Inside the Mind of BTK

192 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
home on foot when she left. He soon began scoping out her house,
trying to determine if she lived with a man or owned a dog.
On a couple of occasions, he walked the dimly lit alley behind her
property. He decided to make his move on March 17, but reminded
himself that he needed to remain “fexable” in case things didn’t work
out. In the three years since Kathy Bright’s murder, he realized he
shouldn’t be so bullheaded about his crimes. If the conditions weren’t
right, he’d go home and wait for another chance. But if it “looks
good—it’s a hit.”
Late that morning, he put on his tweed sport coat and a pair of
dark slacks, drove into Wichita, and knocked on the front door of his
intended victim’s house. No one answered. He turned to walk back to
his car, but he spotted a young boy on the sidewalk, carrying a sack of
groceries. Rader decided to use his “detective ruse” on the young lad
and pulled a picture out of his wallet of Paula and his young son, Brian.
“Do you know if these people live around here?” he asked.
The boy told him that he’d never seen them before, then continued
on to his house, located just down the street. Rader watched him,
paying close attention to which house he entered. Ten minutes later,
he knocked on their front door. When the boy answered, he flashed
his pistol, told him he was a detective, and pushed his way inside,
where he spotted the boy’s brother and sister watching TV.
In his journal, he noted how the boy’s mother grew frightened and
nervous when he told her that he intended to rape her. The kitchen
seemed like a good place to do it, he said. She begged him to first let
her have a cigarette.
“I grant that,” he typed in his grammatically challenged account
of the crime. But no sooner had she polished off the cigarette than she
informed him that she felt sick. After glancing around the filthy,
“junk”-filled house, the hyperneat and always organized Rader
decided that it was no wonder.
He attempted to tie the wrists of Vian’s older son, but the boy
began sobbing. Within seconds, his younger brother and sister also
broke out in tears. “You got some place where I can lock your kids
up?” he asked Vian. But before she could answer, he decided to put
them in the bathroom and managed to prevent the kids from getting
out by blocking one of the doors with a bed and using a rope to tie
another door shut.
With that out of the way, he wrote, he looked at Vian and said,
“It’s time.”