Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 165
Rader later told Landwehr that minutes after getting his pink slip
he realized he was on the verge of doing something weird, something
bad. Paula wasn’t home at that hour of the morning. She wouldn’t
return from her bookkeeping job at the VA hospital until late that
afternoon. So Rader decided just to drive the streets of Wichita, trying
to pretend he didn’t know what was going to happen next.
When he finally spotted a house a few miles away from the Cessna
plant that looked as though the owners were away, he stopped his car,
strode up to the front door, and rang the doorbell. When no one
answered, he walked into the backyard and broke inside. His heart was
going crazy in his chest. Yet standing inside that stranger’s empty
home not only calmed him but made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t
for years. He didn’t stay long. When he finally left, he took only one
thing with him—a hatchet. He walked straight back to his car, shoved
it beneath the front seat, and drove home.
He felt good.
The next few weeks were bad ones. He couldn’t shut off his head.
The yearning to hurt someone wouldn’t go away. He couldn’t shake
it. For years he’d fantasized about this sort of thing. But this was different.
The urge was so much more powerful now, and was growing
more so with each passing day. And now that he didn’t have a job to
occupy him, he had nothing to do all day but think.
He could control his urge if he wanted to—that was what he told
himself. The thing was, he didn’t want to control it anymore. Why
should he? He’d done that all his life. He’d kept his secret under wraps.
He’d hidden it away. He’d played by everybody’s rules, and where had
it had gotten him? Out of work, living off his wife’s salary, and collecting
unemployment, with Christmas just around the corner.
Shortly before getting laid off, Rader decided to surprise Paula with
a trip to Las Vegas. But after getting his pink slip, he didn’t want to go.
The people at the airline, however, didn’t seem to care that he’d just lost
his job, he later said. They weren’t going to give him his money back,
so he had no choice but to use the tickets. He told himself he’d make
the best of it, and before long he began to wonder what Sin City would
look like from the window of his jet, those millions of flickering incandescent
bulbs and miles of neon tubes setting the night sky aglow.
Yet on the evening they flew into Las Vegas, all he saw was darkness.
There must be some mistake, he thought. Had their flight been
diverted to another city?