Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 205
dark for her to fall asleep. And now it was beginning again. Factor X,
he wrote, was arising out of him like a ticking time bomb. He looked
back over his kills and thought about the locations of all his murders,
relative to Wichita: Otero was northeast, Bright was northeast, Vian
was south-central, Fox was southeast, Hedge was north.
The time had come, he reasoned, to murder someone who lived
west of the city.
He first spotted Vicki Wegerle when he stopped on her street one
afternoon to eat lunch in his truck. That was one of his favorite things
to do—eat and troll for victims at the same time. Although he had a
handful of potential targets, Wegerle, a twenty-eight-year-old mother
of two who supplemented her husband’s income by teaching piano,
quickly moved to the top of his so-called hit list.
This time, he decided to strike in the middle of the day, gaining
access to his victim’s home by pretending to be a telephone repairman.
On the afternoon he struck, he’d glued a Southwestern Bell logo onto
a yellow hard hat. On his shirt, he wore a name tag fashioned out of a
phone company business card he’d found somewhere. He carried a
briefcase containing some of the tools that he believed a repairman
might be expected to use, along with his hit kit. Because he thought it
would look less suspicious, he decided to first stop off at the home of
her neighbor next door. An elderly woman answered the doorbell, and
Rader quickly ran through his prepared lines.
“I’m from Southwestern Bell, ma’am,” he told her. “We’re having
trouble with the phone line, and we’re trying to track down the problem.
Need to check it if you don’t mind.”
He stood there on her front step watching through the screen
door as she listened to him. All at once, the thought flashed through
his head that maybe he ought to kill her instead, but he decided she
was too old. Instead of inviting himself inside her house, he told her
he could check her line from outside, and quickly walked to the corner
of her house and started fidgeting with her phone line. Through
a nearby open window, he could hear Wegerle playing the piano.
A moment later, he was knocking on Wegerle’s door, feeding her
the same line as he had her neighbor. Vicki reluctantly let him inside,
but watched him closely as he connected some wires to her interior
phone jack. Her two-year-old son played on the floor.
After a bit of small talk, he pulled out his gun and told her,“I’m not
going to hurt you or your baby.” Then he demanded that she give him
her purse and keys to the car. She looked terrified, he wrote afterwards.