Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (44 page)

McCurdy reminded the bidders that the stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine would stay with the house.

“Think of the rental potential this has,” he exclaimed.

He noted it was conveniently located only a few hundred yards from I-135.

“Park City is a city on the move,” he declared.

He did not mention BTK.

The strip club owner had the winning bid of ninety thousand dollars�thirty-three thousand dollars above the appraised value.

“I’m a real estate investor,” she told Potter later. “I’d like to see all the proceeds go to Mrs. Rader and help her family out. I’ve worked very hard all my life to get where I’m at today. I couldn’t even imagine what she is going through. This is the least I can do.” But Paula Rader would not soon see any of the proceeds. Families of BTK’s victims sued to seize the “extra” thirty-three thousand dollars that they argued was the fruit of her husband’s notoriety. During the legal battle, the buyer backed out.

After the auction ended, Laviana found himself alone in BTK’s backyard, listening to Wayne Newton singing through the auctioneer’s loudspeakers:

“Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen. Thank you for all the joy and pain….”

52

August 17–19, 2005

The Monster Is Banished

For Rader’s sentencing in August, District Attorney Nola Foulston thought detailed testimony in the national spotlight was in order.

Many Wichitans, including some defense attorneys, criticized this decision. Rader had confessed and accepted his fate. Why go to the expense of such a hearing? Why put all the sordid details on television, where they would shock the victims’ families and needlessly embarrass Rader’s innocent wife and children? Was Foulston grandstanding?

Prosecutor Kevin O’Connor despised the backroom gossip. For one thing, Foulston had asked every one of BTK’s victim families whether they had any problem with her putting on the evidence. None objected.

Rader fails to convince people of his remorse during his sentencing hearing.

For another thing, O’Connor said, “If we had wanted to grandstand, the best way to do that would have been to call a press conference and stand there and talk, just the DA, and hold forth for hours in front of the cameras. But that’s not what Nola did.”

People needed to hear from the cops about what they knew, she decided. Otherwise, the only full public explanation of BTK’s crimes would have come from Rader himself, at his plea hearing. Although Rader’s account to the judge had been detailed and horrifying, he minimized the torture.

O’Connor said there was one other reason to proceed. Foulston had long experience with victims of crime. She’d kept that promise, made years before, to handle some murder trials herself, in spite of the work it took to supervise more than fifty assistant prosecutors. She knew how therapeutic it was for victims’ family members to personally confront a killer at his moment of justice. “It is almost like a way for the family to say ‘You didn’t get away with it,’” O’Connor said.

Wichita police detective Dana Gouge presents toys found in the Vian bathroom during Rader’s sentencing hearing.

There were other advantages, some of them dark. Otis knew enough about Rader now to know that he feared for his life in prison and wanted inmates to think that they were about to meet a big, bad serial killer�a dangerous man who should be taken seriously. Otis also knew what convicts thought of child molesters and guys who liked to dress in women’s clothing. He hoped all the inmates planned to watch Rader’s sentencing on television.

In the hearing, held over two days, Foulston asked the detectives to go into gruesome detail about each murder from the witness stand. “I was so sick of the arrogance he had shown at his plea hearing,” she said later. “Much of what we did in the sentencing was deliberately designed to break down his arrogance by showing publicly who he really was.”

Ray Lundin of the KBI told how Rader had mocked Josie Otero during his confession. Dana Gouge pulled on rubber gloves and held up the toys that BTK had tossed into the bathroom to occupy Shirley Vian’s children while he strangled her. Foulston, O’Connor, and Prosecutor Kim Parker showed photographs Rader had taken of himself in bondage, wearing a stolen bra and slip.

Otis tried to get Rader to make eye contact with him as he described Rader confessing to Vicki Wegerle’s murder, but Rader avoided his glare, glancing up only to peek at photos of her body when they flashed on the courtroom screen.

Sedgwick County Sherrif’s Office Capt. Sam Houston holds up the mask Rader left by Dolores Davis’s body.

Some of what Foulston and the cops did in the courtroom was designed to mess with Rader’s head. Foulston wanted to send him to prison as a psychologically shaken man. She had pondered how to do this, and Landwehr’s vivid descriptions of what an anal-retentive neat freak Rader was gave her an idea about how to do it.

When Landwehr took the stand, Foulston approached him with a bag full of Rader’s cutouts of women on index cards that Rader had neatly bound with rubber bands. She dumped them out, undid the rubber bands, and deliberately made a mess of the pile pawing through it. Rader, watching this angrily from the defense table, threw his pen on the floor. But Foulston found her own surprise in the pile: she picked up one of the hundreds of cards at random, turned it over, and read the name “Nola” on the back.

Startled, she showed it to Landwehr in the witness chair.

“Did you realize this was in this pile?” she whispered.

“No,” Landwehr whispered back in surprise. They had both examined the photos in preparation for the hearing and had missed it.

The next day, after hearing statements from victims’ family members, Waller sentenced Rader to ten consecutive life sentences, one for each murder. Rader, by now sixty, would not be eligible for parole until well past his one-hundredth birthday.

Wichita police detective Tim Relph unfolds the nightgown found beside the body of Nancy Fox.

Rader had prepared for this. One day, as deputies were moving Rader in leg chains to another part of the jail, Rader began to jog in place. He said he was exercising so that he would not enter prison as a weakling. And though he had been heterosexual all his life, he was now considering alternatives. Homosexuality might be interesting in prison, he told the cops.

Before dawn the morning after the sentencing, deputies took Rader on the thirty-minute drive from Wichita to the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Rader was dressed in a red jumpsuit and slip-on sandals, shackled at ankles, wrists, and waist.

Sheriff Gary Steed, who years before had investigated the murder of Dolores Davis, assigned himself and two deputies to make the drive.

On the way, they heard a news station play a recording of accusing voices from the previous day’s sentencing:

“I’m Carmen Julie Otero Montoya,” the Oteros’ daughter had told Rader in the courtroom. “Although we have never met, you have seen my face before. It is the same face you murdered over thirty years ago�the face of my mother, Julie Otero. She showed me how to love, to be a good person, to accept others as they are, and, most of all, to face your fears. I’m sure you saw that in her face as she fought to live. My mother against your gun. You are such a
coward
….”

Wichita police detective Kelly Otis tries to make eye contact with Rader during the sentencing hearing.

She described every family member, starting with her playful father.

“I’m sure you could feel his love for his family as you took away his last breath. You are such a coward.”

Her sister, Josie.

“It’s amazing to me that you could be so cruel to a sweet, beautiful child.”

Joey, forever nine years old.

“His name was Joey,
not
‘Junior,’ but I guess it really doesn’t matter to you…. A man with a gun against a little boy. You are definitely a coward….

“Just recently I realized that I could not remember my mother’s voice. It was a painful discovery, but as I put my thoughts on paper it comes to me�I am my mother’s voice. And I know we’ve been heard.”

The judge allowed representatives from all seven families to talk. In the car with Steed, Rader listened to their voices as he looked at green pastures rolling by. Steed wondered how Rader was handling this. Some of the people making statements the day before had cried; some had denounced Rader venomously, including Dee Davis’s son, Jeff, a former sheriff’s officer: