Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (34 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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After a few minutes, he pulled a plastic bag over Vian’s head, then tied her nightie around her neck to keep it tight. He masturbated as she thrashed atop the dirty sheets, her life slowly seeping away. Then he fled the house.
 
He ended his write-up of the murder with a lament over not being able to kill Vian’s children. If only he’d had more time, he fretted. If he had, he had intended to use “a rough hemp rope for the girl and more plastic bag for the boys.”
 
 
Nine months later in December, he struck again. This time his victim was a twenty-five-year-old woman named Nancy Fox, whom he first spotted in November while trolling the streets for victims. He quickly learned her name and that she held two jobs—working at a local law firm and at a jewelry store—by rifling through the contents of her mailbox.
 
In an effort to get a close-up look at Fox, Rader tracked her to the store and purchased some cheap jewelry out of a display case from a clerk; all the while he eyed Fox working in a back room. For the next month, whenever he had time, he stalked the young woman, hoping to learn her routine. On a couple of occasions, he cased the outside of her duplex, trying to find a good entry point inside. Twice he undertook what he called a “dress rehearse,” and in both instances he was prepared to carry out his intended crime “if everything was a go.”
 
The more he learned about Fox, the more he decided she fulfilled all the requirements of the perfect victim. Because of his first few nearly botched attempts at murder, he’d come up with a list of criteria that every one of his “projects” needed to fulfill: they needed to live alone, have an established routine, and not have a boyfriend, husband, or any close male friends who might interfere with things.
 
The victim also needed to be “cute” and of the right age—although he never specified in his journals what that age should be. It was imperative that she live in the type of neighborhood where he believed he wouldn’t stick out if he were observed or spotted. The location of her apartment needed to be such that he could break in without being seen by neighbors. But most important, the proper victim appeared to exude some ineffable quality that led Rader to believe he could “control her if things suddenly went to hell, like they’d had a tendency to do in the past.”
 
On the night of December 8, Rader decided he’d give what he called Project Fox Tail one more try. He told his wife he had to work late on a term paper at the WSU library. So after work he headed back to Wichita in her red Chevelle. Knowing that he had nearly the entire night to himself filled him with confidence.
 
It had been dark for hours when he parked the car a few blocks away from Fox’s apartment and walked to her duplex. It was 8:30 P.M. He was fairly confident that she’d still be at work, but just to play it safe he knocked on her front door. If she answered it, he planned on saying, “Oops, wrong apartment. I was looking for Joanne.” Then he’d flash his pistol, tucked away in his shoulder holster. Provided she didn’t go “ape shit” on him, he’d barge in.
 
But when no one answered his knock, he walked around back and quickly cut Fox’s phone line. He smashed out one of her back windows, climbed inside, and waited. When Fox finally did arrive home around 9:20 P.M., he waited until she walked into the kitchen before confronting her. She attempted to reach for the phone, but he informed her that he had a knife, and pulled open his jacket to reveal his magnum. He informed her that he wanted to rape her and threatened to hurt her badly if she tried anything funny.
 
Just like Shirley Vian, she lit up a cigarette and asked him why he felt compelled to do this. Fox remained calm and cool as the two stood in the kitchen. After she finished the cigarette, she looked at Rader and said, “Let’s get this over with so I can call the police.” On the way to the bedroom, she asked if he’d allow her to use the bathroom.
 
“Yeah,” he replied. “But you better not have any weapons in there or try to escape.”
 
Just to play it safe, he wedged a shoe in the door jamb.
 
After a few minutes, he instructed her to come out with her “main clothes off.” The first thing Fox noticed when she walked out of the bathroom, Rader wrote later, were the rubber gloves he’d just pulled over his hands.
 
As usual, he did his best not to alarm his victim and used his standard line: “I don’t want to leave prints . . . I’m wanted by the cops in a couple of other states.”
 
After instructing Fox to lie down on the bed on her stomach, he snapped a pair of cold steel handcuffs around her wrists. She turned her head, straining to look up at him.
 
“Why do you want to do that?” she asked.
 
“I don’t want any scratches or problems,” he said.
 
He walked across the bedroom and pushed the door closed. “Leave it open,” she pleaded. He ignored her and quickly went to work trying to pull her sweater off. She begged him to leave it on. His heart was pounding as he fumbled to pull off his shoes, pants, and shirt, then tied a yellow nightgown tightly around her ankles and gagged her with a pair of nylons.
 
“Has your boyfriend ever fucked you in the butt?” he asked. But she just lay there, ignoring his question, no doubt hoping to get all this over with. It thrilled him, he wrote, to see that he had an erection. Before he knew it, he was tugging her panties down to her knees with one hand and grabbing his black leather belt off the floor with the other. In a flash, he slipped it over her neck and pulled it tight, trying to be careful not to use so much force that he killed her.
 
Fox’s fingers managed to grab hold of his scrotum, and she squeezed it with every ounce of strength she had left in her. Rader felt no pain. Instead, he wrote, the sensation of “[my victim’s fingernails] digging into my balls . . . increased my sexual thrill.” He pulled the belt tighter and watched as Fox began to pass out.
 
As her eyes fluttered shut, he released the tension on the belt and waited as she came to. Bending over her, he whispered into her left ear that he was the man who killed the Otero family, along with several other women in Wichita. He then informed her that “she was next.”
 
Despite nearly being choked to death moments before, Fox was conscious enough to quickly realize that she was in terrible trouble. Once again, she struggled as best she could against her attacker, but it was no use. Rader pulled on the belt with all his strength. After a few minutes, Nancy Fox was dead.
 
