Inside the Mind of BTK

148 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
“COME ON, CUT IT OUT,” he pleaded. “THIS IS CRAZY, DENNIS.
CAN YOU HEAR ME? YOU GOTTA STOP NOW.”
The headlights of the other car had long ago faded away behind
them in the fog. Yet Rader kept his foot pressed firmly down on the
accelerator, even as the road began to kink and weave in increasingly
unpredictable directions. Something bad was on the verge of happening,
his buddy thought to himself. There was no getting through
to Rader. The lines were all down. So he just gave up trying to talk any
sense into him. And because they were moving far too fast for him to
jump, he braced for the worst.
A few minutes later, Rader missed a turn in the road, and the station
wagon careened over a dirt embankment and plunged into a shallow
ditch, caving in the right side of the vehicle. The impact caused
his pal to slam his head into the ceiling, temporarily knocking him
out. By the time he felt himself coming to, he saw Rader staring at the
bashed-in grillwork, hysterical, sobbing.
A few minutes later, they sat together on the roadside, waiting for
their friends to catch up. All Rader could talk about was the hell he
would surely catch upon arriving home and breaking the news to his
folks.
Roughly forty-five minutes later when the group pulled up in
front of the Rader family home, Rader jumped out of the car, wailing
and frantically shouting about how he’d wrecked the family station
wagon. He failed to mention anything about his injured friend. The
other kids sat there watching him go to pieces in the front yard, then
they left him there and drove his dazed passenger to a nearby hospital,
where doctors treated him for a concussion.
His injured buddy told me that he never could make sense out of
Rader’s strange behavior that night. How could anyone be that oblivious
to another person’s pain, he wondered. It was as if nothing else
mattered to Dennis Rader other than Dennis Rader.
The incident was one of the most revealing moments in Rader’s
young life. Yet it would take decades before the rest of the world
understood just how selfish a person he actually was.
Besides his church youth group, Rader was active in Boy Scouts.
He liked the structure of the organization, the order and predictability.
I bet he liked the uniforms too. Rader showed a lifelong propensity
for paramilitary, police, or, as in his case, low-level municipal
enforcer uniforms. He felt safe in the Boy Scout culture and environ-