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

by Douglas, John

  By then, Shirley Vian had been dead for roughly eighteen months. Ten months had passed since Nancy Fox’s murder, which he considered his homicidal masterpiece. In February 1978, he had penned his infamous screed to police, announcing that there was a new serial killer on the block and that he was unstoppable. Fear and paranoia gnawed at the heart and soul of every resident of Wichita. Rader must have prided himself that he was at the pinnacle of his career as a serial killer. Then he seemed to vanish into the hot, humid air of western Kansas.

  I’d never been able to answer why he’d disappeared. But now I could.

  According to the letter, Rader claimed that Paula’s discovery marked the most humiliating, embarrassing day of his entire life. Far worse, he said, than his arrest twenty-five years later.

  He told this source that he had been prepared to get down on his knees and beg her for forgiveness, but it never came to that. His wife reportedly wasn’t so much angry as she was sickened and concerned that something was terribly wrong with her husband’s brain. She’d never heard of anyone doing something so downright disturbing and strange.

  You need help, she reportedly told him.

  The only problem was that she had no idea whom to turn to, especially as she was so embarrassed by it all—far too embarrassed ever to have the stomach to tell anyone about what had happened. This no doubt must have pleased the hell out of Rader, who described his wife to one of my sources as “sweet, sincere, naïve and the most reserved woman he’d ever known.”

  Obviously it was her naiveté that Rader found most attractive about Paula. Because even though the cat was out of the bag, Dennis couldn’t have picked a better person with whom to have accidentally shared his secret. She was close to her mother, her two sisters, and a friend in Missouri, but he was fairly certain she’d never breathe a word of what she’d seen him doing to a single living soul. Who knows? Perhaps this was the real reason why this always calculating, perpetually plotting psychopath chose Paula to be his wife in the first place.

  Having Rader speak with a therapist or a counselor was out of the question, Paula informed Dennis. It petrified her to imagine what people might think if word ever got out—and Lord only knows that it would in a town as small as Wichita. So, in a matter of days, Paula decided to summon up enough courage to telephone the VA Hospital in Wichita, where she’d once worked as a bookkeeper back during the Otero murders. Without identifying herself, she asked to speak with a therapist over the phone, confiding that a friend of hers had a problem with her husband and wondered whether they had any suggestions on how it might best be handled.

  Whomever she spoke with gave her a list of several self-help books that addressed the issue she’d described. She bought every single title she could find and gave the books to Dennis, telling him he’d better read them and memorize every single page.

  According to my source, he attempted to do just that.

  Rader claimed that his biggest fear was that Paula would leave him, the source insisted. This made perfect sense. Without Paula, he would have no one running interference for him, no one to cover for him—even though Paula had no earthly idea that this was what she was doing. Rader knew that without Paula, it might be just a matter of time before people began wondering about him, giving him second looks and possibly starting to point fingers at him. Paula’s departure from his life, he guessed, could very well be the beginning of the end.

  Rader told my source that for the next two years he tried to clean up his act—at least when it came to practicing his unique form of autoeroticism. He did his best to go cold turkey from the rope. I have no idea what Rader did to quench his terrible, destructive hunger for the next two years. All I know is that one afternoon in 1980, it happened again. Paula walked into the bedroom and caught him with another rope around his neck.

  This time, Rader told my source, his wife was no longer concerned that something might be wrong inside her husband’s head. Instead, she was angry. Just plain ticked off. Mad as a goddamned hornet. This was obviously a reaction Rader hadn’t foreseen. So he took what was a very calculated gamble. He informed Paula that he’d be willing to move out of the house, no doubt keeping his fingers crossed that she’d let him to stay.

  Instead, Paula reportedly replied that she’d contemplate his offer, and for the next few weeks she barely uttered a single word to him.

  Eventually she came around, although I think this was probably because she realized that allowing Dennis to leave would cause people to begin asking questions, something Rader knew his wife would not want. She told him that he could stay, but issued an ultimatum that even he knew he could never violate.

  Paula, according to my letter, tersely informed her husband that he had better never do it again.

  And Rader didn’t. At least that’s what he told my source. He never again put on a dress and hung himself from the bathroom door. The inside of the Rader home became off-limits for that sort of overt, blatantly strange activity. Instead, he waited for one of his “motel parties” or when he was alone out in the woods to break out his rope.

  He knew that Paula would probably never give him another chance. Even worse, he feared, she might begin connecting the dots that would link his bizarre actions with those of the mysterious strangler everyone in Wichita seemed to be talking about.

  It was late, and I was wiped out. I picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “Did somebody drop off a letter for me at the front desk?” I asked the clerk.

  “Hold on,” she said. A moment later, she returned to the line. “No. We’re you expecting one?”

  I awoke the morning after my trip to El Dorado with a dream about death still fresh in my head. I couldn’t recall the specifics, but I knew I’d been murdered some time in the night when my eyes were shut. I’ve always believed that of all the ways to go out, that would be the easiest—simply to shut your eyes and never open them again. Far kinder and more humane than most of the murder cases I had worked in my lifetime, in which victims begged to be killed rather than endure another moment of the torture session at the hands of their psychopathic captors.

