Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 137
her, relishing the frightened look she’d wear once she realized that her
fate rested in his hands.
Rader’s notes about that period of his young life never make it
quite clear what these sexual things would entail. I doubt Rader even
knew. Yet. He didn’t particularly want to kill Annette, although she
usually had the tendency to expire at the end of his imagined torture
sessions. More than anything, he loved the feeling of having total and
absolute power over another. He’d begun to realize that nothing could
compare to it.
By eighth grade, Rader could usually be found sitting in the back
row of class, losing himself in the increasingly dark world that festered
inside his head. School was boring, he wrote, probably because it took
him away from his fantasies. Although he possessed a vivid imagination,
he never quite figured out how to put it to use in school. He
would rather use it to create dungeons, living mummies, and torture
devices. He did fairly well in mathematics, but no matter how hard he
tried he could never get his mind around his English classes—despite
his enjoyment of penning poorly structured limericks. The only problem
was that his verbal creations weren’t the types of things he could
ever show a teacher. Here is one I found in his notes:
There once was a girl who had all the right curves
and a large tummy.
All the better to wrap up tight
and make a mummy.
Rader did the minimum amount of work necessary for him to
slide through school, saving the rest of his neural activity for other
tasks. He’d often sit there in class, half asleep, allowing himself to be
pulled away to all those dark places he fantasized about. No one really
paid attention to him back there, and he got the biggest kick out of
watching how his teachers would come unglued when one of his fellow
students slipped up and got caught nodding off in class. He loved
how it would cause the teachers to smash their rulers down on the
offending student’s desk.
Despite telling himself that he was bored out of his wits, Rader
wrote that he always plastered a perpetually attentive, serious look on
his face, as if he were following every word the teacher uttered. He
wrote that one of his favorite pastimes was to stick the tip of his pencil
through the middle of a ruler and spin it around like a propeller.