Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (48 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 nodded.
Casarona took a deep breath, then launched into a scene that had played itself out inside her head one night as she lay tossing and turning in her troubled sleep not too long ago. For some unknown reason, she had traveled to Venice with Rader. They sat together at a rickety little metal table on the edge of the Piazza San Marco. Out across the massive public square loomed the gothic stone columns and delicate arches of the Palazzo Ducale. Tourists milled about with shopping bags and cameras. She felt uneasy sitting there with him like this. Even as she was dreaming it, she could feel her skin crawling. It didn’t feel right, and her eyes remained locked on him, much the way an animal, such as a chipmunk or a squirrel, might watch a human offering it a scrap of bread.
He knew she was nervous. He didn’t care. It was all part of the game for him. She knew something bad was about to happen. It was only a matter of time. And sure enough, after a few minutes, he did it. He dropped his right arm down toward his waist and began fumbling with his black leather belt that he intended to wrap around her throat.
In the dream, Casarona stood up and walked quickly out into the massive open-air plaza. It would be safer out there among the tourists, she believed. But Rader quickly followed her, and soon he was standing behind her, gripping both ends of the belt with his hands. She began to run, frantically searching for someone to protect her. But wherever she went, he followed. She couldn’t shake him.
“I never told Dennis about that dream,” Casarona said, chewing on a piece of ice. “I mean, I told him I had a dream about the two of us in Venice, but I didn’t tell him about the belt part. It’s just too creepy. . . . Dennis is really into dreams, you know. He thinks it’s possible, if two people are dreaming at the same time, that they can appear in each other’s dreams. I don’t like thinking about that sort of stuff.”
Casarona’s journey to this hotel lobby had been fraught with plenty of drama, headache, and frustration. We’d first bumped up against each other in December 2005 when I wrote Rader to request an interview for this book. He’d forwarded my letter to her, and she promptly telephoned my office, leaving a curt message that instructed me to cease and desist. Rader was hers. She’d bagged him. She had exclusive access to him, and it was this access that was going to net her a book contract, which she would use to jump-start her writing career.
She had a point, of course. A very good one. But if I had been the type of guy who backed down whenever someone told me to go away, I’d still be a FBI field agent, working the streets back in Detroit. I didn’t bother telephoning her back—I decided to let her come to me. Three weeks later, I sent Rader another letter reiterating my same request and expressing my surprise over his decision to pass my first letter on to Casarona. I wanted to push a few buttons—both Rader’s and Casarona’s. She wasted no time getting back to me and fired off a private e-mail to me through my Web site, repeating how she had an exclusive deal with Rader and that he would speak to no one but her. She also mentioned that she’d read all my books and was, for lack of a better word, a fan of my work. I decided not to respond.
A few days later, Casarona once again telephoned my office. I picked up the phone, and we had a brief conversation. I listened as she told me how she’d become interested in the case and why she wanted to write a book on Rader. But I’d begun to grow a bit miffed at Casarona and the way she was preventing me from gaining access to Rader—something that had never happened to me before.
I told her how I first started working on the BTK case in the late 1970s, explaining that I used the knowledge I’d gleaned from decades spent in the trenches researching violent offenders to enlighten my readers about what made these guys tick, educating them in ways she never could.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve read all your books. . . . But I just can’t let you talk to Dennis. I’ve got bills piling up, and I need the money from a book deal to pay off all my lawyers.”
“So you don’t have a book deal yet?” I asked.
“Well . . . no,” she said. “But I will.”
“Tough business, publishing,” I told her. “I’ve written several best sellers, and I can tell you that selling a book to a publisher isn’t easy. Not even for me.”
“Yeah,” she groaned. “I know.”
A week passed and we had another conversation. Then another. And, like I said, when it comes to speaking with people, I’m not half bad. The two of us struck up a weird friendship. After five months of back-and-forth—during which I often played the role of therapist as she vented all her frustrations—Casarona finally caved in. She agreed to give up her precious exclusive access to Rader. She would tell her man to speak with me.
It was a gracious, generous act on her part. The only catch was that she wanted to be present during the interview and then afterwards compare my impressions of Rader with hers.
I was far from excited about her stipulations, so I contacted the state’s Department of Corrections and informed them that Rader had agreed to speak with me. An official there quickly nixed the idea of Casarona coming with me to the prison. She was furious with their decision, but insisted that she’d stand by her agreement to let me talk to Rader.
“When I give my word about something, I stick to it,” she said. “But maybe we could meet afterwards and discuss what you learned?”
“Of course,” I told her. “It’s the least I can do for you.”
Kris Casarona couldn’t recall exactly when her fascination with Dennis Rader started. But she had told me during numerous telephone conversations we’d had over the past months that she’d been able to narrow it down to the year 1974, the same year I first learned about BTK from those homicide detectives in Detroit. She was six at the time of the Otero murders, but the memory of her parents whispering about it became one of those indelible moments in her childhood—just like the sound of locust or the wail of a tornado siren on a spring afternoon. Although her dream was to become a veterinarian (just like Rader, just like me), Casarona also toyed with the idea of one day becoming a detective. By the time she turned ten, she had decided that her first case would be the mysterious BTK homicides.
By this point in her life, the precocious Casarona was regularly devouring the
Wichita Eagle
from the front page to the back. And just like everyone else in the city, she soaked up every word written about the unknown killer who was terrorizing the city.
Wichita Eagle
from the front page to the back. And just like everyone else in the city, she soaked up every word written about the unknown killer who was terrorizing the city.
