Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (29 page)

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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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One thing seems clear: marriage helped focus Rader. In 1972, he landed a job as an assembler at the Coleman Company and began to immerse himself in the goings-on at Park City’s newly created Christ Lutheran Church, where Paula and her mother sang in the choir. By the summer of 1973, he was working on the assembly line at the Cessna Aircraft Company, which seemed perfect because Rader had reportedly begun toying with the idea of becoming a pilot. At this same time, he and Paula were trying to start a family, although they weren’t having much luck yet.
 
By November, the oil crisis was wreaking holy hell across the nation. Gasoline jumped from thirty cents a gallon to more than fifty cents. Every time he flipped on the TV, Rader had to listen to another news report about some plant laying off workers. It wouldn’t happen to him, though—that’s what he told himself. After all, he’d been so good. He’d tried so hard to stop thinking all those bad thoughts. Before long, though, he began hearing rumblings that the suits who sat around all day in their air-conditioned offices had panicked. Because of the huge jump in gas prices, they figured the small plane business was all washed up.
 
So one crisp autumn morning, Rader showed up at the Cessna plant and learned that he and about five hundred other workers had been sacked. He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t fair. All because of some phony oil crisis cooked up by a bunch of guys living out in the desert. His head was spinning around. He felt as though someone had plunged a Buck knife into his heart. Sure, he’d been working on the line for only four months, but he loved the job. The money was good. He was even taking night classes at Wichita State University (WSU). He felt like a person with a future. Now it had been destroyed.
 
He climbed into his ’62 Chevy Impala and poured on the gas out of the parking lot. He told himself that somebody was going to pay for making him feel so small, so powerless. The monster began to squirm inside him. Rader might have deluded himself that it was dead, but it turned out that it had always been in there, lying low, hibernating, gathering strength for the day it would one day reappear.
 
Rader later told Landwehr that minutes after getting his pink slip he realized he was on the verge of doing something weird, something bad. Paula wasn’t home at that hour of the morning. She wouldn’t return from her bookkeeping job at the VA hospital until late that afternoon. So Rader decided just to drive the streets of Wichita, trying to pretend he didn’t know what was going to happen next.
 
When he finally spotted a house a few miles away from the Cessna plant that looked as though the owners were away, he stopped his car, strode up to the front door, and rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he walked into the backyard and broke inside. His heart was going crazy in his chest. Yet standing inside that stranger’s empty home not only calmed him but made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t for years. He didn’t stay long. When he finally left, he took only one thing with him—a hatchet. He walked straight back to his car, shoved it beneath the front seat, and drove home.
 
He felt good.
 
 
The next few weeks were bad ones. He couldn’t shut off his head. The yearning to hurt someone wouldn’t go away. He couldn’t shake it. For years he’d fantasized about this sort of thing. But this was different. The urge was so much more powerful now, and was growing more so with each passing day. And now that he didn’t have a job to occupy him, he had nothing to do all day but think.
 
He could control his urge if he wanted to—that was what he told himself. The thing was, he didn’t want to control it anymore. Why should he? He’d done that all his life. He’d kept his secret under wraps. He’d hidden it away. He’d played by everybody’s rules, and where had it had gotten him? Out of work, living off his wife’s salary, and collecting unemployment, with Christmas just around the corner.
 
Shortly before getting laid off, Rader decided to surprise Paula with a trip to Las Vegas. But after getting his pink slip, he didn’t want to go. The people at the airline, however, didn’t seem to care that he’d just lost his job, he later said. They weren’t going to give him his money back, so he had no choice but to use the tickets. He told himself he’d make the best of it, and before long he began to wonder what Sin City would look like from the window of his jet, those millions of flickering incandescent bulbs and miles of neon tubes setting the night sky aglow.
 
Yet on the evening they flew into Las Vegas, all he saw was darkness. There must be some mistake, he thought. Had their flight been diverted to another city?
 
When he asked a stewardess about it, she just shrugged. It was all because of the oil shortage, she told him. A couple of days before, they’d decided to turn off all the lights in town because it had gotten too expensive to power them. Rader stared down at the blackened city in angry disbelief. He never wrote another word about the trip in his diary, so I can only imagine that his visit to Vegas was both uneventful and disappointing.
 
A few days later, he returned to their tiny house in Park City in a foul, anxious mood. Every morning, he’d drive Paula to work, then return home to thumb through the stash of detective magazines he kept hidden away on a top shelf of the guest bedroom closet. He loved to stare into those pages, reading the stories over and over again, pausing every so often, allowing the headlines to seep deep inside him: “He Was into Kinky Sex . . . and Kinkier Kills: Weird Case of the Hog-Tied Hookers.” “Rape-Strangler’s Two-Year Terror Reign.” “Dog-Leash Strangler Hung Victim from Doorknob!” “The Autopsy Showed That Besides Hog-Tying His Victim, the Pervert Used His “Torture Kit” on Krista!”
 
Rader would close his eyes and masturbate, imagining himself to be right there in the middle of whatever scene he’d just read about. He’d always be the bad guy, and he loved the way the women in these magazines would watch his every move, the way their little eyeballs would dart about in their sockets, never blinking, following him as he walked about the room with his ropes and knives. He was the one with all the power, all the control. There was no denying that. He was in charge. It was sheer ecstasy. He couldn’t get enough of it.
 
 
Winter came early that year. The ground froze up hard as concrete, and the sky always looked gray. Paula was the one bringing home the bacon now. Rader didn’t like thinking about that. It made him feel weak. Some mornings after dropping Paula off at work, he’d write in his journal, something he continued to do on an erratic basis for the remainder of his life as a free man. Lately, his entries had begun to detail his newfound habit of driving the streets of Wichita, allowing his mind to drift from one dark thought to the next.
 
