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

by Douglas, John

  “I just always felt safe in a barn,” he said. “Just something about them. Maybe because barns are always detached from the house, separate, off away by itself. You can do things in a barn and no one will interrupt you. It’s more private than a basement, and I always liked basements. Did a lot of stuff in my parents’ basement.”

  He stopped talking. Judging from the angle of his eyes in relation to the video camera in front of him, he was once again staring at the floor. He looked ashamed.

  “I never killed any animals,” he said. “But I did tie some up and then I masturbated next to them.”

  Why wouldn’t he cop to it? I wondered. Why couldn’t he admit to torturing and killing an animal? Part of the answer had to do with the contradictory, unsettling nature of violent criminals. They’ll elaborate on the goriest details of a case, but then turn evasive over some minor point. In other words, Rader was embarrassed. I’d spent enough time working on farms in high school, hoping to earn school credits to get into a vet school, to know what sort of unspoken things sometimes occurred on a farm when no one was watching.

  At Montana State University, where I spent a few years as an undergraduate, the coeds had a motto that went something like “Montana State. Where men are men and sheep are nervous.”

  That pretty much summed things up. Seeing Rader’s shamed expression, I not only realized that had he killed his share of animals as a youth but also wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d engaged in a bit of sexual experimentation with them as well.

  That was what led me to my next question: “Tell me about your fascination with autoeroticism,” I asked.

  Rader’s green eyes did a double take. His face went blank. “What’s that—autoeroticism?” he asked. Once again, I realized we’d given him far too much credit. He appeared to have no idea that the activity he performed with a rope during his “motel parties,” out in the privacy of the woods, or down in his parents’ basement actually had a name. For all he knew, when I used the term “autoeroticism,” I was talking about inserting a portion of his anatomy into the exhaust pipe of a car. So I explained the clinical definition of the term, and Rader once again shook his head back and forth, claiming he’d never hung himself because it was too risky.

  “I just wouldn’t do that,” he said, his head now turned sideways. “That’s far too dangerous. People die doing that sort of stuff, and that was the last thing I wanted to have happen.”

  He was lying, of course. Not only had several reliable sources confirmed as much, but I also knew that he’d written about this activity far too many times in his journals for it not to be true.

  Yet Rader’s twist on autoeroticism was unique. Unlike all the other case studies I’d researched, he didn’t hang or suffocate himself in order to intensify an orgasm. It turned out that his sense of what caused him to get aroused was so tweaked that merely the sensation of being hung or suffocated was enough to induce an orgasm. I’d never heard of anything like this. Sitting there thinking about Rader stringing himself up made me think about Paula Rader. Plenty of the killers I’d tracked were married to women all cut from the same cloth—placid, easy-to-please, the kind of woman who wouldn’t snoop around in her husband’s belongings.

  Then a new thought occurred to me: I would have wagered a case of Corona (Rader’s favorite beer) that at least once in his thirty-plus years of marriage to her, Paula had walked in on Dennis in the midst of one of his kinky necktie parties.

  “Man,” I said. “This has got to be really rough on your wife.”

  Knowing that I’d made it this far without Rader walking out on me or shutting down made me a bit bolder. But I still didn’t want to burn any bridges. If I played my cards wisely, I could pump him for information long after this interview wrapped up, using Casarona as an intermediary.

  So I just grinned at him, one of those I-might-know-more-than-you, shit-eating kind of smiles. He knew damn well I was working him. He couldn’t be that dense. He understood that I was beginning to sense something about Paula, something nobody else knew. His ugly face glared intently at the camera. When interviewing killers like Rader, I always tried to imagine what their faces looked like during one of their homicidal frenzies. I wondered if the expression I was staring at on my monitor was the same face his victims saw.

  “Paula never knew anything,” he said in a low growl. “She didn’t know a thing . . . And they’re punishing her. She deserves to get some compensation from the sale of the house, but they don’t want her to. I hope some day she’ll forgive me for all this.”

  Tears poured down his cheeks. Touching, really—that is, if one didn’t understand that Rader wasn’t crying for Paula. His tears were still exclusively for himself.

  I gave him a few moments to wallow in self-pity.

  Finally, I said, “No, I don’t think Paula knew anything exactly, but I’m wondering if she ever saw anything. There’s a difference, you know ... There’s a difference between knowing and seeing.”

  “Yeah” was the only word Rader uttered. His gaze appeared to be focused to the left of the video camera, somewhere front of him. He appeared dazed, lost inside the world behind his eyelids. I let him have a few minutes for himself to think things over, to let the seeds I’d just dropped into his brain take root.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  I watched Rader double over again, attempting to smear what I knew to be tears from his eyes. By the time he raised his head back up, he looked more composed.

