Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 281
tests and had spent a couple of years penning speeches for a Kansas
senator. She was confident that she could craft a readable sentence on
paper. More important, she’d also become something of an armchair
crime buff and amateur profiler, devouring countless true-crime
books (including all of mine), plowing through them the way most of
her friends polished off romance novels.
But here was the most peculiar part of her plan: whatever money
she earned from the book—minus expenses—she planned to donate
to the families of Rader’s victims. Casarona wanted to do the right
thing for these people who had endured such an unending loss. But
she was also savvy enough to realize that if her book on Rader went
big, her next one could also earn substantial royalties as she continued
her career as a successful writer.
“That first time we met, there was a piece of glass between us,” she
told me.“I wasn’t scared. But I definitely wasn’t excited or thrilled either.
I had no feelings either way. Except that I found him utterly repulsive,
so I guess that was my only feeling. I really just tried to disassociate
myself like I read that you do when you go to interview one of these
guys. I figured I had a job to do, and that was to get him to trust me.”
Between late April and mid-June, they had met seventeen times
face-to-face, and on each occasion Casarona wore skirt-suits with
high-collar shirts or suit jackets, always buttoned high. She wanted the
guards to assume she was an attorney. Every time they met, she smiled,
laughed, listened with a sympathetic ear, and exuded a strange intensity
that transformed Rader into a type of dopey teddy bear—if that
was possible for a homicidal psychopath.
Four months after that first letter to him, she asked Rader to sign
over the rights to his story to her. He eagerly agreed.
And that was when Casarona’s real troubles started. The media
learned of her relationship with Rader when he forwarded their interview
requests to her and she’d reply, declining all their requests on Dennis’s
behalf. Then, starting in June 2005, three months after Rader’s
arrest, the local and national media, hungry for any news about Rader,
began writing about her relationship with the killer. Word leaked out
that she was writing a religious type of book, which angered many in
the region who believed her to be some sort of bleeding-heart kook,
the type who was probably coddling Rader, telling him he’d be forgiven
for his transgressions.
“It wasn’t long before I became known as ‘that crazy woman from
Topeka,’ ” Casarona moaned.