Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 311
truck during a camp-out during the mid-1980s. On that autumn
night, Rader didn’t wrap a rope around his throat, but he did strip
off his clothes, pull on a pair of women’s underwear and a bra, wrap
himself up in ropes and dog collars, and clamp a pair of handcuffs
over his hands. Problem was, the damn lock got jammed, and he
couldn’t remove the cuffs. So he lay there in the back of his truck,
thrashing and grunting, sweating like a pig as he desperately tried to
free himself.
He wrote in his journal that at one point he feared he might have
to begin shouting for one of his young Scouts to help extricate him
from his bindings. But then, at the last moment, all that perspiration
lathering his body allowed his wrists to slide out of his cuffs. He
removed the rest of his bindings, cleaned himself up, then returned to
the campfire to listen to ghost stories and instruct whoever might be
interested on some advanced knot-tying tips.
Rader’s mouth was primed and ready now. Even if he didn’t want
them to, the words had begun to spill out of his mouth. I could push
a bit harder, lean on him with just a little more force in order to get
him to take me where I wanted to go.
Next I decided to ask him about his earliest victims—the animals.
Since his arrest, Rader had flip-flopped over the issue of whether he
bound, tortured, or killed any animals while he was growing up. His
diaries touched on the subject. During his marathon gabfest with
police, he confirmed as much, explaining that he’d often take the animals
to a barn near his house and kill them. But lately Rader had
changed his tune, telling Casarona that he never would have taken the
life of an animal because he loved them far too much.
“Tell me about the animals, Dennis,” I said. “How did you kill
them, and why always in the barn?”
The face of the man on my TV monitor went stern. His thick,
bushy eyebrows arched downward.
“I know where you’re going with this,” he said. “It’s part of that
homicidal triangle—along with bedwetting and starting fires. But I
never killed any animals. I would never have done that. You know, at
one time I wanted to be a vet? So I just couldn’t do something like that
to an animal.”
I knew he was lying. But I also knew that I didn’t dare call his
bluff. All I could do was try to salvage a part of the truth. “OK, so you