One week later, Wichita police lieutenant Bernie Drowatzky arrived at Quantico. I walked him upstairs to a quiet corner of the library, and Drowatzky spread his crime scene photos across the table. “Let’s go through this murder by murder,” I said. “The only caveat is that you can’t tell me about any potential suspects you might be looking at.”
The veteran cop frowned and, in a subdued voice, said, “We don’t have any suspects.”
Drowatzky remained silent as I thumbed through the grisly photos. The fact that he’d traveled all this way to seek my help told me one thing: the Wichita Police Department was grasping for anyone or anything that could help steer them in a direction they hadn’t thought of.
“We’ve never run across anything like this before,” Drowatzky said. “We normally solve our murders in Wichita.”
At the time, my colleagues and I were trying to acquire answers to the formula of Why + How = Who that I believed could help investigators crack these often frustrating, hard-to-solve cases.
Why, we wondered, would someone want to kill multiple victims over a period of days, months, and, in the case of BTK, many years? Why do they target certain types of victims? How do they prepare for their crimes? What sort of impact do their actions have on them?
Are they born to kill? Did some childhood trauma warp them, causing them to turn violent? Or is their homicidal appetite a combination of these two factors? What factors led to their identification and arrest? Did they get sloppy, or was their capture a result of stellar detective work? Our interview protocol involved thousands of questions and stretched fifty-seven pages in length. The insight we gleaned from these killers provided us with a priceless understanding of how the mind of a serial killer worked.
From what police had been able to piece together from BTK’s crime scenes, it was clear that this killer maintained a high level of control over his victims. This form of dominance over another person appeared to be a big turn-on for BTK. He tied his victims up, using rope or whatever else was handy at the scene. When it came time to kill, his preferred method involved either a garrote or a plastic bag tied over the head. He often arranged the bodies of his victims in poses reminiscent of a detective magazine cover. Before fleeing, he would sometimes masturbate on or near his victims.
Among other things, in the pages of the analysis I wrote in 1979, I emphasized to police that BTK’s ego would eventually lead to his downfall. Their job, I wrote, was to stroke his ego in public whenever possible, to show him the respect he craved, in the hopes that he would continue to communicate with them. The way I saw it, the best chance that law enforcement had to get a handle on this killer was to keep him talking. Exactly what police did with my analysis, I have no idea. I had to jump to the next case on the front burner. If they needed me, all they had to do was pick up a phone and call me.
In October 1984, the Wichita Police paid a second visit to my office. Seven years had passed since BTK’s last known murder, and police still weren’t any closer to taking this sick killer off the street.
The Wichita Police Department had recently formed an eight-person BTK task force, known as the Ghostbusters. The longtime chief was retiring, but before leaving his post, he wanted the case solved and closed. So he assembled a team of six crack investigators, a captain, and a lieutenant and instructed them to reopen the files and sift through the mounds of crime scene photos, witness statements, police and autopsy reports, and even the analysis I’d written on the case five years earlier. After three months, they were desperate to ensure that the investigation didn’t hit another brick wall, so they reached out again to our BSU. A week after telephoning to ask if my unit could offer any assistance, two task force detectives—Paul Dotson and Mark Richardson—arrived at the FBI Academy toting several pounds of new crime scene photos and various reports. I met them in the lobby of the forensic science building, where my office was located. At the time, I oversaw a staff of six criminal profilers.
“Let’s go to the conference room,” I told them. “Several of my colleagues are waiting there for you. I want you to walk us through the case.”
As Dotson and Richardson passed out the grim, gritty eight-by-ten photos and readied the slide projector, I explained just how far we’d come with our criminal profiling program since the last visit by a Wichita homicide detective. Then, for the next eight hours, they outlined the basic facts of the case, describing the victims, communiqués the killer had sent, medical examiner’s reports, and the various neighborhoods where the murders had occurred.
I listened to their presentation, yet when they’d finished I had many more questions than answers. Despite being considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on serial murderers, I’d never encountered a case quite like BTK’s.
Six years had passed since he had written to police, gloating over one of his murders. How, I wondered, was this publicity-starved psychopath able to go underground for so many years? Was he still killing? What specifically did he do sexually, physically, and psychologically to his victims? Why hadn’t he been apprehended?
Together with four of my colleagues, I ingested the information from our briefing. A few days later, we sat down with the detectives again, and, during a marathon skull session, we provided them with a detailed verbal profile of what we had concluded about BTK, given the limited information we had at that point, along with some proactive ideas that we believed might work to flush him out.
The Ghostbusters task force was disbanded in 1987. Because BTK was only one of thousands of cases I worked on during those years, I never learned exactly how many of the ideas generated from our analysis were actually ever used in the investigation. But one fact was frustratingly clear: by the time I retired from the FBI in June 1995, the unknown subject (UNSUB) in Wichita had yet to be identified. Was he dead? Was he incarcerated for another crime? Had he moved away from Wichita? Or was there another reason to explain why he’d gone underground?
