Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 157
stirrings of that fluttery thing inside his stomach he’d first felt long
ago as a boy.
He was becoming aroused. In one of the bedrooms, he spotted a
dresser and began rifling through the drawers until he found exactly
what he’d come looking for—a stash of women’s underwear. He
snatched a handful out from the drawer and stuffed them in the
pocket of his jacket. As he was leaving, he spotted some car keys lying
on a table near the sofa. He grabbed them, walked out the front door,
and within minutes was speeding down the street in a car that didn’t
belong to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so alive—
every molecule in his body seemed to be ablaze. He wanted to explode.
Before leaving the car on a side road outside of town, he masturbated
in the front seat, then hoofed it back to his ’58 Chevy.
As oblivious as Rader could sometimes be when it came to the
world around him, not even he could ignore the mess unfolding on
the other side of the world in Viet Nam. Because the military needed
young bodies to go fight the Viet Cong, the draft had begun to kick
into high gear. Rader knew that with his dismal grades—consisting of
mostly D’s and C’s—he might as well hang a sign on his back that
read: Draft Me. Getting drafted was the last thing he wanted to have
happen. Because deep down Rader was a coward. Of course he loved
violence. But, I knew, just like others with his twisted psychological
hardwiring, he enjoyed only the kind of violent encounters where he
stood no chance of getting hurt. His later crimes would reflect this
when he went out of his way to target small children and older women
over whom he could have dominance with little struggle. Nearly all
the serial killers I’d interviewed were psychologically weak individuals
who picked the most vulnerable victims they could find.
He loved the kind of violence where his victims were weaker than
he was. From what he knew about war, it was a frightfully messy,
unpredictable business, filled with all sorts of uncertainties. He may
have been drunk with dark fantasies, but he clearly understood the
difference between make-believe and reality. (If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t
have gone to such lengths hiding his fantasies away from those around
him.) Besides, for a pathological control freak like Rader, war was to
be avoided at all costs. He’d love to shoot someone, but if there was a
chance that the other guy might shoot back, forget it. Let some other
guy go crawl through the jungle and bayonet communists; he had
other fish to fry.