I had a fairly good idea of what happened next. Other serial killers I have interviewed over the years have described to me the ritual they’d go through when killing an animal. Rader would be no different, I told myself. Because his crimes had a sexual component to them and were directed against women, he struck me as the type who would kill cats, as opposed to dogs. But if he really concentrated, he could transform the animal into something else. He’d stare into its eyes and watch as it changed itself into a human girl.
Then he’d whisper to it, telling it all the terrible things he was going to do to it. And as the animal’s brain slowly died from lack of oxygen, Rader would masturbate, then probably try to ejaculate on the body. When it was all over, he’d untie the animal and, on the way back to his house, toss it in a ditch or leave it on the side of the road. Leaving it strung up inside the barn would have been far too risky.
One of the things Rader would have enjoyed best about killing animals was how powerful he felt afterward, how high it made him. Because he had no other way to achieve that rush of power, he had to steal it away from others. So he started with animals. He loved the sensation of it. It made up for all the ways he felt different from the other kids. It not only leveled the playing field but made him feel better than everyone else.
Over the years, I’ve learned that many serial killers escalated their violence, moving from inanimate objects to animals and then to people. In fact, torturing and killing animals is a type of prep school for potential sex offenders and killers.
Despite his love of violence, Rader wasn’t much of a fighter. This wasn’t because he was scared to trade blows with other kids. His reticence had more to do with his always seeming to have other uses for his energy. Besides, from what he’d observed in the past, fights rarely went down the way they did in the movies. Physical altercations were messy affairs. In a fight, one risked losing control—the last thing Rader would ever want to have happen. He’d worked far too hard, spent far too much time crafting his image, to let down his guard like that.
Most of the time, Rader was content to use words instead of his fists. Years later, as BTK, he used this same approach when convincing victims to go along with him and allow him to tie them up. He used words rather than a blitz attack because he wanted his victims to be conscious when he played out his bondage fantasies.
One of his high school chums told me about the time when another student cut in front of Rader in line; he never lost his cool. One morning when everyone was lined up in front of the cafeteria for lunch, the school’s biggest jock butted in front of Rader and his buddies. One of Rader’s pals recalled how the group quickly decided not to make a big deal out of the incident. But Rader wasn’t the type to ignore such an obvious infraction of the social code. So he tapped the guy on the shoulder and informed him, in the most matter-of-fact way, that he didn’t like the jock’s cutting in front of him. Rader didn’t have a mean look on his face, said the friend. And he never raised his voice. But before anyone knew what had happened, the interloper mumbled a terse apology and walked to the back of the line.
Rader would also do the same thing to anyone who bothered his youngest brother, Paul, who his friends all referred to as Paulie. If there was ever a time when Rader’s softer side came out, it was around Paulie, who was always a small child. That was why his older brother often seemed to have him at his side. He reportedly couldn’t stomach the thought of the other kids razzing Paulie because of his size. On more than one occasion, Rader walked straight up to one of Paulie’s tormentors and, with his usual calm and level voice, stared unblinkingly into his foe’s eyes and said, “I don’t appreciate you teasing Paulie . . . You need to stop now, or I’m going to have to do something about it.” After a while, kids no longer bothered teasing the youngest Rader boy. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to endure Rader’s unnerving, matter-of-fact routine.
There may have been another reason why Rader’s words seemed to carry such weight. The other kids understood that if he had no alternative, Dennis actually did know how to use his fists. According to a friend, back when Rader was in grade school, his father gave him a bit of advice about how to handle those clowns who seemed hell-bent on picking a fight. If he ever encountered one of those guys, old man Rader instructed his eldest son, he needed to learn how to defend himself. So one afternoon, he showed his son how to punch and where to aim his blows on the other guy’s body.
It wasn’t long after that, when Rader was in eighth grade, that the class bully set his sights on the him. All morning long, he picked on and badgered Dennis, calling him names and shoving him around in front of the other kids. Rader finally snapped shortly after lunch, after retreating into a restroom with a buddy, partly to get away from the bully who had decided to make his life hell. It wasn’t long before his tormentor discovered him and quickly resumed picking on him. And it was then, according to one of his childhood friends, that Rader remembered his father’s advice.
He balled up his fists and announced, “That’s enough.”
The fight reportedly didn’t last long, but Rader matched the kid blow for blow. And after all the punches had been thrown, nobody had won or lost, but nobody else ever picked on Rader again.
Back when Rader was in grade school, Friday nights were always a big deal for him. That was the night the local TV station, KAKE, played all those old horror movies. The show was called Rodney and the Host, and it centered around a guy who looked like Boris Karloff, known as the Host, and Rodney, who resembled some sort of a hunchback.
