Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 129
each of the names in order to track down their phone numbers. After
countless phone calls, I began to hit pay dirt.
A handful of Rader’s former friends, most of whom had never spoken
publicly about Dennis, began offering up snippets from his life that
hadn’t appeared anywhere in the police work or the media, little snapshots
that I hoped to piece together into a massive collage that would
give me a better understanding of the man who became BTK.
One person led me to the next. A few of his old friends cried as
they dredged up their memories for me. All of them sounded dazed,
dumbfounded, and horribly saddened by the nightmarish mess their
one-time friend had made of his life.
A few more minutes passed.
I decided to slide the disc out of its plastic case.
“What the hell,” I mumbled. “Probably wouldn’t hurt to take a
peek.”
I tapped the space bar on my laptop, awakening it from its slumber.
I pushed the CD into the tiny slot, and a second later a folder icon
appeared on my desktop. I opened it, saw dozens of other folders, and
began clicking my way from one to the next. There didn’t seem to be
any rhyme or reason to the order of the files in each folder. Some contained
scanned copies of drawings of women strapped to torture
devices. Others held what appeared to be journal entries scrawled in
blue ballpoint ink on scraps of notebook paper.
Scattered among all the folders were Polaroid snapshots. Rader
had snapped most of them himself while engaged in various activities,
most of which involved ropes tied around his neck, arms, and legs
and gags shoved into his mouth. Sometimes he wore frilly dresses,
blonde wigs, and clear plastic Halloween masks with large, pouty lips.
Sometimes he wore only white briefs, pulled up high and tight on his
otherwise naked, soft, pudgy body, as he dangled from the branches
of trees barren of leaves.
The images were disturbing, a bit frightening, and ridiculous.
But what I was most interested in were Rader’s words. So I began
reading.
The feelings and thoughts that set him apart from the rest of
the world began when he was around three years old. According to
one of his journal entries, that was when Dennis Rader’s first memory
wrapped itself around him like a vine and began to squeeze and
choke him.