Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 209
alarms installed to make sure nobody broke in and got injured by the
equipment.
Initially Rader was ticked off that he’d been dragged away from
Wichita for the job.
“I was a team leader and a supervisor,” he later told Landwehr,
“and my boss wanted me to go out and start installing alarms.” But he
quickly decided to roll with it. “I used it to my advantage,” he said. “I
thought, ‘If you’re gonna send me out of town, I’ll go trolling and
stalking on my free time.’ ”
And that was exactly what he did. One evening while in Belleville,
he was “lone-wolfing” it, just cruising the streets looking for the right
type of woman he might want to strangle or garrote, when he happened
to spot a young mother through the front windows of her
house, playing with her kids.
This just might work out, he chuckled to himself.
So he drove over to the town bowling alley, parked his truck, and
walked back. It was the dead of winter, an ice-cold night. On the way
over, he thought about what he wanted to do with the woman’s body
after he killed her. “I’m going to take her out, somewhere out in the
woods,” he recalled of that night. “They may not find her for a while.
Basically, it’ll look like a disappearance.”
But, of course, by the time he made it back to her house, the place
was empty. Just his rotten luck. He paced back and forth in front of
the house, stomping his feet on the ground, trying to stay warm. After
a while, he figured he might as well just break in and wait inside. But
after sitting around in her house for two hours, his head began toying
with him. He finally decided no one was coming home. So he grabbed
some jewelry and a pair of fancy red bikini-style panties and headed
back to the bowling alley.
In July 1988, the ax fell, and Rader lost his job with ADT. He has
always maintained that he was laid off. “It was an informal layoff, you
know. I got a nice letter from them and everything. It wasn’t anything
I did—just company policy.”
But Landwehr told me that he’d heard from a source who worked
at the company that Rader had been seen as mercurial and had a reputation
for being highly argumentative. The source also claimed that
Rader was fired from the job.
Whatever really happened, it didn’t take Rader long to line up
another job perfectly suited for his temperament. In 1989, he was