Inside the Mind of BTK

132 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
it in hushed tones, and, like the image of his mother trapped in her
bed, it became a powerful source of mystery for Dennis. It marked his
first true brush with death. According to my source, Sutherland was
allegedly swimming with another friend in a pond on the family property.
At some point during that afternoon, the other boy disappeared
beneath the water and never returned to the surface. What happened
next Rader claimed to have pieced together from listening to his parents’
brief conversations on the matter. According to Dennis, when
cousin Larry returned back home, his folks demanded to know where
his friend had disappeared to.
“He dove down into the pond,” Larry explained.
“And then what?” his father the sheriff had asked.
“I walked back home,” the boy replied.
“But what happened to your friend?” he demanded.
“He didn’t come back up,” Sutherland told him. “He stayed underwater,
I guess.”
The boy’s body was allegedly later found floating just below the
surface of the water.
For the rest of his days, whenever Rader embarked in the pages of
his journal or with police on one of his half-assed quests for the roots
of what made him so different, he always stumbled back to that memory
of cousin Larry. How, he wondered, could someone be so nonchalant
about the death of another human being? Or at least that was
how Dennis perceived it.
Time and time again, I’d asked myself that same question, trying
to understand the relationship between how a particular incident in
someone’s life might have led to his decision to kill. Long ago, I realized
that the biggest mistake I could make when analyzing a case was
to assume that the sexual predator I was trying to catch possessed the
same feelings and thinking processes as mine. He doesn’t. Yet I sensed
that perhaps what was so interesting about this episode in Rader’s
childhood was that it marked the first time he’d ever witnessed someone
else acting out in a manner that he thought mirrored his own
mixed-up feelings, feelings he had never been able to express.
One of Dennis’s childhood friends told me that when Rader was
around five, his family moved to Wichita, which had become something
of an industrial boomtown since the end of World War II.
Little Dennis’s father, William Rader, was a big man who expected
his boys to be decent and respectful to their elders. He landed a job at