Inside the Mind of BTK

204 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
didn’t want this to look like a BTK killing; that way, the police couldn’t
link this murder to his previous crimes. Rader also knew that indoor
crimes allow police to do a more efficient job collecting and processing
evidence. Victims disposed of outdoors make forensic work much
more challenging. Depending on weather conditions, evidence can be
washed away. Dumping of the body also means that a corpse has more
time to decompose—further obliterating evidence.
Rader loaded Hedge’s body into the trunk of her car and drove to
Christ Lutheran Church, where he and the family spent their Sunday
mornings singing hymns, listening to sermons, and helping out with
things. Because of all his work at the church, he had a key to the place.
He carried Hedge downstairs to the basement and laid her out on the
floor. A few days earlier, he’d put black plastic over the windows and
taped everything up so that nobody could tell if he was down there
with the lights on. He unrolled the blanket and spent the next few
hours posing her body in a myriad of positions, snapping pictures of
her. Playing the role of a deranged fashion photographer, he searched
for the perfect shot. He’d tie and then remove his various bindings
from around her lifeless limbs. Sometimes he’d tug her undergarments
down in suggestive poses, he wrote.
Time slipped away from him. Before long, he noticed that the sun
was coming up. So he stripped her body, loaded her back into the
trunk, and drove roughly six miles, where he dumped Hedge into a
ditch and covered her with leaves and branches. Next to her head he
dropped a knotted panty hose. He dropped her car six miles away in
a shopping center parking lot. Rader made it back to the campground
before anyone woke up, and soon went to work scrambling eggs and
cooking bacon over the fire for breakfast.
The murder of his neighbor Marine Hedge sustained and nourished
Dennis Rader for the next year and a half. But he soon grew
hungry again.
The next time Rader put pen to paper to chronicle a kill was
shortly after he strangled Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986. In his
account of the crime, he wrote, “It had been a long time from the last
time factor x exploded in my world and shatter someone else’s. Mrs.
Hedge’s memories are still fresh in my mind.”
All Rader had to do was shut his eyes, and the homicide came
flooding back to him—the feeling of the damp air, the rain; the sensation
of his hands on her flesh; that long, nerve-wracking wait in the