Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 295
tried to get me in here themselves or were aware of my intentions
to do so.
“Why don’t you give them a call,” I suggested, hoping she wouldn’t.
“I have all their numbers. I think they’d be interested to hear about
the runaround I’m getting here.”
She made several more trips in and out of her office.
“That way,” she said, pointing to a metal door in a corner of the
room.
I opened it, walked through a metal detector, and proceeded down
a hallway lined on either side with bullet-resistant glass. Compared to
Attica or San Quentin, El Dorado hardly felt intimidating. It was a
clean, well-lit place that gave off a just-built vibe. It reeked of fresh
paint instead of stale urine. And unlike nearly every facility I’d ever
visited, it had actually been landscaped.
A guard met me at the end and stamped some sort of invisible ink
on top of my hand, and I made my way into a room that resembled a
community college cafeteria. Men and women sat across from one
another at long tables, holding hands, speaking in hushed tones. A few
of the men, all dressed in prison-issue jeans and blue T-shirts, bounced
children on their knees. Violent offenders like Rader posed far too great
a risk to be allowed the luxury of a face-to-face meeting with visitors.
These guys, I thought to myself, must be the best of the worst.
Another clerk, standing behind another desk, waved to me. After
handing her the piece of paper I carried with me, she studied it and
announced, “You got two and a half hours.”
Her words didn’t sit well with the heavyset woman in Lycra shorts,
standing nearby. “Hey, that’s not fair,” she shouted. “How come I only
get one hour and he gets two and a half?”
I looked into her angry eyes as she gripped the hand of a chubbycheeked
toddler in a dirty NASCAR T-shirt.
“I’ve been waiting thirty years to get in here to talk to this guy,” I
told her, then watched the expression on her face soften.
The clerk handed me a key to a locker, directing me to place my
sunglasses and wallet inside. Another guard led me to a row of four
tiny wooden three-sided cubicles in a far corner of the room, each just
wide enough to fit a chair. I took a seat and noticed the two TV
screens, stacked one on top of the other, on the table in front of me
on a wooden shelf. On top of the monitors was perched a tiny camera
with a lens that resembled the barrel of 12-gauge.