Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 191
ing his head on a pillow—began to attribute Kerri’s night terrors with
her love of horror books and movies. But still, he found it all quite
curious. She didn’t just awaken, screaming, from her terrible dreams.
More often than not, she awoke as if she were being attacked by something
and were fighting off something or someone. Sometimes when
her parents walked into her bedroom, she’d literally be pounding on
a nearby table, or anything close to her, with her fists.
Although some might attribute this behavior to Kerri’s somehow
picking up on the dark psychic energy of her father, I think the explanation
might be a lot less far-fetched. For starters, I believe she might
have stumbled onto Rader’s horrific stash of detective magazines and
sketches of women in bondage. That, I had begun to understand,
would be enough to warp any young, impressionable brain. I also
think it would be safe to say that Rader was not as protective of his
yearning for violent-themed books and movies as he should have
been, and these obsessive appetites were unfortunately transferred into
his young daughter’s mind. The fact that she never said anything to
her father about her bewildering discovery of his stash isn’t surprising.
Like most kids, the last thing she would have wanted to do was
admit she’d been snooping in his stuff.
Kerri’s birth in June 1978 coincided with a slowdown in her
father’s passion for murder. But in the fifteen months leading up to
her arrival in the Rader family, her father had hunted down and murdered
two additional women, bringing his total body count to seven.
Shirley Vian, a mother of three young children, was garroted on March
17, 1977. Rader claimed the life of Nancy Fox on December 8 of that
same year, just around the time Paula was three months pregnant with
Kerri.
The convoluted story behind how Shirley Vian ended up as one
of his victims started in “the early weeks of March,” Rader wrote in his
journal.
“The uncontrollable Factor X is saying kill, “ he wrote.
So Rader began once again to look for another victim. It didn’t
take long to find one—a single mother who he’d seen on a few occasions
at the Blackout tavern, the same watering hole where he’d met
his buddy Bobby Ormston three years earlier. He’d dropped by the
popular tavern after one of his night classes at WSU. It wasn’t Vian he
spotted originally, however, but one of her neighbors. The neighbor
was there with some friends, and Rader watched her, following her