He’d begun noticing things in a way he never had before—coeds from the local university, mothers and little girls, women walking by themselves on the sidewalk. They were all his for the taking, he told himself. And that made him feel good. Sometimes he’d park his car and watch them stroll past his window. Other times, he’d follow them home, paying close attention to where they lived. Up until then, he’d always felt somewhat ashamed of all those thoughts he used to have, but something was different now. The gloves were off. He was sick of pretending. There was a comfort that came with all this thinking, a sense of belonging, of being part of a universe where he called the shots. He didn’t need to hide his thoughts and feelings anymore, to be embarrassed. He could go for hours at a stretch and not do anything but let that TV set between his ears play and play and play. Oh, the places it took him.
 
One morning, after arriving back at the house, he pulled his old typewriter out of the closet in the back bedroom and rolled a piece of paper into it. Over the past few days, he’d been starting to notice that the buzz he got by looking at his magazines wasn’t enough anymore. He’d begun to grow bored reading about all the grand adventures all those other guys were having. He decided it might be nice to create a story of his own, one in which he, not somebody else, got to be the bad guy. He’d certainly never considered himself to be much of a writer, but now it seemed as though the words and sentences were bursting out of him so quickly that he wondered if he’d be able to peck them out on his typewriter quickly enough. It almost felt as though someone were dictating them to him.
 
According to an entry I read in his journal, the first time he tried it, he sat there for a moment and thought about what he wanted to write, what he needed to say. He’d never done that sort of thing before. Yet he had so much going on inside his head that he needed to get out. So he started off by coming up with a title—if he could just get the right title, the rest of the story would come to him.
 
So he typed out the words, THE CHILD KILLER WHO DRESSED LIKE A WOMEN.
 
Something about the word
women
didn’t look right to him, he later told my source, but he couldn’t figure out why. Lord knows he had to be one of the world’s worst spellers. Nevertheless, he liked the way his headline floated there at the top of the page. It looked professional, he told himself.
 
Then, all at once, the story he needed to write exploded inside his brain. He began typing:
 
 
It was suppertime in Wichita, Ks. The streets were nearly deserted. The scene presented, peaceful winter setting for to young girls walking down the street. There was no reason for concern as the two girls walk
along happy with Christmas thought only a few day away. And neither girls notice the yellow two door Chevy following them. Inside the Chevy, a woman or someone dressed like a woman peered nervously from the steering wheel and fingered the cold steel handcuff on the seat next to her. Inside her pants suit a small revolver was cocked and fitted with a silentier. She adjusted her sunglass and move forward toward the girls. When the girls reached the corner of the street she pulled up and rolled the window down, “Girls do want a ride up the street?” The two girls look at each other for the answer, but since this was a woman driving they felt that no harm would come to them. “Sure,” they both answer at about the same time, and slid in. Jessica reached out and shut the door, and the car sped away.
 
 
The story was catalogued on the disc in my computer. Rader’s creation went on for four single-spaced pages. He had yet to finish page one when his main character pulled a pistol out from his waistband and thrust it against Amelia’s temple. Rader wrote that the killer commanded her in a gruff voice to fasten a pair of handcuffs around her friend’s wrist, then fastened the other cuff around her wrist. The car sped off into the darkness that was dropping over the city like a shroud. Next stop, a deserted farm on the edge of town.
 
Neither girl uttered a word during the drive. They both knew they’d been tricked by the man who dressed like a woman. Eventually, the group ended up inside a dusty old tack room located in a corner of an empty barn. The two girls were chained to a post. Next, Rader had his cross-dressing main character retrieve a suitcase from the trunk of his car. From it, he pulled a hemp rope.
 
The girls were seated on a hay bale, whimpering, while the man went into the main part of the barn and tied a slipknot in the rope and threw the other end over a thick wooden beam. He watched as the rope dangled in space, six feet above the hard-packed dirt floor, then returned to the tack room clutching a knife and ordered Amelia to remove her clothes. Rader wrote that the girl froze with fear, but the sharp end of the knife persuaded her to do as she was told. He placed a red gag in her mouth and bound her wrists with nylon cord. She began sobbing. He did the same thing to Jessica, then took pictures of the two frightened girls with his camera.
 
Outside, a full moon hung in the dark sky. The man who dressed like a woman walked out to his car and fetched a shovel from his trunk. A moment later, he stood in a nearby field, awash in the incandescent glow of moonlight, and dug two three-foot-deep holes in the cold Kansas earth, one beside the other. He returned the shovel to his trunk and wrapped it in a plastic bag, then grabbed the kerosene heater he’d brought with him and carried it into the tack room, to make it warm for the two shivering girls.
 
He unchained Amelia and marched her into the barn, prodding her with the tip of his knife. But she couldn’t see the rope he’d prepared for her because of the darkness. After forcing the trembling child onto the ground, he tied her ankles together and pulled the slipknot over her head.
 
“Fear then struck her and she twisted in her rope and cried,” he wrote.
 
She was still struggling to get free when he carried her over to the hay bale and drew the slack rope tight. She froze with fear and closed her eyes as he dropped his pants, wrapped her panties around his penis, then kicked the hay bale out from beneath her. Instantly, her head turned slightly upward and to the side, her legs kicked, her body twitched. The killer took a few pictures of her swinging back and forth in the cold barn, then he cut her down and carried her warm corpse out to the grave he’d just dug. Before rolling her into the hole, he removed Amelia’s blouse and training bra.
 
By the end of the story, the killer who dressed like a woman encircled a loop of baling wire around Jessica’s throat and ordered her to perform fellatio on him. “Suck badly on it real hard,” Rader wrote. “Do you understand me pronto, he screamed.”

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