Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (22 page)
Authors: John Douglas,Johnny Dodd
BOOK: Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer
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We sat there in the middle of the street for a few moments, the car idling, both of us staring in silence at the nondescript structure.
“Not a helluva lot to it,” I said.
Landwehr said nothing. He stepped on the gas, and we sped off.
All morning long, he’d been alluding to a run-down grain silo he wanted me to see. He’d learned about it from Rader while interrogating him. To get out to where it was, we drove past Rader’s office in the neat and tidy one-story brick Park City municipal building on Hydraulic Street. The structure had the sterile, nondescript feel of a medical complex and was located just a few minutes away from his house. Rader’s white work truck with a camper top on the back sat in the parking lot.
Roughly three miles down the road stood the empty silo. Rader had spent much of the last decade driving past this silo, fantasizing about all the terrible things he wanted to do inside it one day. Some guys dream about retiring and moving to Arizona or Florida. Rader told Landwehr that he wanted to stay right here in Park City and set up shop in this old, run-down grain silo, located on the corner of a small family farm.
For Landwehr, the structure represented everything frustrating and sadistic about Dennis Rader. After all, for decades investigators weren’t quite sure what they were dealing with—an evil genius or just an evil guy who somehow managed to catch all the lucky breaks.
Now they knew.
Dennis Rader was a guy with a slightly below average level of intelligence who somehow possessed a repressed type of patience not often found in serial killers.
He was a survivor.
Landwehr slowed down, then pulled over to the side of the road.
“There it is,” he said, pointing past a barbed-wire fence at a concrete column that jutted up into the blue sky. From where we’d parked, the structure appeared to list slightly to the right, resembling a rural version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Beside it sat a decrepit wooden barn; a number of boards were missing from its side, along with pieces of sheet metal from its rusting roof.
“Don’t ask me how in the world he was gonna construct his torture chamber in there without the owner ever realizing what he was up to,” he chuckled. “Like I told you, this guy just doesn’t always seem to think a lot of things through.”
It was midafternoon by the time we made it back to my hotel. Landwehr’s cell phone rang just as he shut off the engine. He fished it out from the pocket of his suit jacket and said, “Landwehr.” I listened to him speak for a few moments and realized he’d just gotten a break in one of the homicide cases he was working.
Landwehr excused himself hastily and sped away while I walked up to my room by myself, checked my e-mail inbox on the laptop I’d brought with me from home, then pulled back the curtains and stared out the window over Wichita.
The city looked as though it had sprouted up from the flat expanse of prairie like a cluster of steel, wood, and concrete mushrooms. I couldn’t help but believe that deep down Dennis Rader identified with the flatness of this land where he’d lived his entire life. Yet he forever yearned to be like one of these buildings that had burst forth from the smooth, predictable ground to become something. Something that stood out. The kind of thing people stopped to stare at.
What the hell is it, I wondered, that creates a killer as twisted and remorseless as BTK? I caught an image of him sitting on a chair, watching Joey Otero’s thrashing, twitching body. Genetics can only go so far in explaining how someone could manage to be so devoid of empathy. There had to be other factors, all of which conspired together in just the perfect way to create a Dennis Rader.
Over the years, I’d heard all sorts of theories put forth to explain what makes men kill. Although some theorists have suggested that even something as seemingly inconsequential as location can play a contributing role, I have to agree with Landwehr when he insisted, “This would have happened wherever Dennis Rader lived. If his family had moved to Kansas City, it would have happened there. It’s not the environment. It’s not the town. It’s the person.”
That may be the case. Nevertheless, the territory around Wichita—like many former frontier settlements—possessed a history rich with blood and gore, stories that someone like Dennis Rader would have found both empowering and inspiring. The darkest tale, which may or may not be rooted in absolute fact, involved the first European ever to set foot in this region. I’d heard the story years ago from a cop on one of my first trips to Kansas while investigating a homicide.
The place that eventually came to be known years later as Wichita, Kansas, was first seen by a white European man in 1540. His name was Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and the day he stumbled into this region, his mood turned foul. The odyssey that led Coronado to this spot had started in 1538, when he and his band of fortune hunters began their bloody trek across the southwestern portion of the so-called New World, killing just about every indigenous man, woman, and child they encountered.
Coronado was chasing a strange vision that had seized the imagination of the intelligentsia and upper class of his era. He’d come looking for a city constructed entirely out of gold, known for decades in Spanish mythology and popular rumor, called Cibola.
For two long years this golden metropolis had eluded him. One day, an Indian slave named El Turco told some of Coronado’s soldiers about just such a city that he claimed to have once seen, located in the land that lay to the east. Against the pleadings of some of his other native scouts, the impatient, gold-drunk Coronado decided to trust El Turco.
The group wandered for months through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and southern Kansas, eventually arriving at the sandy junction of two shallow rivers, now known as the Arkansas and the Little Arkansas. It didn’t take long before he spotted a cluster of domed huts, constructed from golden straw—hardly the opulent splendor he’d been promised. So incensed was Coronado at being brought to this place that he ordered his men to torture a confession out of El Turco.
Exactly what atrocities they performed was never recorded. But the history books are filled with accounts of conquistadors using their razor-sharp rapiers to force information out of their victims by methodically slicing off ears, noses, fingers, and feet. They were also fond of burying people alive for extended periods of time. Whatever the specifics of his torture, El Turco eventually confessed to fabricating the story about the golden city.
