Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 207
After grabbing the woman’s car keys, he walked out the front door
and climbed inside her bronze ’83 Monte Carlo and drove away. At a
nearby shopping center, he disposed of his hard hat in a trash can
located beside an ice cream parlor. He combed through Wegerle’s wallet,
taking her driver’s license and cash, then tucked it under the passenger’s
seat. A moment later, he decided to head back to within a few
blocks of Wegerle’s house in order to retrieve his car. He parked, and as
he walked back to it, he could see her house in the distance and noticed
that her husband’s truck was parked in front. The police had yet to
arrive, he noted.
A moment later he heard the siren of an approaching ambulance.
He drove away, and at one point found himself following a police car
for several blocks. Finally, he pulled over, changed his clothes, then
began driving north, tossing his gloves and other bits of clothing out
the window. While heading across one of the city’s many bridges that
stretched across the Arkansas River, a gust of wind blew several pages
of notes he’d compiled on his victim out the passenger window of his
car. Instead of stopping to gather them, he drove back and forth across
the bridge, convinced that the wind created from his car would blow
the notes into the river.
“I hope the police don’t find them—bad move on my part,” he
later wrote.
He was hungry. So he decided to grab a bit of lunch and made
mental notes of his mistakes as he drove. As best as he could remember,
he’d left a fingerprint from his left hand on the neighbor’s gate.
He was also fairly certain he’d touched Wegerle’s door without wearing
a glove. He told himself that the next time he killed, the first thing
he needed to do was handcuff his victim and always remember to wear
gloves when using a ligature. Last, he decided it would be nice to have
a place in the country where he could drive after his kills, in order to
store or dispose of his gear more efficiently.
From what I’d gleaned about how Rader’s brain worked, I knew
he must have been riding the high from his first five murders when he
landed his job with ADT Security Systems in November 1974. At the
time, he was still enrolled at night school at WSU, studying criminal
justice. This meant that he’d work all day, often miles outside of
Wichita, then head back into town for classes. Landwehr told me that
what Rader loved most about the job was that it gave him the sensation
of being a cop.