The entire call lasted fifteen seconds. In his journal he wrote that as he hung up the phone, he mumbled to himself afterwards, “Maybe no one will recognize my voice.”
A few nights later, while watching TV with Paula, the recording of the call was played on TV for the umpteenth time. Brian was asleep, and Paula was tired. She listened as the voice of Nancy Fox’s killer drifted out of their TV set.
After a few seconds of reflection, she commented, “He sounds just like you.”
Dennis felt his heart begin thumping madly. He did his best to look cool and calm, as though the mere idea that his wife believed that his voice resembled that of the sick and twisted man responsible for Fox’s death was too ludicrous even to be worthy of a comment. But deep down he was in a panic. When he finally glanced over at Paula, she was still gazing at the TV screen. Her comment, he concluded, was nothing more than a bit of idle chat. If she truly believed he was a murderer, she wouldn’t still be sitting beside him in the family room. That phone call to police kept Rader on edge for years, he later claimed. He was forever paranoid that someday somebody would put it all together. But no one did, and as time passed, so did the paranoia.
In an entry penned months after the murder, he likened himself to a submarine loaded with deadly torpedoes. He had surfaced just long enough to claim another victim. But now that his mission was complete, he was ready to descend back into the depths and head back out into open water.
15
I needed a drink. By now it was the middle of the night; Landwehr had yet to return. I was still scrolling through Rader’s writings, and I was thirsty. I needed a shot of something. Vodka would be nice. I wanted to feel something course through my body, to wake me up from this numbing world of words penned by a psychopath.
Years before, I shared a bottle of vodka with a Russian police chief. After polishing off nearly all of it, he recounted the story of a serial killer he once tracked.
“There had been many killings, all decapitations,” he told me. “So we found a suspect, brought him in, questioned him, and, when it appeared we had found our killer, we walked him behind the police station and placed a bullet into his brain. But when the killings continued, we knew that perhaps we hadn’t considered all the facts in the case. So we found another suspect, a good one. But still more killings we had. . . . Finally, after four suspects and four bullets, the killings, they stopped.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “We don’t do things like that here,” I informed the official. He shook his head in disgust, waving my comment away as though it were a gnat.
“That, I think, is why you Americans have so many serial killers,” he said.
I glanced across the room. The digital clock glowed 1:45. In fifteen minutes, the tavern down the street from my hotel room would shut its doors. I put my computer to sleep. Five minutes later, I was seated at the bar. Vodka, for some reason, didn’t sound that appealing anymore.
“A glass of Chardonnay,” I told the bartender, “and two cups of coffee.”
I arranged the glasses in front of me and drank them down in quick succession, noticing how nice the liquids felt sliding down my throat.
Twenty minutes later, I was back at my desk, reading about Rader’s descent into middle age. As I sifted my way through the scrawled pages of his journals, I could feel the empty desperation of his words, how he’d begun to sense that his days were ticking by like mile markers on I-135, one after another, running off toward a horizon that had begun to loom so close he could practically touch it.
If there was anything more pathetic than a serial killer, I thought, it’s an aging serial killer.
The overall impression that I gleaned from Rader’s journal entries from this period was that he’d begun to feel weighed down by life. Having to keep everything bottled up inside—all those horrible yet thrilling secrets—made his heart flutter with excitement whenever he let them play out in his brain. Most of the time, he felt like a spy, forever walking around undercover, watching and waiting, always ready for action, perpetually on the lookout, always wondering if the cops were closing in on him or if someone had stumbled on one of his “hidey holes,” where he stashed all his journals and other mementos from his kills.
The life of a spy suited him, though. He’d grown used to it. After all, he’d spent most of his life keeping his real self bottled up inside him the way his grandmother used to put pickles in mason jars. It was one of the things that helped him survive this long. What bothered him, though, was that he needed to erect such a big façade around him. That was where his wife and children came in. That was where church came in. And the Boy Scouts. And his job. He had so many damn social obligations, so many things pulling him away from the very thing he loved best.
People were his alibi, but they were also his greatest frustration. They slowed him down. They hamstrung him. They kept him from killing with the frequency he yearned for and spent his days fantasizing about. They made it impossible for him to be the lone wolf he’d always fancied himself. In the best of all worlds, he told himself, he’d enjoy living alone. He’d be able to come and go whenever he pleased, stalking victims until 4 A.M. on a weeknight without ever having to explain himself, without worrying about whether or not his wife suspected something. He wrote in his journals that sometimes he’d drive around in his truck and hold pretend conversations with the cops, telling them, “If I’d been a lone wolf, there’d be a lot more bodies around here.”
