Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (37 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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I stared at my tired face in the photo, then studied the brave, uncertain expressions on the faces of my family, who wondered if I’d be alive next week. Life is fragile, I thought to myself. If you’re not careful, it can be snatched away in the wink of a tear-glazed eye. And then all at once I remembered Dennis Rader and how he’d done that to one person after another until the number of lives he’d snatched away equaled ten.
I didn’t want to look at my photograph after that. I turned it over, shoved it back into my briefcase, and walked back toward the desk, then continued reading the words of a monster who fooled everyone into believing he was human.
By July 1988, the rush Dennis Rader received from Vicki Wegerle’s murder had long ago faded, leaving him feeling as empty and hollow as ever. The urge to take another life thrashed inside him as though he’d swallowed an anaconda. One afternoon he picked up his pen and wrote in his standard butchered English, “The desire are in me so strong now day. I have no ideal what keep them in check. Could it be my strong moral as a husband, father, trusted friend or the I-don’t-want-to-be-caught side of me?”
This was definitely a worthy question for Rader to be asking. But like all worthy questions in his life, he felt no reason to wait around for an answer or even to continue probing. When you lack a conscience, simply asking such a question feels good enough. It quiets things just a bit. Perhaps in Rader’s case it even paved the way for the next paragraph he wrote in his journal, in which he launched into a lengthy confession about what he wanted to do with a young blonde-haired girl he’d spotted at the pool earlier that day, on a trip he’d taken there with his kids.
According to his journal, he could barely take his eyes off her. She was eating candy, and something about the way the sunlight danced off her bronze body caused his head to go crazy concocting fantasies about this “innocent, childhood virgin.”
Rader saw himself as a simple man with simple tastes. On that particular afternoon, all he wanted from life was some sort of lubrication for his “rod” and a few moments alone with this girl. He wrote that just thinking about the things he envisioned doing to her “small, delicate” body made his heart race wildly.
Yet no sooner had he concocted some dark scenario inside his mind wherein she found herself bound and gagged than he claimed to feel a sense of shame descend on him. He cautioned himself to be careful, to remember that these desires threatened to rip everything in his life away from him. The revelations of his secret life, he wrote, would destroy the heart and souls of everyone around him. “It must be kept a secret forever,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, in the very next paragraph of his journal, the young blonde girl he’d spotted earlier in the day was now crying in pain, her body drenched in sweat. Although he had tried to be gentle while raping her a few sentences earlier, he now decided that it was time to be done with her. So he fashioned a garrote from a “loose coil” of rope, looped it around her neck, and pulled tight. But instead of feeling good about the kill, he expressed remorse in his next sentence, begging the “guardian of small ones” to give him the strength he needed to continue on with life.
His journal of more than two years later revealed that the urge to kill was as strong as ever. But the stirrings of guilt and shame over his secret world seem to have vanished. Rader hadn’t taken a life in nearly four years, but by Halloween of 1990, he’d already begun planning the intimate details of Project Dogside, the code name he’d given to what would turn out to be his final murder. This one, which wouldn’t take place for another two and one-half months, involved sixty-two-year-old Park City resident Delores Davis, who lived beside a dog kennel on Hillside Street.
Once again, I was reminded that when Rader disappeared from view after his gloating letter to police in 1978, he’d continued plotting. And, on three more occasions, he continued killing. In the pages of his journal, he described how during the afternoon before killing Davis, he acted out exactly what he desired to do with her. His journal described step-by-step how he pretended to be the victim.
This particular masturbatory session began with “heavy breathing and quick relax as he prepare for a trip into far way time zone.”
Within minutes, he’d wrapped a leather belt around his ankles, then encircled his body in a leather web fashioned from various other belts he kept in his closet. After tying himself up, he pulled a plastic bag over his head, wrapped a slipknot around it, then pulled it tight and thrilled as his lungs slowly sucked what remained of the air from the bag.
“He lies there as she [Davis] would, bound, helpless,” he wrote.
Rader first mentioned the thrill he experienced from self-imposed suffocation a couple of months earlier, in September. He still had his job with the Census Bureau at the time, and one afternoon he hung a sign on the door of his office, informing his coworkers that he’d stepped out to lunch. Then he locked the door, spread a plastic tarp over the floor, and rigged up a camera on a tripod with a long cord, allowing him to trigger the shutter from a distance.
Over the course of the next sixty minutes, he stripped himself, then pulled on a pair of panty hose, pink panties, and a bra, complete with padding. He bound himself in nylon straps and began snapping pictures of himself. Thirty minutes later, he’d finished wrapping his entire body in plastic. He eventually reached orgasm after being forced to “fight for air.”
Afterwards, he remarked that the plastic was only part of the reason he experienced a “most satisfying climax.” What really excited him was the notion of pulling off this stunt at the office, surrounded by his coworkers, and managing to knock out this entire fantasy (complete with the snapping of a handful of Polaroids) during his sixty-minute lunch break.
This was a fertile period for Rader’s journal writing. With no one to turn to and years since his last kill, he dumped his thoughts onto the pages of his diary with furious passion. In November 1990, he wrote a short entry about standing in his house and watching “the blonde next door” gather evergreens from her yard for a holiday wreath. He loved the shape of her “butt” in her blue jeans. Later that day while taking a shower, he shut his eyes and masturbated as the fantasy of what he intended to do to her danced on the back of his eyelids.
Two days later he was combing through the
Wichita Eagle,
looking for pictures of women that he could use to “fit the sequence” of a fantasy he’d had the morning before. This one involved a girl between the age of seven and eight with “a nice firm ass.”
