“She’s under a lot of pressure,” I told him.
“I know she is,” Rader said. “But I really like her. I really do. Not in a lover sort of way. It’s nothing like that. She’s had a hard time because of me, but she’s stuck in there for me.”
I clenched my teeth together. It amazed me how delusional this guy was. The only reason Casarona stuck in there with him was because she had no choice. The people suing her didn’t care if she broke her contract with Rader or not. In their eyes, she’d cast her lot with the devil, and those lawsuits were her just deserts. She could crawl into a corner and try to wish it all away (I’d lost count of how many times she’d claimed to have done that). Or she could keep going and attempt to somehow finish this book that had made her life even more unbearable than it already was. What did she really have to lose?
“I want to thank you for the essay you wrote,” I told him. “Kris gave it to me last night. Very interesting. But I’ve got something to ask you. Beside that question about whether or not your mother was overbearing, you wrote the number one-half.”
“I can’t tell you any more about that,” he replied. “That’s for Kris’s book. I’m saving that for her. Are you going to help her get that published? She said you were.”
“Yes,” I assured him. “I’m going to try to help her. But I can’t promise anything. Publishing is a tough business.”
Rader’s gaze dropped to the floor. A scowl crept across his face. Silence. Casarona was correct: Rader looked depressed. His flat, monotone voice and his lifeless eyes were giveaways. Whatever rush he experienced by coming clean to the cops and from the media circus that ensued had begun to fade. The depression he’d grappled with for most of his life had no doubt returned, and now he had no way to hide from it.
I realized now that Rader hated himself with a passion. He always had. He may not have acted like it or revealed his self-contempt to another person, but deep down he loathed every molecule in his body. And because of that he was psychologically unable to love others or be loved. I’m confident that over time, he grew fond of Paula and his two kids, but the emotion he experienced when he was around them or thought of them had nothing to do with love. At best, it was a feeling of intense familiarity.
Rader was talking again, but the sound had gone screwy. I heard crackling coming out from my speaker, but I decided to keep talking until Rader indicated that he could no longer hear me.
“Something else I wanted to ask you,” I told him. “I had this theory about why you started to cry over the Nancy Fox murder during your sentencing hearing. None of your other kills seemed to affect you, but that one did. You want to hear what I think?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me.”
“I’ve heard of this sort of thing happening from other guys I’ve spoken with,” I told him. “Something happened during that murder. You always said Nancy Fox was your perfect victim, but after I watched you wipe away those tears, I figured it was because she said something to you, something that really got to you, and at that moment you suddenly didn’t want to kill her, but you knew you had to. You knew you’d gone too far to allow her to live.”
Rader scrunched up his face into the most serious look I’d seen all morning, appearing to mull over what I’d just told him. He stared into the camera, but somehow avoided looking at it with his eyes.
“I was pretty robotic during that whole day in court. I was on autopilot,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling much of anything. The reason I cried after Nancy’s father’s testimony was because I started thinking about Kerri, my daughter, and I thought about how I’d feel if something like what happened to Nancy Fox happened to her . . . That made me cry.”
24
I stared at Rader’s image on my screen. His mouth was moving, but the damn speaker appeared to have gone dead again. Because the only thing that ever came out of Rader’s mouth was emptiness cloaked in words, I tried to convince myself that the malfunctioning sound system didn’t matter. But I motioned for a guard to come over and fix it anyway. After a few moments spent shaking some wires and tapping the side of the TV monitor, the guard coaxed the speaker back to life, catching Rader in the midst of a ramble about what compelled him to commit his first murder.
“You already know what the precipitating event was,” he said. “It was all because of my getting laid off at Cessna. I wasn’t having any sexual problems with my wife or financial problems. It was all because of unemployment. It didn’t seem fair. It just didn’t seem fair. I really loved that job.”
“Back up a minute, “ I said. “The sound went on the fritz for a few minutes, just as you were about to tell me what it was that drove you.”
A tiny smile returned to Rader’s face. He seemed to be enjoying this.
“It was all psychological,” he said. “My whole thing when I went into someone’s house was based on a fantasy of bondage. I was especially into self-bondage. I wasn’t a sadist. I never pulled the fingernails or toenails out of anyone. Sex was never part of my fantasy, either. I wanted power. I guess that’s what I was really looking for. That’s why Nancy Fox was my most perfect victim. I got to spend plenty of time with her without any interruptions.”
“Tell me about your neighbor—Marine Hedge?” I asked, hoping to get him talking about his various murders. “You carried her to the basement of your church.”
