Inside the Mind of BTK

122 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
house. Rader’s white work truck with a camper top on the back sat in
the parking lot.
Roughly three miles down the road stood the empty silo. Rader
had spent much of the last decade driving past this silo, fantasizing
about all the terrible things he wanted to do inside it one day. Some
guys dream about retiring and moving to Arizona or Florida. Rader
told Landwehr that he wanted to stay right here in Park City and set
up shop in this old, run-down grain silo, located on the corner of a
small family farm.
For Landwehr, the structure represented everything frustrating
and sadistic about Dennis Rader. After all, for decades investigators
weren’t quite sure what they were dealing with—an evil genius or just
an evil guy who somehow managed to catch all the lucky breaks.
Now they knew.
Dennis Rader was a guy with a slightly below average level of
intelligence who somehow possessed a repressed type of patience not
often found in serial killers.
He was a survivor.
Landwehr slowed down, then pulled over to the side of the road.
“There it is,” he said, pointing past a barbed-wire fence at a concrete
column that jutted up into the blue sky. From where we’d parked,
the structure appeared to list slightly to the right, resembling a rural
version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Beside it sat a decrepit wooden
barn; a number of boards were missing from its side, along with pieces
of sheet metal from its rusting roof.
“Don’t ask me how in the world he was gonna construct his torture
chamber in there without the owner ever realizing what he was
up to,” he chuckled. “Like I told you, this guy just doesn’t always seem
to think a lot of things through.”
It was midafternoon by the time we made it back to my hotel.
Landwehr’s cell phone rang just as he shut off the engine. He fished it
out from the pocket of his suit jacket and said, “Landwehr.” I listened
to him speak for a few moments and realized he’d just gotten a break
in one of the homicide cases he was working.
Landwehr excused himself hastily and sped away while I walked
up to my room by myself, checked my e-mail inbox on the laptop I’d
brought with me from home, then pulled back the curtains and stared
out the window over Wichita.