Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 279
“Tough business, publishing,” I told her. “I’ve written several best
sellers, and I can tell you that selling a book to a publisher isn’t easy.
Not even for me.”
“Yeah,” she groaned. “I know.”
A week passed and we had another conversation. Then another.
And, like I said, when it comes to speaking with people, I’m not half
bad. The two of us struck up a weird friendship. After five months of
back-and-forth—during which I often played the role of therapist as
she vented all her frustrations—Casarona finally caved in. She agreed
to give up her precious exclusive access to Rader. She would tell her
man to speak with me.
It was a gracious, generous act on her part. The only catch was
that she wanted to be present during the interview and then afterwards
compare my impressions of Rader with hers.
I was far from excited about her stipulations, so I contacted the
state’s Department of Corrections and informed them that Rader had
agreed to speak with me. An official there quickly nixed the idea of
Casarona coming with me to the prison. She was furious with their
decision, but insisted that she’d stand by her agreement to let me talk
to Rader.
“When I give my word about something, I stick to it,” she said.
“But maybe we could meet afterwards and discuss what you learned?”
“Of course,” I told her. “It’s the least I can do for you.”
Kris Casarona couldn’t recall exactly when her fascination with
Dennis Rader started. But she had told me during numerous telephone
conversations we’d had over the past months that she’d been
able to narrow it down to the year 1974, the same year I first learned
about BTK from those homicide detectives in Detroit. She was six
at the time of the Otero murders, but the memory of her parents
whispering about it became one of those indelible moments in her
childhood—just like the sound of locust or the wail of a tornado
siren on a spring afternoon. Although her dream was to become a
veterinarian (just like Rader, just like me), Casarona also toyed with
the idea of one day becoming a detective. By the time she turned ten,
she had decided that her first case would be the mysterious BTK
homicides.
By this point in her life, the precocious Casarona was regularly
devouring the Wichita Eagle from the front page to the back. And just