  After toast and a cup of coffee, I decided to drive back over to Rader’s abandoned house in Park City. A beat-up wooden bench in his backyard was calling me. I’d spotted it seven months earlier on my first visit to the property, perched amid an overgrown tangle of weeds and grass. I wanted to sit on it and have a nice, long think.

  The streets and highways of Wichita were empty, barren on that Monday morning. The place felt like a ghost town. From my hotel, the drive to Park City took less than ten minutes. On the way, I couldn’t get last night’s letter out of my mind. It had come from someone who would only identify himself or herself as close to Rader, although this could be anyone from Casarona to the handful of pen pals Dennis had attracted since his arrest. I wondered if it might be the same person who had contacted me months earlier with some inside information about Dennis. This time, the source wanted to pass on some answers to me about Paula, answers to the question I’d posed to Rader regarding what his wife would have known about his terrible, destructive appetite. If this letter was correct, it turned out that Paula didn’t know anything about her husband’s being a killer, but she had seen something to upset and anger her about his sexual acting out.

  I also speculated that probably Rader himself was behind the letter. Perhaps he’d phoned the source after our prison meeting because a few of my questions had wormed their way into his thick head, and it concerned him that some people out there might still suspect that Paula had somehow covered up for him during those years he was on the lam. Then again, it could have been any of a number of people. A handful of folks knew I’d come to town this weekend in order to interview Rader.

  From my conversations with his friends, police, and other sources, Rader had never once stopped to consider the ramifications his murders would have on his family. According to Casarona, the couple had roughly $7,000 in savings at the time of Rader’s arrest, leaving
Paula with precious little to live off of when her husband was promptly sacked from his job a few days later.

  Judging from Rader’s comments he made to me at El Dorado the morning before, the wake-up call about the mess he’d made of his wife’s life came when Paula tried to sell the family’s house in July 2005. The would-be buyer, who happened to be a well-intentioned, publicity-savvy owner of a popular strip club in the area, backed out of the deal upon learning that a civil lawsuit on behalf of the surviving family members of Rader’s victims would block any of the cash from ever going to Paula.

  Now the house I was driving toward sat in limbo, and Paula worked as a bookkeeper at a nearby Park City convenience store to make ends meet. So far, people have chosen to respect her privacy and leave her alone, including me. Ever since her husband’s arrest, she’s spent most of her time living with her parents and said she had no interest in ever again stepping foot in the house where she and Dennis lived for over thirty years.

  Shortly before reaching Rader’s house, I decided to take a short detour and stop by Rader’s place of employment to see if there was anything I might have missed during my visit there with Landwehr months before. For fourteen years, Rader’s job in Park City’s city hall served as his refuge. The freedom his position granted him, not to mention the ego gratification, was one of the factors that kept Rader from killing with the frequency that he longed for. I think it would be safe to say that Rader’s being a compliance officer might actually have saved a handful of lives in the community because the job allowed Rader’s imagination plenty of room to breathe. Other than being incarcerated, there was perhaps no safer way for him to occupy his time for eight hours each day, five days a week.

  The parking lot was empty when I arrived. Waves of heat radiated up from the vast expanse of black asphalt as though from a skillet. The only vehicles in the lot were two bone white Chevy pick-up trucks in which Rader often tooled around the streets of Park City. I pulled up next to one of the trucks, rolled down the window of my car, and touched the tiny sticker over the rear quarter-panel; it read CODE ENFORCEMENT. It felt as though it had been cooked with a blow-torch. I pressed my hand against it and thought about how Rader used to crank up classical music on the stereo inside these vehicles and head off across the community, fantasizing about strangling people, while talking dirty to the “slick ad” he’d brought with him and placed in the passenger seat.

  I rolled the window up and sat back in my car with the air conditioner on high, staring out through my windshield, reminding myself that this was the exact view Rader took in each day as he pulled in and out of this parking lot. In order to get to his office on the left side of the squat brick building, Rader had to walk across the parking lot and follow a little concrete sidewalk around the side of the structure.

  But seated there in the sweltering late morning heat, I realized something. On the far right side of the building, completely opposite to where Rader’s office was located, sat the headquarters of Park City’s ten-officer police force. As often as Rader told himself that he loved his job as a compliance officer, deep down he knew it was an ill-fitting substitute for what he truly yearned to be doing: working as a cop. Every morning, instead of heading to the right side of the building, to the police station, Rader was forced to follow the little sidewalk that stretched to the left, to his job as a dogcatcher. It was just one more disappointment in a life filled with disappointments.

  The drive to Rader’s house took only about three minutes. To get there, I drove past the city’s tiny public library, located in a run-down mini-mall, where he often did much of his research for his final barrage of communiqués to police.

