Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (40 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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There was another entry, from a book titled
The Criminal Mind,
that he loved to read and reread, then think about because it showed just how confusing and contradictory killers like him could be. He’d even underlined various sections of it with yellow highlighter.
 
 
 
Even within a category of theories there can be contradictions. When evaluating which personality constructs lead to aggression, for example, many theorists proposed that low self-esteem is a key factor. Bullies and rapists were thought to be men who did not value themselves. However, another researcher said that there is increasing evidence that high self-esteem is instrumental in aggression. Many violent types have an inflated, albeit unstable, sense. If challenged or criticized, they react with violence to reestablish their self-esteem. Researchers who support this theory believe that studies of incarcerated offenders that measured a significant proportion with low self-esteem are a result of the offenders being locked up. The low self-esteem supporters counter that the so-called high self-esteem factor is actually narcissism, which is based on perceived superiority, not a healthy regard for self.
 
 
By the late 1990s, Rader was beginning to grow bored. Brian and Kerri had already graduated from high school and were out of the house. He immersed himself in his job, his duties at Christ Lutheran Church, periodic fishing trips, and, in the fall, driving over to Manhattan, Kansas, with Paula to attend football games at Kansas State, where Kerri attended college.
 
Most important, he still had plenty of projects, scores of them located all over the city, woman he fantasized about undressing, tying up in cord, and strangling.
 
Over time, one of these projects began to emerge as his favorite. Try as he might, he couldn’t shake from his head the images of all the things he planned to do to her—not that he ever tried very hard. She was going to be his last one, he told himself. When he finished with her, he was going to shut down “his operation.” Which was how he enjoyed referring to the past three decades of his life—as though it were some sort of business endeavor.
 
Part of him seriously doubted he’d ever get around to pulling this one off. He just wasn’t sure he was physically up to it. What he did required plenty of brute strength, and now that he was getting older, he wondered if he still had it in him. Nevertheless, he realized he couldn’t let this one slip through his fingers. He’d been stalking his potential victim for over a year. In that time he’d begun to realize that her days followed such a predictable pattern that he could set his watch by her comings and goings from her apartment. She never changed her routine. And, as he always used to say, people like that were in bad shape.
 
She was a large woman, probably tipping the scales at 160 pounds. She wasn’t the type whom most people might assume a serial killer would target. Rader seemed to pride himself in that fact. It was another one of those things that made him different from those other killers—he didn’t discriminate. When it came to victims, everyone was welcome—just as long as they were female, didn’t live with any men, and adhered to a schedule that meshed with his.
 
He had big plans for her, which was why he wanted everything to be perfect. He wrote in his journal that he’d either strangle her or suffocate her, then spread her body out in the main doorway of her apartment in a wildly suggestive pose. He could only imagine what the cops would think when they saw her. Because of her size, he knew he’d have a heck of a time lifting her and securing her into the position he’d envisioned. He also couldn’t quite figure out exactly how he’d hold her there—would he tie a rope around her feet or place a noose around her head?
 
Whatever method he chose, he realized he’d need some sort of a device to winch her up into the position he’d been fantasizing about. He stopped off at a hardware store near his house one afternoon during work and purchased a massive hook, a pulley, and a large screw. Rader had arrived at the conclusion that this was how he’d hoist her body up above the door frame. He’d grown so excited about this project that he began carrying his hit kit with him in his truck wherever he went. He even kept his portable drill with him in order to help him sink that screw into the door frame.
 
Over time, the killing began to grow grander and more elaborate in the secret fantasies of his sick mind. He eventually decided that after murdering her and stringing her up, he’d burn the building down by dousing a few of the rooms with kerosene, then rigging a time-delayed fuse out of a candle. The fuse was crucial, he wrote; the last thing he wanted was for billows of smoke to be rolling out from the windows as he backed out of her driveway.
 
It would be huge, he promised himself.
 
Yet not even this grand, bold fantasy could fill the empty hole inside him that threatened to swallow him up. Which was a bit ironic. After all, he’d spent a lifetime telling himself how badly he yearned to live the carefree life of a lone wolf. Yet now that he was free of the obligations brought on by raising children, he had no idea what to do with himself.
 
 
According to what Landwehr had told me yesterday while we were driving around Wichita, Rader finally understood what the next chapter of his life would entail on January 2004. The day was a Sunday, and he had just returned from church, picked up a copy of the
Wichita Eagle,
and read an article that used the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero murders as an excuse to run a retrospective article on the seemingly long forgotten serial killer named BTK.
 
The headline read, “BTK Case Unsolved, 30 Years Later.” Besides rehashing his seven known murders, the 1,100-word article focused on the efforts of a Wichita attorney named Robert Beattie, who also taught a class in criminal justice at a local university. Beattie had taken it upon himself to pen a book on BTK, partly because he felt that most residents had forgotten this “significant chapter in the city’s history.”
 
Halfway through the piece, Beattie explained how the year before, he’d brought up the case in one of his classes “and was surprised by the reaction. ‘I had zero recognition from the students,’ he said. ‘Not one of them had heard of it.’”
 
Rader read the piece and, according to what he told Landwehr during his interrogation, became disgusted that some local know-it-all attorney was going to write a book about him. He was flattered by the idea of it, but he’d be damned if he was going to let this guy have the final say on his life’s work.
 
