Inside the Mind of BTK

318 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
“I know,” she said. “If he doesn’t deserve the death penalty, who
does? But I don’t think he killed anyone after 1991.”
“Neither do I,” I told her. “He certainly never wrote about it in any
of his journals. And he seemed to write about everything. I don’t think
he would have been able to leave something like that out.”
Casarona’s drink arrived. She raised her lips to the glass and
drained part of it, shutting her eyes for a few brief moments as it slid
down her throat. We both sat there in silence, listening to the old man
in a tuxedo playing show tunes on a piano.
“I need to ask you something,” I said. “Something I’ve been wondering
about since Ken Landwehr mentioned it to me. Did Dennis
ever tell you what happened just before he killed Julie Otero?”
“What do you mean?”
I told her what I’d learned about that January morning back in 1974
as he straddled Julie Otero’s body on the bed and wrapped his sweatdrenched
hands, sheathed in rubber gloves, around her throat. On the
floor nearby, Joseph lay dead with a pillowcase tied over his head. In her
heart, Julie must have known that her eleven-year-old daughter and
nine-year-old son would probably soon be joining him, if they hadn’t
already. She was next. She must have known that. She didn’t have a
chance, and I couldn’t imagine a more hopeless, powerless situation.
Yet something inside this doomed woman allowed her to gaze up into
Rader’s face and whisper, “May God have mercy on your soul.”
How does someone summon up such grace at such a terrible, horrifying
moment, I’ve often wondered. It was a question I’d thought
about from time to time, a question I never had been able to answer.
“So, did he ever tell you anything about that?” I asked. “Did he
ever tell you how her words affected him?”
Casarona polished off her drink and motioned for the waitress to
bring her another.
“Yeah,” she said. “He told me about that. He told me that Julie’s
words dazed him. He told me that several days passed before he even
remembered what she’d said to him.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then he didn’t think about it again for another three
decades,” she said, “but lately he has.”
“Prison can do that to a guy,” I said. “Lot of bush league philosophers
in prison.”
“What he told me was that he’s begun to see Julie as a saint,”
Casarona said. “Which is also how he’s started to see Paula.”