Inside the Mind of BTK

186 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
But the cops never did come, and by February life slowly returned
to normal. The paranoia had begun to ease. Before he knew it, his
appetite had returned, and he’d begun looking for another victim.
Rader’s reaction was typical of the feelings other serial killers had
described to me. After a brief wave of intense paranoia, they begin to
realize how easy it is for them to get away with murder—even if their
MO was somewhat sloppy. Rader must have known that picking
strangers as victims made it terribly difficult for police. The so-called
smoking gun cases, involving family members, friends, or associates,
are the easy ones to crack. But crimes without any apparent motive
are tough to solve, particularly when they are well planned and
thought out in advance by the perp.
One afternoon in March, Rader wrote in his journal, he was driving
to lunch with his wife when he spotted a young woman with long
blonde hair pulling some letters out of a mailbox on the front stoop
of her house on 13th Street. Although he didn’t know it at the time,
the young woman’s name was Kathy Bright. The moment he saw her,
he couldn’t get her out of his mind. All during lunch, the image of her
jean jacket and beaded purse burned a black hole into his brain, he
wrote in his journal. Later that afternoon, he climbed back in his car to
try to locate her, but failed. Instead, he drove back to her house and
looked it over. He liked what he saw. The place was situated by a
vacant lot. On the other side, the neighbor’s house looked deserted.
He parked a few blocks away, then walked back to the house with
a dark stocking cap pulled down over his ears. In his pockets he carried
a knife. Tucked into his belt was his .22-caliber pistol. It was
hardly a menacing-looking weapon, I thought, the kind of firearm
that—if he had to use it—would make a minimal amount of noise.
In his journal, Rader described pounding his fist on the front
door, but no one answered. So he walked back to his car, telling himself
he’d return some other time. Weeks passed. He was never quite
sure how many. But every day he reviewed his “hit plan” in his head,
going over every detail just as he imagined it unfolding.
“Little by little,” he wrote, “my heart raced as the hit came into
focus.”
He was never quite sure how many women lived in the house, but
he had a hunch that there were at least two. On April 4, he decided to
make his move after his morning classes at WSU. He later claimed
to have been so excited during math class that he couldn’t focus on
anything the professor said. Yet, at the same time, he was “tensely