Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 203
A few minutes later, a cabbie was driving him back toward Park
City. Along the way, Rader mumbled that he felt too tipsy to drive.
When he finally reached the outskirts of his neighborhood, he
announced that he needed some fresh air. He asked the driver to pull
over and let him out so that he could walk it off. After paying the driver,
he began walking, eventually taking a short cut through his inlaws’
backyard, then walking past the swing sets in the tiny city park
located behind his house. He jumped the chain-link fence, scrambled
through Marine Hedge’s backyard, then peeked around the side of the
house.
Her car sat in the driveway, so Rader figured she was inside, asleep.
Using a screwdriver, he jimmied open the back window, crawled inside
the darkened house, and crept into Hedge’s darkened bedroom. Her
bed was empty, so he decided to stick around and wait for her to arrive
home.
It was around 11 P.M. when Hedge finally returned from a night
spent playing bingo. Much to Rader’s dismay, a man accompanied her
inside the house. Rader hid himself in a closet and listened as the two
made what he considered to be “loving” remarks to one another.
Finally he left, and Hedge got into bed. It was around 1 A.M., he later
wrote, that he emerged from the closet, entered her room, and
“pounced on her like a tiger,” quickly clutching her throat with his
gloved hands. The whole thing happened far too quickly for his liking.
After all, he’d spent months fantasizing about exactly how he
wanted to take her, then force her to submit to him. As he learned
from past kills, however, his most obsessively thought-out plans often
went awry.
Before he knew it, the petite Hedge had slipped into unconsciousness,
never quite knowing what was happening to her—that her
neighbor was the dreaded BTK and that he’d chosen her to be his next
victim. Rader’s realization that all she knew was that some dark
stranger with powerful hands was choking the life out of her frustrated
him. He quickly handcuffed her and, out of habit, slipped a garrote
over her neck, then pulled it tight. He realized that he needn’t have
bothered—she was already dead. Afterwards, he rolled her up in a
blanket and quickly began rummaging through her apartment for a
few trophies he could take with him. He settled on her purse.
Afterwards, he did something that he’d never before done after
killing someone: he moved his victim’s body from the crime scene.
Rader, it was now clear to me, had decided to change his MO. He