Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (45 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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“These damn journals of Raders,” I said. “They really start playing tricks on your head if you spend too much time reading them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But that’s your specialty, right? I don’t need to read his diaries to know he’s a sick little pervert.”
“You have any idea what Rader was thinking about on the morning you arrested him?” I asked.
“Haven’t a clue,” he replied. “But I know he didn’t have any idea what we had planned for him.”
I recounted how Rader later told one of my sources that the morning before his arrest, Dennis woke up and started thinking about what his next move should be. Part of him wanted to send police another package. He was just dying to unload one more of his specially prepared dolls, which he stored in a closet in Brian’s old bedroom. He wanted this one to represent Shirley Vian, and on his last morning as a free man, he was thinking about how he planned to tie a little plastic baggie over its head—just like he’d done to Vian in real life. But another part of him told him to back off for a bit, especially as it appeared that he could now start communicating via computer disk.
“Had a lot on his mind, didn’t he?” Landwehr smiled.
Then he proceeded to tell me about the day it all went down: February 25, 2005.
The weather had held, he said. Winter appeared to have skipped town early. The sun glowed like a searchlight up in the blue sky. Shortly after 9:30 on that morning, Landwehr’s cell phone rang. One of his buddies was calling, wanting to know if he had time to play a round of golf later that afternoon.
“No,” Landwehr told him, trying not to chuckle at the understatement. “I’d love to, but it looks like I’m probably gonna be a bit tied up most of the day.”
All morning long, a contingent of Landwehr’s men, along with agents from the FBI and KBI, had been on edge. In other parts of Sedgwick County—and in the town of Farmington, Michigan, and Groton, Connecticut—FBI agents were in place, ready to serve search warrants and go to work interviewing Rader’s relatives and coworkers.
Everything, it seemed, was ready. Now all they needed was for the guest of honor to arrive.
From what Landwehr’s detectives had learned, Rader was a creature of habit. He left his office for lunch every day at precisely 12:15. Three minutes later he would arrive home to find that Paula had lunch waiting for him on the kitchen table. That morning was no exception. At 12:15, he walked out of his office, strode across the black asphalt, climbed into his GMC truck, and started the engine.
Less than thirty seconds later, after he turned right out of the Park City Municipal Building parking lot, Rader’s life started coming apart.
“Click on the folder that says ‘arrest photos,’” Landwehr told me, pointing to my computer screen.
I did. A moment later I was staring at thumbnails of roughly seventy photographs, aerial shots of what I assumed marked the progression of Rader’s arrest.
“They were shot from a helicopter,” he explained.
It was fascinating to click my way through the pictures, one after the other, knowing that it marked the last few moments that BTK would ever know freedom. The action started moments after he turned onto Frontage Road, a tiny side street that paralleled 61st Street, the busy four-lane arterial that led to I-135. A white sedan could be seen waiting for Rader to make the turn. The moment he did, I watched as it moved up behind him. One block away on a side street, four brown and black sedans stood ready.
The group sat in a tight little convoy on a side street, listening to their radios for a report of Rader’s progress. Landwehr was in the backseat of one of the vehicles. Wichita’s chief of police, Norman Williams, was in another. The consensus was that Rader might not go down without a bloody fight.
“I’ve faced a lot of these violent guys over the years, even some who don’t want to go to jail for five years, and they try to force the cops to kill them,” KBI special agent Ray Lundin told me a few days before my arrival in Wichita. Not that he had to. I knew from my own experience arresting fugitives just how dangerous the next few minutes could be. At a task force meeting the night before Rader’s arrest, there was talk of using the city’s SWAT team to take him down. The idea was scrapped when task force members voiced frustration over the idea of having some outside group put the cuffs on the man they’d spent so much time trying to catch.
“The last thing Ken said to us,” Lundin told me later, “was, ‘Be ready and be careful.’”
Word came over the radio that Rader was on the move. The moment his white truck drove past the side street, the group swooped after him like wolves. Lundin was piloting a black Crown Victoria. A swarm of butterflies was flapping inside his gut. Strapped to his side was a Sigsauer 9 mm semiautomatic. Beside him in the passenger seat was Wichita police homicide detective Kelly Otis, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun rested in his lap. The lead car, an unmarked white Impala, roared up behind Rader and hit the lights, causing the grillwork to explode in flashing bursts of red and white. Another dozen officers waited on the next street in case Rader tried to make a run for it. He didn’t. The moment he spotted the unmarked car behind him, he steered his truck to the side of the road as Lundin and others rolled into place, forming what resembled a wedge in the aerial photos.
Lundin pulled up so close to the chief’s vehicle that Otis, a stocky former college football player, couldn’t get his door open enough to hop out. So he propped it open, rested his shotgun on the door frame and took aim at Rader, who immediately pushed open his door and climbed out of his truck.
“I had barely stopped the car when Rader jumped out,” Lundin said. “It happened much quicker than any of us thought it would, which is why I made a run for him. He had a pretty aggressive look on his face, and we still didn’t know if he’d be armed. We figured he’d either shoot at us or flash a gun at us, trying to make us shoot him.”
In the seconds it took Lundin to traverse those thirty feet between his sedan and Rader, he marveled at how the man’s uniform resembled the one worn by Wichita police. Lundin also told me that he couldn’t shake the feeling that this arrest might turn violent, ugly.
“Rader knew why we were there,” he said. “And he knew he was going to prison and not coming out.”
