Inside the Mind of BTK

130 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
Rader wrote that he never could recall all the details—at least not
with the precision he could maintain with each of his ten murders. All
he could remember was that he was about three years old when he
walked into his mother’s bedroom and found her struggling on the
bed, hopelessly entangled in the twisted bed sheets wrapped around
the wrought-iron headboard.
He had discovered her wrapped up in the sheets, her arms
extended above her head, writhing, sobbing, and struggling to free
herself. He claimed to have stood there in the doorway for what
seemed like an eternity, watching her, feeling helpless, powerless to do
anything about her situation.
How on earth could she have gotten caught up in such a predicament?
Even after all the years that had elapsed between the event and
when he wrote about it in his journal, he never could answer that
question. But clearly, he acted out some facet of this memory in each
of his murders. This image of his mother, lying in bed, half dressed,
writhing and twisting in desperation, became his visual mantra.
In another folder, I spotted the transcripts from Rader’s interrogation
session. The way Dennis Rader remembered it a few hours into
his grilling by police, there had always been Raders in this section of
the country. There probably always will be, he said. Unless, of course,
they all decide to pack up and move out of the region because of what
he did. He certainly wouldn’t blame them if they did. That was something
he sometimes wondered about, during the last part of his life—
the impact his actions might have on the ones he left behind.
His ancestors came over from Bavaria back in the 1800s. Rader’s
kinfolk were good, solid people. They worked hard, farming the rich
soil, trying to follow God’s word as best they could. The family’s name,
derived from the German noun rat, means wheel. The earliest Raders,
it seems, were employed as wheelwrights. When he was a boy and on
into adulthood, Rader often drew pictures of those same large wooden
wheels that his ancestors used to build. Only Dennis didn’t want to
employ them for transportation. He dreamed about lashing women
to them, then torturing his victims.
Dennis Lynn Rader was born just outside the tiny town of Columbus,
Kansas, on March 9, 1945. When I typed the date into Google, I
learned that at almost the exact moment of his birth, 350 B-29s
dropped 1,500 metric tons of incendiary bombs onto Tokyo, resulting
in a firestorm that killed over 100,000 people.