Inside the Mind of BTK

222 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
several miles outside Park City and rolled Davis’s corpse into a culvert,
then hopped back in her car and found another spot beneath a
highway maintenance shed to stash the various trinkets he’d stolen
from the house, along with his hit kit. He’d come back for that later,
he told himself. First, he needed to switch vehicles before any more
time passed.
After returning the car to Davis’s garage, he walked the two miles
back to his truck. In his journal, he described how he felt cold, thirsty,
and tired. His clothes were drenched in sweat.
Thirty minutes later, he was driving back out to the spot where
he’d just deposited Davis, and retrieved her body. Fog had begun to
roll in as he continued on to a remote part of the county, where he
pulled over long enough to drag Davis’s body beneath a tiny concrete
bridge located beside an expanse of empty farmland. As he drove back
home, he wrote that thoughts of sex and bondage flooded his brain.
Knowing that the sun would be up in a few hours made him feel like
a vampire, he later wrote.
As horrific as these Dear Diary confessions were, they didn’t shock
or surprise me. His words merely confirmed something I’d discovered
years before: serial killers like Rader aren’t human. They look like us,
they train themselves to act like us, but just below the surface they are
hideously different. That was why I expected nothing else out of a
monster like Rader. All I felt was a terrible, heavy sadness for Delores
Davis, along with the rest of Rader’s victims. They didn’t deserve any
of this.
The night after the murder, Rader returned to the bridge to snap
photos of Davis’s partially nude body. Her feet, hands, and knees were
still tied with panty hose. The first thing Rader noticed on arriving was
that some sort of animal—perhaps a coyote, a rat, or a raccoon—had
begun chewing on her body. Because he carried one of those clear
plastic Halloween masks in his hit kit, which was still in his car, he
retrieved it and placed it over her face. He smeared lipstick on it, trying
to make her look more presentable, then snapped a few more photos.
He would have stayed longer, but it was so bloody cold out that
he decided to head home.
Besides, Paula would probably be wondering about him.
Two weeks later, a fifteen-year-old boy chasing a stray dog stumbled
on what remained of Davis. The next day, a story about the mur-