Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (49 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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“All I wanted to do was write a crime book, just like everyone else was doing, and now look what happened,” she moaned in the hotel lobby. “I get letters from people telling me I’m going to hell for doing this. And for what? I didn’t want a dime from this book. Not a dime. If I could get out of this contract with Dennis and be done with all this, I would. But the families of Rader’s victims don’t care. They’re suing me anyway. So I’m stuck.”
 
Ever since I first wrote that letter to Rader in December 2005, requesting an interview for this book, Casarona had been a never-ending source of headaches in my life. But, as strange as it now seems for me to write this, over time she’d become something of a delight. She was a whip-smart, bullheaded woman with a knack for getting herself into tight scrapes. But for those who took the time to get to know her, she was also a generous, good-natured soul, the type to give a stranger in need the last dollar out of her purse.
 
 
“Of course, he disgusts me,” Casarona said, staring at her empty glass. The ice had melted long ago. “If he were to somehow get out of prison and show up on my front doorstep, I’d pump as many slugs into his body as I could. I’ve got a forty-five, you know. Got a nice kick to it. Picked it up after failed marriage number one.”
 
Casarona laughed.
 
I believed her.
 
 
Ever since we’d begun communicating, Casarona had been guarded about most of the intimate details she’d learned about Rader’s childhood. That was what interested her the most.
When did it happen? When did he know he was different?
Something told me she’d yet to unearth the answer. Every so often, she’d drop hints about what she’d learned, but it wasn’t anything that I didn’t already know. And from the few morsels she’d told me, my gut had confirmed one important, disturbing observation: Casarona had become Rader’s next victim. He might be locked behind steel doors, several feet of concrete, and glistening razor wire, monitored by surveillance cameras and watched over by countless heavily armed guards, but he was still up to his old tricks. Somewhere inside his brain, he was plotting to kill Casarona, torturing and strangling her, day after day, week after week, imagining her lifeless naked body fallen before him as he masturbated.
 
The two of them had forged a symbiotic relationship. He needed her as fodder for his fantasies, and she needed him as grist for her book and to solve the riddle that many people were asking: Was Rader born a serial killer and those ten murders he committed an example of genetic destiny? Or was he shaped and molded by some sort of horrible childhood trauma? Of course, this question was nothing more than the age-old nature-versus-nurture enigma, pushed to its moral outer limit.
 
Like me, she’d discovered no examples of sexual or physical abuse in Rader’s past. Although he steadfastly denied ever being victimized as a child, I didn’t buy it. Either he didn’t want to admit it or his psyche had been so shattered by the trauma that he couldn’t retrieve the memory. I refused to believe that Rader was a natural-born killer. It was far too easy an explanation.
 
 
It was late. I wanted to get some sleep. My body was running on East Coast time, where it was closing in on three in the morning. “If I’m gonna do this interview tomorrow, I gotta get some shut-eye,” I mumbled. Casarona nodded wearily, looking almost as exhausted as I felt. We said good-night, and as I headed off to my room, she called out, “I forgot to tell you the code word.”
 
“The code word?” I asked.
 
“Yeah, the code word. Because I wouldn’t get a chance to speak with Dennis on the phone between the time I met you in person tonight and when you showed up for your interview tomorrow morning, I came up with the idea of having you give him a prearranged word that just Dennis and I would know.”
 
“Oh, I see,” I said, convinced she’d been watching far too many spy movies.
 
“Depending on how much I trusted you and what I thought of you, Dennis and I had several passwords,” she said. “Depending on what you tell him, he’ll know how freely he can talk to you, how open he can be.” She paused for a moment, staring down at the stains on the hotel carpet. “You know, he doesn’t understand why I’m letting you speak to him. He really wants me to save everything for
my
book.”
 
I stood there looking at her, too tired to summon up the energy to tell her how idiotic I felt muttering some stupid code word to a convicted serial killer.
 
“So, what is it?” I asked, starting to feel annoyed.
 
“I’m still trying to decide,” she said.
 
“Look, I’m really beat. Why don’t you phone me in the morning when you decide on something.”
 
She started to look a bit embarrassed by all the cloak-and-dagger precautions she was taking. “Tell Dennis when you see him . . . tell him that the lion is strong,” she said.
 
“That’s my password?” I asked. “The lion is strong.”
 
“That’s right.”
 
“This is ridiculous, you know.”
 
Casarona smiled. “Tell him the lion is strong, and it is very positive.”
 
“The lion is strong, and it is very positive,” I said. “Anything else?”
 
“That’s it.”
 
“Good night, Kris,” I mumbled.
 
“Good luck,” she said.
 
I stumbled upstairs to my room, wondering about what I was getting myself into. If my meeting with Rader did go down—and I still wasn’t convinced it would—the interview conditions would be far from perfect.
 
A few days before I flew in to Wichita, an official at El Dorado informed me that Rader and I wouldn’t be allowed to sit together in the same room or even across from one another at a table separated by a slab of bullet-resistant glass. Instead, I’d be required to park myself in the visitor center while he sat in a room in another wing of the facility, staring into the lens of a video camera. The two of us would watch one another on TV screens and communicate with microphones and speakers.
 
The warden could have allowed me to interview Rader in the same room, but he apparently refused. After all, I wasn’t in law enforcement anymore, and he didn’t want to be seen as giving me any “special treatment” or perks, especially when he had a box on his desk stuffed full of requests from people wanting to speak with Rader. Even my good friend Larry Welch, director of the KBI, tried to get me a face-to-face interview, but the warden wasn’t inclined to make any exceptions. It pissed me off something awful, but I respected his decision.
 
