Since my retirement from the FBI, I’d become an independent investigator, called in to review homicide cases for both prosecutors and defense lawyers. My findings were sometimes at odds with those of my former employer—a fact that irked plenty of agents up and down the food chain at the FBI. Which was why my friend felt compelled to phone me—he knew no one else would.
“He’s back,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Who’s back?”
“Your UNSUB in Wichita,” he said.
I’d spent a lifetime hunting UNSUBs responsible for multiple murders, rapes, and a variety of other violent crimes. But the moment I heard the word Wichita, I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“BTK?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“More bodies?”
“No,” my friend said. “Just a letter to a local TV station with a one-page Xerox of some crime scene photos he must have taken and a driver’s license from the victim. Something seems to have flushed him out. It’s been years since this guy last surfaced. A lot of people thought he was dead or gone forever. It’s a real shock for the people of Wichita.”
It dawned on me that twenty years had passed since I’d last immersed myself in the case, which seemed unbelievable. Depending on how optimistic you are, twenty years represents a quarter of a man’s life—the time it takes for him to move from maturity to redundancy.
“You know, deep down, I never really believed he was dead,” I told my former compatriot.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “You always were such an optimist.”
After thanking my caller for his tip, I hung up and stared out the window of my study, out into the darkness. I caught myself wishing that I was back at the FBI, working my old job as a profiler. I knew I wouldn’t be involved in the case now that I was retired. My mind was on fire. It seemed so appropriate that this killer who I hadn’t thought about in years would reenter my life in the dead of night. Back when I was a field agent, we often chose to do the dirty work—stage a raid or arrest a dangerous felon—long after the sun had set. It was a time when even the most ruthless criminals would drop their guards. Years later, when I began doing my interviews with convicted violent offenders, I chose to drop by prisons at night, the loneliest, most isolated time inside a correctional facility. It was also the one time when I could usually count on these monsters wanting to talk.
Although my mind occasionally drifted back to Wichita and BTK, the last time I’d devoted any real time to thinking about this killer was in 1997, while putting together my book Obsession, which detailed the crimes and case histories of various serial killers, serial rapists, child molesters, and stalkers.
Any doubt that the BTK investigation hadn’t left its mark on me vanished when my cowriter and I decided to use the BTK case as the book’s first chapter. What I wrote was essentially a pared-down version of the analysis I created back in 1979, with the addition of ideas about the UNSUB unearthed during my 1984 consult with Wichita police. Because the case was still ongoing, I feared that my intimate account might generate so many false leads that Wichita police would be run ragged chasing each one down. So I changed the names, places, and dates in the story, choosing instead to locate the killer in a fictional town in the Northeast. I also never identified the UNSUB as BTK.
Yet despite all my fictional props, what I wrote must have struck a nerve with readers. Because not long after Obsession went on sale, I started receiving letters and e-mail from people informing me that although they realized the story was set in a fictional town, the suspect I described reminded them of someone they knew or had known. Most wondered whether I might be interested in following up on their tip or knew of a detective they could pass their information on to.
To promote the book, I traveled from city to city, giving lectures and readings and signing copies. I never could quite the shake the feeling that BTK might be sitting out in the audience at one of these engagements, especially the ones held in Kansas.
Did I fear for my safety? Hardly. The one thing I did know with certainty was that this guy was an absolute coward. He’d never in a million years be able to summon up the nerve to attempt any violence in such a public setting. His brand of terror was reserved solely for his victims, and he revealed it only when he knew they were completely helpless.
9
Close to two hours had passed, and still no sign of Ken Landwehr.
That didn’t surprise me. When a case breaks open, you do what you gotta do. There was many a night while I still worked for the FBI when I’d be sitting down to dinner with my family and the telephone would ring. A moment later I’d hear one of my daughters shout, “Dad, it’s for you . . . Somebody from your office needs to speak to you. NOW!”
I’d answer it, and the next thing I knew I’d be sitting on an airplane. Three days would pass before I returned to my home.
I got up from the bed, walked across the room, and grabbed Landwehr’s CD off the desk and stared at it. It was tucked inside a white plastic envelope. I sat down on the chair next to the desk and stared at it, wondering what it might tell me about Dennis Rader.
In the weeks before my arrival in Wichita, I’d begun piecing together some of the facts about Rader’s life that had gradually emerged through the police investigation and my own research. I’d located a number of his friends after obtaining a copy of the Wichita Heights High School yearbook from 1963, the year Rader graduated. I made a list of his classmates and began doing computer searches on each of the names in order to track down their phone numbers. After countless phone calls, I began to hit pay dirt.
A handful of Rader’s former friends, most of whom had never spoken publicly about Dennis, began offering up snippets from his life that hadn’t appeared anywhere in the police work or the media, little snapshots that I hoped to piece together into a massive collage that would give me a better understanding of the man who became BTK.
