Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 269
Three and a half hours had elapsed since Rader had first been
seated in that interrogation room. Morton looked at him and said,
“Say who you are.”
Rader lifted his gaze and stared at the wall behind the two men.
After a few moments, he opened his mouth and finally said it:
“BTK.”
And that was that. In a matter of seconds, it was all over.
But a moment later, Rader realized he needed to ask Landwehr
something. He later told my source that it had been eating away at him
ever since the lieutenant informed him that police had caught him by
tracing his computer disk to Christ Lutheran Church.
To hell with the fact that he’d just confessed to being the man who
had killed ten people. Deep down, part of him always knew that one
day he might be caught. That was practically a given in his business.
What really bothered him, though, was how he’d been caught. It
just didn’t seem . . . fair, Rader told my source. Over that past year, he’d
begun to feel that he and Landwehr had formed a professional bond.
And why wouldn’t he? Ken played the role of the no-nonsense supercop
just as I had envisioned it two decades earlier. For the past eleven
months, Landwehr had appeared on the color TV set in Rader’s family
room and spoken directly to Dennis, stroking his oversized ego,
slowly convincing him that theirs was a relationship built on trust and
respect. The way Dennis saw it, they needed each other—Rader played
the role of the bad guy, and Ken played the cop. They had a good thing
going, a rapport.
“I need to ask you, how come you lied to me?” Rader said. “How
come you lied to me?”
Landwehr listened to the question, but he told me that he couldn’t
quite believe what he’d just heard. Could Rader really be that dense?
Was he so hopelessly deluded as to imagine that the past three
decades had been nothing more than a big game? He bit his lip to
keep from laughing. But Rader was serious. He sat there across the
table, staring at Landwehr, not blinking, patiently waiting for an
answer to his question.
Finally, the tired homicide detective shook his head and muttered,
“Because I was trying to catch you.”
Within minutes of the arrest, a half dozen Wichita police officers
had descended on Rader’s local family, rounding up Paula, her parents,
and two of his brothers and taking them down to FBI headquarters, a