Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 225
loved what happened after he killed. That feeling of being on edge, of
running on pure adrenaline as he waited for the police to track him
down was priceless, he told himself. It was as if every cell in his body
were on red alert, waiting for the inevitable to happen.
The murder of Dolores Davis was no different. Afterwards, he did
what he always did when the memory of a kill was still fresh in his
head. He tried his best to melt back into everyday life.
“Don’t drop the bucket,” he urged himself in the pages of his journal.
“Just keep going with the people around you.” This wasn’t all that
difficult for Rader, because he imagined himself to be a wolf among
sheep. A month after the murder, the paranoia passed, just as it always
did. When the cops never showed up at his front door, he wrote of
himself in the third person, “Maybe he was lucky again.”
One afternoon, he penned an entry in his journal about the day
he pulled out an old tape recorder he’d kept in the closet, popped in
a fresh cassette, and spoke the details of his crime into the microphone.
Before long, he realized that it felt good to talk all his fantasies
out like that—so different than writing them down on a piece of
paper. Verbalizing his kills and dark thoughts just made everything
feel so much more real.
It was easier, too. The spoken word flowed out of him in a way
written words never had. He tried to understand why, and the only
reason he could think of was that maybe it was because he’d never
been able to say those words aloud before.
He’d never before in his life dared let all those thoughts and
memories—the ones he’d locked away inside his head—drift out of
his mouth. The sensation proved so cathartic that after he finished
speaking the memories of Davis into his tape recorder, he decided to
forgo paper and begin chronicling his fantasies with his tape recorder.
At least for most of the next year he did. But, like so many of his artificial
substitutes for killing, recording his fantasies eventually grew
boring. A few years later, he pitched his collection of cassettes into an
incinerator—the same oven, he later told police, where he burned the
bodies of dead cats and dogs during his stint as a compliance officer—
and watched them melt away to nothing.
The murder of Davis also marked another turning point in
Rader’s life. The business of serial killing—which was how he referred
to it in his journal and, after his arrest, to police—wasn’t for the lazy.
Yet when he looked back over his last two kills, he had to admit that