Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 231
Over time, the killing began to grow grander and more elaborate
in the secret fantasies of his sick mind. He eventually decided that after
murdering her and stringing her up, he’d burn the building down by
dousing a few of the rooms with kerosene, then rigging a time-delayed
fuse out of a candle. The fuse was crucial, he wrote; the last thing he
wanted was for billows of smoke to be rolling out from the windows
as he backed out of her driveway.
It would be huge, he promised himself.
Yet not even this grand, bold fantasy could fill the empty hole
inside him that threatened to swallow him up. Which was a bit ironic.
After all, he’d spent a lifetime telling himself how badly he yearned to
live the carefree life of a lone wolf. Yet now that he was free of the
obligations brought on by raising children, he had no idea what to do
with himself.
According to what Landwehr had told me yesterday while we were
driving around Wichita, Rader finally understood what the next chapter
of his life would entail on January 2004. The day was a Sunday, and
he had just returned from church, picked up a copy of the Wichita
Eagle, and read an article that used the thirtieth anniversary of the
Otero murders as an excuse to run a retrospective article on the seemingly
long forgotten serial killer named BTK.
The headline read, “BTK Case Unsolved, 30 Years Later.” Besides
rehashing his seven known murders, the 1,100-word article focused
on the efforts of a Wichita attorney named Robert Beattie, who also
taught a class in criminal justice at a local university. Beattie had taken
it upon himself to pen a book on BTK, partly because he felt that most
residents had forgotten this “significant chapter in the city’s history.”
Halfway through the piece, Beattie explained how the year before,
he’d brought up the case in one of his classes “and was surprised by
the reaction. ‘I had zero recognition from the students,’ he said. ‘Not
one of them had heard of it.’ ”
Rader read the piece and, according to what he told Landwehr
during his interrogation, became disgusted that some local know-itall
attorney was going to write a book about him. He was flattered by
the idea of it, but he’d be damned if he was going to let this guy have
the final say on his life’s work.
And that was when Rader decided he’d write his own damn story,
explaining everything—how he worked, how he chose his victims,
how he jumped from one project to the next. Nobody knew anything