Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 27
to Wichita in 1979. Even though I firmly believed I’d nailed this guy
dead-on, I was constantly asking myself if I’d missed something or
placed too much the emphasis on the wrong bit of evidence. The pressure
to get it right was overwhelming. Knowing that what I wrote
could send investigators off in the wrong direction, which could indirectly
result in more dead bodies, weighed heavily on me. It was one
of the reasons I was so obsessive about my work.
The key to writing the kind of analysis that actually helps investigators
do their job is deceptively simple, but it’s something that takes
years to teach. In fact, it was only after five years of in-depth training
and analysis that I considered one of my wannabes to be an expert.
The most important thing is not just to regurgitate back to the police
the data they already know.
My profiles were rarely more than five pages. I always ended them
with a simple request that investigators pick up the phone and call me.
This was why I never inserted any proactive techniques—on how to
catch the bad guys—into our reports. I feared that whatever I wrote
might get leaked to the press.
In this case, however, I had a hunch that the best use of my expertise
would be to develop some proactive recipes to flush this killer out
of the woodwork. He’d manipulated the police and the community
long enough. The time had come to return the favor and begin messing
with his mind. The only question was, How the hell do we do it?
I decided to skip lunch, gather up all my notes on the case, and
walk over to the third floor of a nearby building on the FBI campus.
This was where the bureau’s legal unit did all its research, and I loved
to sit up there in the library and gaze out through the massive windows
at the green, rolling Virginia countryside. The view of all those
oak and maple trees, along with all that sunlight, was definitely a hell
of a lot more conducive to clear thought than an often foul-smelling
office in the forensic science building. Up there, surrounded by all that
blue sky and those green treetops, things just felt different.
I organized the crime scene reports and my extensive notes in
front of me in neat piles on the table—one stack for each series of
murders. I knew that somewhere within those stacks of paper there
existed a single, simple fact, a piece of evidence—either physical or
verbal—that I might be able to use against the UNSUB. It wasn’t
enough for me to simply serve up some ideas that I believed might
prove useful in the case. I was consumed by the idea of helping police