Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 123
The city looked as though it had sprouted up from the flat expanse
of prairie like a cluster of steel, wood, and concrete mushrooms. I
couldn’t help but believe that deep down Dennis Rader identified with
the flatness of this land where he’d lived his entire life. Yet he forever
yearned to be like one of these buildings that had burst forth from the
smooth, predictable ground to become something. Something that
stood out. The kind of thing people stopped to stare at.
What the hell is it, I wondered, that creates a killer as twisted and
remorseless as BTK? I caught an image of him sitting on a chair,
watching Joey Otero’s thrashing, twitching body. Genetics can only go
so far in explaining how someone could manage to be so devoid of
empathy. There had to be other factors, all of which conspired together
in just the perfect way to create a Dennis Rader.
Over the years, I’d heard all sorts of theories put forth to explain
what makes men kill. Although some theorists have suggested that
even something as seemingly inconsequential as location can play a
contributing role, I have to agree with Landwehr when he insisted,
“This would have happened wherever Dennis Rader lived. If his family
had moved to Kansas City, it would have happened there. It’s not
the environment. It’s not the town. It’s the person.”
That may be the case. Nevertheless, the territory around Wichita—
like many former frontier settlements—possessed a history rich with
blood and gore, stories that someone like Dennis Rader would have
found both empowering and inspiring. The darkest tale, which may or
may not be rooted in absolute fact, involved the first European ever to
set foot in this region. I’d heard the story years ago from a cop on one
of my first trips to Kansas while investigating a homicide.
The place that eventually came to be known years later as Wichita,
Kansas, was first seen by a white European man in 1540. His name
was Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and the day he stumbled into
this region, his mood turned foul. The odyssey that led Coronado
to this spot had started in 1538, when he and his band of fortune
hunters began their bloody trek across the southwestern portion of
the so-called New World, killing just about every indigenous man,
woman, and child they encountered.
Coronado was chasing a strange vision that had seized the imagination
of the intelligentsia and upper class of his era. He’d come looking
for a city constructed entirely out of gold, known for decades in
Spanish mythology and popular rumor, called Cibola.