Inside the Mind of BTK

310 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
have had a lot to talk about. You know, before they caught me, I sometimes
thought about what it would be like to sit down with him and
have a good long talk about everything.
“But then he lied to me about the computer disk and called me
all those names. Said I was a sick pervert and all that. I respected him,
but I don’t respect him now . . .
“I think the guy I liked best was Richard LaMunyon. He was the
chief of police back in the 1970s. Seemed like a real nice guy. I was
hoping that he and I could sit down and have a cup of coffee at the
jail after my arrest. But he never came.”
Amazing. Rader still believed that he and the police shared some
sort of professional camaraderie. I’d suspected that BTK was a
wannabe cop back when I first looked at the case in 1979, but until
sitting here and listening to him speak, I hadn’t realized how
entrenched his delusion was. If only we’d been able to better capitalize
on this frailty of his, to use it against him. Part of me wanted to reach
through the TV monitor and beat some sense into his brain. Talk
about paradoxes. Rader was too savvy to visit one of his victim’s graves
or attend a community meeting, yet he somehow believed that
Landwehr or LaMunyon would actually sit down to have a cup of coffee
with him and chew the fat.
“How did it make you feel when LaMunyon stood up at that press
conference in 1979 and announced that the police had no leads in the
killings?” I asked.
“That felt good,” he laughed. “No, that felt great. It meant the police
didn’t know anything. It meant I could relax and stop looking over my
shoulder every two minutes. That was tiring. But something I didn’t
like was when that district attorney said I used to hang myself at Boy
Scout outings. That’s just not true. I wish you could clear that up for
me in your book. I never did that. I never would have done that. That’s
one of the things that really bothers me. I love the Boy Scouts far too
much to have ever done anything like that during a camp-out.”
The fact that Rader strangled his neighbor during a Boy Scout
camp-out didn’t bother him in the least. Like every criminal, violent
and nonviolent, he had his own twisted code of ethics. Murder was
one thing. He just didn’t want anyone to think he was the type who
might do something weird like hang himself during a Scout outing.
Rader, of course, didn’t know what I knew about him. I’d read an
entry in his journal detailing his late-night exploits in the back of his