Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 261
it. He didn’t. The moment he spotted the unmarked car behind him,
he steered his truck to the side of the road as Lundin and others rolled
into place, forming what resembled a wedge in the aerial photos.
Lundin pulled up so close to the chief’s vehicle that Otis, a stocky
former college football player, couldn’t get his door open enough to
hop out. So he propped it open, rested his shotgun on the door frame
and took aim at Rader, who immediately pushed open his door and
climbed out of his truck.
“I had barely stopped the car when Rader jumped out,” Lundin
said. “It happened much quicker than any of us thought it would,
which is why I made a run for him. He had a pretty aggressive look on
his face, and we still didn’t know if he’d be armed. We figured he’d
either shoot at us or flash a gun at us, trying to make us shoot him.”
In the seconds it took Lundin to traverse those thirty feet between
his sedan and Rader, he marveled at how the man’s uniform resembled
the one worn by Wichita police. Lundin also told me that he
couldn’t shake the feeling that this arrest might turn violent, ugly.
“Rader knew why we were there,” he said. “And he knew he was
going to prison and not coming out.”
Ray Lundin is the kind of man that most people wouldn’t want to
see charging toward them at full gallop. A former power lifter who
competed nationally while in college, he stands six feet tall and weighs
225 pounds. In a flash, he grabbed Rader’s right arm with one beefy
hand, then quickly clenched the collar of his jacket in the other.
“I took him down to the asphalt,” Lundin said. “He went quickly,
without much effort.”
A moment later, another officer slapped cuffs on Rader’s wrists,
and Lundin yanked him back upright. But as he tugged on Rader’s
body, lifting him upright, the eighteen-year veteran special agent
noticed something peculiar.
“His heart wasn’t racing,” he recalled. “He wasn’t breathing hard
or perspiring in the least. I’d never seen anything like it, never seen
anyone look so calm at a moment like that. It was pretty chilling,
really. Kind of summed up everything about who this guy was. It was
as though he felt absolutely nothing. When I got him back to his feet,
he turned slowly and looked me straight in the eye. Everything about
him was calm, cool, flat. He said, ‘Tell my wife I won’t be home for
lunch...I assume you know where I live.’ ”
Lundin replied, “Yeah, we’ll take care of it.”