He looked down at her body and masturbated into her nightgown. Afterwards he loosened the belt, then tied several pair of panty hose around the young woman’s neck. Then he unlocked the handcuffs and bound her wrists with red panty hose. He got dressed, tidied up the apartment, and rummaged through her possessions, looking for some suitable mementos, finally settling on her driver’s license and several pieces of her lingerie and jewelry.
 
The last thing he did before leaving was to crank up the thermostat again in the belief that it would cause Fox’s body to decay at a faster rate, no doubt making her autopsy more difficult. Rader probably learned about this in one of his criminal justice classes at WSU. He’d been told that one of the ways to determine a victim’s time of death is to take his or her temperature with a rectal thermometer, then check the degree of rigor mortis in the body. Room temperature does have an effect on the rate of decomposition, but in many ways this didn’t matter because Rader had no real link to the victim. Instead, this sort of measure would ordinarily be an act for a killer who knew the deceased and wished to alter the estimated time of death in order to establish an alibi.
 
By the next morning, the suspense was killing him. When the hell were the cops going to find her? When was the news of his latest kill going to hit the media? He hadn’t slept much the night before, and the moment he awoke he grabbed that morning’s issue of the
Wichita Eagle
and scanned it for some mention of Nancy Fox. His scrapbooks were stuffed full of articles he’d torn out of the local papers, discussing his previous three murders, and he no doubt was looking forward to adding to his collection. But he could find nothing about the murder in the
Eagle.
Suddenly it dawned on him that even if the cops had discovered her body some time in the night, it probably would have happened far too late to make the deadline for the morning paper.
 
He got dressed and drove to his job at ADT. At the time, he was working as a crew chief, overseeing the installation of a fire alarm in a large building in downtown Wichita. On the way there, he stopped off at a restaurant with a few of the guys from work and picked up some cinnamon rolls and coffee. That was when he spotted the pay phone on the side of a mini-market on the corner of Central and Saint Francis streets. For the next hour, he couldn’t get the image of that damn phone out of his brain. He was dying to pick it up and tip off the cops about what he’d left them in that apartment on South Pershing Street. Even though he knew it would be a stupid move and that his voice would probably be recorded, he couldn’t help himself.
 
No sooner did his men begin working on the fire alarm job than he announced that he needed to head back to the ADT office and pick up some supplies. A few minutes later he was standing beside that pay phone, telling himself that what he was about to do was both careless and bold. “It’s probably the kind of thing you do when you’re younger, the kind of thing you don’t do if you really think things through,” he said years later. But at that moment, the fire burning inside Rader was far too hot. He picked up the phone and dialed the police dispatch number.
 
“You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing,” he told the dispatcher. “Nancy Fox.”
 
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman on the other end of the line replied. “I can’t understand you. What is the address?”
 
At that point another dispatcher, who had been monitoring the call, interrupted: “I believe 843 South Pershing.”
 
“That is correct,” the man said. Then the phone line went quiet.
 
The entire call lasted fifteen seconds. In his journal he wrote that as he hung up the phone, he mumbled to himself afterwards, “Maybe no one will recognize my voice.”
 
A few nights later, while watching TV with Paula, the recording of the call was played on TV for the umpteenth time. Brian was asleep, and Paula was tired. She listened as the voice of Nancy Fox’s killer drifted out of their TV set.
 
After a few seconds of reflection, she commented, “He sounds just like you.”
 
Dennis felt his heart begin thumping madly. He did his best to look cool and calm, as though the mere idea that his wife believed that his voice resembled that of the sick and twisted man responsible for Fox’s death was too ludicrous even to be worthy of a comment. But deep down he was in a panic. When he finally glanced over at Paula, she was still gazing at the TV screen. Her comment, he concluded, was nothing more than a bit of idle chat. If she truly believed he was a murderer, she wouldn’t still be sitting beside him in the family room. That phone call to police kept Rader on edge for years, he later claimed. He was forever paranoid that someday somebody would put it all together. But no one did, and as time passed, so did the paranoia.
 
In an entry penned months after the murder, he likened himself to a submarine loaded with deadly torpedoes. He had surfaced just long enough to claim another victim. But now that his mission was complete, he was ready to descend back into the depths and head back out into open water.
 
15
 
I needed a drink. By now it was the middle of the night; Landwehr had yet to return. I was still scrolling through Rader’s writings, and I was thirsty. I needed a shot of something. Vodka would be nice. I wanted to feel something course through my body, to wake me up from this numbing world of words penned by a psychopath.
 
Years before, I shared a bottle of vodka with a Russian police chief. After polishing off nearly all of it, he recounted the story of a serial killer he once tracked.
 
“There had been many killings, all decapitations,” he told me. “So we found a suspect, brought him in, questioned him, and, when it appeared we had found our killer, we walked him behind the police station and placed a bullet into his brain. But when the killings continued, we knew that perhaps we hadn’t considered all the facts in the case. So we found another suspect, a good one. But still more killings we had. . . . Finally, after four suspects and four bullets, the killings, they stopped.”
 
I felt sick to my stomach. “We don’t do things like that here,” I informed the official. He shook his head in disgust, waving my comment away as though it were a gnat.
 
“That, I think, is why you Americans have so many serial killers,” he said.
 
I glanced across the room. The digital clock glowed 1:45. In fifteen minutes, the tavern down the street from my hotel room would shut its doors. I put my computer to sleep. Five minutes later, I was seated at the bar. Vodka, for some reason, didn’t sound that appealing anymore.

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