Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (51 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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“Seems to be a bit of problem,” she said.
Even though I half expected her to say this, I felt my heart begin to pound. Doing my best to look utterly unconcerned, I smiled. She trotted back into her office again, only to reappear thirty seconds later.
“Actually there are two problems,” she said.
I wasn’t interested in hearing what either of them might be. I wouldn’t be leaving El Dorado without talking to Rader. If he wanted to shut down the interview, so be it. But I’d waited too long, traveled too many miles, and jumped through too many hoops to get here. So I dropped the names of some heavies in the state’s law enforcement and Department of Corrections world who had either tried to get me in here themselves or were aware of my intentions to do so.
“Why don’t you give them a call,” I suggested, hoping she wouldn’t. “I have all their numbers. I think they’d be interested to hear about the runaround I’m getting here.”
She made several more trips in and out of her office.
“That way,” she said, pointing to a metal door in a corner of the room.
I opened it, walked through a metal detector, and proceeded down a hallway lined on either side with bullet-resistant glass. Compared to Attica or San Quentin, El Dorado hardly felt intimidating. It was a clean, well-lit place that gave off a just-built vibe. It reeked of fresh paint instead of stale urine. And unlike nearly every facility I’d ever visited, it had actually been landscaped.
A guard met me at the end and stamped some sort of invisible ink on top of my hand, and I made my way into a room that resembled a community college cafeteria. Men and women sat across from one another at long tables, holding hands, speaking in hushed tones. A few of the men, all dressed in prison-issue jeans and blue T-shirts, bounced children on their knees. Violent offenders like Rader posed far too great a risk to be allowed the luxury of a face-to-face meeting with visitors.
These guys,
I thought to myself,
must be the best of the worst.
These guys,
I thought to myself,
must be the best of the worst.
Another clerk, standing behind another desk, waved to me. After handing her the piece of paper I carried with me, she studied it and announced, “You got two and a half hours.”
Her words didn’t sit well with the heavyset woman in Lycra shorts, standing nearby. “Hey, that’s not fair,” she shouted. “How come I only get one hour and he gets two and a half?”
I looked into her angry eyes as she gripped the hand of a chubby-cheeked toddler in a dirty NASCAR T-shirt.
“I’ve been waiting thirty years to get in here to talk to this guy,” I told her, then watched the expression on her face soften.
The clerk handed me a key to a locker, directing me to place my sunglasses and wallet inside. Another guard led me to a row of four tiny wooden three-sided cubicles in a far corner of the room, each just wide enough to fit a chair. I took a seat and noticed the two TV screens, stacked one on top of the other, on the table in front of me on a wooden shelf. On top of the monitors was perched a tiny camera with a lens that resembled the barrel of 12-gauge.
The top screen displayed my image, the same one Rader would be seeing. On the lower monitor, I glimpsed a nondescript room painted the color of week-old custard. An empty chair sat in the middle of the floor. Dull white light shone in through a steel-barred window on a distant wall. I was dying to ask the guard where on the grounds of this massive prison facility the room on my monitor was located, but I decided against it. Everyone in here seemed so paranoid about security that I knew my question would only make them more nervous.
The room was empty. So I sat there for several minutes, marveling at how hot and sticky the air felt. Patches of sweat, I could feel, had begun to seep through my shirt.
Minutes passed . . .
Where the hell was Rader?
I wondered. A guard walked over and apologized for the delay, explaining that something had gone screwy with the audio feed between the two rooms.
Where the hell was Rader?
I wondered. A guard walked over and apologized for the delay, explaining that something had gone screwy with the audio feed between the two rooms.
Waiting for the guest of dishonor to appear, I thought back to something Casarona had mentioned the night before. Rader’s mood had grown dark lately. A few days earlier, one of his violent fellow inmates thought it would be funny to forge Rader’s signature on a “Do Not Resuscitate” form. Prison humor, I suppose. Not long afterward, one of the guards showed up at Rader’s cell to make sure he had actually signed the form. Rader apparently stood there in the middle of the cell, staring at the piece of paper and reading the legal jargon over and over again, then informed the guard that the signature was bogus.
“Kind of thought as much,” the man told him, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” Rader said. He walked over to the tiny desk bolted into the wall, grabbed a pen, crossed out the imposter’s scrawl, then wrote his name across the form.
“Here,” he said. “Now I signed it.”
I attempted to hold in my head that image of Rader standing there, reading that document. He was beginning to settle in. The novelty of his new life behind bars was starting to wear off, and that do-not-resuscitate form reminded him that the only way he would ever leave El Dorado—outside of being transferred to another prison—was zipped up in a rubber body bag, atop a gurney.
Fifteen minutes later, the screen of the lower monitor showed a door opening. Rader shuffled into the room, led by a guard. His wrists were handcuffed, and his legs were shackled in chains.
It hit me that Rader was far thinner and more gaunt than I could ever recall seeing him in photographs or on TV. He must have lost a lot of weight since he had been incarcerated. Maybe he didn’t like the prison food.
Rader dropped down onto the chair and squinted in the direction of the camera. The blank expression on his face told me that the monitors on his end must still be black. He had no idea I was watching him.
I moved closer to the screen and observed beads of sweat glistening on his face. After a few moments he attempted to wipe away the wetness, but because of the thick steel chain extending upward from his legs to his wrists, he was unable to lift his hands more than an inch or two up from his lap. Instead, he was forced to double over and place his head into his knees in order to rub away the perspiration by sliding his face back and forth across his hands.