Rader twisted his face into another one of his ridiculous pensive expressions. “Yes, she was a good one,” he said after a few moments of thought. “I really enjoyed that one. But you know what? Over the years, all the burglaries I began doing were almost as satisfying as the killing. I broke into a lot of houses, stole watches and jewelry and underwear. But it’s just like you wrote in your books. The fantasy is better than the crime—because in my fantasies, everything was always under control. I played the director and the lead actor. Like I told you before, it’s just like watching a movie. I see myself committing the crime, doing all the things I did in real life, only without all the headache or frustration. Because in real life things never quite turned out the way I wanted them to, the way I expected. My victims always seemed to react in ways I didn’t plan.”
Then Rader said, “You know, if there was one killer who I could identify with, it was Harvey Glatman.”
I knew whom he meant. I said, “Yes, he was into binding and psychologically torturing his victims just like you. He was also the first serial killer we know of who chronicled every aspect of his murders with a camera and later developed the pictures in his home darkroom.”
Rader’s smile grew larger. The memory of this kindred spirit appeared to have lifted his mood.
“Kris told me about the book,” I said. “Last night, she told me all about it.”
“You mean Glatman’s book, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Glatman’s book. You told her that if she really wanted to understand you, all she needed to do is read the back cover of the book, the last couple of sentences.”
“Kris told you that?” he asked, looking alarmed that she would have leaked this bit of information to me.
“You remember what the back of the book says?” I asked. “Because I do. I memorized it.”
“You did?” he asked, obviously flattered that I’d gone to the trouble of memorizing something that I’d been told was so important to him.
“‘For decades,’” I said, reciting the copy from the back cover, “‘these infamous deeds would inspire television and movie plots. But until now, there has been no definitive account for the forces that drove one of America’s most legendary serial killers. And never before has it been explained why, for Harvey Glatman, his crimes weren’t about killing, raping and torturing at all—they were all about the rope.’”
Rader sat there, moving his lips as though he were repeating the words I’d just recited to him. I waited for him to say something, but he remained silent. So I spoke.
“So all you really cared about was binding your victims with rope?” I ask
ed. “Was the hunting for victims, even the killing, just secondary? Your fantasy was to look at someone who you had totally immobilized and made powerless, someone who you were in total control of, free to do as you pleased.”
He nodded, listening to me as though I were a doctor describing some type of physical condition that had troubled him for most of his life.
“So you never really wanted to sexually assault them. That would almost be like cheating on Paula, and you certainly didn’t want to do that . . . What you wanted to do was masturbate as you looked down at the crime scene you’d created for yourself.”
I waited for Rader to say something, but he remained silent. Judging from the look on his face, I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know about himself. But he’d never heard it come from someone else’s mouth before, and he seemed almost stunned by it, as if I’d held up a mirror in front of his face and the image he glimpsed staring back confused him.
A few moments later, he stammered, “But I was a little bit different than Glatman. He didn’t communicate with the police and he didn’t have a wife, a family, and all my social obligations.”
Next, I brought in another serial killer, as I knew he loved the comparisons.
“I once mentioned your case to convince David Berkowitz, that Son of Sam guy, to speak with me.”
Rader’s face brightened when he heard that. “You used me to get to Berkowitz?” he asked. “When would that have been? What year?”
“That was in 1981,” I told him. “Back when you were still working for ADT.”
“You know a lot about me,” he said, smiling. “But you know Berkowitz was also different than me. He was after lovers in the park—and his crimes, like you wrote in one of your books, were impersonal. . . . You know they have another serial killer in here named John Robinson.”
“I know all about John Robinson,” I told him. “I wrote a book about him several years ago.”
“You did?” he asked. “I never saw that one.”
“Nobody did,” I said. “Nobody wanted to read about John Robinson.”
“He was sort of like me because of all the bondage stuff he was into,” Rader said. “But he was into that whole discipline and masochistic stuff which I’m not. He was more sophisticated than me when he chose his victims. He often used the Internet to lure them in . . . I found mine the old-fashioned way. I got in my car and started driving.
“You know, I used to love driving around with classical music on, looking for projects in areas where I felt comfortable, where I knew my way around and felt familiar with the streets. I can’t tell you how many times I cruised past the homes of my past victims over the years. I’d slow down and stare at the house and felt this feeling of accomplishment settle over me because that house was my trophy. It reminded me of what I’d gotten away with, of a secret I knew and nobody else did.”
“Did you ever visit the graves of any of your victims?” I asked.
“No, but I cut their obituaries out of the newspaper and read them over and over again. But I never went to the cemeteries, though. I’d read that the cops sometimes staked out those places, so it didn’t seem to be a safe place to go.”
“What about if the police had organized a community meeting for residents, in order to update them on the killings and ask for citizen volunteers. Would you have attended?” I asked.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d know for certain that the place would be filled with police just waiting for me to show up.”