  “You know, lately I’ve been thinking about what people can do to protect themselves from guys like me, and I came up with a little list,” he said. “I guess most of it is pretty obvious, but I’ll tell it to you if you like.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “The first thing I’d suggest for a woman living alone is to get a security system,” he said.

  “I have ADT,” I told him, remembering how Rader once rigged a home alarm system he helped install for ADT such that if the mood struck him, he could break in and kill the female occupant.

  “You do?” he exclaimed. “They’re a really great company. I worked for them for years, you know. I really liked that job.”

  “I imagine you did,” I replied.

  “Back to my list,” he said, aware that the clock was ticking. “For women living alone, I think the most important thing they can do is give the impression that they live with a man. Maybe have some men’s clothes scattered around the house or leave a toiletry kit out in the open, just in case someone breaks in to scope the place out. It would also be wise to have two dogs—one outside and another one inside. And on the answering machine, have a man’s voice on the outgoing recording. And you know how I used to cut the phone lines of houses? People should always check their phones whenever they enter their house . . .”

  His voice trailed off, realizing how antiquated that piece of advice sounded.

  “Since everybody seems to have cell phones these days, maybe that’s not so important . . . But I do think it’s a good idea to always leave the radio on in your house and avoid routines. Never take the same route to and from work or someplace like the grocery store. And the last thing would be for women to be extra suspicious of vehicles they see parked out in front of their house or apartment. I often used to drive back to my victims’ homes over and over again and park out in front.”

  Rader’s face once again went blank. His sweat-drenched head bobbed up and down.

  “Is that it?” I asked, not exactly overwhelmed by his crime safety tips.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just off the top of my head that’s what came to me.”

  A guard walked toward me, tapping his wristwatch.

  “I think we’ve got to wrap this up, Dennis,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you and I have run out of time.”

  We stared at one another’s image on our monitors. Neither of us spoke a word.

  I thought about a line from Truman Capote’s classic book
In Cold Blood, detailing the 1959 farmhouse slaying of a family that lived in a small Kansas town west of Wichita. In it, Capote wrote of his strange bond with one of the killers—Perry Smith. “It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. One day, I went out the front door and he went out the back.”

  I sure couldn’t say that about Rader and me, despite the uncanny biographical similarities we share. (We were born the same year; both of us wanted to be veterinarians; and we graduated from high school the same year, joined and were discharged from the Air Force the same year, and were married the same year.) I felt not a shred of kinship with the man. Nothing except a professional curiosity about the way his brain worked and what I might be able to learn to help the authorities keep someone like him from going so long without detection.

  I’d like to think that if Rader and I had grown up in the same house, I would have had the courtesy to find some way to drop a cinderblock on his head and put him out of his misery, long before he began inflicting his nightmare on others.

  “I’m trying to control it—I am,” he said. “But the scary thing was how quickly the urge could come over me. I could be staring out the window, looking at something, and it would suddenly be on me and it would take me over . . . But I’m trying to get the upper hand now, now that I’m in here. You know, the other day the guards were walking me to the shower, and a bunch of the guys in the cells I passed by began chanting, ‘BTK . . . BTK . . . BTK.’ I listened for a couple seconds, then I stopped dead in my tracks and looked right at them and I told them,“I’m not BTK . . . I’m Dennis Rader.’ Then I walked on to the shower.”

  I watched as Rader’s eyes move deftly and subtly from the camera down to the screen, no doubt studying my reaction to what he’d just told me.

  “Nice story, Dennis,” I told him, because that was just what I believed it to be: a piece of fiction created solely for my benefit. For however much time Rader had left on this planet—and, if you ask me, he was living on borrowed time—he would forever be BTK. Being BTK was all he knew, all he ever did know. The Dennis Rader bit was just another gimmick, another ruse. Like some frustrated former high school quarterback sliding into middle age, he would forever be reliving his conquests until that day he took his last breath—something that couldn’t come soon enough, as far as I was concerned.

  “You know, I really liked speaking with you,” he said. “It felt good to talk about this stuff. Maybe when all this dies down, you can come back and we can talk face-to-face, without all the cameras.”

  “Maybe,” I told him. “I’ll see you later, perhaps.”

  “Good-bye, sir,” he said.

  The screen went gray, then black, and the image of Dennis Rader disappeared.

  25

  A few hours later back in Wichita, Kris Casarona had a smile plastered on her face as she walked into the lobby of my hotel and took a seat in the tiny lounge.

  “It’s over,” she said. “It’s so over. I can’t believe I just threw away my exclusivity like that. I just got off the phone with one of my friends. They can’t believe I did this. Now I have nothing.”

  I sat there watching her, sipping my Chardonnay, not saying a word.

