“You’re sick,” she replied, as he tied her hands with cord. “You need help.”
She continued to argue with him, telling him that the woman next door had seen him, refusing to get undressed for his pictures. Rader believed he was once again on the verge of losing control of the situation. So he pulled a cord out of his pocket, looped it around her neck, and yanked hard. She began to yell, but the force of the cord crushing her windpipe silenced her. A moment later, the cord snapped, her hands shot up into his face, and she managed to suck a precious lungful of air into her body.
She tried to scream, but he placed his hand over her mouth. He was dumbfounded by her strength. Although her ankles were tied, she poked him with her fingers, slammed her head against his chest, and raked her fingernails across his neck. He winced as his sweat seeped into the wounds, then he gripped her throat so hard that his hands begin to cramp.
“She is a regular tiger,” he wrote afterwards.
He finally managed to grab a pair of panty hose, wrap them around her throat, then tie them into a knot behind her neck. He stood there above her, watching as she died, then grabbed his camera and began snapping pictures—pulling her sweater up in one, her pants down in another, and finally rearranging the panty hose so that they resembled a gag. I clicked my way through his snapshot collection, included on the disc, and felt a stab of nausea sweep through me.
It dawned on Rader that if he stuck around any longer, Wegerle’s husband might return, and Rader would be forced to kill him. So he picked up his gear, organized everything inside his briefcase, and placed his yellow hard hat and Wegerle’s billfold into a paper bag. The dog was still barking in the backyard. On his way out of the house, he noticed that Wegerle’s son sitting on the floor in front room, staring contentedly off into space.
“He looked on without sound,” he wrote in his journal.
After grabbing the woman’s car keys, he walked out the front door and climbed inside her bronze ’83 Monte Carlo and drove away. At a nearby shopping center, he disposed of his hard hat in a trash can located beside an ice cream parlor. He combed through Wegerle’s wallet, taking her driver’s license and cash, then tucked it under the passenger’s seat. A moment later, he decided to head back to within a few blocks of Wegerle’s house in order to retrieve his car. He parked, and as he walked back to it, he could see her house in the distance and noticed that her husband’s truck was parked in front. The police had yet to arrive, he noted.
A moment later he heard the siren of an approaching ambulance. He drove away, and at one point found himself following a police car for several blocks. Finally, he pulled over, changed his clothes, then began driving north, tossing his gloves and other bits of clothing out the window. While heading across one of the city’s many bridges that stretched across the Arkansas River, a gust of wind blew several pages of notes he’d compiled on his victim out the passenger window of his car. Instead of stopping to gather them, he drove back and forth across the bridge, convinced that the wind created from his car would blow the notes into the river.
“I hope the police don’t find them—bad move on my part,” he later wrote.
He was hungry. So he decided to grab a bit of lunch and made mental notes of his mistakes as he drove. As best as he could remember, he’d left a fingerprint from his left hand on the neighbor’s gate. He was also fairly certain he’d touched Wegerle’s door without wearing a glove. He told himself that the next time he killed, the first thing he needed to do was handcuff his victim and always remember to wear gloves when using a ligature. Last, he decided it would be nice to have a place in the country where he could drive after his kills, in order to store or dispose of his gear more efficiently.
From what I’d gleaned about how Rader’s brain worked, I knew he must have been riding the high from his first five murders when he landed his job with ADT Security Systems in November 1974. At the time, he was still enrolled at night school at WSU, studying criminal justice. This meant that he’d work all day, often miles outside of Wichita, then head back into town for classes. Landwehr told me that what Rader loved most about the job was that it gave him the sensation of being a cop.
That was something I had sensed two and a half decades before when I first analyzed the case and wrote that BTK was more than likely a wannabe cop.
He also told Landwehr during his interrogation that he got to carry a gun, a long-barreled .22 pistol. And every so often, he got to hang out with police when they’d arrive at a break-in that had occurred at a home or a business he serviced. But the best part of the job was how it allowed him to float around the region like a ghost. He had a desk and an office, but in his line of work he was never tethered to one place for very long. He specialized in home security systems, which always tended to make him feel like a kid in a candy shop—albeit a very sick kid. More times than he can remember, he rifled through the bedroom of an ADT client and grabbed a few pairs of panties or women’s socks—never anything that the owner would think had been stolen.
One of his most memorable scams occurred on a job he worked for a woman who, he later told police, was being stalked by “a guy just like me. He’d written and told her how he had scissors and tape and was going to do all sorts of things to her. So she hired our company to protect her.”
Rader and his small crew installed alarms on every door and window of the house.
“We did a good job,” he would later say.
Except for one minor detail. Before they completed all the wiring, Rader realized that he might one day enjoy paying this woman a visit himself.
“I rigged the home in a way that would allow me to get back inside,” he later confessed to Landwehr. “All I had to do was hot-wire it in such a way that I’d be able to go around the alarm.”
