Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (39 page)

Part of Rader’s “hit kit,” including duct tape, rope, and a screwdriver, among other items.

“In this corner, you’ll find my basic hit kit, okay? And…it’s probably pretty incriminating. And you’ll find my�my .25 auto, okay? That’s another one of my backups, okay? They’re in a little black bag.” The attic of his home would contain “old what I call detective magazines. And they all tend to be toward bondage. You know, in the fifties, they usually string up the girls….”

Under the false bottom of the cupboard, investigators found Marine Hedge’s wedding ring and several photos�of her body, Dolores Davis’s body, and BTK himself in bondage.

The detectives interrogating Rader were startled to learn from him that the photographs of Hedge were taken inside his church.

They found bondage equipment�including come-alongs and dog collars�in a storage area attached to the back of his house and a metal shed in the backyard. Rader liked to wear the collars.

The FBI sent a team with a semitrailer load of equipment to gather and catalog evidence. It would take days.

At Rader’s city hall office, they found what he called his “Mother Lode,” trophies and all his original writings, in the bottom drawer of a cream-colored filing cabinet. O’Connor helped catalog and describe what they found: seven three-ring binders and more than twenty-five hanging file folders; newspaper clippings about many of the killings; drawings depicting women bound to torture machines of Rader’s design; a copy of the police “wanted” poster for the Otero homicides; and computer disks that were labeled according to the chapters of BTK’s “book.”

Rader had stashed his original writings in his filing cabinet at Park City’s city hall.

A large white three-ring binder was labeled
COMMUNICATION BOOK
. It held:

• A handwritten timeline of the letters and packages he sent in 2004, including the number of each communication and a brief description of it.
  
• The original of the Wegerle letter sent to the
  Eagle
  in March 2004. Taped to the sheet of white paper were the three original Polaroid photographs of Vicki’s body and her driver’s license. The BTK symbol was drawn in pencil.
  
• The original full-size version of “Death on a cold January Moring” and the original ink drawing that accompanied it.
  
• The full-size version of Rader’s fictional “Jakey” story.
  
• Original Polaroid photographs depicting Rader practicing self-bondage, sometimes wearing women’s clothing, makeup, and a blond wig. In several of the photos Rader was wearing the mask he later left with Dolores’s body.
  

Rader wears undergarments from Dolores Davis and a mask over his face while hoisting himself off the ground with pulleys in one of his self-bondage pictures.

• An original version of the note in which Rader inquires whether a computer disk can be traced, along with a clipping of the ad that the police used to respond.
  

Among the items another binder contained:

• The original typewritten letter to KAKE in February 1978.
  
• Newspaper clippings about the Bright homicide and BTK’s typed narrative about it.
  
• Newspaper clippings about the Wegerle homicide and an eleven-page account of Rader’s encounter with Vicki.
  
• The original poem titled “Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear” with handwritten portions in blue ink, as well as the original blue-ink drawing depicting his unfulfilled fantasy.
  
• An original blue-ink drawing meant to depict Dee Davis.
  
• Three original Polaroid photographs showing Dee in her shallow grave, with Rader’s mask on her face.
  

Rader wrapped himself in plastic and lay down in a shallow grave he’d dug at Cheney Reservoir, a popular family camping spot.

• Her driver’s license and Social Security card.
  
• Newspaper articles about her disappearance and homicide. A hand-drawn map was coded with four colors of ink to indicate the paths Rader used before and after the murder.
  
• The original typed letter sent to Mary Fager, along with the original ink drawing of his conception of the crime scene.
  

In a manila folder, they found the original “Shirley Locks” poem, protected by a plastic sleeve.

Rader kept meticulous records. Detectives knew Rader had killed ten. Reading his logbooks, they realized that he had stalked hundreds more.

It took investigators a month to digitally record all of Rader’s stash�the documents and photos of everything from Rader wearing high heels to Rader hoisting himself from tree limbs with pulleys. At one point, O’Connor was shocked to find a photo of a masked body wrapped in plastic, partially buried in a shallow sandy grave.

He took it to Landwehr. “Kenny, I wonder if we’ve got another body here.”

Landwehr was startled at first, but then looked at the photo.

“No,” Landwehr said. “See that cord? Come on. He’s taking his own picture with a remote trigger.” Landwehr grinned at O’Connor. “Okay,” he said. “This is why you are the lawyer and I’m the detective.”