One Saturday afternoon, she and a friend hoofed it to the Wichita Public Library, hoping to catch a glimpse of the killer. She figured that because he’d once left a letter for police on a bookshelf in the library, it only made sense that he’d be there lurking in the aisles, just waiting to be discovered. The two girls combed every aisle looking for the killer, whom they both had a hunch they’d recognize the moment they laid eyes on him, but they never did.
Twenty years later, Casarona was working as an oil and gas analyst for the state of Kansas, wading through piles of state statutes and federal regulations in order to write detailed reports on pipeline safety in Topeka, wondering why life hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d dreamed it would when she was younger. Over the past few years, she’d survived a rape, battled osteoporosis, and weathered a divorce, and now was in the midst of watching her second marriage crumble.
She yearned for change. Nothing terribly dramatic, just something small and meaningful. One morning in February 2005, she picked up the newspaper and read an article about how the bogeyman from her childhood had been apprehended by the Wichita police.
At first she didn’t know what to think. But after a few weeks had passed, she decided to write him a letter, the kind of letter you send to someone without necessarily expecting ever to receive a reply. In her two-page note, Casarona explained how his awful crimes had left a mark on her childhood that she could never quite wash away. She dropped the letter in the mailbox and never gave the matter much thought. Seven days later, she came home from work and pulled an envelope out of the mailbox with a return address from the Sedgwick County Jail.
She and Rader became pen pals, firing off an endless volley of letters to one another. This was three months before I even considered writing a book on BTK. By the middle of April, he began telephoning her at home. Two weeks after that, she drove to Wichita and visited him in the county jail, where access to a prisoner is much easier to get than in a state prison. It was during this first face-to-face meeting that it became obvious what she needed to do.
Casarona decided that she would write a crime book. She would wade in the muck and filth of Rader’s past and attempt to figure out what had transformed him into a heartless killer. Although she’d never had any of her work published, she’d won a handful of writing contests and had spent a couple of years penning speeches for a Kansas senator. She was confident that she could craft a readable sentence on paper. More important, she’d also become something of an armchair crime buff and amateur profiler, devouring countless true-crime books (including all of mine), plowing through them the way most of her friends polished off romance novels.
But here was the most peculiar part of her plan: whatever money she earned from the book—minus expenses—she planned to donate to the families of Rader’s victims. Casarona wanted to do the right thing for these people who had endured such an unending loss. But she was also savvy enough to realize that if her book on Rader went big, her next one could also earn substantial royalties as she continued her career as a successful writer.
“That first time we met, there was a piece of glass between us,” she told me. “I wasn’t scared. But I definitely wasn’t excited or thrilled either. I had no feelings either way. Except that I found him utterly repulsive, so I guess that was my only feeling. I really just tried to disassociate myself like I read that you do when you go to interview one of these guys. I figured I had a job to do, and that was to get him to trust me.”
Between late April and mid-June, they had met seventeen times face-to-face, and on each occasion Casarona wore skirt-suits with high-collar shirts or suit jackets, always buttoned high. She wanted the guards to assume she was an attorney. Every time they met, she smiled, laughed, listened with a sympathetic ear, and exuded a strange intensity that transformed Rader into a type of dopey teddy bear—if that was possible for a homicidal psychopath.
Four months after that first letter to him, she asked Rader to sign over the rights to his story to her. He eagerly agreed.
And that was when Casarona’s real troubles started. The media learned of her relationship with Rader when he forwarded their interview requests to her and she’d reply, declining all their requests on Dennis’s behalf. Then, starting in June 2005, three months after Rader’s arrest, the local and national media, hungry for any news about Rader, began writing about her relationship with the killer. Word leaked out that she was writing a religious type of book, which angered many in the region who believed her to be some sort of bleeding-heart kook, the type who was probably coddling Rader, telling him he’d be forgiven for his transgressions.
“It wasn’t long before I became known as ‘that crazy woman from Topeka,’” Casarona moaned.
But being written off as a kook was one thing. Her legal problems were even worse.
Casarona’s legal nightmare began to unfold in January 2006 when the families of Rader’s victims sued her for an unspecified amount because of the book contract Rader signed. They alleged that Rader had made a deal with her that would allow her to profit from his crimes. The fact that she originally wanted to turn over the proceeds from her book to these same families didn’t seem to matter. A jury trial was tentatively set, but the case was dismissed in March 2007 when both Rader and Casarona signed an agreement requiring her to do exactly what she’d intended to do all along.
Before I spent time getting to know Kris Casarona, I’d written her off as a loony. In all probability, I told myself, she was just another serial killer groupie who would end up being a nuisance and possibly a hindrance to investigators.
In fact, the Wichita police worried about Casarona because when news first leaked that she was about to write a book, Rader had yet to enter a formal plea in court in the ten murder charges filed against him. The authorities still had no idea how many people Rader might have killed. Because law enforcement depends on the public for potential leads and other information, their greatest frustration was that Casarona might end up concealing information for her book about a murder Rader had committed after 1994, when Kansas reinstated the death penalty.
When I finally caught up with Casarona in Wichita in May 2006, she claimed to be nearly $100,000 in debt to the attorneys she’d been forced to hire to defend her against her various lawsuits. Her bold dream of writing a crime book, she told herself, had been stabbed through the heart. She doubted that any of the insight she’d gleaned from her hundreds of hours of phone calls, letters, and jailhouse visits would ever find their way onto paper.
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