Inside the Mind of BTK

270 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
few blocks from city hall. They were briefed on what had just happened
to Dennis and peppered with questions, such as whether they
could remember Rader ever doing anything suspicious.
“You got the wrong man,” Paula Rader’s mother and father kept
saying. “There’s no way Dennis would have done this.”
The arrest and charges were clearly a terrible, disorienting blow
to Rader’s devoted wife.
Paula had arrived first, having been driven to the FBI office by
police, who had resisted descending on the Rader home until after
Dennis had been cuffed. She arrived at the building a few minutes
after her husband was ushered inside, and spent the next four hours
sitting there, listening to investigators paint a picture of a stranger they
claimed was her husband. And all the while, she never appeared to
stop believing in his innocence, insisting that what she really needed
to be doing was hiring a lawyer for him.
But then she remembered something, “a coincidence” she’d
called it.
“Dennis used to drive me to work in 1974,” she explained. “And
we’d always go past the Otero house. That was the route he’d always
take.
“But you’ve got the wrong man,” she told Lundin.“Dennis couldn’t
have done this.”
Paula’s mother excused herself to use the restroom. Her father, a
World War II vet, stared down at his thick arms, and Lundin said he
could practically hear “the wheels turning round and round in his
head.”
After a few moments he looked up at Lundin and said, “So ...you
got the goods on this guy.”
“Yeah,” Lundin replied. “No doubt about it. It’s him.”
After Rader’s in-laws left, Paula excused herself to get a breath of
fresh air and clear her head. Lundin told me that he walked out into the
hallway and saw her leaning against the wall, dazed looking, with a cell
phone pressed up against her ear. She was talking to her daughter, Kerri,
in Michigan, who had just been interviewed by several FBI agents.
“No, no, no,” she whispered. “Your daddy didn’t do this. There’s
been some horrible mistake. You don’t need to worry.”
Lundin heard the same thing a few days later when he flew to a
naval base in Connecticut to speak with Rader’s son, Brian, who was
there attending submarine training school. Like everyone else close to
Rader, he told Lundin there had to be some mistake.