Inside the Mind of BTK

218 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
A week before Christmas, he wrote that he and Paula had had sex
for the first time “in a long time.” For a guy who often filled page after
page with detailed accounts of his imagined sexual conquests, he
devoted precious little ink to the real thing. His only comment in his
journal was that his session with his wife “felt very good and satisfying.”
My sources insist that when it came to his carnal fantasies, Rader
never crossed the line with his daughter.
“She was his best friend, and he claims it never crossed his mind
to think those things about her,” I was told. “But Kerri’s friends . . .
well, that was a different matter. They were definitely fantasy material
for him.”
Like plenty of violent offenders I’d spoken with, Rader had a
boundary he wouldn’t cross, and that gave him comfort. He told this
same source that pornography nauseated him, that he was bewildered
that anyone could think he might be a homosexual, and that it made
him feel good to know that he never “cheated” on Paula by having sex
with any of his murder victims.
During this period of his life, Rader lived for his so-called motel
parties. According to his journals, he’d drive out of town, check into
a room, lock the door, and spend hours alone, fondling the belongings
of his victims, dressing in their clothes, wearing wigs and masks
he’d prettied up with lipstick and mascara, then binding himself in
ropes and tying plastic bags over his head.
Sometimes he’d cover the bed with scantily clad Barbie dolls, set
up his camera on a tripod, and squat down beside the dolls. He’d position
the camera far enough away so that when the shutter snapped he
appeared to be the same size as the dolls—all of which he imagined
were his real-life victims. It just didn’t get any better than that, as far
as he was concerned, because the Barbie doll was the symbol of the
perfect female. I’d seen this type of behavior in men who would hang
dolls, blow them up with M-80s, and smear red dye all over them to
simulate blood. Surprisingly, some of these guys never progressed past
the stage of torturing dolls. They seemed to sense what Rader later
found out—that the fantasy, where they are forever in control, is
always better than the actual crime.
One evening in October 1995, Rader took several decades’ worth
of drawings he’d sketched of women in the midst of being stabbed,
drowned, buried alive, hung, strangled, shot, and tortured on various
homemade devices of his own design, then spread them across the