Ray Lundin is the kind of man that most people wouldn’t want to see charging toward them at full gallop. A former power lifter who competed nationally while in college, he stands six feet tall and weighs 225 pounds. In a flash, he grabbed Rader’s right arm with one beefy hand, then quickly clenched the collar of his jacket in the other.
“I took him down to the asphalt,” Lundin said. “He went quickly, without much effort.”
A moment later, another officer slapped cuffs on Rader’s wrists, and Lundin yanked him back upright. But as he tugged on Rader’s body, lifting him upright, the eighteen-year veteran special agent noticed something peculiar.
“His heart wasn’t racing,” he recalled. “He wasn’t breathing hard or perspiring in the least. I’d never seen anything like it, never seen anyone look so calm at a moment like that. It was pretty chilling, really. Kind of summed up everything about who this guy was. It was as though he felt absolutely nothing. When I got him back to his feet, he turned slowly and looked me straight in the eye. Everything about him was calm, cool, flat. He said, ‘Tell my wife I won’t be home for lunch . . . I assume you know where I live.’”
Lundin replied, “Yeah, we’ll take care of it.”
Lundin told me that he had tried to make sense of the expression he glimpsed in Rader’s face on that afternoon. But what he saw there defied any permutation of evil he’d ever encountered.
“A long time ago, I heard someone describe a Nazi war criminal in a way that I think works for Rader,” he said. “They referred to him as an ‘unfinished soul.’ I can’t think of a better term—unfinished soul. Just seems to fit. This guy just doesn’t have the capability to care, and I have no idea why. Normally, with these guys, you can link it back to their childhood. But his was so average and run-of-the-mill, it doesn’t make sense. He was proud of what he did. Didn’t have a single shred of sadness or remorse—not even for himself. He had nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
It was all over in two minutes. Lundin handed Rader off to several officers in bulletproof vests who hustled the handcuffed man to a nearby brown Chevy Impala with tinted windows, parked up the street. Landwehr sat in the backseat. By this point, Rader’s look of aggression had disappeared, and he appeared dazed.
Rader later told one of my sources that it had all gone down so quickly that he couldn’t understand what had happened. He never saw it coming, he confided. He racked his brain, trying to figure out where he’d slipped up.
Landwehr told me that the moment he laid eyes on Rader, he thought the guy looked confused, lost in thought. When the back door to the Impala opened, Rader peered inside expectantly and looked relieved when he spotted the familiar-looking face he had seen on TV press conferences.
“What happened then?” I asked. “You were about to come face-to-face with the guy you’d been looking for for over two decades.”
Landwehr took a deep breath and sighed. “He looked in at me and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Landwehr.’ So I replied, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Rader.’”
At that instant, for a few brief moments the world outside grew muffled and still. Suddenly it was just the two of them—Dennis and Ken. Just the way my source told me Rader had always hoped it would be. Just the way I’d always imagined he dreamed about.
One of Landwehr’s detectives sat behind the wheel, and the car sped off toward I-135, racing back toward the Epic Center in downtown Wichita where the FBI had offices. An interrogation room on the fourth floor was about to get very busy.
There are moments in life when things become as clear as a freshly cleaned windshield. Landwehr told me that this was one of those moments. Because it was at that exact instant when Dennis Rader uttered his name that he knew the man he’d been pursuing for the last two decades was going to sing until someone told him to shut up.
For the first few minutes of the short drive, the three men sat quietly as the community that Rader had terrorized for over three decades rolled past the windows. Rader told my source that he tried to keep his eyes riveted on the passing scenery, doing his best to look cool and unflustered. He glanced up at the helicopter flying overhead.
After a few minutes, Landwehr told me, he turned toward Rader and said, “Nice day outside. Good golfing weather. You play golf, Mr. Rader?”
The expression on the handcuffed man’s face instantly softened.
“No,” he said, “Not much of a golfer. I garden and fish, mostly.”
He paused, peered back out the window and up at the helicopter. He looked almost pleased, Landwehr told me.
“It certainly is a nice day,” he continued, starting to open up now. “Spring is coming. I made some notes about that just the other day. The flowers are coming up. You know, I saw some robins in the area the other day. Canadian robins, I imagine. Probably just passing through the area. I feed the birds, you know. Just to keep an eye on them.”
Within minutes of arriving at the Epic Center, Rader was taken to the fourth floor interrogation room, which was filled with computers, printers, radios, and fax machines. He was still wearing his compliance uniform. One of the men waiting for him in the room wiped the inside of his mouth with cotton swabs, gathering saliva for a DNA test. Crime technicians at the KBI’s crime lab were anxiously awaiting the sample.
He was led to a chair and asked to take a seat.
Because a police wannabe and egomaniac like Rader would probably be excited to know that an FBI agent had traveled to Wichita from FBI headquarters just to interview him, Landwehr asked FBI behavioral analyst Bob Morton to join in on this phase of the interview. Morton sat at the table beside Landwehr. They both wore black suits.
“I’m from Quantico,” Morton said. “I flew all the way out here for this . . . because this is a very, very interesting investigation for us. I mean, we’ve been looking at it off and on for thirty years.”
As Rader nodded, the expression on his face softened. “Uh-huh,” he mumbled. Morton continued stroking him.
“This is such a dramatic crime,” he said. “Kind of an unheralded crime, if you want to think about it, in history. That’s why there’s so much attention about it.”
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