Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 265
Morton, who had remained quiet, broke his silence: “Since the first
murder?”
Rader seemed a bit flustered with the question. “Well, I don’t
know,” he fumbled. “I’ve always ...I’ve got a degree in administration
of justice, so it’s always been an interest.”
I’m sure Morton must have been smiling at that moment. I would
have been if I’d been sitting there with him, smiling one of those stern,
no-nonsense smiles that would let Rader know we held all the cards.
It would be important to Rader’s ego to appear friendly, but not so
friendly that it didn’t ring true.
Then Morton asked, “Do you know why you’re getting swabbed
today?”
“Well, I assume I’m a main suspect,” Rader replied.
“So,” Morton continued, “if that swab we just took—”
Rader was getting so excited over what Morton was about to say
that he interrupted him with a “Yeah ...Uh-huh.”
“If it comes back a match,” Morton continued.
“Then I guess that will be it,” replied Rader.
“You’re BTK?” Morton asked.
“Well,” Rader said, “if that’s what the scientists say, you know.”
“Do you think it’ll come back that way?” Morton inquired.
“I don’t know,” Rader said. “Let’s just leave it. I don’t know at this
point in time.”
Morton did as Rader asked. He pulled back just a bit, although
not much. “Dennis, I have a question to ask you,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Rader grunted.
“How do you think we came to talk to you?”
Rader frowned and bit into his lip. “Well, I don’t know. As a suspect
I assume. You must have something on me, otherwise you wouldn’t have
brought me in.”
Morton held up the floppy disk received by police nine days earlier,
then Landwehr proceeded to recount exactly how they’d linked it to him.
“You know, every time you print or every time you save something,
it registers in a header that’s hidden, that you can’t alter,” Landwehr
said. “So if we get something like that and it would come from BTK,
then we can go in there, and we can find out that it came from Christ
Lutheran Church....And that’s when we came to you.”
Rader sat there staring at Landwehr, looking like someone had just
hit him over the head with a golf club.