Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 109
cially when it came to cases involving violent offenders. The way I saw
it, whenever you resort to using a polygraph, you’re basically tipping
your hand to the suspect, informing him that you don’t have anything
on him, so your only hope is to rely on this primitive Buck Rogers type
of device to determine if he’s telling the truth.
Walker felt the same way. “If this guy passes his polygraph, he’s
going to sit back and smirk,” he said. “He’s going to feel that he’s beaten
you. But I like the idea of telling him that you’re executing a search
warrant of his home while he’s at the station talking to you. That
would cause him a lot of stress. Which is what you need to do during
your questioning. Create stress, then give him the benefit of doubt.
Watch how he responds to the stressors, figure out why he reacts that
way, then go after him.
“Use two interviewers, one peeling off the other. You have to come
off professional, thorough, but low key. Show him you mean business
and you’re not going to stop until he caves in. He’ll be more vulnerable
to that. And play up the notion of the task force being created just
for him, just to catch him. He’ll like that he’s being taken seriously,
that he has these select super-cops trying to catch him. He’ll like it that
he’s not considered just some small case.”
As I listened to Walker’s words, something else just occurred to
me. It didn’t come to me in the form of an image. It was a sense,
almost a knowing.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing
some sort of a uniform,” I said. “When you bring him in for questioning,
make sure he’s not wearing his uniform. He’ll feel shielded by
it, protected by it. Don’t insult him by canceling the interview if he
arrives wearing it, but plan things so that it’s unlikely he’ll arrive in his
work clothes. If he still walks into headquarters wearing it, that might
tell you something.
“Don’t insult his intelligence directly by saying something like,
‘That was a stupid thing to do.’ All that’s going to do is make him react
defensively or get hostile because the bottom line is that he thinks he’s
pretty smart. But you do want to attack him indirectly by pointing out
mistakes at the crime that led you to him. This would be easy to do in
the third person. He might rationalize the mistake away much more
easily in the third person.”
Walker suddenly picked up on the notion of vanity that I’d
touched on a moment before. “You gotta gratify his ego. That’s going
to be important to him. You gotta make him feel important. If you