Inside the Mind of BTK

190 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
“I couldn’t understand why he’d treated me that way,” he said.
“Even though I thought the world of him as a kid, I had no desire to
see him again after that. That’s how much he frightened me. I never
could understand it. On the surface, he looked the same. But underneath
his skin, something I’d never seen before had taken him over.
Whatever it was, it scared me.”
The two never spoke again, he told me.
In July 1975, Paula gave birth to the couple’s first child, Brian
Howard Rader. By then, Dennis had already landed a job as a construction
and installation supervisor with ADT Security, a firm that
specialized in burglary alarms for residences and businesses. Three
years later in June 1978, a daughter was born—Kerri Lynn Rader.
If Rader truly enjoyed the role of being a father—as many who
thought they knew him said he seemed to—he certainly never mentioned
it in any of his journals. In fact, in the countless pages of his
writings, he makes reference to his family only a half dozen times at
most. And even when he does write about them, it’s only in the
briefest, most cursory manner. Perhaps there was a good reason for
this: his diaries focused on the most passionate loves in his secret life—
bondage and death.
By all accounts, Rader was a doting father, the kind who would
often romp in the family’s backyard, where he eventually built a massive
tree house with the kids. He made sure his son became a Boy
Scout, eventually earning the organization’s top honor of Eagle Scout,
which had eluded Dennis back when he was a teen. But of course, back
when he was growing up, the elder Rader had other things on his
mind.
Kerri grew into an athletic girl, who eventually qualified for the
Kansas state high school golf championships in 1996. Like her father,
she had an insatiable appetite for horror stories. As she grew older, she
devoured nearly every book she could find on monsters, zombies,
ghosts, and ghouls. Whenever she finished one, her father would often
walk into her room, pluck it off of her bookshelf, and read it himself.
But there was something else about Kerri that her father always
found puzzling. When she was six or seven, she began being plagued
by horrible nightmares that caused her to awaken in the middle of the
night, shrieking in terror. Whenever this happened, her mother and
father would plod into her room, sit on her bed, and try to convince
her that it was all just a bad dream. Over time, Rader—who never had
nightmares and normally drifted off to sleep within minutes of plac-