Inside the Mind of BTK

Meeting BTK: An Exclusive Interview 331
Dennis wasn’t physically tortured as a child. His ideas about bondage
stemmed from an experience he had had as a young boy, walking into
his mother’s bedroom and finding her entangled in her bed. The
image lodged inside his head and festered. Several years later, he began
tying up animals, drawing pictures of torture chambers, and sketching
portraits of women bound in ropes and chains. Later in life, Rader
began to devour detective magazines filled with stories about women
being bound and tortured, along with true crime books. None of this
material caused him to kill, but the material did fuel the preexisting
fantasies that festered inside his head.
How can we prevent another BTK? It’s much too late to stop the
pain and horror caused by BTK. But understanding where we went
wrong in our investigation is the best way to prevent another BTK from
enjoying such a long reign of terror and carnage. To answer that question
you only have to start with that image of Rader’s wife walking in
on her husband hanging himself in full drag. Both times this happened
it scared the hell out of Dennis—not enough to keep him from killing
again, but enough to spook him. He feared that Paula would be able
to connect the dots and gulp, “Oh my God, my husband is BTK!”
But another part of him knew that he had little to worry about.
Why? Because in those early years of the case, law enforcement agencies
released precious little information about the UNSUB’s probable
behavior, traits, and characteristics.
That was where I now believed we should have handled things
differently.
We knew from BTK’s writings that at the very least, he was a
police buff. More than likely, he was a wannabe cop. He described the
scenes of his crimes as though he were a veteran member of CSI. I
remember telling myself the first time I read his writings that in all
probability, the UNSUB was a student of criminology. Knowing that
Wichita State University offered such a program would have been a
logical lead early on in the investigation.
We also knew from the crime scenes that BTK was heavily into
bondage, an interest that doesn’t blossom overnight. Therefore it
seemed logical that BTK would possess a stash of pornographic material
containing a fair share of bondage photos.
His artistic ability was another trait that didn’t just sprout one day.
Of course, he was far too careful to sketch women wrapped in ropes
and chains while he was watching the nightly news with his family. But
surely someone had witnessed him drawing human figures, possibly