Inside the Mind of BTK

Q
16
The digital clock beside my bed read 3:47. I’d been
wandering through Rader’s chronicle of his life for over nine straight
hours now.
I stood up and paced around the room, hoping to clear my head,
to purge it for a few moments. I walked over to the bed, opened my
briefcase, and fished out a snapshot taken eight years before on the
day of my older daughter’s wedding. I held it in my hand, and it all
came back to me, how I’d nearly died a few days earlier from pulmonary
embolisms and loss of blood after a doctor punctured my
lung while attempting to place an IV in my chest. On that day, all I
could do was sit in a wheelchair and watch as my ten-year-old son
walked my daughter down the aisle for me.
I stared at my tired face in the photo, then studied the brave,
uncertain expressions on the faces of my family, who wondered if I’d
be alive next week. Life is fragile, I thought to myself. If you’re not
careful, it can be snatched away in the wink of a tear-glazed eye. And
then all at once I remembered Dennis Rader and how he’d done that
to one person after another until the number of lives he’d snatched
away equaled ten.
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