I told him about my super-cop theory, explaining how the intended goal was to make the UNSUB identify with a single officer instead of an entire police force. As he listened, his eyes grew wide, and his tongue darted over his top lip as if he were trying to wet it.
“Yes,” he said, grasping what it was I was speaking about. “Ken Landwehr was kinda like that. For the longest time I really liked him. He seemed like a good cop, a straight shooter. The two of us would have had a lot to talk about. You know, before they caught me, I sometimes thought about what it would be like to sit down with him and have a good long talk about everything.
“But then he lied to me about the computer disk and called me all those names. Said I was a sick pervert and all that. I respected him, but I don’t respect him now . . .
“I think the guy I liked best was Richard LaMunyon. He was the chief of police back in the 1970s. Seemed like a real nice guy. I was hoping that he and I could sit down and have a cup of coffee at the jail after my arrest. But he never came.”
Amazing. Rader still believed that he and the police shared some sort of professional camaraderie. I’d suspected that BTK was a wannabe cop back when I first looked at the case in 1979, but until sitting here and listening to him speak, I hadn’t realized how entrenched his delusion was. If only we’d been able to better capitalize on this frailty of his, to use it against him. Part of me wanted to reach through the TV monitor and beat some sense into his brain. Talk about paradoxes. Rader was too savvy to visit one of his victim’s graves or attend a community meeting, yet he somehow believed that Landwehr or LaMunyon would actually sit down to have a cup of coffee with him and chew the fat.
“How did it make you feel when LaMunyon stood up at that press conference in 1979 and announced that the police had no leads in the killings?” I asked.
“That felt good,” he laughed. “No, that felt great. It meant the police didn’t know anything. It meant I could relax and stop looking over my shoulder every two minutes. That was tiring. But something I didn’t like was when that district attorney said I used to hang myself at Boy Scout outings. That’s just not true. I wish you could clear that up for me in your book. I never did that. I never would have done that. That’s one of the things that really bothers me. I love the Boy Scouts far too much to have ever done anything like that during a camp-out.”
The fact that Rader strangled his neighbor during a Boy Scout camp-out didn’t bother him in the least. Like every criminal, violent and nonviolent, he had his own twisted code of ethics. Murder was one thing. He just didn’t want anyone to think he was the type who might do something weird like hang himself during a Scout outing.
Rader, of course, didn’t know what I knew about him. I’d read an entry in his journal detailing his late-night exploits in the back of his truck during a camp-out during the mid-1980s. On that autumn night, Rader didn’t wrap a rope around his throat, but he did strip off his clothes, pull on a pair of women’s underwear and a bra, wrap himself up in ropes and dog collars, and clamp a pair of handcuffs over his hands. Problem was, the damn lock got jammed, and he couldn’t remove the cuffs. So he lay there in the back of his truck, thrashing and grunting, sweating like a pig as he desperately tried to free himself.
He wrote in his journal that at one point he feared he might have to begin shouting for one of his young Scouts to help extricate him from his bindings. But then, at the last moment, all that perspiration lathering his body allowed his wrists to slide out of his cuffs. He removed the rest of his bindings, cleaned himself up, then returned to the campfire to listen to ghost stories and instruct whoever might be interested on some advanced knot-tying tips.
Rader’s mouth was primed and ready now. Even if he didn’t want them to, the words had begun to spill out of his mouth. I could push a bit harder, lean on him with just a little more force in order to get him to take me where I wanted to go.
Next I decided to ask him about his earliest victims—the animals. Since his arrest, Rader had flip-flopped over the issue of whether he bound, tortured, or killed any animals while he was growing up. His diaries touched on the subject. During his marathon gabfest with police, he confirmed as much, explaining that he’d often take the animals to a barn near his house and kill them. But lately Rader had changed his tune, telling Casarona that he never would have taken the life of an animal because he loved them far too much.
“Tell me about the animals, Dennis,” I said. “How did you kill them, and why always in
the barn?”
The face of the man on my TV monitor went stern. His thick, bushy eyebrows arched downward.
“I know where you’re going with this,” he said. “It’s part of that homicidal triangle—along with bedwetting and starting fires. But I never killed any animals. I would never have done that. You know, at one time I wanted to be a vet? So I just couldn’t do something like that to an animal.”
I knew he was lying. But I also knew that I didn’t dare call his bluff. All I could do was try to salvage a part of the truth. “OK, so you didn’t kill them, but you tied a few dogs and cats up, right?” I asked. “And why always in barns? What was it about barns?”
For the first time all morning, he looked almost embarrassed. In his mind, torturing and killing humans was one thing, but performing the same atrocities on animals was something else altogether.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 39