He claimed never to have taken advantage of the rigged alarm, but just knowing that it was there gave him a sick sense of comfort.
In his journal, he wrote that another perk of his job at ADT was the overnight trips he took to towns scattered around Kansas. Whenever he was out of town, Rader happily combined business with pleasure. At night, when whatever work was expected of him on these out-of-town assignments was finished, he’d either go out trolling for future victims or break into homes to steal lingerie, jewelry, and various types of IDs, such as driver’s licenses or Social Security cards.
Once, in mid-1987, his bosses sent him to Belleville, Kansas, to install an alarm system in an old meat-packing plant. The place was filled with all sorts of dangerous machinery, and the owners wanted alarms installed to make sure nobody broke in and got injured by the equipment.
Initially Rader was ticked off that he’d been dragged away from Wichita for the job.
“I was a team leader and a supervisor,” he later told Landwehr, “and my boss wanted me to go out and start installing alarms.” But he quickly decided to roll with it. “I used it to my advantage,” he said. “I thought, ‘If you’re gonna send me out of town, I’ll go trolling and stalking on my free time.’”
And that was exactly what he did. One evening while in Belleville, he was “lone-wolfing” it, just cruising the streets looking for the right type of woman he might want to strangle or garrote, when he happened to spot a young mother through the front windows of her house, playing with her kids.
This just might work out, he chuckled to himself.
So he drove over to the town bowling alley, parked his truck, and walked back. It was the dead of winter, an ice-cold night. On the way over, he thought about what he wanted to do with the woman’s body after he killed her. “I’m going to take her out, somewhere out in the woods,” he recalled of that night. “They may not find her for a while. Basically, it’ll look like a disappearance.”
But, of course, by the time he made it back to her house, the place was empty. Just his rotten luck. He paced back and forth in front of the house, stomping his feet on the ground, trying to stay warm. After a while, he figured he might as well just break in and wait insi
de. But after sitting around in her house for two hours, his head began toying with him. He finally decided no one was coming home. So he grabbed some jewelry and a pair of fancy red bikini-style panties and headed back to the bowling alley.
In July 1988, the ax fell, and Rader lost his job with ADT. He has always maintained that he was laid off. “It was an informal layoff, you know. I got a nice letter from them and everything. It wasn’t anything I did—just company policy.”
But Landwehr told me that he’d heard from a source who worked at the company that Rader had been seen as mercurial and had a reputation for being highly argumentative. The source also claimed that Rader was fired from the job.
Whatever really happened, it didn’t take Rader long to line up another job perfectly suited for his temperament. In 1989, he was hired as a field supervisor for the U.S. Census Bureau. Once again, he had found a job that gave him a priceless feeling of power over the countless underlings whose duty it was to collect census forms from local residents. His first territory was limited to the Wichita area, but by 1990 he did so well that he was promoted to the role of state supervisor. Getting to boss people around felt wonderful, but not as nice as it felt to be a freewheeler who was able to spend plenty of time by himself out on the road, living out of a suitcase as he traveled from one town to the next.
Just as he did while working for ADT, Rader quickly discovered a way to combine his two loves—being a boss and being a stalker. Just looking at a map of Kansas could bring a smile to his face. He had so many projects in so many towns—Topeka, Concordia, Hayes, Salina, Beaumont.
He wrote in his journal that on one occasion he tracked a woman in the town of Hayes, whom he eventually decided to kill. He nicknamed her Project Prairie. One afternoon, he dug a grave for her outside of town and, just as he envisioned doing in Belleville but never got the chance, broke into her home, then sat in a chair waiting for her to return.
But she never did.
So he grabbed her purse, which she’d left behind, and fled into the night. As he drove down the road, he placed the bag in his lap and plucked out a few choice trinkets—her license and her Social Security card—and pitched everything else out the window of his car.
16
The digital clock beside my bed read 3:47. I’d been wandering through Rader’s chronicle of his life for over nine straight hours now.
I stood up and paced around the room, hoping to clear my head, to purge it for a few moments. I walked over to the bed, opened my briefcase, and fished out a snapshot taken eight years before on the day of my older daughter’s wedding. I held it in my hand, and it all came back to me, how I’d nearly died a few days earlier from pulmonary embolisms and loss of blood after a doctor punctured my lung while attempting to place an IV in my chest. On that day, all I could do was sit in a wheelchair and watch as my ten-year-old son walked my daughter down the aisle for me.
I stared at my tired face in the photo, then studied the brave, uncertain expressions on the faces of my family, who wondered if I’d be alive next week. Life is fragile, I thought to myself. If you’re not careful, it can be snatched away in the wink of a tear-glazed eye. And then all at once I remembered Dennis Rader and how he’d done that to one person after another until the number of lives he’d snatched away equaled ten.
I didn’t want to look at my photograph after that. I turned it over, shoved it back into my briefcase, and walked back toward the desk, then continued reading the words of a monster who fooled everyone into believing he was human.
