Inside the Mind of BTK

200 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
“That, I think, is why you Americans have so many serial killers,”
he said.
I glanced across the room. The digital clock glowed 1:45. In fifteen
minutes, the tavern down the street from my hotel room would
shut its doors. I put my computer to sleep. Five minutes later, I was
seated at the bar. Vodka, for some reason, didn’t sound that appealing
anymore.
“A glass of Chardonnay,” I told the bartender, “and two cups of
coffee.”
I arranged the glasses in front of me and drank them down in quick
succession, noticing how nice the liquids felt sliding down my throat.
Twenty minutes later, I was back at my desk, reading about Rader’s
descent into middle age. As I sifted my way through the scrawled pages
of his journals, I could feel the empty desperation of his words, how
he’d begun to sense that his days were ticking by like mile markers on
I-135, one after another, running off toward a horizon that had begun
to loom so close he could practically touch it.
If there was anything more pathetic than a serial killer, I thought,
it’s an aging serial killer.
The overall impression that I gleaned from Rader’s journal entries
from this period was that he’d begun to feel weighed down by life.
Having to keep everything bottled up inside—all those horrible yet
thrilling secrets—made his heart flutter with excitement whenever he
let them play out in his brain. Most of the time, he felt like a spy, forever
walking around undercover, watching and waiting, always ready
for action, perpetually on the lookout, always wondering if the cops
were closing in on him or if someone had stumbled on one of his
“hidey holes,” where he stashed all his journals and other mementos
from his kills.
The life of a spy suited him, though. He’d grown used to it. After
all, he’d spent most of his life keeping his real self bottled up inside
him the way his grandmother used to put pickles in mason jars. It was
one of the things that helped him survive this long. What bothered
him, though, was that he needed to erect such a big façade around
him. That was where his wife and children came in. That was where
church came in. And the Boy Scouts. And his job. He had so many
damn social obligations, so many things pulling him away from the
very thing he loved best.
People were his alibi, but they were also his greatest frustration.
They slowed him down. They hamstrung him. They kept him from