Wichita Eagle,
looking for pictures of women that he could use to “fit the sequence” of a fantasy he’d had the morning before. This one involved a girl between the age of seven and eight with “a nice firm ass.”
In his mind, she was bound on a bed and petrified with fear. The “bogeyman,” it seemed, had claimed another victim. Her name was Kirsten. When Rader climbed into the shower, he still didn’t have all the details of the attack worked out, but by the time the water hit him and he covered his body with soap, the images began to come to him.
He had wrapped tape around her ankles and hands, then whispered, “Hi, I’m the bogeyman.”
He sodomized her, then looped a nylon garrote around her throat and quickly got down to the business of strangling her.
All of this fantasy killing was detailed in his journal. Then he wrote about how he made the fantasy into a graphic representation. It took a bit of searching, but he finally located a photo of a model from an ad that looked like it would do the trick. He cut it out, laid a piece of paper over it, and went to work tracing the outline of the little girl—although unlike the ad, his picture, which he titled “Boogie Men Loves Little Girls,” depicted her pants rolled down around her ankles.
Because the newspaper was chock full of ads on that particular day, Rader saw no reason to limit his art project to just one so-called slick ad. He quickly located another picture of what he felt was a suitably curvy preteen wearing some sort of a Halloween costume. His ink pen knew exactly what it needed to do, and twenty minutes later she became the “Devil’s Delight.” His art project, which he would later stash away in the far reaches of his bedroom closet, whipped him into such a frenzy that he sat back in his easy chair, and when he was sure that Paula and the kids were out of the house, he masturbated into a plastic baggie. That was one of the drawbacks of living in such horribly tight quarters—he was forever having to watch his back in order to have any fun. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that he was able at least to move part of his cache of sketches and other memorabilia to some file cabinets at work.
In May 1991, with his temporary census job finished, Rader landed another job—as compliance supervisor for Park City. This time he got to wear a badge and a uniform, complete with a radio he clipped onto his belt. His main duties involved driving around the tiny suburb in a white truck and writing up tickets for residents who kept old refrigerators in their front yards or let their dogs run off-leash or let their grass grow too long. The job paid $16.62 an hour. For a guy who always wanted to be a cop and spent much of his waking hours dreaming about flaunting power over others, this was about as close to heaven as he could get without killing someone. He even got to carry a rifle in his truck, on the off chance that he had to put down a wild dog.
But the best thing about the job was that it allowed him to disappear for hours at a stretch in his truck, providing plenty of time to stalk victims, work on his slick ads, or fantasize about past kills while masturbating into plastic sandwich bags.
According to Landwehr, opinion is divided over exactly how heavy-handed Rader was in his duties. Plenty of residents loathed the way he bullied them, showing up at their homes with a ruler to measure the height of their grass, then demanding they mow it or else he’d fine them. Others complained that he had their dogs euthanized purely out of his lust for power. And then there were those who insisted that Rader was doing only what was expected of him—enforcing city code.
Over time, the job even caused him to see the irony of a serial killer writing someone a ticket for leaving her trash can out on the curb for too many days wasn’t lost on him.
“I work with code violators,” he told Landwehr after his arrest. “Year after year, they keep doing the same old thing. They never change. People don’t change.”
He paused for a moment after saying this, as though his words were seeping into his brain. Then, Landwehr told me, he blurted out, “You are what you are, and I am what I am.”
As I read on and on, I could see how Rader continued to dump his troubled thoughts out into the pages of his makeshift journals, which were often nothing more than random pages he’d torn from a notebook.
Few entries exist for the four-year period that stretched between November 1990 and October 1994. The approaching death of his father from colon cancer in 1996 caused him to pick up his pen and scrawl a few comments onto a notepad, which he later shoved into his cache. In this particular entry, he seemed concerned that his old man would learn about his eldest son’s murderous alter ego when he died and crossed over to the other realm.
“Will he know of my foul deeds?” Rader pondered. “I hope if there is a heaven or afterlife, he will forgive me. I wish no sorrow on his heart. He has been a good dad . . . He must understand that he did not raise a problem child.” The real culprit responsible for his horrible appetite, Rader concluded, was Factor X.
Later that same day, it appeared that any sense of worry over his father’s soul had vanished. He penned another entry about how he’d begun carrying photographs of girls around with him in the work truck. The females he chose were his “dream girls,” and for hours at a time he’d cruise through the neighborhoods daydreaming about how he’d use rope and sexual molestation to mentally torture his victims. The fantasy, he claimed, broke the boredom of everyday life at work.
A few weeks later, Rader no longer described what he was doing as simply driving around town with tiny pictures of women in his truck. By mid-November 1990, he’d begun to consider these photographs glued to three-by-five cards as actual living creatures.
“Rode around with cute blonde in bikini today,” he wrote. The next day, he claimed to have ridden with a “babe with a Jewish or Hispanic-looking face.”
Two days after that, he took pop music sensation Madonna with him for a one-way tour of Park City. In her picture, she wore a body-suit complete with cup-shaped brassiere. As he went about his duties that day, his mind exploded with angry thoughts about hanging her from a heavy wooden beam. He envisioned himself wrapping a coarse hemp rope around her neck. In her mouth was stuffed the obligatory gag. The only problem was that he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to use a rope or a chain to spread her legs apart. But what he did know was that he wouldn’t use his usual rope garrote to dispatch the Material Girl. For her, he opted to end his fantasy and her life with a “slow strangulation hold.”
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