One person led me to the next. A few of his old friends cried as they dredged up their memories for me. All of them sounded dazed, dumbfounded, and horribly saddened by the nightmarish mess their one-time friend had made of his life.
A few more minutes passed.
I decided to slide the disc out of its plastic case.
“What the hell,” I mumbled. “Probably wouldn’t hurt to take a peek.”
I tapped the space bar on my laptop, awakening it from its slumber. I pushed the CD into the tiny slot, and a second later a folder icon appeared on my desktop. I opened it, saw dozens of other folders, and began clicking my way from one to the next. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the order of the files in each folder. Some contained scanned copies of drawings of women strapped to torture devices. Others held what appeared to be journal entries scrawled in blue ballpoint ink on scraps of notebook paper.
Scattered among all the folders were Polaroid snapshots. Rader had snapped most of them himself while engaged in various activities, most of which involved ropes tied around his neck, arms, and legs and gags shoved into his mouth. Sometimes he wore frilly dresses, blonde wigs, and clear plastic Halloween masks with large, pouty lips. Sometimes he wore only white briefs, pulled up high and tight on his otherwise naked, soft, pudgy body, as he dangled from the branches of trees barren of leaves.
The images were disturbing, a bit frightening, and ridiculous.
But what I was most interested in were Rader’s words. So I began reading.
The feelings and thoughts that set him apart from the rest of the world began when he was around three years old. According to one of his journal entries, that was when Dennis Rader’s first memory wrapped itself around him like a vine and began to squeeze and choke him.
Rader wrote that he never could recall all the details—at least not with the precision he could maintain with each of his ten murders. All he could remember was that he was about three years old when he walked into his mother’s bedroom and found her struggling on the bed, hopelessly entangled in
the twisted bed sheets wrapped around the wrought-iron headboard.
He had discovered her wrapped up in the sheets, her arms extended above her head, writhing, sobbing, and struggling to free herself. He claimed to have stood there in the doorway for what seemed like an eternity, watching her, feeling helpless, powerless to do anything about her situation.
How on earth could she have gotten caught up in such a predicament? Even after all the years that had elapsed between the event and when he wrote about it in his journal, he never could answer that question. But clearly, he acted out some facet of this memory in each of his murders. This image of his mother, lying in bed, half dressed, writhing and twisting in desperation, became his visual mantra.
In another folder, I spotted the transcripts from Rader’s interrogation session. The way Dennis Rader remembered it a few hours into his grilling by police, there had always been Raders in this section of the country. There probably always will be, he said. Unless, of course, they all decide to pack up and move out of the region because of what he did. He certainly wouldn’t blame them if they did. That was something he sometimes wondered about, during the last part of his life—the impact his actions might have on the ones he left behind.
His ancestors came over from Bavaria back in the 1800s. Rader’s kinfolk were good, solid people. They worked hard, farming the rich soil, trying to follow God’s word as best they could. The family’s name, derived from the German noun rat, means wheel. The earliest Raders, it seems, were employed as wheelwrights. When he was a boy and on into adulthood, Rader often drew pictures of those same large wooden wheels that his ancestors used to build. Only Dennis didn’t want to employ them for transportation. He dreamed about lashing women to them, then torturing his victims.
Dennis Lynn Rader was born just outside the tiny town of Columbus, Kansas, on March 9, 1945. When I typed the date into Google, I learned that at almost the exact moment of his birth, 350 B-29s dropped 1,500 metric tons of incendiary bombs onto Tokyo, resulting in a firestorm that killed over 100,000 people.
Dennis was the first of the four sons of William, a former U.S. Marine, and Dorothea Rader. His parents grew up in the area—William had served as the captain of the high school football team, and Dorothea had been chosen as the school’s head cheerleader. Dennis was baptized at the Zion Lutheran Church in Pittsburgh, Kansas. His first four or five years were spent living on the wheat, dairy, and cattle farm owned by his paternal grandparents, who also happened to be cousins. Space was tight, as the entire brood lived under the same roof.
It was here, roughly 110 miles west of Wichita, that Rader first began to think that he might be different from other people. It was here the secrets began. Sitting on the back porch of the farmhouse, he would often watch his grandmother go through the ritual of twisting the heads off chickens, before frying them up for dinner. The headless fowl would dance about the dusty yard, blood spurting from the empty socket at the top of their neck.
Rader wrote in his journal that the spectacle caused a curious sensation to flutter up inside his stomach—vaguely sexual and thoroughly enjoyable. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that the feeling was something akin to standing on the edge of a high-rise rooftop, one without any guardrail, and peering over into the blurry void below.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, that was when it started. In the impressionable young synapses of Rader’s developing brain, he began to equate death and its various associates with the intoxicating mystery of sexual arousal. One became inextricably linked to the other.
