Inside the Mind of BTK

320 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
Her husband.
Dennis had tied a rope around his neck and was hanging himself
from a door in front of the bathroom mirror. He wore a dress,
probably stolen during one of the countless home burglaries he had
committed.
Nothing in Paula’s sheltered, cloistered life spent in sleepy Park City
could have prepared her for that strange sight. Rader told my source
that this happened a few months after Kerri’s birth in June 1978.
By then, Shirley Vian had been dead for roughly eighteen months.
Ten months had passed since Nancy Fox’s murder, which he considered
his homicidal masterpiece. In February 1978, he had penned his
infamous screed to police, announcing that there was a new serial
killer on the block and that he was unstoppable. Fear and paranoia
gnawed at the heart and soul of every resident of Wichita. Rader must
have prided himself that he was at the pinnacle of his career as a serial
killer. Then he seemed to vanish into the hot, humid air of western
Kansas.
I’d never been able to answer why he’d disappeared. But now
I could.
According to the letter, Rader claimed that Paula’s discovery
marked the most humiliating, embarrassing day of his entire life. Far
worse, he said, than his arrest twenty-five years later.
He told this source that he had been prepared to get down on his
knees and beg her for forgiveness, but it never came to that. His wife
reportedly wasn’t so much angry as she was sickened and concerned
that something was terribly wrong with her husband’s brain. She’d
never heard of anyone doing something so downright disturbing and
strange.
You need help, she reportedly told him.
The only problem was that she had no idea whom to turn to,
especially as she was so embarrassed by it all—far too embarrassed
ever to have the stomach to tell anyone about what had happened.
This no doubt must have pleased the hell out of Rader, who described
his wife to one of my sources as “sweet, sincere, naïve and the most
reserved woman he’d ever known.”
Obviously it was her naiveté that Rader found most attractive
about Paula. Because even though the cat was out of the bag, Dennis
couldn’t have picked a better person with whom to have accidentally
shared his secret. She was close to her mother, her two sisters, and a