Inside the Mind of BTK

Q
I’d been drifting for far too many hours on Dennis
Rader’s words and dark thoughts. I needed to feel something else
move through me besides him and the terrible, curious images his
writings caused to play out inside my head.
I was a bit like that little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. I not
only saw dead people—although, actually, they were corpses—but also
people killing people. When I plunged myself into a case, I became
someone else. I became the killer. I glimpsed the world through his
eyes, seeing events I really had no business seeing.
Once, during an interview with a man convicted of murdering six
people (authorities suspected he’d been responsible for twice as
many), I listened as he recounted his crimes, and suddenly the visuals
began to unfold in front of my eyes. I saw everything—or at least
just enough. After a few minutes, I began speaking in the first person
when talking about his killings, as though I were the one who had
committed the crimes just described to me.
“Knock it off, man,” he shouted, looking unnerved. “You’re freaking
me out.”
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