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

by Douglas, John

  I was far from excited about her stipulations, so I contacted the state’s Department of Corrections and informed them that Rader had agreed to speak with me. An official there quickly nixed the idea of Casarona coming with me to the prison. She was furious with their decision, but insisted that she’d stand by her agreement to let me talk to Rader.

  “When I give my word about something, I stick to it,” she said. “But maybe we could meet afterwards and discuss what you learned?”

  “Of course,” I told her. “It’s the least I can do for you.”

  Kris Casarona couldn’t recall exactly when her fascination with Dennis Rader started. But she had told me during numerous telephone conversations we’d had over the past months that she’d been able to narrow it down to the year 1974, the same year I first learned about BTK from those homicide detectives in Detroit. She was six at the time of the Otero murders, but the memory of her parents whispering about it became one of those indelible moments in her childhood—just like the sound of locust or the wail of a tornado siren on a spring afternoon. Although her dream was to become a veterinarian (just like Rader, just like me), Casarona also toyed with the idea of one day becoming a detective. By the time she turned ten, she had decided that her first case would be the mysterious BTK homicides.

  By this point in her life, the precocious Casarona was regularly devouring the Wichita Eagle from the front page to the back. And just like everyone else in the city, she soaked up every word written about the unknown killer who was terrorizing the city.

  One Saturday afternoon, she and a friend hoofed it to the Wichita Public Library, hoping to catch a glimpse of the killer. She figured that because he’d once left a letter for police on a bookshelf in the library, it only made sense that he’d be there lurking in the aisles, just waiting to be discovered. The two girls combed every aisle looking for the killer, whom they both had a hunch they’d recognize the moment they laid eyes on him, but they never did.

  Twenty years later, Casarona was working as an oil and gas analyst for the state of Kansas, wading through piles of state statutes and federal regulations in order to write detailed reports on pipeline safety in Topeka, wondering why life hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d dreamed it would when she was younger. Over the past few years, she’d survived a rape, battled osteoporosis, and weathered a divorce, and now was in the midst of watching her second marriage crumble.

  She yearned for change. Nothing terribly dramatic, just something small and meaningful. One morning in February 2005, she picked up the newspaper and read an article about how the bogeyman from her childhood had been apprehended by the Wichita police.

  At first she didn’t know what to think. But after a few weeks had passed, she decided to write him a letter, the kind of letter you send to someone without necessarily expecting ever to receive a reply. In her two-page note, Casarona explained how his awful crimes had left a mark on her childhood that she could never quite wash away. She dropped the letter in the mailbox and never gave the matter much thought. Seven days later, she came home from work and pulled an envelope out of the mailbox with a return address from the Sedgwick County Jail.

  She and Rader became pen pals, firing off an endless volley of letters to one another. This was three months before I even considered writing a book on BTK. By the middle of April, he began telephoning her at home. Two weeks after that, she drove to Wichita and visited him in the county jail, where access to a prisoner is much easier to get than in a state prison. It was during this first face-to-face meeting that it became obvious what she needed to do.

  Casarona decided that she would write a crime book. She would wade in the muck and filth of Rader’s past and attempt to figure out what had transformed him into a heartless killer. Although she’d never had any of her work published, she’d won a handful of writing contests and had spent a couple of years penning speeches for a Kansas senator. She was confident that she could craft a readable sentence on paper. More important, she’d also become something of an armchair crime buff and amateur profiler, devouring countless true-crime books (including all of mine), plowing through them the way most of her friends polished off romance novels.

  But here was the most peculiar part of her plan: whatever money she earned from the book—minus expenses—she planned to donate to the families of Rader’s victims. Casarona wanted to do the right thing for these people who had endured such an unending loss. But she was also savvy enough to realize that if her book on Rader went big, her next one could also earn substantial royalties as she continued her career as a successful writer.

  “That first time we met, there was a piece of glass between us,” she told me. “I wasn’t scared. But I definitely wasn’t excited or thrilled either. I had no feelings either way. Except that I found him utterly repulsive, so I guess that was my only feeling. I really just tried to disassociate myself like I read that you do when you go to interview one of these guys. I figured I had a job to do, and that was to get him to trust me.”

  Between late April and mid-June, they had met seventeen times face-to-face, and on each occasion Casarona wore skirt-suits with high-collar shirts or suit jackets, always buttoned high. She wanted the guards to assume she was an attorney. Every time they met, she smiled, laughed, listened with a sympathetic ear, and exuded a strange intensity that transformed Rader into a type of dopey teddy bear—if that was possible for a homicidal psychopath.

  Four months after that first letter to him, she asked Rader to sign over the rights to his story to her. He eagerly agreed.

