Two days later he was combing through the Wichita Eagle, looking for pictures of women that he could use to “fit the sequence” of a fantasy he’d had the morning before. This one involved a girl between the age of seven and eight with “a nice firm ass.”
In his mind, she was bound on a bed and petrified with fear. The “bogeyman,” it seemed, had claimed another victim. Her name was Kirsten. When Rader climbed into the shower, he still didn’t have all the details of the attack worked out, but by the time the water hit him and he covered his body with soap, the images began to come to him.
He had wrapped tape around her ankles and hands, then whispered, “Hi, I’m the bogeyman.”
He sodomized her, then looped a nylon garrote around her throat and quickly got down to the business of strangling her.
All of this fantasy killing was detailed in his journal. Then he wrote about how he made the fantasy into a graphic representation. It took a bit of searching, but he finally located a photo of a model from an ad that looked like it would do the trick. He cut it out, laid a piece of paper over it, and went to work tracing the outline of the little girl—although unlike the ad, his picture, which he titled “Boogie Men Loves Little Girls,” depicted her pants rolled down around her ankles.
Because the newspaper was chock full of ads on that particular day, Rader saw no reason to limit his art project to just one so-called slick ad. He quickly located another picture of what he felt was a suitably curvy preteen wearing some sort of a Halloween costume. His ink pen knew exactly what it needed to do, and twenty minutes later she became the “Devil’s Delight.” His art project, which he would later stash away in the far reaches of his bedroom closet, whipped him into such a frenzy that he sat back in his easy chair, and when he was sure that Paula and the kids were out of the house, he masturbated into a plastic baggie. That was one of the drawbacks of living in such horribly tight quarters—he was forever having to watch his back in order to have any fun. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that he was able at least to move part of his cache of sketches and other memorabilia to some file cabinets at work.
In May 1991, with his temporary census job finished, Rader landed another job—as compliance supervisor for Park City. This time he got to wear a badge and a uniform, complete with a radio he clipped onto his belt. His main duties involved driving around the tiny suburb in a white truck and writing up tickets for residents who kept old refrigerators in their front yards or let their dogs run off-leash or let their grass grow too long. The job paid $16.62 an hour. For a guy who always wanted to be a cop and spent much of his waking hours dreaming about flaunting power over others, this was about as close to heaven as he could get without killing someone. He even got to carry a rifle in his truck, on the off chance that he had to put down a wild dog.
But the best thing about the job was that it allowed him to disappear for hours at a stretch in his truck, providing plenty of time to stalk victims, work on his slick ads, or fantasize about past kills while masturbating into plastic sandwich bags.
According to Landwehr, opinion is divided over exactly how heavy-handed Rader was in his duties. Plenty of residents loathed the way he bullied them, showing up at their homes with a ruler to measure the height of their grass, then demanding they mow it or else he’d fine them. Others complained that he had their dogs euthanized purely out of his lust for power. And then there were those who insisted that Rader was doing only what was expected of him—enforcing city code.
Over time, the job even caused him to see the irony of a serial killer writing someone a ticket for leaving her trash can out on the curb for too many days wasn’t lost on him.
“I work with code violators,” he told Landwehr after his arrest. “Year after year, they keep doing the same old thing. They never change. People don’t change.”
He paused for a moment after saying this, as though his words were seeping into his brain. Then, Landwehr told me, he blurted out, “You are what you are, and I am what I am.”
As I read on and on, I could see how Rader continued to dump his troubled thoughts out into the pages of his makeshift journals, which were often nothing more than random pages he’d torn from a notebook.
Few entries exist for the four-year period that stretched between November 1990 and October 1994. The approaching death of his father from colon cancer in 1996 caused him to pick up his pen and scrawl a few comments onto a notepad, which he later shoved into his cache. In this particular entry, he seemed concerned that his old man would learn about his eldest son’s murderous alter ego when he died and crossed over to the other realm.
“Will he know of my foul deeds?” Rader pondered. “I hope if there is a heaven or afterlife, he will forgive me. I wish no sorrow on his heart. He has been a good dad . . . He must understand that he did not raise a problem child.” The real culprit responsible for his horrible appetite, Rader concluded, was Factor X.
Later that same day, it appeared that any sense of worry over his father’s soul had vanished. He penned another entry about how he’d begun carrying photographs of girls around with him in the work truck. The females he chose were his “dream girls,” and for hours at a time he’d cruise through the neighborhoods daydreaming about how he’d use rope and sexual molestation to mentally torture his victims. The fantasy, he claimed, broke the boredom of everyday life at work.
A few weeks later, Rader no longer described what he was doing as simply driving around town with tiny pictures of women in his truck. By mid-November 1990, he’d begun to consider these photographs glued to three-by-five cards as actual living creatures.
“Rode around with cute blonde in bikini today,” he wrote. The next day, he claimed to have ridden with a “babe with a Jewish or Hispanic-looking face.”
