Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 251
Ken Landwehr pushed open the metal door of my hotel room and
walked inside. He took off his suit coat, carefully draped it over the
one chair in the room, and took a seat on the bed. A few minutes earlier,
I had assumed my usual perch beside the desk, basking in the glow
of my computer screen.
“So how’d it go down?” I asked him. “Walk me through those final
days before you put the cuffs on him.”
Landwehr explained that after Rader met with Clark, he returned
home, placed the disk into his computer, deleted the agenda for the
upcoming church council meeting and made the biggest mistake of
his life—besides being born. He typed out the next installment of his
message to police.
On February 16, a padded envelope arrived at the studios of
KAKE-TV. Inside was the usual assortment of index cards, along with
a locket attached to a gold chain, no doubt pilfered from one of his
victims. But the envelope also contained something else—a purple
computer disk. The communiqué was quickly turned over to the task
force.
The moment Landwehr spotted the disk, he dialed the extension
for Det. Randy Stone, the department’s computer crimes sleuth.
Within minutes, Stone had popped the disk into a PC and began clicking
his way inside it.
“There were seven of us there,” recalled Landwehr. “We were all
staring over his shoulder, watching what he was doing, and he was
walking us through every step he took.”
Stone quickly saw that the disk held only one file, which was titled
“TestA.rtf.” He clicked it open and read the message left by the killer:
“This is a test. See 3 x 5 Card for details on Communication with me
in the newspaper.” Stone asked to see the index card and moaned after
reading the message: “Any communications will have a # assigned
from now on, encase one is lost or not found.”
Landwehr explained to me that it was Rader’s use of the word
“encase” that put everybody in the room on alert. It turned out that
Encase is the proprietary name for a sophisticated type of software
used in forensic computer investigations. “With it, you can literally
strip off all the identifying information we were hoping to find,”
Landwehr explained. “Randy said that it looked like it could be a setup,
and his use of the word was some sort of clue he’d left for us.”
Landwehr had begun to wonder the same thing.