Still, it wasn’t a bad life. When he could find the time, he enjoyed hanging himself. All he needed was a quiet place to do it. That was the trouble with hanging, especially when you liked getting all dolled up for it the way he did. It was an all-or-nothing kind of affair. Much of the time he’d do it in his parents’ basement. He liked the dark, dank feel of the room. It reminded him of some medieval dungeon. Other times, he’d go out into the woods and find a sturdy branch, then toss a nice thick rope over it. Not a cord, though—that would be far too thin. Besides, cord had the tendency to bite like a knife into the soft flesh of the neck. True, he’d have no qualms about using it on one of his victims. But for himself he preferred a thicker gauge rope—nylon, polyester, sisal, or hemp. He’d slip his head through the simple noose he’d fashioned, then put some weight onto it. Not enough to fully cut off the blood supply to his brain—just enough so that he could feel the biting pressure against his throat and up the side of his neck.
It was the pressure he enjoyed most of all. He never went all the way, though. Unlike some of the jokers he’d read about who accidentally died while hanging themselves, he always kept his feet planted firmly on the ground, and leaned into the rope. That was enough to do the trick. He could literally hang himself for hours at a time, dangling there, imagining himself to be one of his victims, feeling all the terror, confusion, and helplessness that must have coursed through their bodies before he put them down. More often than not, he’d be dressed in a frilly, intimate getup he’d stolen out of some woman’s house. A few of the outfits came from his victims’ lingerie drawers.
A source close to Rader told me that once, on a family fishing vacation to Colorado, Rader managed to secure an afternoon away from Paula and the kids, so he hung himself from a tree for hours. The problem was, he didn’t bother putting any sunscreen on his neck, and the sun cooked him red—all except where the rope had been, which was white as the stripe that ran along the back of a skunk. He had a helluva time trying to explain that one the next morning, but he managed somehow. He always did. That was one of his strengths. He could play people the way some people played musical instruments.
But there was something peculiar about the way Rader hung himself. Plenty of people use a rope to cut off the blood supply to their brain in order to intensify an orgasm they’ve achieved either through sex with another person or by masturbating. But Rader did things differently. He didn’t need to have sex or masturbate in order to reach an orgasm. In his mind, just being hung was enough. The longer he dangled from the
end of that rope, the harder his erection would become, until eventually he’d explode.
For him, it was all about the rope.
Marine Hedge lived five doors down from him. Whenever Dennis Rader would walk by her place, his journals revealed, he’d wave to her if she were out front gardening. Some time in early April 1985, something clicked inside his head, and he began to wonder what she’d look like with a rope around her neck and a gag in her mouth. When he learned that the fifty-three-year-old widow worked in a hospital coffee shop, he nicknamed her Project Cookie. Deep down, he knew that targeting someone who lived so close to his house violated one of the cardinal rules of serial killing—never murder a neighbor. But he didn’t care. Once he’d begun fixating on her, he couldn’t shake her loose from his mind. After a few months spent fantasizing about all the things he yearned to do her, he started sneaking down to her house at night and peeking in through the venetian blinds as she read in bed. On one occasion, her cat spotted him looking in the window and flipped out, jumping off the bed and hissing.
He finally decided he would make his move on April 27, during a Saturday night Boy Scout camping trip with Brian. Logistically, the murder would be his most complicated, involving what he later referred to as lots of “maneuverment.” On that evening, the tents had all been pitched, the dinner was cooked, and the campfire was blazing when Rader began to complain to the other Scout leaders of a headache, and soon disappeared inside his tent. Not long afterwards, he sneaked out, fetched his hit kit, which he’d stashed inside a bowling bag, then hoofed it to a nearby bowling alley. He stayed just long enough to buy a beer, drink a bit of it, then splash the rest of it on his clothes. He walked outside, reeking of beer, and called a taxi from a pay phone.
A few minutes later, a cabbie was driving him back toward Park City. Along the way, Rader mumbled that he felt too tipsy to drive. When he finally reached the outskirts of his neighborhood, he announced that he needed some fresh air. He asked the driver to pull over and let him out so that he could walk it off. After paying the driver, he began walking, eventually taking a short cut through his in-laws’ backyard, then walking past the swing sets in the tiny city park located behind his house. He jumped the chain-link fence, scrambled through Marine Hedge’s backyard, then peeked around the side of the house.
Her car sat in the driveway, so Rader figured she was inside, asleep. Using a screwdriver, he jimmied open the back window, crawled inside the darkened house, and crept into Hedge’s darkened bedroom. Her bed was empty, so he decided to stick around and wait for her to arrive home.
It was around 11 P.M. when Hedge finally returned from a night spent playing bingo. Much to Rader’s dismay, a man accompanied her inside the house. Rader hid himself in a closet and listened as the two made what he considered to be “loving” remarks to one another. Finally he left, and Hedge got into bed. It was around 1 A.M., he later wrote, that he emerged from the closet, entered her room, and “pounced on her like a tiger,” quickly clutching her throat with his gloved hands. The whole thing happened far too quickly for his liking. After all, he’d spent months fantasizing about exactly how he wanted to take her, then force her to submit to him. As he learned from past kills, however, his most obsessively thought-out plans often went awry.
