Inside the Mind of BTK

The Capture and Arrest of BTK 271
“We walked through things with him, and he was shocked,”
Lundin explained to me. “He seemed like a squared-away guy, solid.
But he took it really super-hard. He told me, ‘We had the Leave It to
Beaver life. Mom was always at home and Dad was doing everything—
the Scouts, church, helping out at school. Every summer we’d go on
summer vacations.’ ”
But just like Paula’s father, Brian grew quiet after a bit of time had
passed.
“Then he looked at me and said, ‘It just doesn’t make any sense....
The only thing that ever gave me any cause of suspicion happened
when I was a little kid and I was going through Dad’s stuff. I found
this drawing. It was of a woman in this horrible position. She was all
bound up in ropes. It scared me. I put it away and never looked in his
stuff again.’ ”
At the same time that Rader’s family was being briefed on his
secret life, he sat in a nearby interrogation room, relishing all the
attention being heaped on him. He felt downright giddy with all
those detectives rotating in and out of the room, asking him questions.
Now that he’d confessed to being BTK, the next order of business
involved getting him to walk police through each of his ten
murders, step-by-step.
It felt as though they were talking shop, Rader later confessed to
my source. The way he saw it, he was practically a cop himself. Of
course, he knew what they were trying to do. But at the same time, it
felt as though they were all soldiers, battle-worn vets who had once
been sworn enemies but, now that the war was over, could come
together to chew the fat.
Rader, I knew, was thrilled to be able finally to talk about everything
he’d done—even if it meant the end of the line for him. He’d
never been able to do that, to talk about that side of his life to anybody.
And suddenly there he was, handcuffed in a room filled with
cops, shooting the breeze with a group of guys who seemed to know
everything about him, eager to ask questions about how he’d managed
to pull everything off.
At the same time, though, a sense of weariness had begun to seep in.
Rader told my source that despite all the hoopla and excitement
surrounding his arrest, after a few hours he’d begun to feel the gentle
stirrings of fatigue and depression. The high he’d initially experienced
had started to tiptoe away—just as all his highs did. But he didn’t want