Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 219
room. The collective image of all these nude, gasping, wincing, terrified
women and girls covering the room was horribly breathtaking,
he thought.
As he gazed at the drawings, it reinforced his belief that he definitely
didn’t want anything to happen to his cache of artwork. A few
months earlier, he’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and at that time it
had begun to occur to him that he needed to stop being so careless with
his drawings, along with the rest of his cache of memorabilia. So he
began to concoct a plan of how to copy his sketches over to three-byfive
cards, then stick the original drawings in a safe-deposit box that
he’d reserve by using the fake name “Johnson.” The way he envisioned
it, the box wouldn’t get opened until months after he died. Whether or
not the bank employee who found it was able to piece together what
the contents alluded to didn’t concern him, he told Landwehr.
Because he had so much material to catalogue during that
autumn night in 1995, he decided to organize it into categories, such
as hangings, strangulations, torture devices, and so on. In his journal,
he bitched that it “took a lot of work checking dates and sorting,” but
his recent milestone birthday had convinced him that the last thing
he wanted to do was die and leave a “skeleton in the closet.” It wasn’t
until late 2004 that he began digitizing his archives and copying them
onto CDs. But the project was fraught with headaches because the CD
burner on his decrepit home computer was broken. Even more frustrating
was the fact that he didn’t have a scanner at home, so he had
to use the one at the office, which meant he had to do everything on
the sly. By the time police caught up with him, he’d been able to transfer
only a small handful of material onto discs.
His duties as an archivist soon sent him combing through his
journals and scores of yellowed clippings from the Wichita Eagle,
detailing BTK’s various murders and efforts to catch him. For the first
time since he’d begun killing, he suddenly realized that his cache of
memorabilia could get him in trouble; he wrote, “[it would be] bad
news for me if found, yet I can’t let it go.”
One of the reasons Rader couldn’t let it go was because four years
had elapsed since his last—and what would prove to be his final—
murder. He desperately needed his various mementos to curb his lust
for death, to sustain and recharge him.
Just as he had with his countless other projects, Rader had spent
a couple of months driving past the home of Delores “Dee” Davis, a