I’d begun to believe that I’d never get the answers to my questions until one evening in March 2004, when a former colleague telephoned. At the time, my wife, Pam, and I were living together with our oldest daughter, Erika, twenty-nine, who was living at home, studying to become a nurse. Her sister, Lauren, twenty-four, was finishing up her third year of law school. My son, Jed, eighteen, was getting ready to graduate from high school. My family had just finished dinner, but I was seated at my desk in the study, talking to a rape victim who had contacted me through my Web site. No sooner had I ended my conversation with that sobbing, shell-shocked woman than my phone rang.
“He’s back,” said the voice on the other end of the line. It belonged to a FBI profiler I’d hired and trained shortly before leaving the bureau.
News that BTK had resurfaced and had just sent the local newspaper a packet containing a photo snapped of a murder he’d committed in 1991 both excited and disappointed me. My gut told me that it would be just a matter of time before he tripped himself up and police nabbed him. But I also knew that because I was no longer employed by the FBI, I’d have to wait years before I’d ever get a crack at interviewing him.
Over the next eleven months, Wichita police used a technique I’d first tried out in the 1980s to solve a murder in San Diego. It involved creating what I called a “super-cop,” the kind of law enforcement officer who could stand up at press conferences and talk directly to the UNSUB, eventually building up such a rapport with the suspect that he allows himself to take chances and risks he wouldn’t take otherwise.
Which was exactly what happened with BTK. He let his guard down. He began to believe that he and the police were, in a sense, comrades and colleagues. He made the mistake of believing that he could trust them to tell him the truth, and that led to his downfall. In February 2005, police arrested Dennis Rader, a seemingly mild-mannered, married, churchgoing father of two grown children. He was a municipal employee; he worked for the city of Wichita as a compliance officer, handing out tickets to people when their lawns grew too high
or they held a garage sale without obtaining the necessary permits. And, just as we feared, he had continued to kill. His body count had climbed to ten victims.
Six months after his arrest, I watched intently as Rader spoke at his televised sentencing hearing, calmly detailing whom he had killed and how. But what I really wanted to know was why.
Several years had passed since I’d written a book. I’d been waiting for the right kind of story to come along, something that I could use to tell readers about how the inside of a serial killer’s head works and how other serial killers might be stopped. As I watched Dennis Rader’s performance in court on that day in August, I knew I’d finally found my inspiration. It was the kind of story that comes along once in a career. BTK was one of the very first serial killers I encountered whose appetite for death set me on a journey into the heart of darkness. His career spanned mine. He was always there, always lurking on the periphery. So when the opportunity came to finally put the pieces together, I jumped at the chance.
Yet for all the years of study and analysis I’d done on serial killers, nothing about Rader made sense to me: Who was this guy? Why did killing mean so much to him? How could he be married, raise two kids, and also be such a heartless monster, such a sick sexual pervert? Why did he go underground for so many years? How was it that this killer could be elected president of his church? Why was no one able to glimpse his real identity? Is there anything that could have been done during all those years that would have led sooner to his arrest? Why did he finally come out of hiding and get caught?
So I picked up the phone, called my literary agent, Liza Dawson, and told her all about BTK, detailing my involvement with the case and how, with my police contacts on both the local and state level, I’d try to secure a prison interview with Rader. Within weeks, she made an arrangement with Jossey-Bass, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, to publish the book, and I soon embarked on my odyssey into the dark, twisted mind of Dennis Rader.
At the time, I had no idea just how rough that journey would be. It quickly became plagued by so many problems—both personal and political—that I began to lose hope of ever getting my questions answered. My supposedly perfect story soon emerged as the most arduous, frustrating one I’d ever experienced, researched, and written.
Yet by the time it was all over, I’d become the only author to talk to Rader. Part of the reason was that Rader wanted to talk to me. He knew me and my work very well and was anxious to communicate about it.
I found out that during the years Dennis Rader had been leading his Jekyll-and-Hyde existence, he’d read many of my books. In one of them, Obsession, published in 1998, he had read my profile of BTK.
He apparently found what I’d written intriguing, and nine months after his arrest, he wrote a critique of my analysis. I eventually read it while I was researching this book; it proved both fascinating and disturbing.
What you’re about to read is a story of a haunting journey through the mind of one of America’s most elusive serial killers. In researching this book on BTK, I was handed the keys and invited into the kingdom of his convoluted, empty, and horrific inner world. I entered his life, his point of view, his relationships, and the world he lived in. Besides speaking with his friends, confidants, and others whose lives intersected with Rader’s, I spent a year getting to know a number of law enforcement officials who had tracked this killer for decades. They led me through the actual places—Rader’s home and office, the rooms and streets, the basements and automobiles and phone booths—and every aspect of their investigation into the killings that terrorized the Wichita community.
