Inside the Mind of BTK

114 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
time, my three children had grown into adults, my marriage had
crumbled and then put itself back together, and, on two different occasions,
I nearly died from pulmonary blood clots.
But most important, on February 25, 2005, the phantom-like
killer who had eluded capture for more than three decades was finally
unmasked.
He turned out to be the fifty-nine-year-old father of two grown
children. For the past thirty-three years he’d been married to the same
woman and had lived in the same small house in the sleepy bedroom
community of Park City, located six miles north of downtown Wichita.
He’d served as a longtime Boy Scout leader and as president of his
church congregation, and, for almost fifteen years, he could be found
driving the streets of Park City, wearing a drab brown uniform that
made him look like a cross between a park ranger and a cop. He bullied
residents as he handed out tickets for such infractions as overgrown
grass and expired dog tags.
His name was Dennis Rader.
In many ways, Dennis Rader turned out to be everything I’d predicted.
In other ways, however, he was a bit different.
Almost four hours after Rader’s arrest on a quiet residential street
near his tiny house in Park City, he was informed that his saliva had
the same genetic makeup as the semen found on Nancy Fox’s nightgown.
So Rader confessed to the seven killings that police knew he’d
committed between 1974 and 1977, then admitted that he’d murdered
another three women in 1981, 1986, and 1991.
Four months later, Rader pled guilty to ten counts of first-degree
murder and was sentenced to ten life sentences in El Dorado Correctional
Facility. Because the murders he committed all occurred before
Kansas reinstituted the death penalty in 1994, Rader managed to avoid
a date with the executioner’s needle.
Many people—myself included—believed this to be a tragedy. If
any killer deserved to die for his selfish, savage crimes, he did.
Two months after Greg Waller, a Sedgwick County district judge,
imposed Rader’s sentence, I decided the time had come to make the
journey to Wichita. I wanted to breathe the same air that had nurtured
Rader for the nearly six decades he’d lived there. I wanted to drive
slowly over the same tree-shaded streets he’d driven. But mostly, I
wanted to probe the brain of Wichita police lieutenant Ken Landwehr,
the man credited with helping nail Rader.