Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 155
on the bottles. Although he enjoyed the covert nature of his scam,
breaking into soda machines definitely lacked the buzz that his earlier
brush with crime provided.
Nevertheless, escaping the insular atmosphere of Wichita was
good for Rader. Even though his grades were just shy of abysmal, his
year-and-a-half-long stint at Kansas Wesleyan did help him acquire
one of his most sorely needed qualities: how to be an extrovert. He
joined a fraternity and quickly became a regular fixture at the beer
parties around campus. Before long, he started to enjoy the feeling of
allowing himself to emerge from the shell he’d constructed around
himself.
As much as it frightened him to give up that kind of control, he
assured himself it would be okay. No one really knew him on campus;
no one knew the Dennis Rader who’d grown up in Wichita. To everyone
concerned, he was a blank slate, a young man with no past. And
it was always fascinating, he told himself, to see how his peers reacted
to whatever it was he decided to write on that slate. So much of high
school was spent trying to hide what was inside of him. He had always
been on the defensive. Now he was on the offensive. Despite all the
admonitions against doing so, people truly did judge books by their
covers. And he was creating the perfect cover.
All he needed to do was smile and laugh, and people just naturally
assumed him to be the kind of guy who always smiled and
laughed. They were such sheep. At times, he felt like a painter—only
instead of creating illusions on canvas, he used his face. For the first
time in his life, he began consciously constructing a cover for himself
that was far different than the one he’d assumed back in his hometown,
back where everyone knew him only as Dennis Rader, the perpetual
face in the crowd, the guy who blended in with any background
he happened to stand up against. In a few short months, he transformed
himself into something of a third-rate midwestern bon vivant.
Even more important, his new guise was just one more thing in his
empty life that he could control and have power over—which is what
he loved most of all.
How easy it was to do and how utterly simple to pull off. All he
need do was crack a goofy smile, and nobody was the wiser, nobody
had a clue about all the dark things festering inside his head. Why
hadn’t he thought about doing something like this before?
It wasn’t too long before he summoned up enough nerve to ask
out a few of the Wesleyan coeds, although nothing much happened