Inside the Mind of BTK

My Lifelong Hunt for BTK 89
sick fantasies. The way I see it, precious few people who read true (or
fictional) crime books harbor some latent desire to go out and kill
someone. People read them for the same reason they rubberneck
when driving past a bloody automobile accident. They want a glimpse
of horror, but they don’t want to get too close to the blood and gore.
Others consume these books and magazines in order to understand a
violent offender’s background, to grasp what makes him so different
than the rest of us—particularly when they seem to so closely resemble
us.
Did BTK read these magazines? I would have bet my FBI pension
on it. The one thing that this violent media didn’t do, however, was
cause these individuals to become killers—it only fueled their already
deeply embedded fantasies and provided literal models of horrible
acts in vivid detail.
For me, the killer who drove home the idea that violent offenders
learn the tools of their trade from their elders was a balding, gaunt
serial killer named Joseph Fischer. On the evening I showed up at
Attica State Prison to speak with him, back in 1981, it was hard to
imagine how this former transient could have killed six women during
his wanderings across the nation. Yet Fischer, who insisted that he’d
actually murdered thirty-two people, put this killer-nurturing-killer
concept into perspective for me in a way that none of the other murderers
I’d interviewed before had.
“It’s kinda like guys who follow baseball or football,” he told me
in that dimly lit prison interrogation room. “They know all the batting
averages, yards per game, interceptions versus touchdowns, where
the players went to high school. They know every stat about all their
favorite players.”
Fischer took a deep breath and began tracing an imaginary circle
into the top of the table that separated the two of us.
“Well, those other guys got their games, and guys like me, we got
our games. I didn’t grow up wanting to hit home runs. I grew up
wanting to kill people. And I used to soak up every bit of information
I could find on the guys who were good at playing my kind of game.”
It always made me sick to my stomach when guys like Fischer
referred to their habit of killing innocent people as a game. But clearly
that’s what it had become for BTK—a deadly game that nobody had
yet been able to stop. And by the summer of 1979, when the locals in
Wichita learned that the serial killer living in their midst wasn’t going
away, BTK finally graduated from rookie player to coach, from pupil