Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 177
I read how Mr. Otero tried to reassure Rader that if he’d let him
put the dog out, everything would be fine.
“He hates the cold,” he said, grabbing the animal by the scruff of
his neck. Rader allowed him to open up the kitchen door and dump
the dog into the backyard, but he watched Otero like a hawk all the
while. At first he wanted to tie them up in the family room, but when
he spotted the back bedroom, he ordered the family to walk back there
and lie down on their stomachs on the bed with their hands behind
their backs.
Landwehr told me that Rader originally had fantasized about having
sex with the mother and daughter, then strangling them. But as
Rader stood there in the family’s home, he wasn’t so sure. He knew only
that he needed to do something, fast. Lying there face down on the bed,
they were beginning to panic again, and it scared him to think what
might happen if he lost control of the situation. He couldn’t let that
happen. He stood behind them, watching them, especially the father.
At any moment, they were going to turn on him. He could feel it.
“I gotta get out to California,” he said while fumbling around in
his oversized pockets for his rope, gags, and tape. “If I can get out
there,I’ll be safe ...I’m gonna have to take your car.”
“Take it,” the mother pleaded. “You can have it. We want you to
have it.”
He was desperate to keep things from unraveling, to stay in control.
That was what he wanted more than anything else—to finally
have absolute and total control over another human being, to bind
another person up the way he felt bound and hemmed in by his rotten
life, then to cinch those ropes up tight. It was what he’d always
dreamed about. And at that moment, after more than two decades of
fantasizing, he realized that all his dreams and more were on the verge
of being realized.
He worked on the father first, ordering him off the bed and onto
the floor. He wrapped tape around his wrists, over and over again.
When he was confident that Otero couldn’t break free no matter how
hard he tried, he moved his attention to the mother. Rader knew there
was little risk of the father’s attempting to run from the house for help.
Because Otero feared for the safety of his wife and children, the last
thing he’d want to do was be seen as a threat to the man who’d burst
into his home brandishing a pistol. And this made Rader feel just a bit
calmer. With the father out of commission, he felt his confidence
return. And as he wrapped the tape around the mother’s delicate