Inside the Mind of BTK

120 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
a dangerous man off the streets, but for another reason. He was angry
and incredulous that police didn’t arrest Johnson when he’d first identified
him, hours after the robbery of Butell’s.
“What I didn’t know then was that they were looking for him,” he
told me. “But it just seemed to be taking so long to find him. And that
just made me mad. That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to wait until
I could land a spot with the FBI. I figured I could do more good by
being a cop here in Wichita.”
A few minutes after noon on my second day in Wichita, Landwehr
returned to my hotel room. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go for a drive.”
We walked downstairs and climbed into his car. For the next
ninety minutes, he led me on a tour of Rader’s various haunts around
the county. We drove past the locations of his various murders, all of
them in safe neighborhoods, all of them middle class. Not a single feature
about any of the homes made them stand out from the residences
surrounding them.
Some of Rader’s victims lived on corner lots. A few resided in the
middle of their block. The backyard of one abutted a park. In the years
that had passed, a few of the structures had been razed; the lots now
sat empty, overrun with weeds and tall grass.
Twenty minutes into our tour, we drove past the duplex where
Rader claimed that his soon-to-be next victim lived. During his interrogation,
he told police he’d been targeting the middle-aged woman for
months and planned on killing her sometime in the autumn of 2005.
“You gotta leave her name out of this,” Landwehr said. “It would
be too much for her.”
Occasionally during my tour, I’d glance out my window and catch
sight of a driver in a nearby car doing a double-take upon realizing
that the famous Lieutenant Ken Landwehr was in their midst.
“You ought to run for mayor,” I laughed.
“Yeah,” Landwehr frowned. “That’s just what I need to do.”
A look of boredom had begun to settle across his face. He
appeared to be growing tired of this incessant talk of Dennis Rader.
Not only that, he looked almost embarrassed by the attention he’d
received since the arrest.
Sitting there beside him in the car, I got the feeling that he wanted
to be done with the whole damn thing so that he could go back to
focusing on the other homicide investigations that he and the detectives
in his unit were currently working. After all, most of the elements