Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 93
I suggested that they should say they were uncertain if this person
was a suspect or just someone who stopped to lend a helping
hand.
A few days later, our “Good Samaritan” took the bait and stopped
by police headquarters to inform them that he may have been the person
seen by some of the witnesses. And, yes, as a matter of fact, he had
stopped by to help the victim, but for some reason she’d declined his
assistance. Bingo! Suddenly, the police had someone they could place
at the scene, and investigators could go to work doing a thorough
background check of the suspect, along with attempting to link him
to the crime.
The so-called Good Samaritan was later convicted when police
were able to match up hair and fibers on the dog collar, along with
biological evidence in the form of sperm.
When it came to the murders in Wichita, we didn’t have a busy
highway or a plethora of potential witnesses. But we did have something
else. We knew our UNSUB had a weak spot.
In the past, BTK had risked everything for the chance to thumb
his nose at police by writing letters, which for all he knew might inadvertently
contain a few incriminating scraps of forensic evidence or
intimate clues about his psychology. If he was going to slip up again,
my hunch was that it might be because of this unquenchable need to
communicate, to reach out and share the secret he had to keep locked
up inside his brain.
I just had one question: How do we force his hand?
A few afternoons later I still didn’t have an answer. So I decided
to spend my lunch hour going for a mellow jog through the woods
that surrounded the FBI Academy. I’d often done this in the past when
working on a case. I’d head out onto a trail at a slow ten-minute-amile
pace, allowing my mind to drift wherever it wanted. The process
was similar to what I did at night when I forced myself to dream about
a case. My technique led to plenty of heart-stopping nightmares, but
the insight I gleaned made it worthwhile. The network of running
trails that weave and crisscross their way through the dense woods at
Quantico have achieved near mythic lore among agents. Many a
promising rookie has emptied the contents of his stomach on these
trails as a result of pushing himself past his physical limits. Because
it’s so easy to get disoriented on the meandering paths (as I once did