Inside the Mind of BTK

74 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
I was back at the office by 6:15. This was the only way I could ever
get any work done, especially now that I was still having problems getting
my post-coma brain to resume firing on all eight cylinders. I told
myself I’d get to the next installment of BTK’s homicides—this one
involving what the killer surely must have considered to be his most
satisfying murder—later in the afternoon. In the meantime, piles of
file folders that desperately needed my attention were spread across
my desk.
This dynamic between organized and disorganized, chaos and
order, proved to be a constant source of tension in my life. I was
embarrassed to admit it, but I had the unshakeable feeling that the
man responsible for these unsolved killings in Wichita could probably
teach me a thing or two about organization.
BTK’s murders employed elements that were both uniquely organized
and disorganized. He could be sloppy at times, such as when
leaving behind biological evidence at his crime scenes. But it was the
razor-sharp control that he obviously maintained after his murders
that perplexed and astounded me. I wasn’t sure what he did for work
or even if he was married, but I felt confident that he never allowed
his inner world—which seethed inside him like a bubbling cauldron—
to bleed into his outer world.
In the analysis I wrote in 1979, performed on the heels of his two
last known murders, I thought we were looking for someone who
resembled a monster. But five years had passed, and now I began to
glimpse another element of his character.
One of the reasons he was able to place so much time between his
kills was because he’d somehow developed the ability to blend in to
his environment. It would be far too much to expect him to stand out
in his community. The reason we couldn’t see him was that we were
looking past him, not at him.
Shortly before lunch, I’d plowed through my paperwork, played
Dear Abby to a couple of men in my unit, and was happily back at it
up in my quiet corner of the law library, digging and sifting though
the stack of reports that detailed BTK’s last known murder, which
occurred during the night of December 8, 1977.
Clearly, this was the UNSUB’s most perfect kill, no doubt producing
the kind of memories that might just have been tiding him
over for these past few years. It began to unfold to the outside world
with a phone call to an emergency dispatcher at 8:20 the next
morning.