Inside the Mind of BTK

312 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
didn’t kill them, but you tied a few dogs and cats up, right?” I asked.
“And why always in barns? What was it about barns?”
For the first time all morning, he looked almost embarrassed. In
his mind, torturing and killing humans was one thing, but performing
the same atrocities on animals was something else altogether.
“I just always felt safe in a barn,” he said. “Just something about
them. Maybe because barns are always detached from the house, separate,
off away by itself. You can do things in a barn and no one will
interrupt you. It’s more private than a basement, and I always liked
basements. Did a lot of stuff in my parents’ basement.”
He stopped talking. Judging from the angle of his eyes in relation
to the video camera in front of him, he was once again staring at the
floor. He looked ashamed.
“I never killed any animals,” he said. “But I did tie some up and
then I masturbated next to them.”
Why wouldn’t he cop to it? I wondered. Why couldn’t he admit to
torturing and killing an animal? Part of the answer had to do with the
contradictory, unsettling nature of violent criminals. They’ll elaborate
on the goriest details of a case, but then turn evasive over some minor
point. In other words, Rader was embarrassed. I’d spent enough time
working on farms in high school, hoping to earn school credits to get
into a vet school, to know what sort of unspoken things sometimes
occurred on a farm when no one was watching.
At Montana State University, where I spent a few years as an
undergraduate, the coeds had a motto that went something like “Montana
State. Where men are men and sheep are nervous.”
That pretty much summed things up. Seeing Rader’s shamed
expression, I not only realized that had he killed his share of animals
as a youth but also wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d engaged in a
bit of sexual experimentation with them as well.
That was what led me to my next question: “Tell me about your
fascination with autoeroticism,” I asked.
Rader’s green eyes did a double take. His face went blank. “What’s
that—autoeroticism?” he asked. Once again, I realized we’d given him
far too much credit. He appeared to have no idea that the activity he
performed with a rope during his “motel parties,” out in the privacy
of the woods, or down in his parents’ basement actually had a name.
For all he knew, when I used the term “autoeroticism,” I was talking
about inserting a portion of his anatomy into the exhaust pipe of a
car. So I explained the clinical definition of the term, and Rader once