Inside the Mind of BTK

272 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
to think about that right now. He wanted to sit there and talk about
his crimes—he could do that forever. These guys were soaking up
every word he uttered. But as more hours stretched on and on, the
weariness became too pronounced to ignore.
At one point, he shook his head and muttered, “A little thirtynine-cent
piece of plastic floppy was my demise ...That’s what cooked
my goose.”
Roughly twelve hours into his interrogation, Rader looked across
the table at his inquisitors and said, “Could one of you guys do me a
favor? Just shoot me in the head. Put me out of my misery. I know you
would be in big trouble for that. But just shoot me like a mad dog. Just
shoot me and be done with it. Sneak up behind me and shoot me.
BOOM! I won’t know what hit me.”
The detectives seated across from him would have been happy to
oblige, but they didn’t. A bullet to the back of the head would be far
too easy an out for Rader.
Landwehr let Rader keep blabbing off and on for thirty-two
hours. Then he had him booked in the Sedgwick County Jail and
placed him under suicide watch. When Rader awoke in jail the next
morning, he told my source, he’d never felt so low in all his life.
“My heart goes out to him,” Landwehr grumbled.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Really chokes me up.”
The two of us sat there in silence for a few moments, then I said,
“You know what really eats at me is that I’ve still got so many unanswered
questions about this guy, so many things I can’t figure out. I
gotta get in to see him. I need to sit down with him and pick his
brain.”
Landwehr shook his head, looking almost bored. “Getting into
that prison is gonna be tough, even for you,” he said, giving me one of
those why-bother sighs. “I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t need
to know why Dennis Rader killed all those people. I don’t need to
know where his mind was or how it got that way. That’s not my forte.
He killed them, he planned it, and my job was to nail him for ten murders.
After I did that, I was done with him.”
Part of me wished I too could be done with Dennis Rader. But for
some reason, I felt as though I was only just beginning.