Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 97
power, and intelligence that covered up his deep-seated feelings of
inferiority and self-hatred. This meant that our super-cop couldn’t be
just anyone. That he might be a detective working the case or some
high-ranking officer in the department wouldn’t be good enough.
What mattered most was that they be made of the kind of stuff that
we could mold into the proper façade. Image would be everything.
Our super-cop would have to mouth words that sounded something
like this: “If it takes me my whole career or even my lifetime, I
will solve this case. I will look and search in every corner, every dark
alley, and every crack in the sidewalk until I can identify the individual
responsible for these homicides—and that’s a promise to you.”
Would it work? Could my idea help nab a killer as elusive as BTK?
It seemed worth a try.
A few afternoons later I was seated in a first floor conference room
in the FBI’s forensic science building, not far from my office. With me
at that massive rectangular oak table were two other agents, along with
the two detectives from Wichita who had traveled to Quantico looking
for answers. Behind us were a handful of rubber-neckers, camped
out in the back of the room to catch a glimpse of what was about to
unfold during the next few hours.
We were going to toss out ideas about what sort of person might
be responsible for those seven unsolved murders in Kansas, how police
might track him down, and ways they could get him to crack once
they had a possible suspect.
To my left sat Roy Hazelwood, a rail thin, chain-smoking fortyseven-year-old
FBI instructor, widely regarded as one of finest minds
in the study of interpersonal violence. A truly brilliant researcher and
homicide investigator, Hazelwood was a former Army major who was
first introduced to detective work while serving in the military police.
Beside him sat Ron Walker, a clean-cut thirty-five-year-old former FBI
field agent from Colorado, brought into my unit shortly after my collapse
from viral encephalitis. A veteran Air Force pilot, Walker was whip
smart, highly organized, and in the midst of learning the ropes of profiling
from me. He was proving to be an exceptionally quick study.
In many ways, our goal here felt similar to what musicians do
when they get together and jam. Only instead of sound, we were
bouncing our thoughts off one another, working with ideas based on
clues BTK had left us at his murders and in his letters. Sometimes we
chased a thread spooled out by someone else. At other moments, one