Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (33 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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The combination of his bogus story and his pistol convinced them to go along with his demands. After tying the two up in separate bedrooms, Rader racked his brain trying to figure how he was going to handle this glitch in his plan. Once again, he hadn’t foreseen the possibility of a man being at the house.
“How do you do away with one without the other knowing it?” he later wrote.
The next fifteen minutes were pure chaos. He was running back and forth from bedroom to bedroom, trying to keep control of a situation that was quickly deteriorating. Absolutely nothing was going according to his carefully rehearsed plan. In an attempt to kill the boy, he ended up shooting him two times in the head. His nerves were so frayed that he accidentally fired an additional round through the bathroom wall. He tried to strangle the young woman, but it seemed to be taking too long, so he grabbed his knife and began stabbing her. “I drove one in her back below the rib cage, hoping to hit the lungs,” he wrote. Blood splattered everywhere. Rader later commented that he was amazed at how slick it felt when it got on his fingertips.
Just as he was just preparing to jab the blade into the woman’s neck, he heard the front door open. He ran to the front window in time to see the young man he’d shot stumbling down the street, trying to flag down a car. In a flash, Rader grabbed his gear and ran like hell out the back door.
This time, Rader didn’t bother to write what happened in the hours after the murder. In an entry penned weeks later, he did explain that he once again believed it to be just a matter of time before the police nabbed him.
He confessed to his journal that he’d been transformed into a nervous wreck. He couldn’t recall ever reading about such a botched crime that didn’t end with the guy who did it going to jail. But the cops never came. Even after weeks and months passed, Rader was still on edge.
One afternoon in October 1974, a high school buddy named Bobby Ormston picked up the phone and dialed Rader’s phone number. I’d first heard about Ormston after a law enforcement source familiar with the details of Rader’s interrogation passed his name on to me. Apparently, Rader told the cops that during the final days of his letter writing campaign in 2004-2005, he’d toyed with the idea of convincing the authorities that Ormston was BTK. He thought it would be funny to trick the police into kicking in Bobby’s front door, then dragging him away in handcuffs. I spoke to Ormston on the phone a few days before hunkering down in this Wichita hotel room with Rader’s journal.
Ormston told me that when he phoned Rader in 1974, nearly ten years had passed since they’d seen each other, and he was dying to catch up with him. During that time, Ormston had moved away from Wichita to attend college, earned an engineering degree, and gotten married, and was now in the midst of a divorce.
He and Rader chatted for a few minutes on the phone. Ormston recalled thinking that Rader’s voice sounded just as flat and serious as it had back in high school. By the time he hung up, they’d agreed to meet at the Blackout, a local tavern near the WSU campus, and catch up on life over a pitcher of beer.
It was around 5:30 in the afternoon when Ormston showed up at the bar. Dennis was already there, sitting at a table in the back, nursing his beer. He’d positioned his chair so that he was facing the door, allowing him to glimpse whoever entered long before they would be able to spot him. Ormston grabbed a glass and joined him at the table, excited to hear what he’d been up to over the past decade. But the moment he sat down, he was shocked at what he encountered.
“There was just this incredible hostility about him,” he told me over the phone one afternoon a few weeks before my arrival in Wichita. “It made me real uncomfortable. A couple of times I thought he was going to come across the table at me. He was just so tense. Never in my life had I seen Dennis like that. It was like he was sitting on a spring and was ready to pop out of his seat. I’ve been around people who have been high on meth, and that look that he gave me had that same kind of teeth-gritted intensity to it.”
Ormston explained to me that he tried his best to ignore the tension and listened as Rader described his life since graduating from high school.
“He told me how he’d just gotten married and was big into the church and big into Jesus,” his friend recalled. “I don’t have anything against Jesus, it’s just his fan club I sometimes have a problem with. Dennis knew that about me, and he also knew I was going through a divorce, so I figured that all the hostility I’d been sensing was on account of him thinking I was some wayward sinner. I chalked it all up to that.”
Over three decades later, Ormston began sobbing when recounting that awkward meeting with his friend.
“I couldn’t understand why he’d treated me that way,” he said. “Even though I thought the world of him as a kid, I had no desire to see him again after that. That’s how much he frightened me. I never could understand it. On the surface, he looked the same. But underneath his skin, something I’d never seen before had taken him over. Whatever it was, it scared me.”
The two never spoke again, he told me.
In July 1975, Paula gave birth to the couple’s first child, Brian Howard Rader. By then, Dennis had already landed a job as a construction and installation supervisor with ADT Security, a firm that specialized in burglary alarms for residences and businesses. Three years later in June 1978, a daughter was born—Kerri Lynn Rader.
If Rader truly enjoyed the role of being a father—as many who thought they knew him said he seemed to—he certainly never mentioned it in any of his journals. In fact, in the countless pages of his writings, he makes reference to his family only a half dozen times at most. And even when he does write about them, it’s only in the briefest, most cursory manner. Perhaps there was a good reason for this: his diaries focused on the most passionate loves in his secret life—bondage and death.
By all accounts, Rader was a doting father, the kind who would often romp in the family’s backyard, where he eventually built a massive tree house with the kids. He made sure his son became a Boy Scout, eventually earning the organization’s top honor of Eagle Scout, which had eluded Dennis back when he was a teen. But of course, back when he was growing up, the elder Rader had other things on his mind.
Kerri grew into an athletic girl, who eventually qualified for the Kansas state high school golf championships in 1996. Like her father, she had an insatiable appetite for horror stories. As she grew older, she devoured nearly every book she could find on monsters, zombies, ghosts, and ghouls. Whenever she finished one, her father would often walk into her room, pluck it off of her bookshelf, and read it himself.