According to his friends, Rader loved being scared. Back then, there were nights when he and his buddies would see who could stand being scared the most. Rader always seemed to win. The other guys would be forced to shut their eyes, but Rader couldn’t get enough. The next week at school, when his friends would still be having nightmares, Rader would be carrying on about all the monsters and evil doctors he’d watched on that previous Friday night. For the rest of the week, he was beside himself trying to imagine what horrors Rodney and his sidekick would serve up for their next show.
A few years later, when high school rolled around, his buddies no longer wanted to spend their Friday nights watching horror flicks. By then, they’d moved on to other pursuits, such as the regular Friday night ritual of hanging out at a place known as “The Big Spot.” That was where a lot of the guys in town would end up after telling their parents they were spending the night at a buddy’s house. They’d drive out to a shallow bend on the Little Arkansas River, build a big bonfire, and drink beer. Often a bunch of local girls would join them. Around midnight after the girls went home, the guys would drink more beer, shoot the shit, then fall asleep on the sand.
But friends recall that Rader never seemed interested in showing up at the popular hangout, which at the time didn’t seem all that odd because he was always working at a nearby grocery. Then again, there was something peculiar about his absence, because he certainly would have been welcome there. After all, Rader wasn’t one of those typically hopeless social basket cases. Although he certainly did seem . . . well, different. He was one of those guys you could convince yourself you knew. But deep down, if you ever bothered to really think about him, you’d have to admit that you had no idea who he really was—and that was just the way he liked it.
Still, Rader was hardly an automaton. He enjoyed a good laugh, but he wasn’t the type to tell a joke. Yet he knew how to make his buddies laugh. It’s just that the gags he employed were a bit . . . well, dark. And the laughter that followed always had more to do with a sense of relief than with hilarity.
One of Dennis Rader’s favorite gags, according to a friend, involved a trick he would play on his buddies while cruising around town in his old Chevy, the one he spent so much time tinkering on. It always happened the same way. He’d have a few of his pals with him, and he’d be driving beside the railroad tracks that ran through town. Everybody would be carrying on, yakking away, not paying a lick of attention to the scenery rolling by
outside.
Nobody, of course, except Rader.
He always knew exactly where he was. And when the moment was just right, he’d crank the wheel and drive over the railroad crossing. Only just before his front tires would come in contact with the rails, Rader would let out the kind of fake train whistle that not even Boxcar Willie could match. It sounded just like the ear-splitting sonic blast a diesel locomotive might make seconds before it came tearing through the side of your car, annihilating everything in its path. It was enough, recalled one of his friends, to make the hair on the back of everyone’s neck stand straight up.
Afterwards, Rader would roar with laughter, chuckling over the wide-eyed look of panic he glimpsed on the faces of his pals, who believed they were seconds away from death. It was all too perfect. Nobody ever saw it coming.
If Dennis Rader’s childhood was spent exploring the landscape of that dark, violent world within his head, his teenage years were consumed with another type of passion—hiding it.
By the time he was a teenager, he’d sensed that whatever this thing was that lurked inside him, it needed to be hidden. To let it out in front of others would be tantamount to suicide. Which was why he loved retreating to the empty barns near his house, where he could not only dream of his bondage fantasies but also act them out on animals.
When it came to cloaking his true identity, Rader was a quick study, a natural. This was when he first began to feel like a spy, as though he had two identities, his ostensible life as a straight shooter and his secret life as a perpetrator of violent sexual fantasies. Keeping the two lives and two identities separate wasn’t really that hard to pull off, if he really focused on it. Still, there were a few moments when he slipped up and let his guard down in front of someone else, when he allowed himself to get so caught up in the excitement of the moment that the next thing he knew, the darkness inside his head had grabbed hold of him and carried him away. It scared him when that happened, when he lost control like that and allowed someone else to glimpse that secret part of him.
According to one of his high school friends, this happened one evening when he and Rader were driving back from a youth group gathering at their church.
Rader loved to drive. His friends told me that acquiring a driving permit was incredibly important for him. The reason, I realized, wasn’t so much that he equated a license with freedom. It had more to with the fact that driving represented power and control. It meant he could borrow his folks’ car and, in a few sweet minutes, vanish from the world he believed was always watching him. He could drive out into the country and do all those secret things he so enjoyed.
The night of this incident, patches of thick fog rolled over the fields outside Wichita like smoke. Rader had just attended a church youth group meeting and was driving down the road with one of his friends, who recounted the story to me during an interview the week before my arrival in town.
The friend told me that Rader was usually a careful driver, always in control and strangely serious about the responsibilities that came with operating a vehicle. But something odd happened on that particular night as he and Rader were driving down a deserted country road near Wichita. A group of guys who’d also been at the church pulled up next to him in another car. They started honking and flashing their lights.
Rader looked at them and laughed as the other vehicle shot off ahead, disappearing into the darkness. The glowing red of taillights were just visible in the fog covering the empty dirt road.