But most revealing of all, they granted me a rare glimpse into the reams of evidence seized from Rader’s house and office after his arrest. Never in my career had I been given access to such an enormous stash. It was mind blowing. The material, which included Rader’s personal journals, drawings, Polaroid snapshots, and written accounts of his crimes, provided me with a startling, often sickening look at this cold, calculating killer.
Climbing inside the heads of monsters is my specialty. It was something I did on a daily basis during my twenty-five-year tenure with the FBI. My work there—along with the research I continue to do—allowed me to understand killers like Rader far better than they themselves could ever hope to. With this book, I’ve pushed my criminology skills in entirely new directions in order to do the following:1. Tell the story of why Rader started killing
2. Describe how he was able to so effectively compartmentalize his life
3. Explain why—at the peak of his ability to terrorize—he seemingly disappeared into the shadows
4. Detail how the police caught him and what we’ve learned from him that can help us catch serial killers sooner, before they can become the next BTK
If you’ve read my books before, you know that education and prevention are the cornerstones of my writings. I want people to understand that Rader—and those like him—don’t happen overnight. As he told me in our exclusive prison interview, he not only had become obsessed by violent thoughts at a very young age but had already begun acting them out while still a young boy.
I truly believe that parents and teachers should be able to recognize certain behavioral “red flags,” alerting us that a potentially dangerous problem is festering.
In the end, Rader proved a horrifying but fascinating study, allowing me to glimpse an altogether new variation of the homicidal mind. Having said that, it makes me sick that he was able to escape the ultimate punishment he deserved and not be executed for his heinous crimes.
Shortly before noted serial killer Ted Bundy was electrocuted in 1989, a group of behavioral scientists wanted me to make a public announcement that Bundy should be studied and not put to death. They were less than thrilled when I told them, “It would only take a few days to study Ted Bundy. After that, he should receive his just rewards.”
I’m glad Dennis Rader lived long enough to speak with me and provide me with the answers I first started asking back in 1974. But about what happens to him now, I truly could not care less. Perhaps he’ll commit suicide? Or maybe a fellow inmate, hoping to acquire a bit of notoriety in prison circles, will snuff out his sad, empty life?
Whatever fate awaits Rader, the chronicle of his days, the exclusive account of his crimes, and the exploration into his mind are waiting for you in the pages of this book. I trust you’ll find the odyssey of this enigmatic killer both terrifying and enlightening.
It’s a story I’ve been waiting to tell for more than three decades.
ACT ONE
My Lifelong Hunt for BTK
1
Somewhere inside my head, the murder played itself out the way it always did in my dreams. His hands were wrapped around her throat—patiently, relentlessly squeezing the life away from her. Blood vessels in the whites of her eyes ruptured from the pressure building up inside her head, creating hemorrhages that resembled faint red and yellow flowers.
She never thought it would end like this. But then who really does? And still he continued to squeeze. His hands and fingers were powerful enough to prevent the blood from flowing through the carotid arteries that snaked up either side of her neck. But to compress the vertebral arteries that allowed the blood to drain from her brain, he needed to twist her head at just the correct angle. So he lifted her torso a few inches off the mattress and went about his business. It was almost over—even amid the chaos, she could sense this. So she used what remained of her strength to try to claw his face. But he’d already considered that option and had tied her arms and legs to the wooden bedposts. She never laid a finger on him.
After a few more moments, her hyoid bone cracked. The sound was similar to that of a twig snapping. It was only a matter of time now. A spasm-like shudder rippled through her nude body, followed by a trickle of blood dripping from her nostrils . . .
“Jesus,” I muttered, sitting up in bed, wiping the sweat from my eyes. “I gotta get a grip.”
My heart was p
ounding, thumping madly. For a moment, I wondered if I was having a heart attack, but the vision of the strangled woman’s face quickly returned. Just another god-awful nightmare.
That face—I’d been seeing that face and hundreds like it for the past couple years now. Almost every night they came to visit me when I fell asleep. Each was in the midst of being brutally murdered—strangled, stabbed, shot, beaten, poisoned. All of them were people I’d come to know only after they’d been killed.
Welcome to my life, circa October 1984. For the past five years I’d worked myself to the point of physical and mental exhaustion while helping create the FBI’s elite criminal profiling unit. Back when I started with the bureau in 1970, criminal profiling was seen as a bunch of snake oil, something spoken about only in whispers. But over the course of the next decade and a half, I and a few other visionary, bullheaded souls like Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood had worked tirelessly to prove that criminal personality profiling could provide a legitimate, effective crime-fighting tool. Investigators from police departments around the globe turned to me and my unit after they’d hit a brick wall. We examined crime scenes and created profiles of the perpetrators, describing their habits and predicting their next moves.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 2