Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 313
again shook his head back and forth, claiming he’d never hung himself
because it was too risky.
“I just wouldn’t do that,” he said, his head now turned sideways.
“That’s far too dangerous. People die doing that sort of stuff, and that
was the last thing I wanted to have happen.”
He was lying, of course. Not only had several reliable sources confirmed
as much, but I also knew that he’d written about this activity
far too many times in his journals for it not to be true.
Yet Rader’s twist on autoeroticism was unique. Unlike all the other
case studies I’d researched, he didn’t hang or suffocate himself in order
to intensify an orgasm. It turned out that his sense of what caused him
to get aroused was so tweaked that merely the sensation of being hung
or suffocated was enough to induce an orgasm. I’d never heard of anything
like this. Sitting there thinking about Rader stringing himself up
made me think about Paula Rader. Plenty of the killers I’d tracked
were married to women all cut from the same cloth—placid, easy-toplease,
the kind of woman who wouldn’t snoop around in her husband’s
belongings.
Then a new thought occurred to me: I would have wagered a case
of Corona (Rader’s favorite beer) that at least once in his thirty-plus
years of marriage to her, Paula had walked in on Dennis in the midst
of one of his kinky necktie parties.
“Man,” I said. “This has got to be really rough on your wife.”
Knowing that I’d made it this far without Rader walking out on
me or shutting down made me a bit bolder. But I still didn’t want to
burn any bridges. If I played my cards wisely, I could pump him for
information long after this interview wrapped up, using Casarona as
an intermediary.
So I just grinned at him, one of those I-might-know-more-thanyou,
shit-eating kind of smiles. He knew damn well I was working
him. He couldn’t be that dense. He understood that I was beginning
to sense something about Paula, something nobody else knew. His
ugly face glared intently at the camera. When interviewing killers like
Rader, I always tried to imagine what their faces looked like during
one of their homicidal frenzies. I wondered if the expression I was
staring at on my monitor was the same face his victims saw.
“Paula never knew anything,” he said in a low growl. “She didn’t
know a thing . . . And they’re punishing her. She deserves to get some
compensation from the sale of the house, but they don’t want her to.
I hope some day she’ll forgive me for all this.”