Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 79
As a child, Glatman possessed an insatiable obsession with
bondage and ropes. In his early teens, he’d spent hours masturbating
in the attic, hanging himself from the rafters in an effort to heighten
his orgasms. A family doctor told his concerned parents to ignore their
son’s strange hobby because he’d one day outgrow it.
By the time Glatman turned sixteen, he used a cap gun to force a
girl to undress. He was quickly arrested and, upon being released on
bail, traveled to New York. Not long afterward, he was arrested for robbery
and sent to jail for five years. After his release in 1951, Glatman
moved to Los Angeles and opened a TV repair shop. To the outside
world, he lived a fairly quiet life and did his best to keep away from
women.
Then, one sweltering afternoon in July 1957, the dam broke, and
Glatman’s self-imposed exile from the opposite sex ended. An avid amateur
shutterbug, he convinced a nineteen-year-old model he met while
on a TV repair job to pose for him, telling her he made extra cash shooting
pictures for detective magazines. She showed up at his house a few
days later, eager to pocket the $50 he promised her for the photo shoot.
Within minutes of her arrival, he raped her at gunpoint, then drove her
out to a remote expanse of desert outside Los Angeles. He stripped the
hysterical woman to her underwear and, before strangling her, shot
pictures of her pleading for her life. Over the next year, he killed two
other women using his photography ruse in order to win them over.
Glatman wasn’t caught until one of his would-be victims, whom
he’d already shot through the thigh, grabbed his pistol while he drove
her on a one-way ride out to the desert. When taken into custody,
Glatman gleefully provided officers with detailed accounts of each of
his killings. He was executed by cyanide gas in San Quentin’s death
chamber in 1959.
BTK could very well feel a kinship with a sick killer like Glatman.
After all, he seemed to possess a fantasy life every bit as intense and
consuming as Harvey’s. Yet Glatman’s main problem was his inability
to harness this invisible world inside his head. If he had been able to
do so, that world might have provided sustenance for him during
those stretches when he should have been lying low. Which was, it
appeared, what Nancy Fox’s killer had been doing for the nine months
since his murder of Shirley Vian—he’d managed to restrain himself.
And it was also what he did for the next two months after Fox’s death.
He retreated back into the shadows and no doubt did his best to
resume his day-to-day life.