  “You want a drink?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Jack Daniel’s and Coke . . . You know, the code word that Dennis and I use for you is Daniel because you’ve got the same initials as Jack Daniel’s—JD.”

  “Why in God’s name do you need a code name for me?” I asked.

  “It was Dennis’s idea,” she said. “But we were both convinced that whenever we spoke to one another, the police were listening to us.”

  “They probably were,” I told her. “Or they should have been. You know, they want to be able to pin another murder on Dennis. Something after 1994, so they can stick him on death row.”

  “I know,” she said. “If he doesn’t deserve the death penalty, who does? But I don’t think he killed anyone after 1991.”

  “Neither do I,” I told her. “He certainly never wrote about it in any of his journals. And he seemed to write about everything. I don’t think he would have been able to leave something like that out.”

  Casarona’s drink arrived. She raised her lips to the glass and drained part of it, shutting her eyes for a few brief moments as it slid down her throat. We both sat there in silence, listening to the old man in a tuxedo playing show tunes on a piano.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said. “Something I’ve been wondering about since Ken Landwehr mentioned it to me. Did Dennis ever tell you what happened just before he killed Julie Otero?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told her what I’d learned about that January morning back in 1974 as he straddled Julie Otero’s body on the bed and wrapped his sweat-drenched hands, sheathed in rubber gloves, around her throat. On the floor nearby, Joseph lay dead with a pillowcase tied over his head. In her heart, Julie must have known that her eleven-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son would probably soon be joining him, if they hadn’t already. She was next. She must have known that. She didn’t have a chance, and I couldn’t imagine a more hopeless, powerless situation. Yet something inside this doomed woman allowed her to gaze up into Rader’s face and whisper, “May God have mercy on your soul.”

  How does someone summon up such grace at such a terrible, horrifying moment, I’ve often wondered. It was a question I’d thought about from time to time, a question I never had been able to answer.

  “So, did he ever tell you anything about that?” I asked. “Did he ever tell you how her words affected him?”

  Casarona polished off her drink and motioned for the waitress to bring her another.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He told me about that. He told me that Julie’s words dazed him. He told me that several days passed before he even remembered what she’d said to him.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “And then he didn’t think about it again for another three decades,” she said, “but lately he has.”

  “Prison can do that to a guy,” I said. “Lot of bush league philosophers in prison.”

  “What he told me was that he’s begun to see Julie as a saint,” Casarona said. “Which is also how he’s started to see Paula.”

  “Nothing like hindsight, I suppose,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, taking a sip out of her new drink, then chewing on a chunk of ice. She placed the glass back on the table.

  “So,” she said, “tell me what Dennis said to you. Tell me everything ... Tell me everything.”

  So I did. It was the least I could for Kris Casarona.

  By the time I started back to my room, it was nearly nine o’clock. I placed the key in my door, twisted it, then pushed it open. The first thing I noticed was a white envelope sitting on the burgundy carpet. Nothing was written on the front of it. I opened it and pulled out three typewritten pages. Whoever had written the letter felt the need to make one thing clear up front. None of what appeared on the pages that followed were to be quoted in my book. The reason I’d been sent this material was so that I might have all the facts. Whether or not I chose to use them in my book was up to me.

  I fumbled for my reading glasses, then sat down on the edge of my bed and started reading. Slowly. One word at a time. Backing up every few words and going over what I’d just ingested. Ten minutes later, I’d finished. I folded the letter up, placed it back in the envelope, then lay down on the bed to think.

  Whoever had written this was either close to Dennis or a confidante of Paula. Exactly why it came to be sitting inside my hotel room was hardly surprising. Wichita may be the largest city in Kansas, but gossip still moves through it the way it does in a small town. No doubt word had leaked out fast that I was coming here to interview Dennis, and someone had decided to help me in a way not unlike anonymous tipsters do when they phone police with a scrap of crucial information to help solve a crime.

  I sensed that whoever wrote this note wanted to provide law e
nforcement with some useful, concrete information that would shed light on one of the most enigmatic unanswered questions about BTK—namely, why he went underground for so many years. It’s only by understanding the answer to that question that we can find better, more effective ways to ensure that we never have another Dennis Rader.

  My hunch was spot-on. It had gone down much the way I’d imagined. According to my letter, the first time Rader had to go underground was in the autumn of 1978, when Paula walked into the tiny bedroom she shared with her husband and found herself staring at something that just about killed her.

  Her husband.

  Dennis had tied a rope around his neck and was hanging himself from a door in front of the bathroom mirror. He wore a dress, probably stolen during one of the countless home burglaries he had committed.

  Nothing in Paula’s sheltered, cloistered life spent in sleepy Park City could have prepared her for that strange sight. Rader told my source that this happened a few months after Kerri’s birth in June 1978.