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

by Douglas, John

  “I need to ask you, how come you lied to me?” Rader said. “How come you lied to me?”

  Landwehr listened to the question, but he told me that he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard. Could Rader really be that dense? Was he so hopelessly deluded as to imagine that the past three decades had been nothing more than a big game? He bit his lip to keep from laughing. But Rader was serious. He sat there across the table, staring at Landwehr, not blinking, patiently waiting for an answer to his question.

  Finally, the tired homicide detective shook his head and muttered, “Because I was trying to catch you.”

  Within minutes of the arrest, a half dozen Wichita police officers had descended on Rader’s local family, rounding up Paula, her parents, and two of his brothers and taking them down to FBI headquarters, a few blocks from city hall. They were briefed on what had just happened to Dennis and peppered with questions, such as whether they could remember Rader ever doing anything suspicious.

  “You got the wrong man,” Paula Rader’s mother and father kept saying. “There’s no way Dennis would have done this.”

  The arrest and charges were clearly a terrible, disorienting blow to Rader’s devoted wife.

  Paula had arrived first, having been driven to the FBI office by police, who had resisted descending on the Rader home until after Dennis had been cuffed. She arrived at the building a few minutes after her husband was ushered inside, and spent the next four hours sitting there, listening to investigators paint a picture of a stranger they claimed was her husband. And all the while, she never appeared to stop believing in his innocence, insisting that what she really needed to be doing was hiring a lawyer for him.

  But then she remembered something, “a coincidence” she’d called it.

  “Dennis used to drive me to work in 1974,” she explained. “And we’d always go past the Otero house. That was the route he’d always take.

  “But you’ve got the wrong man,” she told Lundin. “Dennis couldn’t have done this.”

  Paula’s mother excused herself to use the restroom. Her father, a World War II vet, stared down at his thick arms, and Lundin said he could practically hear “the wheels turning round and round in his head.”

  After a few moments he looked up at Lundin and said, “So . . . you got the goods on this guy.”

  “Yeah,” Lundin replied. “No doubt about it. It’s him.”

  After Rader’s in-laws left, Paula excused herself to get a breath of fresh air and clear her head. Lundin told me that he walked out into the hallway and saw her leaning against the wall, dazed looking, with a cell phone pressed up against her ear. She was talking to her daughter, Kerri, in Michigan, who had just been interviewed by several FBI agents.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Your daddy didn’t do this. There’s been some horrible mistake. You don’t need to worry.”

  Lundin heard the same thing a few days later when he flew to a naval base in Connecticut to speak with Rader’s son, Brian, who was there attending submarine training school. Like everyone else close to Rader, he told Lundin there had to be some mistake.

  “We walked through things with him, and he was shocked,” Lundin explained to me. “He seemed like a squared-away guy, solid. But he took it really super-hard. He told me, ‘We had the Leave It to Beaver life. Mom was always at home and Dad was doing everything—the Scouts, church, helping out at school. Every summer we’d go on summer vacations.’”

  But just like Paula’s father, Brian grew quiet after a bit of time had passed.

  “Then he looked at me and said, ‘It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . The only thing that ever gave me any cause of suspicion happened when I was a little kid and I was going through Dad’s stuff. I found this drawing. It was of a woman in this horrible position. She was all bound up in ropes. It scared me. I put it away and never looked in his stuff again.’”

  At the same time that Rader’s family was being briefed on his secret life, he sat in a nearby interrogation room, relishing all the attention being heaped on him. He felt downright giddy with all those detectives rotating in and out of the room, asking him questions. Now that he’d confessed to being BTK, the next order of business involved getting him to walk police through each of his ten murders, step-by-step.

  It felt as though they were talking shop, Rader later confessed to my source. The way he saw it, he was practically a cop himself. Of course, he knew what they were trying to do. But at the same time, it felt as though they were all soldiers, battle-worn vets who had once been sworn enemies but, now that the war was over, could come together to chew the fat.

  Rader, I knew, was thrilled to be able finally to talk about everything he’d done—even if it meant the end of the line for him. He’d never been able to do that, to talk about that side of his life to anybody. And suddenly there he was, handcuffed in a room filled with cops, shooting the breeze with a group of guys who seemed to know everything about him, eager to ask questions about how he’d managed to pull everything off.

  At the same time, though, a sense of weariness had begun to seep in. Rader told my source that despite all the hoopla and excitement surrounding his arrest, after a few hours he’d begun to feel the gentle stirrings of fatigue and depression. The high he’d initially experienced had started to tiptoe away—just as all his highs did. But he didn’t want to think about that right now. He wanted to sit there and talk about his crimes—he could do that forever. These guys were soaking up every word he uttered. But as more hours stretched on and on, the weariness became too pronounced to ignore.