Before he knew it, the petite Hedge had slipped into unconsciousness, never quite knowing what was happening to her—that her neighbor was the dreaded BTK and that he’d chosen her to be his next victim. Rader’s realization that all she knew was that some dark stranger with powerful hands was choking the life out of her frustrated him. He quickly handcuffed her and, out of habit, slipped a garrote over her neck, then pulled it tight. He realized that he needn’t have bothered—she was already dead. Afterwards, he rolled her up in a blanket and quickly began rummaging through her apartment for a few trophies he could take with him. He settled on her purse.
Afterwards, he did something that he’d never before done after killing someone: he moved his victim’s body from the crime scene. Rader, it was now clear to me, had decided to change his MO. He didn’t want this to look like a BTK killing; that way, the police couldn’t link this murder to his previous crimes. Rader also knew that indoor crimes allow police to do a more efficient job collecting and processing evidence. Victims disposed of outdoors make forensic work much more challenging. Depending on weather conditions, evidence can be washed away. Dumping of the body also means that a corpse has more time to decompose—further obliterating evidence.
Rader loaded Hedge’s body into the trunk of her car and drove to Christ Lutheran Church, where he and the family spent their Sunday mornings singing hymns, listening to sermons, and helping out with things. Because of all his work at the church, he had a key to the place. He carried Hedge downstairs to the basement and laid her out on the floor. A few days earlier, he’d put black plastic over the windows and taped everything up so that nobody could tell if he was down there with the lights on. He unrolled the blanket and spent the next few hours posing her body in a myriad of positions, snapping pictures of her. Playing the role of a deranged fashion photographer, he searched for the perfect shot. He’d tie and then remove his various bindings from around her lifeless limbs. Sometimes he’d tug her undergarments down in suggestive poses, he wrote.
Time slipped away from him. Before long, he noticed that the sun was coming up. So he stripped her body, loaded her back into the trunk, and drove roughly six miles, where he dumped Hedge into a ditch and covered her with leaves and branches. Next to her head he dropped a knotted panty hose. He dropped her car six miles away in a shopping center parking lot. Rader made it back to the campground before anyone woke up, and soon went to work scrambling eggs and cooking bacon over the fire for breakfast.
The murder of his neighbor Marine Hedge sustained and nourished Dennis Rader for the next year and a half. But he soon grew hungry again.
The next time Rader put pen to paper to chronicle a kill was shortly after he strangled Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986. In his account of the crime, he wrote, “It had been a long time from the last time factor x exploded in my world and shatter someone else’s. Mrs. Hedge’s memories are still fresh in my mind.”
All Rader had to do was shut his eyes, and the homicide came flooding back to him—the feeling of the damp air, the rain; the sensation of his hands on her flesh; that long, nerve-wracking wait in the dark for her to fall asleep. And now it was beginning again. Factor X, he wrote, was arising out of him like a ticking time bomb. He looked back over his kills and thought about the locations of all his murders, relative to Wichita: Otero was northeast, Bright was northeast, Vian was south-central, Fox was southeast, Hedge was north.
The time had come, he reasoned, to murder someone who lived west of the city.
He first spotted Vicki Wegerle when he stopped on her street one afternoon to eat lunch in his truck. That was one of his favorite things to do—eat and troll for victims at the same time. Although he had a handful of potential targets, Wegerle, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two who supplemented her husband’s income by teaching piano, quickly moved to the top of his so-called hit list.
This time, he decided to strike in the middle of the day, gaining access to his victim’s home by pretending to be a telephone repairman. On the afternoon he struck, he’d glued a Southwestern Bell logo onto a yellow hard hat. On his shirt, he wore a name tag fashioned out of a phone company business card he’d found somewhere. He carried a briefcase containing some of the tools that he believed a repairman might be expected to use, along with his hit kit. Because he thought it would look less suspicious, he decided to first stop off at the home of her neighbor next door. An elderly woman answered the doorbell, and Rader quickly ran through his prepared lines.
“I’m from Southwestern Bell, ma’am,” he told her. “We’re having trouble with the phone line, and we’re trying to track down the problem. Need to check it if you don’t mind.”
He stood there on her front step watching through
the screen door as she listened to him. All at once, the thought flashed through his head that maybe he ought to kill her instead, but he decided she was too old. Instead of inviting himself inside her house, he told her he could check her line from outside, and quickly walked to the corner of her house and started fidgeting with her phone line. Through a nearby open window, he could hear Wegerle playing the piano.
A moment later, he was knocking on Wegerle’s door, feeding her the same line as he had her neighbor. Vicki reluctantly let him inside, but watched him closely as he connected some wires to her interior phone jack. Her two-year-old son played on the floor.
After a bit of small talk, he pulled out his gun and told her, “I’m not going to hurt you or your baby.” Then he demanded that she give him her purse and keys to the car. She looked terrified, he wrote afterwards. The dog was barking, and her child was watching him as he ordered Wegerle into the bedroom, leaving her son behind.
Wegerle began crying, insisting that she was having her period and that her husband would be home at any minute. Grabbing her arm, he dragged her into the bedroom and told her he needed to tie her up.
“I want to take some pictures of you,” he said.
Once again, Rader relied on words, rather than threats of physical violence, to convince his victim to do as he asked.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 26