Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 145
known as the Host, and Rodney, who resembled some sort of a
hunchback.
According to his friends, Rader loved being scared. Back then,
there were nights when he and his buddies would see who could stand
being scared the most. Rader always seemed to win. The other guys
would be forced to shut their eyes, but Rader couldn’t get enough. The
next week at school, when his friends would still be having nightmares,
Rader would be carrying on about all the monsters and evil
doctors he’d watched on that previous Friday night. For the rest of the
week, he was beside himself trying to imagine what horrors Rodney
and his sidekick would serve up for their next show.
A few years later, when high school rolled around, his buddies no
longer wanted to spend their Friday nights watching horror flicks. By
then, they’d moved on to other pursuits, such as the regular Friday
night ritual of hanging out at a place known as “The Big Spot.” That
was where a lot of the guys in town would end up after telling their
parents they were spending the night at a buddy’s house. They’d drive
out to a shallow bend on the Little Arkansas River, build a big bonfire,
and drink beer. Often a bunch of local girls would join them. Around
midnight after the girls went home, the guys would drink more beer,
shoot the shit, then fall asleep on the sand.
But friends recall that Rader never seemed interested in showing
up at the popular hangout, which at the time didn’t seem all that odd
because he was always working at a nearby grocery. Then again, there
was something peculiar about his absence, because he certainly would
have been welcome there. After all, Rader wasn’t one of those typically
hopeless social basket cases. Although he certainly did seem ...well,
different. He was one of those guys you could convince yourself you
knew. But deep down, if you ever bothered to really think about him,
you’d have to admit that you had no idea who he really was—and that
was just the way he liked it.
Still, Rader was hardly an automaton. He enjoyed a good laugh,
but he wasn’t the type to tell a joke. Yet he knew how to make his buddies
laugh. It’s just that the gags he employed were a bit ...well,dark.
And the laughter that followed always had more to do with a sense of
relief than with hilarity.
One of Dennis Rader’s favorite gags, according to a friend,
involved a trick he would play on his buddies while cruising around
town in his old Chevy, the one he spent so much time tinkering on. It
always happened the same way. He’d have a few of his pals with him,