Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 217
Two days after that, he took pop music sensation Madonna with
him for a one-way tour of Park City. In her picture, she wore a bodysuit
complete with cup-shaped brassiere. As he went about his duties
that day, his mind exploded with angry thoughts about hanging her
from a heavy wooden beam. He envisioned himself wrapping a coarse
hemp rope around her neck. In her mouth was stuffed the obligatory
gag. The only problem was that he couldn’t decide whether he wanted
to use a rope or a chain to spread her legs apart. But what he did know
was that he wouldn’t use his usual rope garrote to dispatch the Material
Girl. For her, he opted to end his fantasy and her life with a “slow
strangulation hold.”
The following Sunday, after attending church, he wrote about
shoplifting a book on a serial killer who lived in Hawaii. The next morning,
he went to work with a redhead in the seat beside him. On Tuesday,
she’d been replaced with a woman whom he would describe only as “the
bitch.” For the rest of that afternoon, he daydreamed that she’d kidnapped
him, trussed him up in cord, placed a leather collar around
his neck, and laid him out on a bed covered with red satin pillows.
A week later, in an effort to drum up some orders for the annual
Boy Scout popcorn drive, he dropped by a church not far from his
office. On his way back out to his truck, he happened to glance at a
young boy and his sister playing in the grass by the parking lot. All at
once, the telltale urge seemed to well up from deep inside him.
“The sexual predatory instinct kicks in,” he wrote. His head was
flooded by thoughts of “getting” the two young children. By the time
he climbed inside his truck and started the engine, the kids had vanished,
and he spent the next ten minutes cruising the streets around
the church hoping to catch another glimpse of them. He wasn’t exactly
sure what he would have done if he had spotted them, but by this
point in the day his head was going crazy with wild possibilities. He
steered his truck toward the neighborhoods where his last two victims
had lived before he’d paid them a late night visit, driving up and down
the streets that surrounded their homes, letting his mind wander.
The need to take another life was rising up inside him, threatening
to burst out. On the first weekend in December 1990, he attended
an out-of-town Boy Scout camp with his son. Packed away in his truck
was his hit kit, complete with plastic gloves, knife, .25-caliber pistol,
mask, and cord. Exactly what he intended to do, he never specified in
his journal, although he did write that he arrived at the camp “too late
and was too tired to try anything.”