Rader seemed to enjoy educating detectives about his life and habits.

He was “totally a lone wolf,” he said; there was never anyone else involved.

He liked bondage. “If I have sex, I would rather have the bondage. You know, I could still perform with my wife and everything, but that’s the way I like to have sex. Because I like to have that person under control.”

It started in childhood, he said. He once saw his grandparents butcher chickens, when he was eight, and he remembered the blood and the way the chickens hopped around after their heads were cut off, and the feeling he got as he watched.

Growing up, he knew that he thought of girls differently than his friends did. They all wanted to hold child star Annette Funicello’s hand and kiss her; he wanted to tie her up and throttle her.

Over the decades, he had wanted to kill a lot more people. But he often settled for stalking them, sometimes breaking into their homes to look around, steal underwear, and pretend he was a spy.

Some women became targets when he worked part-time for the 1990 U.S. census in small towns around Kansas, others while he was on the road for the security alarm company. His farthest target lived about two hundred miles from Wichita. He had dug a grave for a northern Kansas woman he intended to kill, but she wasn’t home when he came for her. In motel rooms, he put on stolen bras and panties and�using a tripod and shutter cable�took pictures of himself.

The cops debated whether to tell the people they could identify that they had almost become BTK victims. Landwehr didn’t want to upset them. But he decided investigators should contact them�and make sure there were no more bodies. There were not.

Some of the targets were angry about being told they had caught the eye of a serial killer; ignorance was a blessing. None of them wanted their identities publicized.

Rader described his crimes with the same flat tone that most people reserve for recalling routine errands.

When he confronted the Otero family in their kitchen, Joe Otero struggled to make sense of it: “He said, ‘My brother-in-law put you up to this.’ I said, ‘No, this is not a joke.’ I told him I had a weapon, a .22 with the hollow points I would use. So they started to lay down. They started to lay down in the living room.

“I didn’t really have real good control of the family, they were freaking out and stuff. So I bound them as best I could.” He had prepared the bindings beforehand. “I already had my cords with me, and I think some of them were already tied, I mean pre-knotted.”

Rader described the family as being cooperative because he used a ruse�which he inarticulately pronounced “russ.”

“I just told them I was going to California; I needed money, and I needed�I needed a car. And I was going�oh, I used that on several people, I said I need food.”

He tied Joe’s feet to his bed to keep him from escaping. Rader had worn gloves to prevent fingerprints, but he had not bothered to wear a mask. They had seen his face. So there was no doubt what was going to happen next. “They were going down.”

Rader went to his “hit kit” in the living room to get plastic bags; he returned to the bedroom.

“All hell broke loose when they found out I was going after them. I got him down, put the bag over his head. And I think I had to wrap something around it. And he went ballistic, trying to chew a hole in it or whatever.”

The family’s screams unnerved him. “That was a bad moment,” as he recalled.

He strangled Julie until she passed out, then turned his attention to Joey�putting a bag over his head. Julie regained consciousness and “yelled at me that ‘You killed my boy, you killed my boy.’ And she was just going ballistic…. That’s when I strangled her the second time.”

Rader then went to the girl, who had been screaming “Momma” and crying. He strangled her, but she came back too.

“You know, I strangled dogs and cats, but I never strangled a person before…. Strangling is a hard way to kill a person, you know, they don’t go down in a minute like they do in the movies…. I figured once you strangled a person, they would be done for.” But if any oxygen gets in the airway, “you’re going to come back…. You know you’re being strangled, that’s your torture.”

At some point, he said, Joe was still moving around, “so I put the coup de grâce on him.”

Rader said he then took “Little Joseph” to his bedroom and put a T-shirt under the plastic bag so he couldn’t chew through it. “I set the chair to watch…. I think I put him on the bed and I think he rolled off and he was expired there.”

Rader’s first thought after watching Joey struggle and die was “Gee, you know…I’ve always had a sexual desire for younger women, so I thought Josephine would be my primary target.” When he returned to the master bedroom, he saw that she had “woke up.”

That’s when he decided on an “encore.”

“I took her down in the basement, pulled her pants down, tied her up a little bit more, found the sewer pipe.” Before hanging the girl, Rader asked Josie if her daddy had a camera, because he wanted to take a picture. She said no.

The “encore” was completed, Rader explained, when he slipped the rope over her head and masturbated. He left her hanging with her toes just barely off the floor.