Inside the Mind of BTK

280 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
like everyone else in the city, she soaked up every word written about
the unknown killer who was terrorizing the city.
One Saturday afternoon, she and a friend hoofed it to the Wichita
Public Library, hoping to catch a glimpse of the killer. She figured that
because he’d once left a letter for police on a bookshelf in the library,
it only made sense that he’d be there lurking in the aisles, just waiting
to be discovered. The two girls combed every aisle looking for the
killer, whom they both had a hunch they’d recognize the moment they
laid eyes on him, but they never did.
Twenty years later, Casarona was working as an oil and gas analyst
for the state of Kansas, wading through piles of state statutes and
federal regulations in order to write detailed reports on pipeline safety
in Topeka, wondering why life hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d
dreamed it would when she was younger. Over the past few years,
she’d survived a rape, battled osteoporosis, and weathered a divorce,
and now was in the midst of watching her second marriage crumble.
She yearned for change. Nothing terribly dramatic, just something
small and meaningful. One morning in February 2005, she picked up
the newspaper and read an article about how the bogeyman from her
childhood had been apprehended by the Wichita police.
At first she didn’t know what to think. But after a few weeks had
passed, she decided to write him a letter, the kind of letter you send to
someone without necessarily expecting ever to receive a reply. In her
two-page note, Casarona explained how his awful crimes had left a
mark on her childhood that she could never quite wash away. She
dropped the letter in the mailbox and never gave the matter much
thought. Seven days later, she came home from work and pulled an
envelope out of the mailbox with a return address from the Sedgwick
County Jail.
She and Rader became pen pals, firing off an endless volley of letters
to one another. This was three months before I even considered
writing a book on BTK. By the middle of April, he began telephoning
her at home. Two weeks after that, she drove to Wichita and visited
him in the county jail, where access to a prisoner is much easier to get
than in a state prison. It was during this first face-to-face meeting that
it became obvious what she needed to do.
Casarona decided that she would write a crime book. She would
wade in the muck and filth of Rader’s past and attempt to figure out
what had transformed him into a heartless killer. Although she’d never
had any of her work published, she’d won a handful of writing con-