Inside the Mind of BTK

96 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
yearned to apply, but knew that if they ran a fingerprint check on him
they might stumble on a print he’d left behind at one of his crime
scenes, which police had collected but never made public.
David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) had a bit of this same type of
confused love-hate relationship with police festering inside him. On
April 17, 1977, after shooting ten people and killing five, he pumped
four .44-caliber bullets into two Bronx teenagers necking in a Mercury
Montego. The event marked the latest chapter in his pathetic,
senseless murder spree. But what made this one different was that
before fleeing the scene, he left a note behind, marking the first time
he’d felt compelled finally to reach out to the world and explain who
he was. The note was addressed to Joseph Borrelli, the Bronx police
captain who had been investigating Berkowitz’s earlier homicides.
In the note, which has become one of the most infamous examples
of the workings of a deranged homicidal mind, he wrote, “I am
deeply hurt by your calling me a woman hater. I am not. But I am a
monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ . . . When father Sam gets drunk he
gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up in the back
of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to
drink blood. ‘Go out and kill,’ commands Father Sam.”
BTK penned loosely similar-sounding rants to police, hinting at
the dark, unstoppable forces that dwelled within him. But the more I
thought about it, I realized that part of the key to influencing his
behavior was getting a better understanding of whom he was really
thumbing his nose at when he wrote his communiqués. Was he directing
his taunts at a specific officer whose identity only he knew? Or
were the police merely some ambiguous, fuzzy concept inside his troubled
mind, a collection of faceless, nameless men in blue? If the latter
were the case, I wondered why we couldn’t provide him with a single
image he could latch on to. Because if we could begin to control the
mental picture he maintained of the police, we might just have a
chance of controlling him.
Which is exactly where our so-called super-cop would enter the
picture. He would become the face that the UNSUB would picture
whenever he thought of the police. He would become, in a sense,
BTK’s partner in crime, the devoted acolyte who tracked every move
the killer made. The trick, of course, would be to locate someone
whom BTK could not only identify with but also feel comfortable
opening up to, the kind of law enforcement professional who could
begin to harness BTK’s self-inflated sense of his own importance,