  Rader’s neighborhood felt like a cemetery. At this hour, the sun burned so hot overhead that nobody bothered watering their lawns. Hours would pass before the hoses and sprinklers were turned on. I parked, walked up Rader’s cracked, crumbling concrete driveway, and noticed a sign in the plate-glass window of his neighbor’s house advertising piano lessons. Could this be the same neighbor mentioned in his journal? I wondered. The one he fantasized over as she clipped evergreen boughs from her shrubs to make a holiday wreath?

  There was nothing out of the ordinary about his place. It was roughly the same size as all his neighbors’ homes and—besides having an overgrown yard—resembled every other residence on the street. People always seem surprised whenever I tell them how unremarkable the home of a killer can be. Of course, it’s only human nature to want anything associated with a monster to stand out, much as everyone wanted Rader to resemble some sort of hideous ghoul with blood dripping from his teeth, someone who could be easily plucked out of a crowd.

  The problem is, they look like us and to some degree can act like us. The only time they don’t occurs during those horrifying few moments when they morph into their true identity as a secret killer. But precious few people ever get a glimpse of that side of the killer’s personality. And those who do seldom live long enough to tell anyone about it.

  I made my way to Rader’s backyard and stood there in the middle of the brown, dead grass, surveying the space that stretched off behind Rader’s house. I’ve always felt that if you wanted to understand someone, all you need do was spend some time in his backyard; it is there, hidden by the façade-like front of his home, that a person dares to act out all those things he keeps hidden away from the rest of the world.

  The yard was large and comfortable, roughly the area of two tennis courts laid side by side. Tall, leafy hickory trees bordered much of the perimeter of the yard, but in the center the sun had baked the ground into hard clay. When I spotted Rader’s empty, battered aluminum storage shed, I poked around inside, searching for something I figured I’d know when I saw it. But the shed had long since been picked over—no doubt by the police or someone looking to make a few bucks on eBay. I made a note to myself to check the Web site to see if any of his belongings turned up there.

  Rader kept his fishing gear back there in that shed, a source had told me, but it was gone now—except for a few hooks scattered on the floor, a couple of sinkers, and a tiny ball of knotted-up nylon fishing line. Standing there, it occurred to me that this was perfect fishing weather, and I found myself wondering if Rader was standing at the window of his prison cell, looking out across the prairie, thinking this exact same thought.

  I recalled another story I’d heard from Casarona about Rader that happened on a day similar to this one. He was gazing out his cell window, daydreaming about God only knows what. He noticed a prison employee picking up trash in a stretch of grass near one of the many fences that encircled the facility. Rader’s attention turned toward the man’s slow, languid movements as he picked his way across the tough, wind-burned blades of grass. His head was fairly quiet. Rader wasn’t thinking about much of anything, but suddenly everything turned to shit, just the way everything did in his life. Because when the garbage man turned and spotted the familiar-looking visage of Dennis Rader staring at him through one of the prison’s thick bullet-resistant windows, it was clear that he didn’t like what he saw one bit.

  In the time it took Rader to blink his eyes, the garbage man held up his middle finger, flipping Rader off. This rubbed Rader the wrong way.

  Who the hell did that guy think he was? Rader heard himself think. That idiot is an employee of the state’s Department of Corrections. His behavior certainly isn’t the type of conduct taxpayers should tolerate. It’s not only disrespectful; it no doubt violates some sort rule of conduct for state employees.

  So Rader turned away from his prairie vista and put out a call for a guard. When the guard arrived at Rader’s cell, Rader told him what had just transpired and how he didn’t much appreciate being flipped off. The guard wrote up a report and disappeared. A few minutes later, Rader heard the cellblock’s speaker system crackle to life.

  “Whoever flipped off BTK,” the voice intoned, “needs to stop. He finds it disrespectful . . . Again, whoever flipped off BTK, please stop this disrespectful b
ehavior at once.”

  Rader smiled and shook his head. That ought to take care of that, he told himself. A split second later, the cellblock exploded into a cacophony of laughter, jeers, and whistles. Before Rader knew it, he was laughing too.

  It was a peculiar image, I thought. Because at first glance it almost appeared that Rader was laughing at himself. But he wasn’t. This would have been impossible for an egomaniac like Rader. He would never have mentioned this incident to Casarona if he had understood that those other inmates were laughing at him. Instead, he interpreted the event as yet another example of how, for a brief instant, he’d become the center of the universe, the guy everybody was thinking and talking about.

  He was BTK, he told himself. Even in prison, he was the guy giving orders, and, narcissistic sociopath that he was, he expected special treatment.

  I poked around the backyard a bit longer, kicking at the dirt and dead grass, checking out what remained of Rader’s vegetable gardens, where he claimed to enjoy futzing about on summer evenings after work. His two black plastic compost bins were nearly covered over by vines and weeds. Of all the low-life psychopaths in whose lives I’d immersed myself, Rader had his role down pat. No wonder it took police so long to catch him. He could out-normal even the most normal person. If they gave out awards for alter egos, he’d be a contender for an Oscar.