Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 135
minutes away from death, completely at the mercy of some bad
stranger who possessed complete control over him. It was even better
than the fantasies he used to drum up in his head after rifling through
his mother’s lingerie drawer, then stealing a pair of her underwear and
disappearing into a nearby barn with it to masturbate.
One afternoon, when Rader was in sixth grade, a snowstorm blanketed
Wichita under a pile of white. I learned from one of Rader’s
friends that because the weather was so nasty outside on the playground,
his teacher, Mrs. Hadon, made all the kids stay inside for
recess. According to the friend, Dennis and two of his buddies got a
sheet of paper, grabbed some pencils, and decided to pass the time by
drawing what Rader referred to as a “girl trap.”
Both his pals thought it sounded like a good idea. After all, plenty
of the girls they knew had the tendency to be pretty annoying, always
showing off by winning the class spelling bees and arithmetic contests.
Rader had other reasons for wanting to trap girls, but he kept them to
himself, and within minutes the group was busy drawing.
The first thing Dennis did was sketch out a giant castle, like the
one he’d heard about in Chicago, built in the early 1890s by Dr. Henry
Holmes, a wealthy physician later convicted of butchering over
twenty-seven people. (Some estimate that his total number of kills
may have reached two hundred.) Rader had become fixated on Dr.
Holmes ever since he’d read about the details of the hotel Holmes had
built—filled with trap doors, secret passageways, and a hidden dungeon
where he performed experiments on his victims.
The three boys sketched the interior of the hotel while Rader drew
the various contraptions, which included massive combines and
threshing machines that he imagined would subdue his unsuspecting
prey. As Dennis worked on his drawing, one of his friends noticed that
something peculiar was happening to him. While Dennis was drawing
the blades on his threshing machine, along with the steel cages and
the flames that shot out of the walls to roast his victims, a look washed
over his face. It was an expression that went far beyond intensity or
passion for the task at hand.
It seemed more like a possession.
On that afternoon in sixth grade when Mrs. Hadon walked up to
the table where the three boys were putting the finishing touches on
their girl trap, Dennis was clearly excited. His face was lit up like a
Christmas tree doused in kerosene. When the boys were asked about