Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 253
Within hours of discovering Rader’s identity, the task force met
to brainstorm what needed to be done to nail Rader to the BTK murders.
After thirty-one years spent searching for their killer, the last thing
investigators wanted was for their top suspect to slip through their fingers.
Landwehr had other reasons for wanting to move slowly. He
couldn’t shake the sick feeling that BTK was setting them up, leading
them straight to Dennis Rader in the hopes that they’d arrest him and
become the laughingstock of the media for nabbing the wrong man.
“His use of the word ‘encase,’ ” Landwehr told me, “was just something
I couldn’t write off to bad spelling.”
And there was another reason. In one of BTK’s early communiqués,
he had threatened to blow up his house—or as he called it, his
“lair”—if police tried to close in on him.
But Landwehr was far too smart a detective to let these obstacles
slow him down. He’d spent a couple of years learning the ins and outs
of DNA evidence while working in the department’s high-tech crime
lab back in the early 1990s. What he learned there convinced him that
the next step in the investigation would involve obtaining a DNA sample
from Rader and matching it with semen left behind at his crime
scenes.
There was just one problem, Landwehr explained to me. How the
hell could police do that without tipping Rader off that he was a suspect
in the case? And it was during a brainstorming session the next
morning at task force headquarters that one of Landwehr’s investigators
on loan from the KBI came up with a novel solution that sounded
like something straight out of an episode of the hit TV show CSI.
If they couldn’t get Rader’s DNA, Landwehr reasoned, why not get
hold of a sample from a relative? Landwehr had used that technique
in the past to help ID murder victims whose identity they weren’t sure
of. If they could just locate a sample from a parent, sibling, or child,
it should be close enough to Rader’s to confirm whether or not police
had the right man.
But Wichita was far too small a city for police to be able to waltz
into a doctor’s office with a court order asking for the medical records
of someone related to Rader. Word would quickly leak out about what
they were up to, and that was the last thing Landwehr or anyone on the
task force wanted.
Ray Lundin, a KBI special agent, attended that task force meeting,
held on the following Monday morning. Two weeks before I flew out
to Wichita, Lundin’s boss, KBI director Larry Welch, a longtime friend