  And that was when Casarona’s real troubles started. The media learned of her relationship with Rader when he forwarded their interview requests to her and she’d reply, declining all their requests on Dennis’s behalf. Then, starting in June 2005, three months after Rader’s arrest, the local and national media, hungry for any news about Rader, began writing about her relationship with the killer. Word leaked out that she was writing a religious type of book, which angered many in the region who believed her to be some sort of bleeding-heart kook, the type who was probably coddling Rader, telling him he’d be forgiven for his transgressions.

  “It wasn’t long before I became known as ‘that crazy woman from Topeka,’” Casarona moaned.

  But being written off as a kook was one thing. Her legal problems were even worse.

  Casarona’s legal nightmare began to unfold in January 2006 when the families of Rader’s victims sued her for an unspecified amount because of the book contract Rader signed. They alleged that Rader had made a deal with her that would allow her to profit from his crimes. The fact that she originally wanted to turn over the proceeds from her book to these same families didn’t seem to matter. A jury trial was tentatively set, but the case was dismissed in March 2007 when both Rader and Casarona signed an agreement requiring her to do exactly what she’d intended to do all along.

  Before I spent time getting to know Kris Casarona, I’d written her off as a loony. In all probability, I told myself, she was just another serial killer groupie who would end up being a nuisance and possibly a hindrance to investigators.

  In fact, the Wichita police worried about Casarona because when news first leaked that she was about to write a book, Rader had yet to enter a formal plea in court in the ten murder charges filed against him. The authorities still had no idea how many people Rader might have killed. Because law enforcement depends on the public for potential leads and other information, their greatest frustration was that Casarona might end up concealing information for her book about a murder Rader had committed after 1994, when Kansas reinstated the death penalty.

  When I finally caught up with Casarona in Wichita in May 2006, she claimed to be nearly $100,000 in debt to the attorneys she’d been forced to hire to defend her against her various lawsuits. Her bold dream of writing a crime book, she told herself, had been stabbed through the heart. She doubted that any of the insight she’d gleaned from her hundreds of hours of phone calls, letters, and
jailhouse visits would ever find their way onto paper.

  “All I wanted to do was write a crime book, just like everyone else was doing, and now look what happened,” she moaned in the hotel lobby. “I get letters from people telling me I’m going to hell for doing this. And for what? I didn’t want a dime from this book. Not a dime. If I could get out of this contract with Dennis and be done with all this, I would. But the families of Rader’s victims don’t care. They’re suing me anyway. So I’m stuck.”

  Ever since I first wrote that letter to Rader in December 2005, requesting an interview for this book, Casarona had been a never-ending source of headaches in my life. But, as strange as it now seems for me to write this, over time she’d become something of a delight. She was a whip-smart, bullheaded woman with a knack for getting herself into tight scrapes. But for those who took the time to get to know her, she was also a generous, good-natured soul, the type to give a stranger in need the last dollar out of her purse.

  “Of course, he disgusts me,” Casarona said, staring at her empty glass. The ice had melted long ago. “If he were to somehow get out of prison and show up on my front doorstep, I’d pump as many slugs into his body as I could. I’ve got a forty-five, you know. Got a nice kick to it. Picked it up after failed marriage number one.”

  Casarona laughed.

  I believed her.

  Ever since we’d begun communicating, Casarona had been guarded about most of the intimate details she’d learned about Rader’s childhood. That was what interested her the most. When did it happen? When did he know he was different? Something told me she’d yet to unearth the answer. Every so often, she’d drop hints about what she’d learned, but it wasn’t anything that I didn’t already know. And from the few morsels she’d told me, my gut had confirmed one important, disturbing observation: Casarona had become Rader’s next victim. He might be locked behind steel doors, several feet of concrete, and glistening razor wire, monitored by surveillance cameras and watched over by countless heavily armed guards, but he was still up to his old tricks. Somewhere inside his brain, he was plotting to kill Casarona, torturing and strangling her, day after day, week after week, imagining her lifeless naked body fallen before him as he masturbated.

  The two of them had forged a symbiotic relationship. He needed her as fodder for his fantasies, and she needed him as grist for her book and to solve the riddle that many people were asking: Was Rader born a serial killer and those ten murders he committed an example of genetic destiny? Or was he shaped and molded by some sort of horrible childhood trauma? Of course, this question was nothing more than the age-old nature-versus-nurture enigma, pushed to its moral outer limit.

  Like me, she’d discovered no examples of sexual or physical abuse in Rader’s past. Although he steadfastly denied ever being victimized as a child, I didn’t buy it. Either he didn’t want to admit it or his psyche had been so shattered by the trauma that he couldn’t retrieve the memory. I refused to believe that Rader was a natural-born killer. It was far too easy an explanation.

  It was late. I wanted to get some sleep. My body was running on East Coast time, where it was closing in on three in the morning. “If I’m gonna do this interview tomorrow, I gotta get some shut-eye,” I mumbled. Casarona nodded wearily, looking almost as exhausted as I felt. We said good-night, and as I headed off to my room, she called out, “I forgot to tell you the code word.”

