Inside the Mind of BTK

212 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
I didn’t want to look at my photograph after that. I turned it over,
shoved it back into my briefcase, and walked back toward the desk,
then continued reading the words of a monster who fooled everyone
into believing he was human.
By July 1988, the rush Dennis Rader received from Vicki Wegerle’s
murder had long ago faded, leaving him feeling as empty and hollow
as ever. The urge to take another life thrashed inside him as though
he’d swallowed an anaconda. One afternoon he picked up his pen and
wrote in his standard butchered English, “The desire are in me so
strong now day. I have no ideal what keep them in check. Could it be
my strong moral as a husband, father, trusted friend or the I-don’twant-to-be-caught
side of me?”
This was definitely a worthy question for Rader to be asking. But
like all worthy questions in his life, he felt no reason to wait around
for an answer or even to continue probing. When you lack a conscience,
simply asking such a question feels good enough. It quiets
things just a bit. Perhaps in Rader’s case it even paved the way for the
next paragraph he wrote in his journal, in which he launched into a
lengthy confession about what he wanted to do with a young blondehaired
girl he’d spotted at the pool earlier that day, on a trip he’d taken
there with his kids.
According to his journal, he could barely take his eyes off her. She
was eating candy, and something about the way the sunlight danced
off her bronze body caused his head to go crazy concocting fantasies
about this “innocent, childhood virgin.”
Rader saw himself as a simple man with simple tastes. On that
particular afternoon, all he wanted from life was some sort of lubrication
for his “rod” and a few moments alone with this girl. He wrote
that just thinking about the things he envisioned doing to her “small,
delicate” body made his heart race wildly.
Yet no sooner had he concocted some dark scenario inside his
mind wherein she found herself bound and gagged than he claimed
to feel a sense of shame descend on him. He cautioned himself to be
careful, to remember that these desires threatened to rip everything
in his life away from him. The revelations of his secret life, he wrote,
would destroy the heart and souls of everyone around him. “It must
be kept a secret forever,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, in the very next paragraph of his journal, the young
blonde girl he’d spotted earlier in the day was now crying in pain, her