Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 329
erase this ugly monument to the lie he lived for decades. I doubted
any of his neighbors would care.
But, as interesting as I’d always found arson to be from a criminology
standpoint, I hurried to my car, climbed inside, and cranked up
the air conditioning. A few minutes later I was speeding past Wichita,
making my way back to the interstate that would take me to Kansas
City. Fields of wheat and corn rushed past my window for nearly an
hour before I noticed the message light flashing on my cell phone.
I looked at the numbers and saw that Casarona had just called, so
I retrieved the message.
“I can’t take this anymore,” she moaned. “Last night, I talked to
Dennis. I swear to God half the time I feel like I’m talking to a little
boy, not the monster I know he is.
“You know what he tells me? He tells me that he’s felt depressed
all day and says, ‘I know I have no room to say this, but I really miss
McDonald’s. I really miss their hamburgers and fries.’ I almost
dropped my phone. Can you believe that? He killed ten people and he
feels bad that he can’t have a cheeseburger and fries. What do you say
to that? I wanted to throw up. I made myself stay calm. I felt like his
mother or something.
“I said in this really patient voice, ‘Dennis, you really need to
remember why you’re in there. You need to remember that.’
“He got all silent after that, then he said, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’
I can’t take this anymore, John. Why did I ever write him that damn
letter? I have no idea how can you stand doing this . . .”
Casarona’s voice faded away. I figured I must have hit a dead zone.
I continued my trek east as my head churned through everything
I’d absorbed over the past few days. Ten people were dead; countless
other lives had holes torn out of them, holes that would forever
remain empty.
All because of one man.
For just over three decades, I’d been trying to understand the man
who called himself BTK. I’d now spent the past year immersing myself
in his world, interviewing the cops who tracked him, talking to his
friends, reading his journals, pouring through the words and images
he left behind on paper. Here was what I had learned:
What was his motive? Initially, Rader’s motive for killing was simply
to act out his bondage fantasies with a victim, then kill her. Nothing
too complicated about that. But his reasons for killing began to