Inside the Mind of BTK

260 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
I did. A moment later I was staring at thumbnails of roughly seventy
photographs, aerial shots of what I assumed marked the progression
of Rader’s arrest.
“They were shot from a helicopter,” he explained.
It was fascinating to click my way through the pictures, one after
the other, knowing that it marked the last few moments that BTK
would ever know freedom. The action started moments after he
turned onto Frontage Road, a tiny side street that paralleled 61st
Street, the busy four-lane arterial that led to I-135. A white sedan
could be seen waiting for Rader to make the turn. The moment he did,
I watched as it moved up behind him. One block away on a side street,
four brown and black sedans stood ready.
The group sat in a tight little convoy on a side street, listening to
their radios for a report of Rader’s progress. Landwehr was in the
backseat of one of the vehicles. Wichita’s chief of police, Norman
Williams, was in another. The consensus was that Rader might not go
down without a bloody fight.
“I’ve faced a lot of these violent guys over the years, even some
who don’t want to go to jail for five years, and they try to force the
cops to kill them,” KBI special agent Ray Lundin told me a few days
before my arrival in Wichita. Not that he had to. I knew from my own
experience arresting fugitives just how dangerous the next few minutes
could be. At a task force meeting the night before Rader’s arrest,
there was talk of using the city’s SWAT team to take him down. The
idea was scrapped when task force members voiced frustration over
the idea of having some outside group put the cuffs on the man they’d
spent so much time trying to catch.
“The last thing Ken said to us,” Lundin told me later, “was, ‘Be
ready and be careful.’ ”
Word came over the radio that Rader was on the move. The
moment his white truck drove past the side street, the group swooped
after him like wolves. Lundin was piloting a black Crown Victoria. A
swarm of butterflies was flapping inside his gut. Strapped to his side
was a Sigsauer 9 mm semiautomatic. Beside him in the passenger
seat was Wichita police homicide detective Kelly Otis, a Remington
12-gauge shotgun rested in his lap. The lead car, an unmarked white
Impala, roared up behind Rader and hit the lights, causing the grillwork
to explode in flashing bursts of red and white. Another dozen
officers waited on the next street in case Rader tried to make a run for