Inside the Mind of BTK

Q
The sun was coming up. I’d been at it all night. I was
getting too old for this sort of thing, I told myself as I walked across
the hotel room and opened a window, leaned my head out, and
dragged a long, deep breath of the cool morning air into my lungs.
The leaves, a little yellower than the day before, clung to the
branches of the crabapple tree just outside my window. In a few more
days, their tenuous grasp on the branches would weaken, causing
them to tumble to the ground.
Before I knew what I was doing, I caught myself studying the
limbs, looking to see if any might be strong enough to hold the weight
of a full-grown psychopath in a white satin evening gown with a rope
tied around his neck. But none appeared to possess the necessary girth
for the task.
“Jesus,” I muttered,“his journals are changing the way I look at trees.”
A moment later, I dumped some coffee grounds into the tiny percolator
on a shelf by the closet, filled it with water, then walked back
to my desk, listening for my coffee maker to gurgle to life.
On my computer screen glowed a picture of a piece of notebook
paper dated January 27, 1991. Rader was ruminating on how much he
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