Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 175
And then one day it happened. He told himself that it would be
OK. The dark-skinned woman with the three or four children offered
the prime setup. From what I knew about these sorts of violent killers,
I could almost read Rader’s mind. He convinced himself that it would
be just she and the kids. Which was a good thing. It meant that she’d
comply with his demands in order to protect her children. Even the
location of her house was perfect: it was situated on a corner lot; there
was a garage set off from the house, a fenced yard, and plenty of space
between the neighbor’s house and the back door. This time, he told
himself, things would turn out differently than they had a month
before. This time everything would go down just as he’d planned.
Rader typed up his chilling, utterly heartless account of what happened
on that day in January, not long after it all went down. It was
part of the stash on the disc in my computer.
He wrote that he awoke early that morning, drove over to the mall
parking lot, and started walking. A light dusting of snow was tumbling
out of the gray sky. Damn, it was cold out, he muttered to himself. He
couldn’t remember feeling a cold quite like it ever before. He pulled
his Air Force parka up tight around his face and started walking
toward the house in the 800 block of North Edgemoor Street. Once
he got there, he walked straight toward the backyard, jumped a fence,
and crouched down in the snow next to the house. That was when he
spotted the dog pawprints in the snow. For a few brief moments, he
panicked. Why hadn’t he ever stopped to consider that the family
might own a dog? Part of him wanted to get the hell out of there, but
whatever it was that had control of him wouldn’t hear of it. There
would be no backing out now. He’d come too far for that.
In his journal, Rader wrote that he made a few soft whistling
sounds, trying to flush out the dog. But the backyard seemed clear,
and before he knew it, he was reviewing his three plans. The first
involved waiting until the mother left to take her kids to school, then
creeping into the garage. When she returned, he’d force her into the
house. His second idea was to hide in the garage and overpower
the mother and her two kids when they attempted to leave for school,
then force them back inside. The last scenario had him sitting tight
out there in the snow, then waiting for someone to open the back
door, which was when he’d force himself inside.
He didn’t have much time. If a neighbor glanced out a back window,
he was a sitting duck. He decided he’d take the three of them in