  “The code word?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the code word. Because I wouldn’t get a chance to speak with Dennis on the phone between the time I met you in person tonight and when you showed up for your interview tomorrow morning, I came up with the idea of having you give him a prearranged word that just Dennis and I would know.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said, convinced she’d been watching far too many spy movies.

  “Depending on how much I trusted you and what I thought of you, Dennis and I had several passwords,” she said. “Depending on what you tell him, he’ll know how freely he can talk to you, how open he can be.” She paused for a moment, staring down at the stains on the hotel carpet. “You know, he doesn’t understand why I’m letting you speak to him. He really wants me to save everything for my book.”

  I stood there looking at her, too tired to summon up the energy to tell her how idiotic I felt muttering some stupid code word to a convicted serial killer.

  “So, what is it?” I asked, starting to feel annoyed.

  “I’m still trying to decide,” she said.

  “Look, I’m really beat. Why don’t you phone me in the morning when you decide on something.”

  She started to look a bit embarrassed by all the cloak-and-dagger precautions she was taking. “Tell Dennis when you see him . . . tell him that the lion is strong,” she said.

  “That’s my password?” I asked. “The lion is strong.”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is ridiculous, you know.”

  Casarona smiled. “Tell him the lion is strong, and it is very positive.”

  “The lion is strong, and it is very positive,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Good night, Kris,” I mumbled.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  I stumbled upstairs to my room, wondering about what I was getting myself into. If my meeting with Rader did go down—and I still wasn’t convinced it would—the interview conditions would be far from perfect.

  A few days before I flew in to Wichita, an official at El Dorado informed me that Rader and I wouldn’t be allowed to sit together in the same room or even across from one another at a table separated by a slab of bullet-resistant glass. Instead, I’d be required to park myself in the visitor center while he sat in a room in another wing of the facility, staring into the lens of a video camera. The two of us would watch one another on TV screens and communicate with microphones and speakers.

  The warden could have allowed me to interview Rader in the same room, but he apparently refused. After all, I wasn’t in law enforcement anymore, and he didn’t want to be seen as giving me any “special treatment” or perks, especially when he had a box on his desk stuffed full of requests from people wanting to speak with Rader. Even my good friend Larry Welch, director of the KBI, tried to get me a face-to-face interview, but the warden wasn’t inclined to make any exceptions. It pissed me off something awful, but I respected his decision.

  Yet the most frustrating stipulation was that I would be allowed to spend only two and a half hours with Rader. That may sound like plenty of time to engage in a one-on-one conversation with a homicidal psychopath, but it was woefully inadequate. To date, all of my interviews had been open ended. They finished either when I obtained all the information I needed or when the prisoner got so ticked off that he called for a guard and demanded to be taken back to his cell.

  I fell back onto my bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out the lines I’d use on Rader in the morning. Shouts echoed up from the street below. A bottle, perhaps two or three of them, shattered. A bar fight, I figured, was spilling out into the night. Listening to the din, my mind raced backwards two decades to an interview I’d somehow managed to pull off, despite being told to hit the goddamned road. The memory of that afternoon I walked through the rusted gates of Stateville Correctional Institute in Joliet, Illinois, to pick the ugly, disturbed brain of mass murderer Richard Speck, caused my mood to lighten.

  As mass murderers go, Speck was at the top of the cesspool. One hot July morning in 1966 in South Chicago, he butchered eight student nurses, raping several of the women before beating and stabbing them.

  Speck had been sentenced to twelve hundred years in prison. When I arrived on his cell block, he was in a foul mood. In the months prior to my visit, he’d managed to capture one of the sparrows that used to fly in and out of the broken windows of Stateville. He tied a string around one of its legs and turned the bird into his pet. The guards would watch him sitting in his cell for hours at a
time talking to it, feeding it scraps of bread.

  Prison officials were mildly astonished to observe this cold-blooded killer’s kinder, gentler side. Over time, however, the novelty wore off, and Speck, who was violating prison rules prohibiting inmates from having pets, was informed that the bird would have to go. So he untied the string from its tiny leg, held the animal in his hand for a few brief seconds, and just when it appeared that he would set it free, crushed the bird in his hands, tossing the bloodied carcass into a large fan, sending feathers and bird guts throughout the cell block.

  “GO FUCK YOURSELF” were the first words out of Speck’s mouth when I entered the chain-link holding pen where he sat on a filing cabinet, waiting for me.

  After a few more obscenity-laced descriptions of all the activities he wanted to perform on my mother, I looked at him and said, “It’s OK, Richard. I don’t have to be here. I’ve got plenty of other things to do.”

  I stood up, preparing to leave, then glanced over at one of the prison administrators who organized the interview. “Damn,” I said with a wink. “I wanted to ask this son of a bitch how the hell he fucked all those eight nurses. Because whatever Richard’s eating, I want some of it.”