Inside the Mind of BTK

232 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
about that sort of thing. They knew about his victims and the facts
surrounding his crimes—that stuff was pretty much all out in the
public domain—but what he yearned to do was dump the contents
of his brain out on the sidewalk for everybody in Wichita to shudder
over. He wanted to stir the hornets’ nest. He just hoped he didn’t end
up getting stung, although he told himself that the chances of that
were slim. After all, he’d been thumbing his nose at the cops for three
decades, and they’d never come close to laying a finger on him. He
wasn’t deluded enough to think that a publisher might actually take
on his project and release his writings in the form of a book. What
he had mind was more on the order of a public relations effort. He
wanted to set the record straight, while also reminding the community
that Wichita’s infamous brand-name killer was still alive and
plotting.
By then, Brian had joined the Navy as a seaman apprentice and
was based at the Navy submarine base in Groton, Connecticut. Kerri
had gotten married and moved to Michigan. Like a lot of tech-savvy
couples, she and her husband maintained a blog about their life
together, which they posted online. From the sound of it, her night
terrors had continued into adulthood; whatever had crawled inside as
a child and caused her so much pain whenever she shut her eyes at
night was still alive and squirming.
A few months before my arrival in Wichita, I was doing a bit of
Web sleuthing on Kerri’s name and stumbled onto one particularly
chilling entry from the couple’s blog.
Kerri’s husband had written it sometime in 2004. In it, he
described what it was like to live with a woman who suffered from
night terrors:
I think this is going to shorten my life. I am either waking up with
no covers, waking up with a psychotic woman looking for a monster
or for some Mexican person that could’ve broken in to murder us.
Either that or she is screaming because she thinks, in my peaceful state
of slumber, I am trying to mutilate her in some way. I have heard
rumors that all women are completely insane when they sleep. I think
the idea is to control every facet of their man’s life. There was a week
where I was woke up three times in a night to some sort of dream event
of some kind or screaming. Let me tell you, it just about destroyed me.