You’d think that for a guy who loved bondage, he’d be enjoying himself but the bored scowl on his face certainly didn’t give any indication of that. A minute later, the sound of human breathing erupted from the speakers positioned in front of me. Judging by the self-conscious shift in Rader’s void demeanor, I could tell that he was now staring at my image on the screen in front of him.
“Hello, sir,” he said.
His use of the word
sir
startled me. It seemed terribly naïve and a bit calculated, especially considering that we were both the same age.
sir
startled me. It seemed terribly naïve and a bit calculated, especially considering that we were both the same age.
“Call me John.”
Rader nodded.
“A mutual friend of ours sends her regards,” I said.
He nodded again, no doubt conjuring up Casarona’s image inside his head. “She’s a very sweet woman,” Rader said. “She’s . . . she’s been quite helpful to me.”
“Yes,” I told him, wondering if he’d already tortured and murdered her in his mind this morning. “I’m sure she has.”
Rader’s face went blank again as though he hadn’t heard me, but I continued.
“There’s something I’m supposed to tell you . . . The lion is strong, and it is very positive.”
Rader squinted into the camera, then bent down, twisted his head sideways, and tapped his right ear with his hand. I could still hear his heavy breathing, but I had a hunch he was attempting to tell me that the sound on his end had gone on the fritz. Once again, we stared into each other’s image on the screen in front of us, waiting in silence until the audio began working.
The moment the sound came back on, his face lit up as if a thought of great importance had just materialized in his mind. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t you have some sort of a code for me?”
This was getting more idiotic with each passing moment. “Yes,” I replied. “The lion is very strong, and it is positive.”
Rader nodded slowly, letting the words soak in. His mouth hung open slightly, causing him to look almost befuddled. I had a sneaking suspicion that he’d already forgotten what Casarona’s damn code was, but decided to wing it.
“Very good,” he said. “That’s very good about the lion.”
23
Dennis Rader sat in the black plastic chair, ramrod straight. The dark circles of sweat on his blue T-shirt were growing larger by the minute around his armpits and beneath his neck. In the past, I’d always paid close attention to the way my interview subjects perspired. It often meant they’d begun to lose control. But here in El Dorado all bets were off. The place felt like a goddamned sauna, and I was dying to take my sport coat off, but decided to keep it on. Rader no doubt was impressed by my feeling compelled to put on a sport coat for him.
“Sorry to hear about your mother,” Rader said, squinting as he peered into the camera. His words hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. I figured Casarona might have told him about my mother’s death three months earlier, but I never imagined that he’d bring it up. Something about a serial killer handing out condolences over the death of a loved one just seemed ironic. Not only that, he didn’t mean it—because he couldn’t mean it. At least not the way most people do. But he said it anyway, because it was one of those things that normal people said to one another, and Dennis Rader had long ago mastered the art of trying to do and say all the things that were expected of normal people.
“Thanks,” I said.
Rader sat there and listened with a pensive, somber look plastered on his face as I continued to speak about my mother’s death. He appeared as though he were trying to fathom what I was telling him, but I knew he could not. It was physically and psychologically impossible. And after a few moments, a thin, dull glaze had begun to descend over his eyes, so I decided to steer the conversation back to him.
“I had a hell of a time getting in to see you,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “There were a few people who rather we didn’t talk. Two FBI agents came here a couple of months ago and told me that I didn’t need to be speaking to you. They kept telling me, ‘Forget about John Douglas. Talk to us’ . . . I think they’re jealous of you.”
“They’re not jealous,” I told him. “They’re just sore. I’ve butted heads with the FBI a few times since my retirement in cases where I believed they’d made a mistake. The JonBenet Ramsey murder was one of them.”
I spoke slowly, trying not to appear too anxious to talk about his crimes. I wanted to establish myself as a guy who looked at all sides of a case, the kind who wasn’t out to please either prosecutors or defense attorneys. I wanted him to know that I would give him a fair shake.
Rader peered intently into the camera and nodded his head slowly. “You don’t think her parents had something to do with it?”
“No, I don’t,” I told him. “At different times during the investigation I was brought in by both the defense and the prosecution, but I walked away from that one convinced there was no way the family could have committed that murder.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“When a parent kills a child, the body generally doesn’t look like that little girl’s did,” I said. “After the murder, they usually attempt to undo the scene and make it appear more comfortable and peaceful for the victim. But JonBenet had been viciously garroted. Duct tape covered her mouth. Her hands were bound over her head. And shortly before she died, her skull was smashed with a blow that would have brought down a two-hundred-pound man.”
Rader looked bored, fidgety. He’d begun to slouch just a bit. All this talk about some murder he’d played no part in had begun to annoy him, I could tell. He wanted this to be all about him.
Fearful he was on the verge of growing bored because I wasn’t properly stroking his ego, I decided to switch gears and compliment him. I told him that I’d always been impressed with his ability to describe his crime scenes with such uncanny precision. Rader appeared happy to play along with me. His face once again took on that serious look. His head rocked up and down, and his back straightened.
“I remember every detail from every crime,” he replied. “I remember every detail like most people do their favorite movie, and I play it over and over again inside my head. That’s really how it all started back when I was a child. I had these thoughts and images that played out inside my head. The more I thought about them, the stronger they became. I just got so caught up in them that pretty soon . . . they took me over. I couldn’t fight them anymore.”
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