But there was something else about Kerri that her father always found puzzling. When she was six or seven, she began being plagued by horrible nightmares that caused her to awaken in the middle of the night, shrieking in terror. Whenever this happened, her mother and father would plod into her room, sit on her bed, and try to convince her that it was all just a bad dream. Over time, Rader—who never had nightmares and normally drifted off to sleep within minutes of placing his head on a pillow—began to attribute Kerri’s night terrors with her love of horror books and movies. But still, he found it all quite curious. She didn’t just awaken, screaming, from her terrible dreams. More often than not, she awoke as if she were being attacked by something and were fighting off something or someone. Sometimes when her parents walked into her bedroom, she’d literally be pounding on a nearby table, or anything close to her, with her fists.
Although some might attribute this behavior to Kerri’s somehow picking up on the dark psychic energy of her father, I think the explanation might be a lot less far-fetched. For starters, I believe she might have stumbled onto Rader’s horrific stash of detective magazines and sketches of women in bondage. That, I had begun to understand, would be enough to warp any young, impressionable brain. I also think it would be safe to say that Rader was not as protective of his yearning for violent-themed books and movies as he should have been, and these obsessive appetites were unfortunately transferred into his young daughter’s mind. The fact that she never said anything to her father about her bewildering discovery of his stash isn’t surprising. Like most kids, the last thing she would have wanted to do was admit she’d been snooping in his stuff.
Kerri’s birth in June 1978 coincided with a slowdown in her father’s passion for murder. But in the fifteen months leading up to her arrival in the Rader family, her father had hunted down and murdered two additional women, bringing his total body count to seven. Shirley Vian, a mother of three young children, was garroted on March 17, 1977. Rader claimed the life of Nancy Fox on December 8 of that same year, just around the time Paula was three months pregnant with Kerri.
The convoluted story behind how Shirley Vian ended up as one of his victims started in “the early weeks of March,” Rader wrote in his journal.
“The uncontrollable Factor X is saying kill,“he wrote.
So Rader began once again to look for another victim. It didn’t take long to find one—a single mother who he’d seen on a few occasions at the Blackout tavern, the same watering hole where he’d met his buddy Bobby Ormston three years earlier. He’d dropped by the popular tavern after one of his night classes at WSU. It wasn’t Vian he spotted originally, however, but one of her neighbors. The neighbor was there with some friends, and Rader watched her, following her home on foot when she left. He soon began scoping out her house, trying to determine if she lived with a man or owned a dog.
On a couple of occasions, he walked the dimly lit alley behind her property. He decided to make his move on March 17, but reminded himself that he needed to remain “fexable” in case things didn’t work out. In the three years since Kathy Bright’s murder, he realized he shouldn’t be so bullheaded about his crimes. If the conditions weren’t right, he’d go home and wait for another chance. But if it “looks good—it’s a hit.”
Late that morning, he put on his tweed sport coat and a pair of dark slacks, drove into Wichita, and knocked on the front door of his intended victim’s house. No one answered. He turned to walk back to his car, but he spotted a young boy on the sidewalk, carrying a sack of groceries. Rader decided to use his “detective ruse” on the young lad and pulled a picture out of his wallet of Paula and his young son, Brian.
“Do you know if these people live around here?” he asked.
The boy told him that he’d never seen them before, then continued on to his house, located just down the street. Rader watched him, paying close attention to which house he entered. Ten minutes later, he knocked on their front door. When the boy answered, he flashed his pistol, told him he was a detective, and pushed his way inside, where he spotted the boy’s brother and sister watching TV.
In his journal, he noted how the boy’s mother grew frightened and nervous when he told her that he intended to rape her. The kitchen seemed like a good place to do it, he said. She begged him to first let her have a cigarette.
“I grant that,” he typed in his grammatically challenged account of the crime. But no sooner had she polished off the cigarette than she informed him that she felt sick. After glancing around the filthy, “junk”-filled house, the hyperneat and always organized Rader decided that it was no wonder.
He attempted to tie the wrists of Vian’s older son, but the boy began sobbing. Within seconds, his younger brother and sister also broke out in tears. “You got some place where I can lock your kids up?” he asked Vian. But before she could answer, he decided to put them in the bathroom and managed to prevent the kids from getting out by blocking one of the doors with a bed and using a rope to tie another door shut.
With that out of the way, he wrote, he looked at Vian and said, “It’s time.”
She removed her blue housecoat and pink nightie, then lay down on her stomach, on top of the bed. In his entry, Rader noted that her head faced east and her feet pointed west. As he wrapped black electrical tape around her hands and arms, she vomited on the floor. He walked into the kitchen and fetched her a glass of water. She drank it and once again attempted to talk him out of raping her. Rader was unmoved by her plea and taped her feet to the railing at the west end of the bed, then continued wrapping more tape around her ankles and knees.
Suddenly the telephone rang. Vian explained that it was probably her friend, calling to inquire about when she should drop by to take her to the doctor. Something about the ringing phone caused the children to begin crying again.
“Plans changed . . . Plans changed,” Rader noted.
He wrote that in a flash, he looped a piece of cord around Vian’s neck, which seemed to surprise her. She moaned about the tension, begging for somebody to help her. But nobody could hear her except for Rader, who watched as her face changed from red to blue, then from purple to dark purple. He decided to wrap additional cord around her neck, observing that if he relied on what he’d originally used, she might “come too” in the same way that Josephine Otero had during his initial attempts to kill her.
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