  At one point, he shook his head and muttered, “A little thirty-nine-cent piece of plastic floppy was my demise . . . That’s what cooked my goose.”

  Roughly twelve hours into his interrogation, Rader looked across the table at his inquisitors and said, “Could one of you guys do me a favor? Just shoot me in the head. Put me out of my misery. I know you would be in big trouble for that. But just shoot me like a mad dog. Just shoot me and be done with it. Sneak up behind me and shoot me. BOOM! I won’t know what hit me.”

  The detectives seated across from him would have been happy to oblige, but they didn’t. A bullet to the back of the head would be far too easy an out for Rader.

  Landwehr let Rader keep blabbing off and on for thirty-two hours. Then he had him booked in the Sedgwick County Jail and placed him under suicide watch. When Rader awoke in jail the next morning, he told my source, he’d never felt so low in all his life.

  “My heart goes out to him,” Landwehr grumbled.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Really chokes me up.”

  The two of us sat there in silence for a few moments, then I said, “You know what really eats at me is that I’ve still got so many unanswered questions about this guy, so many things I can’t figure out. I gotta get in to see him. I need to sit down with him and pick his brain.”

  Landwehr shook his head, looking almost bored. “Getting into that prison is gonna be tough, even for you,” he said, giving me one of those why-bother sighs. “I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t need to know why Dennis Rader killed all those people. I don’t need to know where his mind was or how it got that way. That’s not my forte. He killed them, he planned it, and my job was to nail him for ten murders. After I did that, I was done with him.”

  Part of me wished I too could be done with Dennis Rader. But for some reason, I felt as though I was only just beginning.

  ACT THREE

  Meeting BTK: AN Exclusive Interview

  21

  On May 28, eight months after my last trip to Wichita to research the events leading up to Rader’s arrest, I hopped another flight out to that city on the plains and booked a hotel room downtown by the old train station, at the same place I stayed last time—a newly renovated century-old former warehouse for a company that manufactured scythes, axes, and butcher knives. The side-walks and the buildings in that part of the city had a tired, ancient smell. Everything there appeared to be constr
ucted from bricks made from day-old dried blood. Just thinking about that color brought back memories of the thousands of grisly crime scene photos I’d spent my career wading through while attempting to reconstruct events I now wanted to forget.

  It was late May, but even at midnight the air felt hot and damp, the kind of syrupy heat that made me wish I could shake my compulsion to wear button-down shirts. But old habits die hard.

  I’d returned to Wichita to interview Dennis Rader, now known to the staff of the El Dorado Correctional Facility as Inmate no. 0083707. Getting permission to see him hadn’t been easy. In fact, it had been damn near impossible. Most people think that all I have to do is show up at the front gate of a prison and the warden will meet and escort me to the cell of whatever inmate I want to speak with. Truth is, there are countless bureaucratic hoops I’m forced to jump through before I can talk with an inmate—particularly this inmate.

  Back in the days when I was in the FBI, things were different. All I needed to do was walk in, flash my credentials, and ask to speak with an inmate. Not anymore. I lost that luxury when I retired from the agency in 1995. But even if I still had my credentials and the warden’s support, Rader wouldn’t have to speak with me, and I couldn’t force him to.

  Six months ago, I’d learned that a woman named Kris Casarona had formed a special relationship with Rader in prison. They had a signed contract between them that gave her power as his official gatekeeper over who could see or interview him. She evidently had plans to write a book about him.

  I began communicating with Kris Casarona, calling her, writing her, talking to her at great length, trying to convince her to approve my interview with Rader. I needed her blessing before he’d agree to speak with me. Since his arrest, he’d been contacted by hundreds of journalists, TV producers, behavioral scientists, authors, and screen-writers, all of them requesting—and, in many cases, begging—for an interview. So far, the only people to have gained access to Rader at his new home in the El Dorado Correctional Facility were the Wichita police, members of his state-appointed defense team, and, of course, Casarona herself.

  So far we had never met in person, but on this evening when I got back to Wichita, Casarona came over to the hotel, and we sat together in the hotel lobby. Casarona turned out to be a frazzled-looking thirty-nine-year-old woman in a floral-print dress. I sipped Chardonnay as she drank a Jack Daniel’s and cola. Several, to be exact. But that was partially because the past week had been so hellish. It seemed as though every time she picked up the telephone, her lawyer was on the other end of the line, giving her more bad news.

  Hardly surprising. For the past thirteen months, Casarona had become increasingly involved in the world of Dennis Rader. Shortly after his arrest, she succeeded in befriending him, convincing him that she was on his side, that she understood. At the time, he was still incarcerated in the Sedgwick County Jail. The relationship, however, had taken a terrible toll on her, turning her life upside down, sinking her deep into debt, leading to her vilification by many in this part of Kansas. Nobody said that dancing with the devil was easy.

