Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 185
“What are you talking about?” I asked, unaware of what I’d just
done.
“You’re not me. OK?” he said. “You’re not me. So stop pretending
to be.”
And as I read Dennis Rader’s notes about what happened after he
returned home from murdering those four members of the Otero family,
I began to sense a slight pressure behind my eyes. Which didn’t
really surprise me, because Rader wrote that his head was killing him.
When he returned home, he felt as though he’d gotten his head stuck
in a vise and someone was cranking the hell out of it. At least that was
how he described it.
In all the stories he’d read about killers in his detective magazines,
he’d never heard of this happening before. After an hour or two, he
wondered just how much more of it he could take. Paula wasn’t home
from work, which was good. He couldn’t find the Off switch for his
brain. The cops were going to kick in the door at any minute, he convinced
himself.
His only chance, he told himself, was to pitch everything—his
sketches, his stash of detective magazines, and all those stories he’d
written. He combed through every blessed inch of his car, then cleaned
out his desk and tossed everything into the trash pit in his backyard.
He doused it with gasoline and flung a match on it. A few minutes
later, the pile had been reduced to a mound of black ash.
He changed his clothes; piled whatever he’d worn during the murders,
including his shoes, into a paper bag; and drove back across town
to his parents’ house. No one was home. He wanted to torch his clothes
in their trash pit, but decided against it. Something about burning a
pile of clothes in the middle of the day just didn’t make sense. How
the hell would he explain that if somebody spotted him back there?
Instead, he stashed everything up in the top of his folks’ decrepit backyard
hen house. His stuff would be safe there, he reassured himself.
He’d come back some other time and put a match to it. At the last
minute, he decided not to pitch his parka—the bloodstains on it, he
wrote in his journal, weren’t all that visible.
When he made it back to his house, he felt a bit calmer. Just to
play it safe, though, he hid all his weapons around the house—his pistols,
hunting rifles, knives, even the hatchet he’d stolen back when he’d
gotten laid off at Cessna. If the cops really were going to come for him,
he’d be damned if they were going to take him without a fight.