Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 189
be funny to trick the police into kicking in Bobby’s front door, then
dragging him away in handcuffs. I spoke to Ormston on the phone a
few days before hunkering down in this Wichita hotel room with
Rader’s journal.
Ormston told me that when he phoned Rader in 1974, nearly ten
years had passed since they’d seen each other, and he was dying to
catch up with him. During that time, Ormston had moved away from
Wichita to attend college, earned an engineering degree, and gotten
married, and was now in the midst of a divorce.
He and Rader chatted for a few minutes on the phone. Ormston
recalled thinking that Rader’s voice sounded just as flat and serious as
it had back in high school. By the time he hung up, they’d agreed to
meet at the Blackout, a local tavern near the WSU campus, and catch
up on life over a pitcher of beer.
It was around 5:30 in the afternoon when Ormston showed up at
the bar. Dennis was already there, sitting at a table in the back, nursing
his beer. He’d positioned his chair so that he was facing the door,
allowing him to glimpse whoever entered long before they would be
able to spot him. Ormston grabbed a glass and joined him at the table,
excited to hear what he’d been up to over the past decade. But the
moment he sat down, he was shocked at what he encountered.
“There was just this incredible hostility about him,” he told me
over the phone one afternoon a few weeks before my arrival in
Wichita. “It made me real uncomfortable. A couple of times I thought
he was going to come across the table at me. He was just so tense.
Never in my life had I seen Dennis like that. It was like he was sitting
on a spring and was ready to pop out of his seat. I’ve been around people
who have been high on meth, and that look that he gave me had
that same kind of teeth-gritted intensity to it.”
Ormston explained to me that he tried his best to ignore the tension
and listened as Rader described his life since graduating from
high school.
“He told me how he’d just gotten married and was big into the
church and big into Jesus,” his friend recalled. “I don’t have anything
against Jesus, it’s just his fan club I sometimes have a problem with.
Dennis knew that about me, and he also knew I was going through a
divorce, so I figured that all the hostility I’d been sensing was on account
of him thinking I was some wayward sinner. I chalked it all up to that.”
Over three decades later, Ormston began sobbing when recounting
that awkward meeting with his friend.