Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 99
Hazelwood, a serious caffeine addict, polished off what was left of
his coffee and then said, “But in his mind, he is torturing his victims.
That’s why he uses the bags. He wants to see the terror in their eyes as
he places it over their heads.”
Hazelwood stopped talking, but Walker and I knew better than to
speak—he was just getting started. “He’s definitely a sexual bondage
practitioner and a collector of bondage magazines and detective magazines.
He’s also got an interest in criminology or psychology. He’s
probably pretty well known to adult book store operators in the area.”
“Yeah,” said Walker. “This guy is definitely into psychological torture.
That indicates a higher level of sophistication and a higher level
of intelligence than the average Joe on the street. The more physical
the torture, the more primal and reactive the person inflicting it is.
Not much intelligent thought goes into physical torture.”
All of our heads nodded in unison.
“What we’re finding from our research is that most of these guys
have an IQ range between 105 and 145,” I said. “The average falls
between 115 and 120. Average for the normal population is 100. What
this is showing us is that most of these guys are able to move around
in society fairly easily. We catch the dumb ones quickly. The smarter
ones take longer....And so do the lucky ones.
“I think it’s pretty clear that this guy is able to spend a bit of time
at his crime scenes. This is something that appears important to him.
He seems to want to have some kind of dialogue with his victims. It
isn’t a blitz-type scenario. As we learned from the Bright murder, he
attempted to diffuse the situation and make everyone feel that if they’d
just cooperate with him, he’d leave. They had no way of knowing that
this was part of his MO. So he’s capable of maintaining that type of
control relationship. In a group kill, he’s smart enough to go after
strength first. He uses the stronger victim to tie up the others. Then
he gets rid of that strong figure and, as he said in one of his letters, he
saves the best for last.”
As I spoke, I rubbed the tip of my index finger over the raised
monogram on one of my gold cufflinks. “I’ve often wondered if the
reason he took eleven-year-old Josie Otero to the basement was that
she’d begun to get hysterical and loud after seeing her family killed,”
I said. “He was taking a chance by forcing her down there, but he may
have been losing control of her at that moment and was concerned
about the neighbors hearing her. It was a chance he was willing to take.
And the way he tied her up with all those bindings felt like he was