It was only then that Coronado finally had him strangled.
From the window of my hotel room, I watched as the sun, misshapen and colored like a pumpkin, rolled beneath the horizon. The Arkansas River ran near here, but it was dry as a bone now, nothing but sand, clay, and willows. Nightfall was looming, and once again I found myself far from home in yet another hotel room, trying to understand what had compelled a man I’d never met to murder ten people while leading a life that, on the surface, appeared hopelessly normal.
I was about to finish the journey through the dark, convoluted mind of a monster, a journey I had begun over thirty years ago when I first became obsessed with capturing and understanding the Wichita serial killer during my first job as an FBI agent in Detroit.
Landwehr knocked on the hollow metal door of my room, then pushed it open. He pulled a CD out of his pocket, held it in the air, and said, “Got some things on here you might find interesting.” He placed it on the desk, beside my computer. “It’s the stuff we seized from Rader after his arrest—his stash of journals, personal pictures, notes from his killings. I show it whenever I do PowerPoint presentations at Rotary Clubs, Elks’ Lodges, places like that. Been asked to do plenty of talks ever since they put him away.”
But before he could utter a word, his cell phone once again jingled. Landwehr frowned, flipped it open, scrutinized the number on the display, and said, “Gotta take this call.” He pulled open the door to my room and disappeared out into the hallway.
I turned on the TV, kicked back on the bed, and tried to cool my heels until he returned. But the cable was out, so I just sat there staring at the gray static on the screen, listening to the hiss.
The CD Landwehr placed on the desk was still sitting there, next to my computer. I tried to ignore it. Sunlight, the last remnants of it, faintly orange and tired, shone in through my window. I studied the luminous puddle it cast on the blood-red carpet, trying to piece together how it was I’d ended up here in this hotel room in Wichita.
I remembered the phone call.
It came late one night in March 2004. By then I’d been retired from the FBI for nine years. On the other end of the line was a criminal profiler I’d once trained, who still worked in my former unit.
Since my retirement from the FBI, I’d become an independent investigator, called in to review homicide cases for both prosecutors and defense lawyers. My findings were sometimes at odds with those of my former employer—a fact that irked plenty of agents up and down the food chain at the FBI. Which was why my friend felt compelled to phone me—he knew no one else would.
“He’s back,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Who’s back?”
“Your UNSUB in Wichita,” he said.
I’d spent a lifetime hunting UNSUBs responsible for multiple murders, rapes, and a variety of other violent crimes. But the moment I heard the word
Wichita,
I knew exactly who he was talking about.
Wichita,
I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“BTK?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“More bodies?”
“No,” my friend said. “Just a letter to a local TV station with a one-page Xerox of some crime scene photos he must have taken and a driver’s license from the victim. Something seems to have flushed him out. It’s been years since this guy last surfaced. A lot of people thought he was dead or gone forever. It’s a real shock for the people of Wichita.”
It dawned on me that twenty years had passed since I’d last immersed myself in the case, which seemed unbelievable. Depending on how optimistic you are, twenty years represents a quarter of a man’s life—the time it takes for him to move from maturity to redundancy.
“You know, deep down, I never really believed he was dead,” I told my former compatriot.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “You always were such an optimist.”
After thanking my caller for his tip, I hung up and stared out the window of my study, out into the darkness. I caught myself wishing that I was back at the FBI, working my old job as a profiler. I knew I wouldn’t be involved in the case now that I was retired. My mind was on fire. It seemed so appropriate that this killer who I hadn’t thought about in years would reenter my life in the dead of night. Back when I was a field agent, we often chose to do the dirty work—stage a raid or arrest a dangerous felon—long after the sun had set. It was a time when even the most ruthless criminals would drop their guards. Years later, when I began doing my interviews with convicted violent offenders, I chose to drop by prisons at night, the loneliest, most isolated time inside a correctional facility. It was also the one time when I could usually count on these monsters wanting to talk.
Although my mind occasionally drifted back to Wichita and BTK, the last time I’d devoted any real time to thinking about this killer was in 1997, while putting together my book
Obsession,
which detailed the crimes and case histories of various serial killers, serial rapists, child molesters, and stalkers.
Obsession,
which detailed the crimes and case histories of various serial killers, serial rapists, child molesters, and stalkers.
Any doubt that the BTK investigation hadn’t left its mark on me vanished when my cowriter and I decided to use the BTK case as the book’s first chapter. What I wrote was essentially a pared-down version of the analysis I created back in 1979, with the addition of ideas about the UNSUB unearthed during my 1984 consult with Wichita police. Because the case was still ongoing, I feared that my intimate account might generate so many false leads that Wichita police would be run ragged chasing each one down. So I changed the names, places, and dates in the story, choosing instead to locate the killer in a fictional town in the Northeast. I also never identified the UNSUB as BTK.
Yet despite all my fictional props, what I wrote must have struck a nerve with readers. Because not long after
Obsession
went on sale, I started receiving letters and e-mail from people informing me that although they realized the story was set in a fictional town, the suspect I described reminded them of someone they knew or had known. Most wondered whether I might be interested in following up on their tip or knew of a detective they could pass their information on to.
Obsession
went on sale, I started receiving letters and e-mail from people informing me that although they realized the story was set in a fictional town, the suspect I described reminded them of someone they knew or had known. Most wondered whether I might be interested in following up on their tip or knew of a detective they could pass their information on to.
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