Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 131
Dennis was the first of the four sons of William, a former U.S.
Marine, and Dorothea Rader. His parents grew up in the area—
William had served as the captain of the high school football team, and
Dorothea had been chosen as the school’s head cheerleader. Dennis was
baptized at the Zion Lutheran Church in Pittsburgh, Kansas. His first
four or five years were spent living on the wheat, dairy, and cattle farm
owned by his paternal grandparents, who also happened to be cousins.
Space was tight, as the entire brood lived under the same roof.
It was here, roughly 110 miles west of Wichita, that Rader first
began to think that he might be different from other people. It was
here the secrets began. Sitting on the back porch of the farmhouse, he
would often watch his grandmother go through the ritual of twisting
the heads off chickens, before frying them up for dinner. The headless
fowl would dance about the dusty yard, blood spurting from the
empty socket at the top of their neck.
Rader wrote in his journal that the spectacle caused a curious sensation
to flutter up inside his stomach—vaguely sexual and thoroughly
enjoyable. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him
that the feeling was something akin to standing on the edge of a highrise
rooftop, one without any guardrail, and peering over into the
blurry void below.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, that was when it started. In the
impressionable young synapses of Rader’s developing brain, he began
to equate death and its various associates with the intoxicating mystery
of sexual arousal. One became inextricably linked to the other.
I learned from a source that Rader often spent his summers at the
family farm of his cousin, Larry Sutherland, in Columbus, Kansas.
Sutherland’s father, according to one of Rader’s close friends who—like
many of my sources—would speak to me only on the condition that I
kept his name out of my book, became the first true figure of authority
in Rader’s life. He worked as the town’s sheriff, and Rader recalled that
he carried himself with the confident swagger of Clint Eastwood in his
spaghetti western days. Rader looked up to his son, also named Larry,
who was five years his senior, as the older brother he never had.
Larry was a bright kid, and the two of them would often build
model airplanes together and fantasize about one day becoming pilots.
But there was something else about Sutherland that forever intrigued
Dennis. According to what Rader told one of my sources, it involved
an incident that occurred one sweltering summer afternoon on Larry’s
farm. As a boy, Rader claimed to have heard his parents speak about