And that was when Rader decided he’d write his own damn story, explaining everything—how he worked, how he chose his victims, how he jumped from one project to the next. Nobody knew anything about that sort of thing. They knew about his victims and the facts surrounding his crimes—that stuff was pretty much all out in the public domain—but what he yearned to do was dump the contents of his brain out on the sidewalk for everybody in Wichita to shudder over. He wanted to stir the hornets’ nest. He just hoped he didn’t end up getting stung, although he told himself that the chances of that were slim. After all, he’d been thumbing his nose at the cops for three decades, and they’d never come close to laying a finger on him. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that a publisher might actually take on his project and release his writings in the form of a book. What he had mind was more on the order of a public relations effort. He wanted to set the record straight, while also reminding the community that Wichita’s infamous brand-name killer was still alive and plotting.
 
 
By then, Brian had joined the Navy as a seaman apprentice and was based at the Navy submarine base in Groton, Connecticut. Kerri had gotten married and moved to Michigan. Like a lot of tech-savvy couples, she and her husband maintained a blog about their life together, which they posted online. From the sound of it, her night terrors had continued into adulthood; whatever had crawled inside as a child and caused her so much pain whenever she shut her eyes at night was still alive and squirming.
 
A few months before my arrival in Wichita, I was doing a bit of Web sleuthing on Kerri’s name and stumbled onto one particularly chilling entry from the couple’s blog.
 
Kerri’s husband had written it sometime in 2004. In it, he described what it was like to live with a woman who suffered from night terrors:
 
 
 
I think this is going to shorten my life. I am either waking up with no covers, waking up with a psychotic woman looking for a monster or for some Mexican person that could’ve broken in to murder us. Either that or she is screaming because she thinks, in my peaceful state of slumber, I am trying to mutilate her in some way. I have heard rumors that all women are completely insane when they sleep. I think the idea is to control every facet of their man’s life. There was a week where I was woke up three times in a night to some sort of dream event of some kind or screaming. Let me tell you, it just about destroyed me.
 
My cell phone rang. It was Landwehr.
 
“You up yet?” he asked.
 
“Never went to bed.”
 
“Got tied up last night,” he said. “Homicide we’re working. Couple things we’d been waiting to happen fell into place. Made some arrests.”
 
“That always feels good,” I said, remembering the rush that I’d sometimes get after helping take some dangerous scumbag off the street.
 
“Yeah. I’m hungry,” he said. “You wanna grab some breakfast? I got some time before work.”
 
“Sure,” I said.
 
“You get a chance to look at that disc I left on the desk?” he asked.
 
“You might say so,” I laughed, wearily. “He’s one prolific son of a bitch.”
 
“Yeah,” Landwehr grumbled. “Just another poor frustrated artist.”
 
“Twisted,” I said. “Don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across one quite like him.”
 
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it over breakfast.”
 
“Meet you down in the hotel lobby,” I said.
 
“Gimme fifteen.”
 
18
 
The moment Ken Landwehr walked into Egg Cetera, nearly every head in the breakfast eatery turned to look. Some stared, others whispered. Landwehr took it all in. His face seemed to tighten just a bit; he looked annoyed.
 
“Let’s take that booth in the back,” he said. “Back in the corner.”
 
As we navigated our way through the maze of tables, I noticed that he was clutching a folder stuffed with paper. One of the patrons stood up, grabbed his hand, and pumped it.
 
“Lieutenant Landwehr,” the man exclaimed. “It’s a pleasure, a real pleasure.”
 
“How you doing?” Landwehr growled, sounding truly excited. “How you been?”
 
The man proceeded to tell him.
 
Afterwards, as we slid into our booth, I asked, “Friend of yours?”
 
“Never laid eyes on him before,” he said. “Figured he was one of your fans and was just trying to be nice to me.”
 
The waitress handed us menus, smiling at Landwehr the whole time. “I’m telling you, you oughta run for mayor,” I laughed.
 
Landwehr’s face went taut. “Yeah,” he said. “Gonna put that one on my to-do list later today.”
 
The waitress returned, took our order, filled our cups with coffee, and disappeared.
 
“So where were you when he resurfaced?” I asked. “I’m curious what the hell you were doing when he poked his head up.”
 
Landwehr nodded at the waitress to come dump some more coffee into his cup. He was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie. He ran his fingers along his neck, just inside his stiff white collar. Then he told me. The morning it happened, he was standing beside his wife’s hospital bed. She’d just had stomach surgery, and he was waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. It was March 17, 2004, the twenty-seventh anniversary of Shirley Vian’s murder.
 
“My phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a detective in my unit. ‘We just got a letter,’ he said. ‘Looks like it could be from BTK.’”
 
“How’d that make you feel?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
 
“Sick to my stomach,” Landwehr said. “I thought, ‘We could be in a lot of trouble, here’ . . . But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we had a chance to finally catch this guy.”
 
A half hour later, he was holding the white envelope that had arrived in the morning mail at the offices of the
Wichita Eagle.
The sender’s name, typed in the upper left-hand corner, was listed as Bill Thomas Killman. His return address—1684 S. Oldmanor—didn’t exist on any map of Wichita.

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