Two days after that, he took pop music sensation Madonna with him for a one-way tour of Park City. In her picture, she wore a body-suit complete with cup-shaped brassiere. As he went about his duties that day, his mind exploded with angry thoughts about hanging her from a heavy wooden beam. He envisioned himself wrapping a coarse hemp rope around her neck. In her mouth was stuffed the obligatory gag. The only problem was that he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to use a rope or a chain to spread her legs apart. But what he did know was that he wouldn’t use his usual rope garrote to dispatch the Material Girl. For her, he opted to end his fantasy and her life with a “slow strangulation hold.”
The following Sunday, after attending church, he wrote about shoplifting a book on a serial killer who lived in Hawaii. The next morning, he went to work with a redhead in the seat beside him. On Tuesday, she’d been replaced with a woman whom he would describe only as “the bitch.” For the rest of that afternoon, he daydreamed that she’d kidnapped him, trussed him up in cord, placed a leather collar around his neck, and laid him out on a bed covered with red satin pillows.
A week later, in an effort to drum up some orders for the annual Boy Scout popcorn drive, he dropped by a church not far from his office. On his way back out to his truck, he happened to glance at a young boy and his sister playing in the grass by the parking lot. All at once, the telltale urge seemed to well up from deep inside him.
“The sexual predatory instinct kicks in,” he wrote. His head was flooded by thoughts of “getting” the two young children. By the time he climbed inside his truck and started the engine, the kids had vanished, and he spent the next ten minutes cruising the streets around the church hoping to catch another glimpse of them. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would have done if he had spotted them, but by this point in the day his head was going crazy with wild possibilities. He steered his truck toward the neighborhoods where his last two victims had lived before he’d paid them a late night visit, driving up and down the streets that surrounded their homes, letting his mind wander.
The need to take another life was rising up inside him, threatening to burst out. On the first weekend in December 1990, he attended an out-of-town Boy Scout camp with his son. Packed away in h
is truck was his hit kit, complete with plastic gloves, knife, .25-caliber pistol, mask, and cord. Exactly what he intended to do, he never specified in his journal, although he did write that he arrived at the camp “too late and was too tired to try anything.”
A week before Christmas, he wrote that he and Paula had had sex for the first time “in a long time.” For a guy who often filled page after page with detailed accounts of his imagined sexual conquests, he devoted precious little ink to the real thing. His only comment in his journal was that his session with his wife “felt very good and satisfying.”
My sources insist that when it came to his carnal fantasies, Rader never crossed the line with his daughter.
“She was his best friend, and he claims it never crossed his mind to think those things about her,” I was told. “But Kerri’s friends . . . well, that was a different matter. They were definitely fantasy material for him.”
Like plenty of violent offenders I’d spoken with, Rader had a boundary he wouldn’t cross, and that gave him comfort. He told this same source that pornography nauseated him, that he was bewildered that anyone could think he might be a homosexual, and that it made him feel good to know that he never “cheated” on Paula by having sex with any of his murder victims.
During this period of his life, Rader lived for his so-called motel parties. According to his journals, he’d drive out of town, check into a room, lock the door, and spend hours alone, fondling the belongings of his victims, dressing in their clothes, wearing wigs and masks he’d prettied up with lipstick and mascara, then binding himself in ropes and tying plastic bags over his head.
Sometimes he’d cover the bed with scantily clad Barbie dolls, set up his camera on a tripod, and squat down beside the dolls. He’d position the camera far enough away so that when the shutter snapped he appeared to be the same size as the dolls—all of which he imagined were his real-life victims. It just didn’t get any better than that, as far as he was concerned, because the Barbie doll was the symbol of the perfect female. I’d seen this type of behavior in men who would hang dolls, blow them up with M-80s, and smear red dye all over them to simulate blood. Surprisingly, some of these guys never progressed past the stage of torturing dolls. They seemed to sense what Rader later found out—that the fantasy, where they are forever in control, is always better than the actual crime.
One evening in October 1995, Rader took several decades’ worth of drawings he’d sketched of women in the midst of being stabbed, drowned, buried alive, hung, strangled, shot, and tortured on various homemade devices of his own design, then spread them across the room. The collective image of all these nude, gasping, wincing, terrified women and girls covering the room was horribly breathtaking, he thought.
As he gazed at the drawings, it reinforced his belief that he definitely didn’t want anything to happen to his cache of artwork. A few months earlier, he’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and at that time it had begun to occur to him that he needed to stop being so careless with his drawings, along with the rest of his cache of memorabilia. So he began to concoct a plan of how to copy his sketches over to three-by-five cards, then stick the original drawings in a safe-deposit box that he’d reserve by using the fake name “Johnson.” The way he envisioned it, the box wouldn’t get opened until months after he died. Whether or not the bank employee who found it was able to piece together what the contents alluded to didn’t concern him, he told Landwehr.
