Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 213
body drenched in sweat. Although he had tried to be gentle while raping
her a few sentences earlier, he now decided that it was time to be
done with her. So he fashioned a garrote from a “loose coil” of rope,
looped it around her neck, and pulled tight. But instead of feeling
good about the kill, he expressed remorse in his next sentence, begging
the “guardian of small ones” to give him the strength he needed
to continue on with life.
His journal of more than two years later revealed that the urge to
kill was as strong as ever. But the stirrings of guilt and shame over his
secret world seem to have vanished. Rader hadn’t taken a life in nearly
four years, but by Halloween of 1990, he’d already begun planning the
intimate details of Project Dogside, the code name he’d given to what
would turn out to be his final murder. This one, which wouldn’t take
place for another two and one-half months, involved sixty-two-yearold
Park City resident Delores Davis, who lived beside a dog kennel
on Hillside Street.
Once again, I was reminded that when Rader disappeared from
view after his gloating letter to police in 1978, he’d continued plotting.
And, on three more occasions, he continued killing. In the pages of
his journal, he described how during the afternoon before killing
Davis, he acted out exactly what he desired to do with her. His journal
described step-by-step how he pretended to be the victim.
This particular masturbatory session began with “heavy breathing
and quick relax as he prepare for a trip into far way time zone.”
Within minutes, he’d wrapped a leather belt around his ankles,
then encircled his body in a leather web fashioned from various other
belts he kept in his closet. After tying himself up, he pulled a plastic
bag over his head, wrapped a slipknot around it, then pulled it tight
and thrilled as his lungs slowly sucked what remained of the air from
the bag.
“He lies there as she [Davis] would, bound, helpless,” he wrote.
Rader first mentioned the thrill he experienced from self-imposed
suffocation a couple of months earlier, in September. He still had his
job with the Census Bureau at the time, and one afternoon he hung a
sign on the door of his office, informing his coworkers that he’d
stepped out to lunch. Then he locked the door, spread a plastic tarp
over the floor, and rigged up a camera on a tripod with a long cord,
allowing him to trigger the shutter from a distance.