Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 29
But he also left some things to chance. If his intended victim
wasn’t available, he would strike the next best target he could find. On
several occasions, it appeared he had difficulty controlling his victims.
And he was hardly the neatest killer I’d encountered, leaving behind
semen near the bodies of two of his kills.
Then there was his peculiar way of posing his victims. I’d never
come across another killer who did it the way he did. He primped and
preened the bodies in erotic positions, clothing, and bindings as fuel
for his masturbatory fantasies. But he had also laid out and displayed
nearly all the bodies of his victims—except for Kathy Bright, who died
of stab wounds—for the investigators who arrived at his crime scenes
long after he’d fled.
It was as if he positioned the corpses the way a florist might
arrange flowers. He wanted to shock, yet his visual statements were
also fairly tame and modest—at least in terms of the work I’d seen
other sociopathic serial killers leave behind. Compared to those maniacs
who left severed heads propped up on TV sets or their victims
spread-eagled on the floor with various objects inserted into their
vaginas or rectums, UNSUB was downright juvenile and soft core.
Nevertheless, he used his victims as inanimate props, posing them to
resemble a scene out of the pages of a detective magazine, leaving
them out in the open so that the first person to discover the body
would practically trip over it when entering the front door of the victim’s
home.
Without a doubt, BTK was a sadist who inflicted unfathomable
horrors upon his victims. Yet he also differed from all the other sexual
sadists I’d studied, guys who needed to inflict physical torture in
order to be sexually satisfied. He got off by employing a form of torture
that was predominantly mental, not physical. Although he seemed
obsessed with physical torture, it wasn’t part of what’s referred to as
his “signature,” which is what a killer must do to satisfy himself psychologically.
BTK’s signature was bondage—not physical torture.
BTK never penetrated any of his victims. It would have been easy
to interpret this type of behavior as though he were trying to say You’re
not even good enough for me to rape. But I knew better.
His decision to not rape his victims or engage in necrophilia actually
told me that despite BTK’s sexual obsessions, deep inside his mind
he felt hopelessly inadequate. His opinion of himself was so low—and
his fear of women so great—that he could never bring himself to
thrust himself so intimately into any of his victims. They were used