collect himself and rehearse how he wanted everything to go down. Then he took a deep breath and started up the walkway. But just as the sole of his shoe made contact with the concrete step that led to her front door, all hell broke loose. The air suddenly exploded with a cacophony of police and ambulance sirens. The sounds were so loud that they drowned out the fantasies playing inside his head.

  “Something’s up,” he muttered to himself as he turned and high-tailed it back to his car. He switched on the radio and learned that a sniper was hunkered down on the twenty-sixth floor of the Holiday Inn Plaza in downtown Wichita, picking off people in the streets below. The gunman ended up killing two men and wounding seven others. Rader drove back to Park City, feeling as though he’d just had a piece of candy snatched away from him.

  One activity that always seemed to take the edge off was reading over his collection of headlines he’d clipped from old detective magazines or ripped from the covers of books. He fancied himself to be an intelligent man, one who was sensitive enough to be moved by words. That was why he’d started saving all this stuff in the first place. He’d read poetry—that is, of course, if limericks were considered poetry. But nothing he’d read before touched him like those words.

  Part of it might have had to do with the typography—the big, bold letters, which nearly always seemed to be capitalized. And sometimes the images they conjured up struck him as a little too over the top. But it was these words that always got him. They cut into him like a knife and stirred things up inside him. They were something to aspire to. They made him proud of who he was and what he stood for. They were written about other guys just like him, guys who lived all around this great nation of ours, who all seemed to have this same thing living inside their heads that he had. They’d all done unspeakable, horrible things to other humans just as he had. Their crimes were big, bold, and daring—he had to give them that. But more often than not, they weren’t particularly the kind of atrocities that he got off on.

  Nevertheless, as corny as it sounded, his collection of headlines always felt to him as though they’d been written just for him. The words transported him to another place. They stood for everything he lived for but had always kept hidden away. Some of his favorite headlines included: NEVER KILL ANYONE YOU KNOW . . . SCHOOL

  GIRL STRANGLER . . . NEVER TEASE A SEX KILLER . . . SHE WATCHED HIM DIG HER GRAVE . . . SEXUAL HORROR FANTASIES BECAME REALITY . . . PRETTY WOMAN PLAYING GAMES FOUND OUT—YOU SHOULD NEVER TEASE A SEX KILLER.

  Even the lowercase headlines never failed to excite him: “He used to ‘practice’ in his basement with stuffed dolls.” “He liked to watch his young female hostages writhe painfully against the rope holding them tightly bound. He felt he could do anything he wanted to them—even blow them away.” “The suspect’s alibi, lawmen claim, is that he was engaged in a little karate mixed with bondage and he accidentally killed her. Then why rape her after she’s dead, they wondered.” “Look of innocence masks the mind of murderer whose obsession with bondage led to girl’s strangulation.” “An air-powered dart gun, several sharp darts, knives, twine and an assortment of various-sized vibrators—these told were all used by the sex fiend who ravaged many girls’ lives with them.”

  Reading the longer pieces he’d clipped from books, magazines, and newspapers also helped feed Rader’s hunger. From time to time, when it was safe, he’d thumb through his stack of articles and passages that allowed him to put everything inside his head into perspective. These weren’t fantasy stories. They were articles written by scholars and others who had studied people just like him.

  One of his favorite was an op-ed piece he clipped from a January 23, 1997, issue of the Wichita Eagle, titled “Children Without a Conscience Dangerous But Can Be Helped.” Accompanying the piece was a moody sketch of a little boy with an angry, defiant glare in his eyes. Two adult hands appeared to be gripping the troubled young lad’s shoulders.

  “They are a parent’s nightmare,” the article stated, “society’s worst fear come to life. They seem a mocking rebuke to our sacred, deeply held beliefs on the innocence and purity of childhood. And they do not exist only in pulp novels or B-grade movies such as The Bad Seed. Terrifyingly they exist in real life.”

  There was another entry, from a book titled The Criminal Mind, that he loved to read and reread, then think about because it showed just how confusing and contradictory killers like him could be. He’d even underlined various sections of it with yellow highlighter.

  Even within a category of theories there can be contradictions. When evaluating which personality constructs lead to aggression, for example, many theorists proposed that low self-esteem is a key factor. Bullies and rapists were thought to be men who did not value themselves. However, another researcher said that there is increasing evidence that high self-esteem is instrumental in aggression. Many violent types have an inflated, albeit unstable, sense. If challenged or criticized, they react with violence to reestablish their self-esteem. Researchers who support this theory believe that studies of incarcerated offenders that measured a significant proportion with low self-esteem are a result of the offenders being locked up. The low self-esteem supporters counter that the so-called high self-esteem factor is actually narcissism, which is based on perceived superiority, not a healthy regard for self.

  By the late 1990s, Rader was beginning to grow bored. Brian and Kerri had already graduated from high school and were out of the house. He immersed himself in his job, his duties at Christ Lutheran Church, periodic fishing trips, and, in the fall, driving over to Manhattan, Kansas, with Paula to attend football games at Kansas State, where Kerri attended college.

  Most important, he still had plenty of projec
ts, scores of them located all over the city, woman he fantasized about undressing, tying up in cord, and strangling.

  Over time, one of these projects began to emerge as his favorite. Try as he might, he couldn’t shake from his head the images of all the things he planned to do to her—not that he ever tried very hard. She was going to be his last one, he told himself. When he finished with her, he was going to shut down “his operation.” Which was how he enjoyed referring to the past three decades of his life—as though it were some sort of business endeavor.

  Part of him seriously doubted he’d ever get around to pulling this one off. He just wasn’t sure he was physically up to it. What he did required plenty of brute strength, and now that he was getting older, he wondered if he still had it in him. Nevertheless, he realized he couldn’t let this one slip through his fingers. He’d been stalking his potential victim for over a year. In that time he’d begun to realize that her days followed such a predictable pattern that he could set his watch by her comings and goings from her apartment. She never changed her routine. And, as he always used to say, people like that were in bad shape.