Yet the most frustrating stipulation was that I would be allowed to spend only two and a half hours with Rader. That may sound like plenty of time to engage in a one-on-one conversation with a homicidal psychopath, but it was woefully inadequate. To date, all of my interviews had been open ended. They finished either when I obtained all the information I needed or when the prisoner got so ticked off that he called for a guard and demanded to be taken back to his cell.
 
 
I fell back onto my bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out the lines I’d use on Rader in the morning. Shouts echoed up from the street below. A bottle, perhaps two or three of them, shattered. A bar fight, I figured, was spilling out into the night. Listening to the din, my mind raced backwards two decades to an interview I’d somehow managed to pull off, despite being told to hit the goddamned road. The memory of that afternoon I walked through the rusted gates of Stateville Correctional Institute in Joliet, Illinois, to pick the ugly, disturbed brain of mass murderer Richard Speck, caused my mood to lighten.
 
As mass murderers go, Speck was at the top of the cesspool. One hot July morning in 1966 in South Chicago, he butchered eight student nurses, raping several of the women before beating and stabbing them.
 
Speck had been sentenced to twelve hundred years in prison. When I arrived on his cell block, he was in a foul mood. In the months prior to my visit, he’d managed to capture one of the sparrows that used to fly in and out of the broken windows of Stateville. He tied a string around one of its legs and turned the bird into his pet. The guards would watch him sitting in his cell for hours at a time talking to it, feeding it scraps of bread.
 
Prison officials were mildly astonished to observe this cold-blooded killer’s kinder, gentler side. Over time, however, the novelty wore off, and Speck, who was violating prison rules prohibiting inmates from having pets, was informed that the bird would have to go. So he untied the string from its tiny leg, held the animal in his hand for a few brief seconds, and just when it appeared that he would set it free, crushed the bird in his hands, tossing the bloodied carcass into a large fan, sending feathers and bird guts throughout the cell block.
 
“GO FUCK YOURSELF” were the first words out of Speck’s mouth when I entered the chain-link holding pen where he sat on a filing cabinet, waiting for me.
 
After a few more obscenity-laced descriptions of all the activities he wanted to perform on my mother, I looked at him and said, “It’s OK, Richard. I don’t have to be here. I’ve got plenty of other things to do.”
 
I stood up, preparing to leave, then glanced over at one of the prison administrators who organized the interview. “Damn,” I said with a wink. “I wanted to ask this son of a bitch how the hell he fucked all those eight nurses. Because whatever Richard’s eating, I want some of it.”
 
Speck shut his big dirty mouth and looked at me as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard me say. He took the bait almost as soon as I tossed it at him.
 
“I didn’t fuck all eight of them,” he said, alarmed that I didn’t have my facts straight. “Who the hell fucks eight women in one sitting?”
 
By the time I finally walked out of that holding cell, Speck had blabbed for nearly seven hours, walking me through all the wretched days of his life, providing me with an intimate look into the evolution of this twisted killer.
 
Something told me that I wouldn’t enjoy the same luxury with Dennis Rader. I was fairly certain that he’d pretend to weep over the memory of his victims. And odds were that he’d also be respectful and polite because he believed the two of us shared some sort of professional camaraderie. But the bottom line was this: if he grew miffed or upset at any moment during the interview—which often happened during these sessions—he could pull the plug, and I’d be unable to do anything to stop him. All he’d need to do would be to shout for a guard, who would walk over and flick a switch on the video camera. And that would be it. Game over.
 
Welcome to the brave new world of criminology,
I mumbled to myself, then felt the soft tug of sleep pull me away.
 
22
 
A few hours later I awoke, showered, and pulled on a pair of trousers, a sport coat over my tan plaid shirt, and loafers. On the way out of my room, I glanced at my reflection in the mirror.
 
“Jesus,” I laughed. “You look just like a prison shrink.” Even though Rader knew my background, I’d discovered years ago that wearing casual clothes helped grease the skids during these prison interviews.
 
Incarcerated felons, it seems, can smell a cop two hundred feet away. Dressing down gave me the appearance of being either a social worker or a member of the prison’s psych staff, two categories that tended to put inmates at ease.
 
I grabbed my briefcase and headed down to the hotel lobby for a cup of coffee, then took a seat at a rickety table.
 
Tucked away in my briefcase was a folder containing five pieces of yellow paper yanked from a legal pad. The pages were a gift from Casarona, handed to me the previous night. Rader had mailed them to her a few days earlier. Turned out that when he learned I was writing a book about him and that Kris had given him her blessing to speak with me, Rader decided to contribute an essay of sorts.
 
As Landwehr had told me during my last visit to Wichita, Rader was a fan of my books. Predictably, his favorite was
Obsession,
no doubt because the first chapter was a thinly veiled account of the BTK case.
 
According to Casarona, Rader was impressed at what I seemed to know about him long before police apprehended him. Over the years, he had gone back to that chapter again and again. He had told Kris that reading what I’d written gave him a sense of perspective about himself he’d never had, allowing him to better understand the forces that writhed and squirmed within him, compelling him to kill. Not that this insight did him a lick of good. But because he could never turn to a psychiatrist or a psychologist for help, what I’d written in
Obsession
felt as close to a therapy session as he’d ever had. The words on the pages of that chapter forced him to ask questions about himself. Of course, he never figured out any answers. But, as I’ve said before, for someone as shallow and empty as Rader, just asking the questions was good enough.

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