Because he had so much material to catalogue during that autumn night in 1995, he decided to organize it into categories, such as hangings, strangulations, torture devices, and so on. In his journal, he bitched that it “took a lot of work checking dates and sorting,” but his recent milestone birthday had convinced him that the last thing he wanted to do was die and leave a “skeleton in the closet.” It wasn’t until late 2004 that he began digitizing his archives and copying them onto CDs. But the project was fraught with headaches because the CD burner on his decrepit home computer was broken. Even more frustrating was the fact that he didn’t have a scanner at home, so he had to use the one at the office, which meant he had to do everything on the sly. By the time police caught up with him, he’d been able to transfer only a small handful of material onto discs.
His duties as an archivist soon sent him combing through his journals and scores of yellowed clippings from the Wichita Eagle, detailing BTK’s various murders and efforts to catch him. For the first time since he’d begun killing, he suddenly realized that his cache of memorabilia could get him in trouble; he wrote, “[it would be] bad news for me if found, yet I can’t let it go.”
One of the reasons Rader couldn’t let it go was because four years had elapsed since his last—and what would prove to be his final—murder. He desperately needed his various mementos to curb his lust for death, to sustain and recharge him.
Just as he had with his countless other projects, Rader had spent a couple of months driving past the home of Delores “Dee” Davis, a sixty-two-year-old retired secretary at an oil and gas company. Before long, he decided that she seemed to have everything going for her—all the qualities he required of his victims. For weeks on end during the closing months of 1990, he’d lie in bed and fantasize about all the things he wanted to do to her.
One afternoon in mid-January 1991, the fantasies had grown so real that he decided it didn’t make sense to wait any longer. A few nights later on January 18, shortly after attending a Boy Scout function with his son, he changed out of his scouting uniform at a Baptist church near his home, then drove out near her house on North Hillside Street in Park City. He parked a couple miles away.
It was so cold outside that the only thing that kept him warm on that moonless night during his twenty-five-minute walk to her house were the thoughts of what he was on the verge of doing.
Davis’s bedroom light was still on when he arrived in her front yard. She was inside reading. He paced around in the darkness, waiting for her to go to bed. It occurred to him that he didn’t have a clue about how he was going to get inside. The locks on her doors were all sturdy. It would come to him, he told himself. He just needed to be patient. It made him crazy to know that his victim was inside, oblivious to the wolf that lurked just beyond her walls.
After what felt like an eternity, Davis switched off her bedside light and climbed into bed. Rader waited for another thirty minutes, then decided the time had come to make his move. If there was some neat and orderly way to get inside, he couldn’t figure out what it might be. He decided to wing it. He’d never done that before with one of his projects—at least not to gain entry. But, as he would later tell Landwehr, he was “hell bent for leather, and Factor X had kicked in.”
According to his journal, he stood there in her backyard looking around for something, anything he could use to help him get inside. When he finally spotted a cinder block lying near the patio, he knew exactly what he needed to do. After slicing through the outside phone line, he picked up the block, gripping the sides of it firmly with his hands; he crept up on the back porch, then heaved the block through the large sliding-glass door. The sound of the glass shattering made one helluva loud noise.
Davis came running out of her bedroom to see what had happened and discovered Rader standing in her family room. She thought a car had slammed into the side of her house, but he quickly set her straight, telling her he was ex-con on the run.
“It’s cold outside,” he said. “I need some warmth, a car, and some food.”
Then he told her to lie down on the bed; he pulled handcuffs out from a pocket in his coat and slipped them over her wrists. Davis began to panic, but Rader told her to relax. He explained that if she’d only tell him where her car keys were, he’d be gone in no time. He grabbed a pillowcase, went into the kitchen, and began filling it with cans of food, making as much noise as possible. This seemed to calm Davis down.
His journal detailed how he checked out where she kept her car, then got everything ready for what would happen
next. In his mind, he felt confident that Davis believed he was preparing to leave. Next he walked back into the bedroom, unlocked her cuffs, and tied her wrists with rope. Once again, he apologized for breaking into her house, assuring her that he’d be gone in a minute and that someone would probably find her shortly. As she lay there on her stomach on the bed, he opened the drawer to her dresser and pulled out a pair of panty hose. She spotted him, but he once again attempted to convince her that everything would be okay; the last thing he wanted was for her to begin panicking.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked. “I need these to tie you a little more.”
And that was when he decided there was no reason to wait any longer. In one quick motion, he looped the hose around her throat.
“Please,” she pleaded. “I have children.”
So did Rader, I thought. They were both home asleep in their beds, just down the hallway from his wife. But that didn’t seem to matter. He pulled the hose tight and later wrote that it took her between two and three minutes to die. Rivulets of blood trickled from her nose, ears, and mouth. As he stared down at her body, the thought occurred to him that the moment he savored most when he killed happened at that instant when his victims had been bound and realized they were doomed. He could live off that moment for years, he wrote afterwards.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 28