Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 323
first visit to the property, perched amid an overgrown tangle of weeds
and grass. I wanted to sit on it and have a nice, long think.
The streets and highways of Wichita were empty, barren on that
Monday morning. The place felt like a ghost town. From my hotel, the
drive to Park City took less than ten minutes. On the way, I couldn’t
get last night’s letter out of my mind. It had come from someone who
would only identify himself or herself as close to Rader, although this
could be anyone from Casarona to the handful of pen pals Dennis had
attracted since his arrest. I wondered if it might be the same person
who had contacted me months earlier with some inside information
about Dennis. This time, the source wanted to pass on some answers
to me about Paula, answers to the question I’d posed to Rader regarding
what his wife would have known about his terrible, destructive
appetite. If this letter was correct, it turned out that Paula didn’t know
anything about her husband’s being a killer, but she had seen something
to upset and anger her about his sexual acting out.
I also speculated that probably Rader himself was behind the letter.
Perhaps he’d phoned the source after our prison meeting because a few
of my questions had wormed their way into his thick head, and it concerned
him that some people out there might still suspect that Paula
had somehow covered up for him during those years he was on the lam.
Then again, it could have been any of a number of people. A handful of
folks knew I’d come to town this weekend in order to interview Rader.
From my conversations with his friends, police, and other sources,
Rader had never once stopped to consider the ramifications his murders
would have on his family. According to Casarona, the couple had
roughly $7,000 in savings at the time of Rader’s arrest, leaving Paula
with precious little to live off of when her husband was promptly
sacked from his job a few days later.
Judging from Rader’s comments he made to me at El Dorado the
morning before, the wake-up call about the mess he’d made of his
wife’s life came when Paula tried to sell the family’s house in July 2005.
The would-be buyer, who happened to be a well-intentioned, publicitysavvy
owner of a popular strip club in the area, backed out of the deal
upon learning that a civil lawsuit on behalf of the surviving family
members of Rader’s victims would block any of the cash from ever
going to Paula.
Now the house I was driving toward sat in limbo, and Paula
worked as a bookkeeper at a nearby Park City convenience store to