Inside the Mind of BTK

206 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
The dog was barking, and her child was watching him as he ordered
Wegerle into the bedroom, leaving her son behind.
Wegerle began crying, insisting that she was having her period and
that her husband would be home at any minute. Grabbing her arm, he
dragged her into the bedroom and told her he needed to tie her up.
“I want to take some pictures of you,” he said.
Once again, Rader relied on words, rather than threats of physical
violence, to convince his victim to do as he asked.
“You’re sick,” she replied, as he tied her hands with cord. “You
need help.”
She continued to argue with him, telling him that the woman next
door had seen him, refusing to get undressed for his pictures. Rader
believed he was once again on the verge of losing control of the situation.
So he pulled a cord out of his pocket, looped it around her neck,
and yanked hard. She began to yell, but the force of the cord crushing
her windpipe silenced her. A moment later, the cord snapped, her
hands shot up into his face, and she managed to suck a precious lungful
of air into her body.
She tried to scream, but he placed his hand over her mouth. He
was dumbfounded by her strength. Although her ankles were tied, she
poked him with her fingers, slammed her head against his chest, and
raked her fingernails across his neck. He winced as his sweat seeped
into the wounds, then he gripped her throat so hard that his hands
begin to cramp.
“She is a regular tiger,” he wrote afterwards.
He finally managed to grab a pair of panty hose, wrap them
around her throat, then tie them into a knot behind her neck. He
stood there above her, watching as she died, then grabbed his camera
and began snapping pictures—pulling her sweater up in one, her
pants down in another, and finally rearranging the panty hose so that
they resembled a gag. I clicked my way through his snapshot collection,
included on the disc, and felt a stab of nausea sweep through me.
It dawned on Rader that if he stuck around any longer, Wegerle’s
husband might return, and Rader would be forced to kill him. So he
picked up his gear, organized everything inside his briefcase, and
placed his yellow hard hat and Wegerle’s billfold into a paper bag. The
dog was still barking in the backyard. On his way out of the house, he
noticed that Wegerle’s son sitting on the floor in front room, staring
contentedly off into space.
“He looked on without sound,” he wrote in his journal.