Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 159
He claimed to have fallen in love with one of the prostitutes. In
one of his diary entries, he listed her name as Tina. Reading between
the lines, I got the sense that Tina gave him the equivalent of a graduate
school education in sex. For a while there, he convinced himself
that he wanted to marry her. But the relationship eventually went
south, so he found another bar girl and picked up where he’d left off.
More than anything, he yearned to experience the feeling of binding
somebody up, then having sex with her. He felt as though he’d
been dreaming about it for most of his life. Sometimes in the middle
of sex with some prostitute, he’d make his move and quickly attempt
to tie the women up. But the prostitutes he frequented were far too
seasoned for that sort of kinky nonsense. Whenever he attempted such
a stunt, they sent him packing, which wasn’t any big deal because he
had access to more prostitutes than he knew what to do with.
He had other hobbies, too. While in Japan, he picked up a macholooking
big-barreled .22-caliber semiautomatic Woodsman Colt. The
pistol, he wrote, had the craziest hair trigger he’d ever felt on a gun.
The damn thing spooked him. He used to joke that all he had to do
was look at it wrong and it would go off. When he bought it, he told
himself he wanted it as a target shooter. But that other part of him
knew it would make a helluva weapon if the shit ever started hitting
the fan. On those days when he had nothing better to do, he used it to
blast cans, and he was a decent enough shot. After his arrest, he told
Landwehr that at twenty-five yards, he rarely missed.
Rader also bought a camera at a base store and spent some of his
off hours snapping photos of the prostitutes he’d bedded, then developing
the pictures in a base darkroom. Sometimes he’d draw a noose
around the woman’s neck, a gag over her mouth, and ropes across her
wrists and ankles. He could look at those photographs and masturbate
for hours. But, he later claimed, his favorite activity involved clipping
pictures of women out of newspapers and magazines, then
sketching all manner of bindings around their bodies. He loved the
way it felt to pick his victims at random from the pages. No one was
safe. And everyone was so unsuspecting, so oblivious to what lay waiting
for them. He took whomever he wanted, clipped them neatly from
their paper home, and glued them to index cards.
He called his little cards “slick ads.” He did that for two reasons—
they were often printed on glossy paper stock, and most of his victims
were in the midst of modeling something when he snatched
them. He would hold them in his hands, whispering to them all the