  Casarona drained what was left in her glass. Her eyes looked nervous, as though she was already regretting what was going to happen the next morning when, thanks to her help, I would be allowed to speak with Rader.

  “Tell me about the dream,” I said, trying to get her to think about something else.

  She crinkled up the skin around her nose, which gave her a look that conveyed both bewilderment and amusement. Several weeks earlier, she’d briefly alluded to the dream, and now seemed like the perfect time to have her tell me about it.

  “So you wanna know how all this has affected me, right?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  Casarona took a deep breath, then launched into a scene that had played itself out inside her head one night as she lay tossing and turning in her troubled sleep not too long ago. For some unknown reason, she had traveled to Venice with Rader. They sat together at a rickety little metal table on the edge of the Piazza San Marco. Out across the massive public square loomed the gothic stone columns and delicate arches of the Palazzo Ducale. Tourists milled about with shopping bags and cameras. She felt uneasy sitting there with him like this. Even as she was dreaming it, she could feel her skin crawling. It didn’t feel right, and her eyes remained locked on him, much the way an animal, such as a chipmunk or a squirrel, might watch a human offering it a scrap of bread.

  He knew she was nervous. He didn’t care. It was all part of the game for him. She knew something bad was about to happen. It was only a matter of time. And sure enough, after a few minutes, he did it. He dropped his right arm down toward his waist and began fumbling with his black leather belt that he intended to wrap around her throat.

  In the dream, Casarona stood up and walked quickly out into the massive open-air plaza. It would be safer out there among the tourists, she believed. But Rader quickly followed her, and soon he was standing behind her, gripping both ends of the belt with his hands. She began to run, frantically searching for someone to protect her. But wherever she went, he followed. She couldn’t shake him.

  “I never told Dennis about that dream,” Casarona said, chewing on a piece of ice. “I mean, I told him I had a dream about the two of us in Venice, but I didn’t tell him about the belt part. It’s just too creepy. . . . Dennis is really into dreams, you know. He thinks it’s possible, if two people are dreaming at the same time, that they can appear in each other’s dreams. I don’t like thinking about that sort of stuff.”

  Casarona’s journey to this hotel lobby had been fraught with plenty of drama, headache, and frustration. We’d first bumped up against each other in December 2005 when I wrote Rader to request an interview for this book. He’d forwarded my letter to her, and she promptly telephoned my office, leaving a curt message that instructed me to cease and desist. Rader was hers. She’d bagged him. She had exclusive access to him, and it was this access that was going to net her a book contract, which she would use to jump-start her writing career.

  She had a point, of course. A very good one. But if I had been the type of guy who backed down whenever someone told me to go away, I’d still be a FBI field agent, working the streets back in Detroit. I didn’t bother telephoning her back—I decided to let her come to me. Three weeks later, I sent Rader another letter reiterating my same request and expressing my surprise over his decision to pass my first letter on to Casarona. I wanted to push a few buttons—both Rader’s and Casarona’s. She wasted no time getting back to me and fired off a private e-mail to me through my Web site, repeating how she had an exclusive deal with Rader and that he would speak to no one but her. She also mentioned that she’d read all my books and was, for lack of a better word, a fan of my work. I decided not to respond.

  A few days later, Casarona once again telephoned my office. I picked up the phone, and we had a brief conversation. I listened as she told me how she’d become interested in the case and why she wanted to write a book on Rader. But I’d begun to grow a bit miffed at Casarona and the way she was preventing me from gaining access to Rader—something that had never happened to me before.

  I told her how I first started working on the BTK case in the late 1970s, explaining that I used the knowledge I’d gleaned from decades spent in the trenches researching violent offenders to enlighten my readers about what made these guys tick, educating them in ways she never could.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve read all your books. . . . But I just can’t let you talk to Dennis. I’ve got bills piling up, and I need the money from a book deal to pay off all my lawyers.”

  “So you don’t have a book deal yet?” I asked.

  “Well . . . no,” she said. “But I will.”

  “Tough business, publishing,” I told her. “I’ve written several best sellers, and I can tell you that selling a book to a publisher isn’t easy. Not even for me.”

  “Yeah,” she groaned. “I know.”

  A week passed a
nd we had another conversation. Then another. And, like I said, when it comes to speaking with people, I’m not half bad. The two of us struck up a weird friendship. After five months of back-and-forth—during which I often played the role of therapist as she vented all her frustrations—Casarona finally caved in. She agreed to give up her precious exclusive access to Rader. She would tell her man to speak with me.

  It was a gracious, generous act on her part. The only catch was that she wanted to be present during the interview and then afterwards compare my impressions of Rader with hers.