I learned from a source that Rader often spent his summers at the family farm of his cousin, Larry Sutherland, in Columbus, Kansas. Sutherland’s father, according to one of Rader’s close friends who—like many of my sources—would speak to me only on the condition that I kept his name out of my book, became the first true figure of authority in Rader’s life. He worked as the town’s sheriff, and Rader recalled that he carried himself with the confident swagger of Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti western days. Rader looked up to his son, also named Larry, who was five years his senior, as the older brother he never had.
Larry was a bright kid, and the two of them would often build model airplanes together and fantasize about one day becoming pilots. But there was something else about Sutherland that forever intrigued Dennis. According to what Rader told one of my sources, it involved an incident that occurred one sweltering summer afternoon on Larry’s farm. As a boy, Rader claimed to have heard his parents speak about it in hushed tones, and, like the image of his mother trapped in her bed, it became a powerful source of mystery for Dennis. It marked his first true brush with death. According to my source, Sutherland was allegedly swimming with another friend in a pond on the family property. At some point during that afternoon, the other boy disappeared beneath the water and never returned to the surface. What happened next Rader claimed to have pieced together from listening to his parents’ brief conversations on the matter. According to Dennis, when cousin Larry returned back home, his folks demanded to know where his friend had disappeared to.
“He dove down into the pond,” Larry explained.
“And then what?” his father the sheriff had asked.
“I walked back home,” the boy replied.
“But what happened to your friend?” he demanded.
“He didn’t come back up,” Sutherland told him. “He stayed underwater, I guess.”
The boy’s body was allegedly later found floating just below the surface of the water.
For the rest of his days, whenever Rader embarked in the pages of his journal or with police on one of his half-assed quests for the roots of what made him so different, he always stumbled back to that memory of cousin Larry. How, he wondered, could someone be so nonchalant about the death of another human being? Or at least that was how Dennis perceived it.
Time and time again, I’d asked myself that same question, trying to understand the relationship between how a particular incident in someone’s life might have led to his decision to kill. Long ago, I realized that the biggest mistake I could make when analyzing a case was to assume that the sexual predator I was trying to catch possessed the same feelings and thinking processes as mine. He doesn’t. Yet I sensed that perhaps what was so interesting about this episode in Rader’s childhood was that it marked the first time he’d ever witnessed someone else acting out in a manner that he thought mirrored his own mixed-up feelings, feelings he had never been able to express.
One of Dennis’s childhood friends told me that when Rader was around five, his family moved to Wichita, which had become something of an industrial boomtown since the end of World War II.
Little Dennis’s father, William Rader, was a big man who expected his boys to be decent and respectful to their elders. He landed a job at the Kansas Gas and Electric power plant, located about ten minutes from the family’s house. He worked long hours, sometimes pulling double shifts or working graveyard, doing maintenance around the plant and perpetually monitoring the myriad gauges that sprouted out of the walls and pipes. Rader looked up to his old man. In his mind, he was tough, but fair. He wrote that his only complaint was about the times when his dad would return home from working one of his crazy shifts, disappear into his bedroom, and shout for everybody to pipe down so he could get some shut-eye.
Dennis’s pals from that period in his life told me they recalled that his mother, Dorothea, had a certain movie-star quality about her. When she got dressed up, which she always seemed to for her job as a bookkeeper at Leeker’s Family Foods, the neighborhood kids thought she bore an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Wood. To catch a glimpse of her sitting at her desk in the middle of the grocery, elevated up on a little platform above the floor, made them feel as though they’d suddenly been plunked down in the middle of a Hollywood movie set. Rader, according to various sources, has both confirmed and denied that on the rare occasions that Dorothea resorted to spanking, he experienced that same familiar sensation in
his crotch that he’d first felt while watching his grandma wring the necks off chickens.
By all accounts, the young Dennis Rader fit in well with the simple, don’t-rock-the-boat sensibility so prevalent in Kansas’s largest city in the 1950s. By the time third grade rolled around, no one was surprised when he was picked to play Joseph for the Riverview Grade School’s Christmas play.
The Rader family lived in a three-bedroom house in the 4300 block of North Seneca Street. Despite being located on the north-western edge of town, the neighborhood had a fairly rural feel to it. Rader hung out with a close-knit group of nearly a dozen kids. When school let out, they’d could often be found walking home together and exploring the sandy banks of the Little Arkansas River, which snaked its way through town. On nearly every afternoon, most of the boys played baseball in a nearby empty field.
But not Dennis. He wasn’t much of a sportsman. By the time he was nine years old, his friends told me, he wasn’t much of anything—other than a quiet kid who seemed to have a knack for never standing out. And that was why his absences from those neighborhood ball games never felt odd. Even if he had participated in those games, chances are that nobody would have noticed him. He kept to himself, but not because he was shy. Rader had other reasons. Reasons that only he knew about.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 17