Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 285
“The lion is strong, and it is very positive,” I said. “Anything else?”
“That’s it.”
“Good night, Kris,” I mumbled.
“Good luck,” she said.
I stumbled upstairs to my room, wondering about what I was getting
myself into. If my meeting with Rader did go down—and I still
wasn’t convinced it would—the interview conditions would be far
from perfect.
A few days before I flew in to Wichita, an official at El Dorado
informed me that Rader and I wouldn’t be allowed to sit together in
the same room or even across from one another at a table separated
by a slab of bullet-resistant glass. Instead, I’d be required to park
myself in the visitor center while he sat in a room in another wing of
the facility, staring into the lens of a video camera. The two of us
would watch one another on TV screens and communicate with
microphones and speakers.
The warden could have allowed me to interview Rader in the same
room, but he apparently refused. After all, I wasn’t in law enforcement
anymore, and he didn’t want to be seen as giving me any “special treatment”
or perks, especially when he had a box on his desk stuffed full of
requests from people wanting to speak with Rader. Even my good
friend Larry Welch, director of the KBI, tried to get me a face-to-face
interview, but the warden wasn’t inclined to make any exceptions. It
pissed me off something awful, but I respected his decision.
Yet the most frustrating stipulation was that I would be allowed
to spend only two and a half hours with Rader. That may sound like
plenty of time to engage in a one-on-one conversation with a homicidal
psychopath, but it was woefully inadequate. To date, all of my
interviews had been open ended. They finished either when I obtained
all the information I needed or when the prisoner got so ticked off
that he called for a guard and demanded to be taken back to his cell.
I fell back onto my bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying
to figure out the lines I’d use on Rader in the morning. Shouts
echoed up from the street below. A bottle, perhaps two or three of
them, shattered. A bar fight, I figured, was spilling out into the night.
Listening to the din, my mind raced backwards two decades to an
interview I’d somehow managed to pull off, despite being told to hit
the goddamned road. The memory of that afternoon I walked through
the rusted gates of Stateville Correctional Institute in Joliet, Illinois,