By July 1988, the rush Dennis Rader received from Vicki Wegerle’s murder had long ago faded, leaving him feeling as empty and hollow as ever. The urge to take another life thrashed inside him as though he’d swallowed an anaconda. One afternoon he picked up his pen and wrote in his standard butchered English, “The desire are in me so strong now day. I have no ideal what keep them in check. Could it be my strong moral as a husband, father, trusted friend or the I-don’t-want-to-be-caught side of me?”
This was definitely a worthy question for Rader to be asking. But like all worthy questions in his life, he felt no reason to wait around for an answer or even to continue probing. When you lack a conscience, simply asking such a question feels good enough. It quiets things just a bit. Perhaps in Rader’s case it even paved the way for the next paragraph he wrote in his journal, in which he launched into a lengthy confession about what he wanted to do with a young blonde-haired girl he’d spotted at the pool earlier that day, on a trip he’d taken there with his kids.
According to his journal, he could barely take his eyes off her. She was eating candy, and something about the way the sunlight danced off her bronze body caused his head to go crazy concocting fantasies about this “innocent, childhood virgin.”
Rader saw himself as a simple man with simple tastes. On that particular afternoon, all he wanted from life was some sort of lubrication for his “rod” and a few moments alone with this girl. He wrote that just thinking about the things he envisioned doing to her “small, delicate” body made his heart race wildly.
Yet no sooner had he concocted some dark scenario inside his mind wherein she found herself bound and gagged than he claimed to feel a sense of shame descend on him. He cautioned himself to be careful, to remember that these desires threatened to rip everything in his life away from him. The revelations of his secret life, he wrote, would destroy the heart and souls of everyone around him. “It must be kept a secret forever,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, in the very next paragraph of his journal, the young blonde girl he’d spotted earlier in the day was now crying in pain, her body drenched in sweat. Although he had tried to be gentle while raping her a few sentences earlier, he now decided that it was time to be done with her. So he fashioned a garrote from a “loose coil” of rope, looped it around her neck, and pulled tight. But instead of feeling good about the kill, he expressed remorse in his next sentence, begging the “guardian of small ones” to give him the strength he needed to continue on with life.
His journal of more than two years later revealed that the urge to kill was as strong as ever. But the stirrings of guilt and shame over his secret world seem to have vanished. Rader hadn’t taken a life in nearly four years, but by Halloween of 1990, he’d already begun planning the intimate details of Project Dogside, the code name he’d given to what would turn out to be his final murder. This one, which wouldn’t take place for another two and one-half months, involved sixty-two-year-old Park City resident Delores Davis, who lived beside a dog kennel on Hillside Street.
Once again, I was reminded that when Rader disappeared from view after his gloating letter to police in 1978, he’d continued plotting. And, on three more occasions, he continued killing. In the pages of his journal, he described how during the afternoon before killing Davis, he acted out exactly what he desired to do with her. His journal described step-by-step how he pretended to be the victim.
This particular masturbatory session began with “heavy breathing and quick relax as he prepare for a trip into far way time zone.”
Within minutes, he’d wrapped a leather belt around his ankles, then encircled his body in a leather web fashioned from various other belts he kept in his closet. After tying himself up, he pulled a plastic bag over his head, wrapped a slipknot around it, then pulled it tight and thrilled as his lungs slowly sucked what remained of the air from the bag.
“He lies there as she [Davis] would, bound, helpless,” he wrote.
Rader first mentioned the thrill he experienced from self-imposed suffocation a couple of months earlier, in September. He still had his job with the Census Bureau at the time, and one afternoon he hung a sign on the door of his office, informing his coworkers that he’d stepped out to lunch. Then he locked the door, spread a plastic tarp over the floor, and rigged up a camera on a tripod with a long cord, allowing him to trigger the shutter from a distance.
Over the course of the next sixty minutes, he stripped himself, then pulled on a
pair of panty hose, pink panties, and a bra, complete with padding. He bound himself in nylon straps and began snapping pictures of himself. Thirty minutes later, he’d finished wrapping his entire body in plastic. He eventually reached orgasm after being forced to “fight for air.”
Afterwards, he remarked that the plastic was only part of the reason he experienced a “most satisfying climax.” What really excited him was the notion of pulling off this stunt at the office, surrounded by his coworkers, and managing to knock out this entire fantasy (complete with the snapping of a handful of Polaroids) during his sixty-minute lunch break.
This was a fertile period for Rader’s journal writing. With no one to turn to and years since his last kill, he dumped his thoughts onto the pages of his diary with furious passion. In November 1990, he wrote a short entry about standing in his house and watching “the blonde next door” gather evergreens from her yard for a holiday wreath. He loved the shape of her “butt” in her blue jeans. Later that day while taking a shower, he shut his eyes and masturbated as the fantasy of what he intended to do to her danced on the back of his eyelids.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 27