Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 141
One of the things I learned from reading his words was that by
the time high school rolled around, he had become quite adept at
knowing how to stay just below the radar. He may not have been fully
conscious of what it was he was doing, but by then he had emerged as
an expert at fooling all the people all the time.
According to another of his friends who didn’t want their name
to appear in print, Rader was one of that rare breed of youth who
often caused the parents of other kids in his neighborhood to exclaim,
“Why can’t you be like Dennis Rader?” His personality was so predictably
even-keeled that many of his classmates at Wichita Heights
High School wrote him off as hopelessly boring.
Clearly Rader did not fit the mold of the typical serial killer. In
most of the cases I’ve looked at, teachers and neighbors often tell me
that they were already predicting that a certain child would grow up
to be a violent offender long before he was old enough to graduate
high school. For generations, the mantra among mental health professionals
has been, “The best predictor of future behavior is past
behavior.” Yet sometimes this dictum doesn’t hold true—at least not
in the case of a burgeoning killer like Rader, who never allowed anyone
to glimpse his real mind or his secret behavior.
The teenage Rader would much rather be boring than draw any
sort of attention to himself. Trouble, it seemed, was for the careless.
Rader didn’t have much time for that sort of sloppiness. As a kid, he’d
gotten in a few tight scrapes, and they had left their mark on him. One
of his friends told me about the afternoon Rader and some of the
other neighborhood kids stuck pennies on the train tracks near his
home. One of his pals got carried away and stuck a baseball bat on the
tracks; this ticked off the railroad dicks, who hunted the kids down.
They knocked on the Rader family’s front door and told his mother
that if she couldn’t keep her boy in line, they’d be happy to do it. Their
threat rattled Dorothea, and after that, I was told, Rader thought twice
about pulling the kind of stunts that might land him in hot water. It
wasn’t worth the hassle, he told himself.
In reading his journal, I began to sense his preternatural concern
over his parent’s reaction to his behavior. This paranoia was wonderful
training for the young serial killer, providing him with a skill that
would come in handy after he began killing. It taught him to never let
his guard down.
Yet I wondered just what caused him to be so hypervigilant. Was
it due to respect, or was there some other cause? Over the course of