Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 133
the Kansas Gas and Electric power plant, located about ten minutes
from the family’s house. He worked long hours, sometimes pulling
double shifts or working graveyard, doing maintenance around the
plant and perpetually monitoring the myriad gauges that sprouted out
of the walls and pipes. Rader looked up to his old man. In his mind,
he was tough, but fair. He wrote that his only complaint was about the
times when his dad would return home from working one of his crazy
shifts, disappear into his bedroom, and shout for everybody to pipe
down so he could get some shut-eye.
Dennis’s pals from that period in his life told me they recalled that
his mother, Dorothea, had a certain movie-star quality about her.
When she got dressed up, which she always seemed to for her job as a
bookkeeper at Leeker’s Family Foods, the neighborhood kids thought
she bore an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Wood. To catch a glimpse
of her sitting at her desk in the middle of the grocery, elevated up on
a little platform above the floor, made them feel as though they’d suddenly
been plunked down in the middle of a Hollywood movie set.
Rader, according to various sources, has both confirmed and denied
that on the rare occasions that Dorothea resorted to spanking, he
experienced that same familiar sensation in his crotch that he’d first
felt while watching his grandma wring the necks off chickens.
By all accounts, the young Dennis Rader fit in well with the simple,
don’t-rock-the-boat sensibility so prevalent in Kansas’s largest city
in the 1950s. By the time third grade rolled around, no one was surprised
when he was picked to play Joseph for the Riverview Grade
School’s Christmas play.
The Rader family lived in a three-bedroom house in the 4300
block of North Seneca Street. Despite being located on the northwestern
edge of town, the neighborhood had a fairly rural feel to it.
Rader hung out with a close-knit group of nearly a dozen kids. When
school let out, they’d could often be found walking home together and
exploring the sandy banks of the Little Arkansas River, which snaked
its way through town. On nearly every afternoon, most of the boys
played baseball in a nearby empty field.
But not Dennis. He wasn’t much of a sportsman. By the time he
was nine years old, his friends told me, he wasn’t much of anything—
other than a quiet kid who seemed to have a knack for never standing
out. And that was why his absences from those neighborhood ball
games never felt odd. Even if he had participated in those games,
chances are that nobody would have noticed him. He kept to himself,