Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 255
Kimmie had just gotten home from her job as a dialysis technician.
Her kids were off at school. And that was when something happened,
something that still makes her queasy whenever she thinks
about it. She tries not to.
Not long before I arrived in Wichita to interview Ken Landwehr,
Comer tracked me down through my Web site, wondering if I might
be interested in hearing her story.
I told her I was.
It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. Nice day. Sunny. Spring,
it seemed, had arrived early. Comer left her front door open, and a
warm breeze was seeping in through the screen door as Dr. Phil’s
twangy Texas voice drifted out of the TV.
“All of a sudden, I turned and looked up and he was standing
there, staring at me,” she recalled. “Dennis Rader had walked right in
my house without knocking. He looked at me sitting there, then said
in this calm, quiet voice, ‘Oh, I wanted to make sure you didn’t forget
your court date ...for the ticket I gave you.’ ”
Comer told me that she couldn’t believe what was happening. For
the past eight months, Park City’s heavy-handed compliance officer
had made her life a living hell—all because she’d parked two cars in
her driveway. Both cars worked just fine, but Rader started giving her
tickets—eight of them, to be exact—for having what he considered to
be an inoperable vehicle on her property. Each time he’d pull up in front
of her house to give her another one, she’d attempt to show him how
both automobiles ran perfectly fine, but the officious Rader didn’t want
to hear about it.
“That’s why we have courts,” he’d tell her. “Take it up with the
judge.”
So on that balmy Wednesday afternoon in late February when she
saw him standing in her family room, holding his goddamned ticket
book, she lost it. “I jumped up from the couch and got right in his face
and started cussing him out. I told him how dare he walk into my
house like this, and he better get the hell out. And that’s what he did.
He didn’t get angry. He just turned and walked out.”
As Rader futzed around his truck, pulling papers in and out of his
briefcase, Comer stood there on the doorstep shaking.
“You’re an old pervert,” she shouted at him. “Why won’t you leave
me and family alone? You’re just a goddamned dog catcher.”
Rader had began thrusting himself into Comer’s life shortly after
her move to Park City in November 2003. A single mother of two