Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 71
detectives who could endure only a few minutes of these recordings
before wincing and quickly exiting the room, shaking their head.
I once worked a case involving two truly savage murderers who
used sound as a way to relive their killings. Lawrence Bittaker, convicted
of assault with a deadly weapon, and rapist Roy Norris became
pals while incarcerated at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis
Obispo. Shortly before their release from prison, they hatched a plan
to kill teenage girls, one for every “teen” year from thirteen to nineteen.
They yearned to record their crimes on audiotape. By June 1979,
they’d purchased an old Ford van, nicknamed “Murder Mack,” and set
out to fulfill their dark fantasy.
In quick succession during that summer, they brutally raped, tortured,
and killed four young girls. When police finally caught up with
them, they quickly discovered the duo’s collection of audiotapes. I’ll never
forget the afternoon I listened to one of their cassettes in preparation for
an interview that I and a female agent did with Bittaker, who was sentenced
to death for his crimes and sent to San Quentin State Prison.
During the recording, his cohort was driving the van while Bittaker—whose
nickname was “Pliers” because this was his favorite
instrument of torture—scripted the frightened, moaning fourteenyear-old
girl, telling her exactly what he wanted her to say as he slowly
mutilated her. Just as the BTK posed his victims in order to see their
bodies in his imagination, Bittaker needed to hear just the right combination
of words in order to keep his victims alive within his head.
The afternoon we finally sat down with this sad excuse for a
human being in a San Quentin interview room, he was more than
happy to spill his guts to us. The only glitch was that he refused to look
at my female colleague when she asked him questions. That was how
much he hated women. By the time our session was over, he was sobbing.
Of course, his tears were for himself—not his victims.
Walking back to my car through the moonbeam-lit cemetery, I
caught myself thinking about the letter BTK sent to police in October
1974. In it, he wrote, “Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or
by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine.”
I could only assume that he’d written this out of ignorance,
because every criminal justice student with even the slightest bit of
frontal lobe activity knows that killers do change their MO. It is their
most malleable and fluid quality, a skill that is constantly evolving and
changing to the point of perfection.