Inside the Mind of BTK

330 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
evolve when he realized what effect his actions had on the men and
women of Wichita. The adrenaline rush proved intoxicating. The
community feared him. Overnight, he’d gone from being a pathetic
nobody to an all-powerful puppet master. He pulled the strings and
everybody danced. Before long, terrorizing the community and outwitting
the police became as satisfying as acting out those dark fantasies
on his victims.
How did he pick his victims? What Rader really sought were
women who were vulnerable. Nothing more. His victims could be any
age. All that mattered was that he could bind and dress them exactly
the way he wanted. Rader really didn’t care what his victims looked
like, because once he’d taken their lives, they became virtual entities
existing only his mind, where he could sexually assault them over and
over again, embellishing all the details of the crime or their physical
features in any way he wanted.
How was he able to elude law enforcement for so long? Rader was a
former criminal justice student and a police buff. He was an “organized
type” of serial killer, meaning that he carefully thought about and
planned each of his homicides. All of his victims—besides his neighbor
Marine Hedge—were total strangers. For law enforcement, these
so-called stranger homicides are the most difficult to solve. Something
else he had going for him was patience. This is a quality not often
found in the other serial killers I’ve studied. He didn’t murder with regularity.
He could go years between killings because he was able to sustain
his fantasies by taking personal items from his victims, then using
them during his masturbation sessions while reliving his crimes.
Why had Rader resurfaced after all these years? In January 2004,
the Wichita Eagle ran a thirtieth-anniversary story on the Otero homicides.
The article chronicled the efforts of a local attorney who was in
the process of writing a book about BTK. I learned that these two
events worked together to flip a switch inside Rader’s fragile ego. He’d
be damned if someone else was going to pen a book about him when
he was the only one who knew what his motivation was; what drove
him into bondage, torture, and killing; what really happened during
each of his homicides. So he decided to write his own book, and eventually
began sending messages to the media and police. In the end, his
ego turned out to be his downfall; we in law enforcement should have
used it against him much sooner.
What made Dennis Rader a serial killer? It has always been my
opinion that killers like Rader aren’t born bad. From what I’d learned,