Inside the Mind of BTK

124 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
For two long years this golden metropolis had eluded him. One
day, an Indian slave named El Turco told some of Coronado’s soldiers
about just such a city that he claimed to have once seen, located in the
land that lay to the east. Against the pleadings of some of his other
native scouts, the impatient, gold-drunk Coronado decided to trust
El Turco.
The group wandered for months through New Mexico, Texas,
Oklahoma, and southern Kansas, eventually arriving at the sandy junction
of two shallow rivers, now known as the Arkansas and the Little
Arkansas. It didn’t take long before he spotted a cluster of domed huts,
constructed from golden straw—hardly the opulent splendor he’d been
promised. So incensed was Coronado at being brought to this place
that he ordered his men to torture a confession out of El Turco.
Exactly what atrocities they performed was never recorded. But
the history books are filled with accounts of conquistadors using their
razor-sharp rapiers to force information out of their victims by
methodically slicing off ears, noses, fingers, and feet. They were also
fond of burying people alive for extended periods of time. Whatever
the specifics of his torture, El Turco eventually confessed to fabricating
the story about the golden city.
It was only then that Coronado finally had him strangled.
From the window of my hotel room, I watched as the sun, misshapen
and colored like a pumpkin, rolled beneath the horizon. The
Arkansas River ran near here, but it was dry as a bone now, nothing
but sand, clay, and willows. Nightfall was looming, and once again I
found myself far from home in yet another hotel room, trying to
understand what had compelled a man I’d never met to murder ten
people while leading a life that, on the surface, appeared hopelessly
normal.
I was about to finish the journey through the dark, convoluted
mind of a monster, a journey I had begun over thirty years ago when
I first became obsessed with capturing and understanding the Wichita
serial killer during my first job as an FBI agent in Detroit.
Landwehr knocked on the hollow metal door of my room, then
pushed it open. He pulled a CD out of his pocket, held it in the air,
and said, “Got some things on here you might find interesting.” He
placed it on the desk, beside my computer. “It’s the stuff we seized
from Rader after his arrest—his stash of journals, personal pictures,