It was at that moment the change occurred. All at once, Rader’s face tensed. His eyes, which had begun to bulge, burned with an intensity that his friend sitting in the passenger seat had never seen before. Rader stomped on the accelerator, gunning the engine in his parents’ ’58 Plymouth station wagon so hard that his buddy felt as though he were sitting in a rocket.
“SLOW DOWN, DENNIS,” he yelled.
But Rader didn’t hear him. He was clenching his teeth so tightly that the muscles in his jaws were visible. His buddy couldn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t figure out where Rader had gone. What on earth had happened to him? he wondered. They were barreling down the bumpy road at over seventy miles per hour by the time they caught up with the other car, then flew past it.
“OK, SO YOU PASSED ’EM,” his friend shouted, hoping Rader would come to his senses. “YOU CAN SLOW DOWN NOW.”
But Rader was still hunched over the wheel, squeezing it so tightly that he seemed to be trying to crush it. His buddy just sat there, wishing to God he were somewhere else.
“COME ON, CUT IT OUT,” he pleaded. “THIS IS CRAZY, DENNIS. CAN YOU HEAR ME? YOU GOTTA STOP NOW.”
The headlights of the other car had long ago faded away behind them in the fog. Yet Rader kept his foot pressed firmly down on the accelerator, even as the road began to kink and weave in increasingly unpredictable directions. Something bad was on the verge of happening, his buddy thought to himself. There was no getting through to Rader. The lines were all down. So he just gave up trying to talk any sense into him. And because they were moving far too fast for him to jump, he braced for the worst.
A few minutes later, Rader missed a turn in the road, and the station wagon careened over a dirt embankment and plunged into a shallow ditch, caving in the right side of the vehicle. The impact caused his pal to slam his head into the ceiling, temporarily knocking him out. By the time he felt himself coming to, he saw Rader staring at the bashed-in grillwork, hysterical, sobbing.
A few minutes later, they sat together on the roadside, waiting for their friends to catch up. All Rader could talk about was the hell he would surely catch upon arriving home and breaking the news to his folks.
Roughly forty-five minutes later when the group pulled up in front of the Rader family home, Rader jumped out of the car, wailing and frantically shouting about how he’d wrecked the family station wagon. He failed to mention anything about his injured friend. The other kids sat there watching him go to pieces in the front yard, then they left him there and drove his dazed passenger to a nearby hospital, where doctors treated him for a concussion.
His injured buddy told me that he never could make sense out of Rader’s strange behavior that night. How could anyone be that oblivious to another person’s pain, he wondered. It was as if nothing else mattered to Dennis Rader other than Dennis Rader.
The incident was one of the most revealing moments in Rader’s young life. Yet it would take decades before the rest of the world understood just how selfish a person he actually was.
Besides his church youth group, Rader was active in Boy Scouts. He liked the structure of the organization, the order and predictability. I bet he liked the uniforms too. Rader showed a lifelong propensity for paramilitary, police, or, as in his case, low-level municipal enforcer uniforms. He felt safe in the Boy Scout culture and environment. He slowly but systematically worked his way from one merit badge to the next.
Scouting also allowed him to put his fascination with string and bindings to productive use, especially when it came time to begin learning how to tie knots. Before long he was showing the same kind of enthusiasm for his knots as he had on that snowy afternoon in sixth grade when he sketched out his ghastly, deadly girl trap. Those close to him couldn’t help but notice how proud he appeared to be of his skills, once displaying them on a board at a meeting, the names of each creation written out on tiny pieces of paper pinned beneath each knot.
His favorite, according to one of his friends, was the clove hitch.
“It’s one of the most elementary types of hitch knots,” he once explained. “But what I like about it is that it’s quick to tie and easy to slip over something. Additionally, it’s one of the easiest to untie, even after a load has been applied.”
One summer, Rader traveled to New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch with his troop and embarked on a fifty-mile hiking expedition through the Sangre de Cristo Range of the Rocky Mountains. Yet Rader, who was a stickler for details and for following instructions,
just couldn’t bring himself to abide by one of the most stringent requirements: nobody’s backpack could weigh more than forty-five pounds. The way his friend interpreted it, Rader had clearly taken the Boy Scout motto of always being prepared to heart, insisting on bringing a pack filled with nearly seventy pounds of gear and supplies. The troop leaders were hardly thrilled by the young hiker’s enormous pack, but they told him he could bring it—provided he carry it during the entire trek.
He did. And if it was ever too heavy, he never let on.
But then, Rader hardly divulged much of what was going on inside him to anyone. God only knows what he had stashed away inside his pack. I have a hunch it wasn’t survival gear he carried, but gear for his own self-pleasure. Because the one thing I knew about Rader was that, even at this young age, he’d developed a serious yearning for isolation. It’s likely he anticipated that this trip might provide him the opportunity to act out his self-bondage fantasies while others slept.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 19