Inside the Mind of BTK

208 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
That was something I had sensed two and a half decades before
when I first analyzed the case and wrote that BTK was more than likely
a wannabe cop.
He also told Landwehr during his interrogation that he got to carry
a gun, a long-barreled .22 pistol. And every so often, he got to hang out
with police when they’d arrive at a break-in that had occurred at a
home or a business he serviced. But the best part of the job was how it
allowed him to float around the region like a ghost. He had a desk and
an office, but in his line of work he was never tethered to one place for
very long. He specialized in home security systems, which always
tended to make him feel like a kid in a candy shop—albeit a very sick
kid. More times than he can remember, he rifled through the bedroom
of an ADT client and grabbed a few pairs of panties or women’s
socks—never anything that the owner would think had been stolen.
One of his most memorable scams occurred on a job he worked
for a woman who, he later told police, was being stalked by “a guy just
like me. He’d written and told her how he had scissors and tape and
was going to do all sorts of things to her. So she hired our company
to protect her.”
Rader and his small crew installed alarms on every door and window
of the house.
“We did a good job,” he would later say.
Except for one minor detail. Before they completed all the wiring,
Rader realized that he might one day enjoy paying this woman a visit
himself.
“I rigged the home in a way that would allow me to get back
inside,” he later confessed to Landwehr. “All I had to do was hot-wire
it in such a way that I’d be able to go around the alarm.”
He claimed never to have taken advantage of the rigged alarm, but
just knowing that it was there gave him a sick sense of comfort.
In his journal, he wrote that another perk of his job at ADT was
the overnight trips he took to towns scattered around Kansas. Whenever
he was out of town, Rader happily combined business with pleasure.
At night, when whatever work was expected of him on these
out-of-town assignments was finished, he’d either go out trolling for
future victims or break into homes to steal lingerie, jewelry, and various
types of IDs, such as driver’s licenses or Social Security cards.
Once, in mid-1987, his bosses sent him to Belleville, Kansas, to
install an alarm system in an old meat-packing plant. The place was
filled with all sorts of dangerous machinery, and the owners wanted