Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

by Douglas, John

  Ray Lundin, a KBI special agent, attended that task force meeting, held on the following Monday morning. Two weeks before I flew out to Wichita, Lundin’s boss, KBI director Larry Welch, a longtime friend of mine, gave Lundin the green light to speak with me about those final days of the investigation.

  Lundin told me that when he learned at the meeting that Rader’s daughter, Kerri, had attended Kansas State University—which happened to be the same university he had attended—a light bulb went on inside his head.

  “I remembered that at K-State everyone used the student clinic,” he said. Lundin also knew that the school’s medical center was far enough away from Wichita that his inquiries there about Kerri Rader’s health records wouldn’t send up so many red flags.

  So on Thursday morning he drove to Manhattan, Kansas, 130 miles away from Wichita, and learned that Kerri had visited the clinic on several occasions. Lundin returned the next day with a court order for the young woman’s medical records and spent the weekend combing through them, finding reference to a pap test.

  The following Monday morning, Lundin returned to Manhattan and confirmed that the tiny glass microscope slide containing a collection of cells scraped from Kerri’s cervix still existed. It was stored, he learned, at a nearby lab. The next morning he showed up at the lab with another court order. Thirty minutes later, he began the drive back to Topeka to deliver the slide to the KBI’s crime lab.

  On Wednesday morning, he handed it off to the lab supervisor, who ended up spending hours trying to remove the thin, brittle glass cover from the top of the slide.

  Thursday night, just around 7:30, Lundin was walking into Sam’s Club in Wichita when his cell phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that the call was coming from the crime lab.

  “I remember thinking, ‘Well, here we go,’” Lundin told me.

  He placed the phone to his ear. “I’m shaking,” said the KBI’s forensic lab supervisor Sindey Schueler.

  “What’d you get?” Lundin asked.

  “I can tell you this,” said Schueler, “this girl is the offspring of BTK.”

  Landwehr was notified about the match, and he knew the hunt was finally over. He’d found his killer. Now all he had to do was go collect him.

  The same day Kerri Rader’s pap smear was being examined by Schueler in Topeka, Park City resident Kimmie Comer was sitting on the couch in the front room of her house, watching Dr. Phil on TV.

  Kimmie had just gotten home from her job as a dialysis technician. Her kids were off at school. And that was when something happened, something that still makes her queasy whenever she thinks about it. She tries not to.

  Not long before I arrived in Wichita to interview Ken Landwehr, Comer tracked me down through my Web site, wondering if I might be interested in hearing her story.

  I told her I was.

  It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. Nice day. Sunny. Spring, it seemed, had arrived early. Comer left her front door open, and a warm breeze was seeping in through the screen door as Dr. Phil’s twangy Texas voice drifted out of the TV.

  “All of a sudden, I turned and looked up and he was standing there, staring at me,” she recalled. “Dennis Rader had walked right in my house without knocking. He looked at me sitting there, then said in this calm, quiet voice, ‘Oh, I wanted to make sure you didn’t forget your court date . . . for the ticket I gave you.’”

  Comer told me that she couldn’t believe what was happening. For the past eight months, Park City’s heavy-handed compliance officer had made her life a living hell—all because she’d parked two cars in her driveway. Both cars worked just fine, but Rader started giving her tickets—eight of them, to be exact—for having what he considered to be an inoperable vehicle on her property. Each time he’d pull up in front of her house to give her another one, she’d attempt to show him how both automobiles ran perfectly fine, but the officious Rader didn’t want to hear about it.

  “That’s why we have courts,” he’d tell her. “Take it up with the judge.”

  So on that balmy Wednesday afternoon in late February when she saw him standing in her family room, holding his goddamned ticket book, she lost it. “I jumped up from the couch and got right in his face and started cussing him out. I told him how dare he walk into my house like this, and he better get the hell out. And that’s what he did. He didn’t get angry. He just turned and walked out.”

  As Rader futzed around his truck, pulling papers in and out of his briefcase, Comer stood there on the doorstep shaking.

  “You’re an old pervert,” she shouted at him. “Why won’t you leave me and family alone? You’re just a goddamned dog catcher.”

  Rader had began thrusting himself into Comer’s life shortly after her move to Park City in November 2003. A single mother of two young children, Comer’s second husband was murdered several years earlier. She’d come to the sleepy little bedroom community of Wichita because it seemed like a nice place for her young son and daughter to grow up.

  “I’d only been there about an hour and a half, moving boxes inside the house, when I saw him walking up the driveway in that little uniform of his,” she recalled. “I thought he’d stopped by to meet the new people, to say hello.”

  But, she told me, it quickly became apparent that Rader wasn’t in the welcoming mood, and he certainly hadn’t dropped by her house on a social visit. “Before I could even get a single word out of my mouth, he pointed to my washer and dryer that had just been unloaded from our moving truck and were sitting under the carport and snapped, ‘You can’t have these here. You’re going to have to put those inside the house.’”

  Comer was dumbfounded. “I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I tried to tell him that we’d just unloaded them a few minutes before and were going to move them inside, but we hadn’t had a chance yet.’ But all he could say was, ‘Just move them inside or I’m going to write you up.’”

  Within a couple of months, she explained that Rader began showing up at her house with alarming, annoying regularity. In February 2004, he started writing Comer tickets for the vehicle in her driveway. On more occasions than she could recall, she’d arrive from work and find his white truck parked in front of her house. The moment he spotted her, he’d drive away. One Saturday afternoon, her two children walked into the family room and informed their mother that a man in white truck had just given them a ride home from the park where they’d been playing.

  “What do you mean a man in a white truck gave you a ride?” she asked, alarmed.

  “The man who always parks in front of the house,” her son replied. “He said there was a dog with rabies running around and that’s why he needed to take us home. He gave me his card.”

  He handed his mother a stiff white piece of paper that read, “Dennis Rader. Park City Compliance Officer.”

  “After a while, it was like he knew my schedule,” she said. “I’d come home from work, and my neighbors would tell me that he’d stopped by their house, asking them questions about me. Sometimes he’d be out in front of my house, measuring my grass. I am not kidding about that. He would actually measure grass with a little tape measure. I just thought he was a crazy old pervert. I know all this sounds crazy, but I think he used to come in here and take things. Pictures would be missing and . . . well, so would my underwear. It used to drive me crazy. I never could understand where my panties had disappeared to. It doesn’t mean he did it, but I’ve never had things disappear like that. Not ever. One night, my dog—he was an old, blind racing greyhound I’d adopted—disappeared. I’d put him out in the backyard on the chain, and the next thing in knew he was gone. The only way that dog could have gotten loose is if somebody unclipped him from that chain.”

  On another occasion, Comer received a phone call at work from a neighbor, informing her that some “old guy in a brown uniform, who claimed to be a police officer” was looking for her. She rushed home on her lunch break and a few minutes later watched as Rader thrust his ugly head in through he
r open kitchen window.

  “You fucked up, buddy,” she yelled, picking up the phone and dialing 911. But the Park City police officer who arrived at her house a few minutes later told her that Rader was just performing his duties and that she really needed to chill out.

  20

  Landwehr had gone downstairs to snag a Mountain Dew, smoke a cigarette, and make a couple of calls. The guy needed to take some time off, I thought. Reminded me of me, back before I crashed and burned, then spent a week in a coma.

  I turned on my laptop, clicked my mouse a couple of times, and began wading back through Landwehr’s disc, looking for something I might have missed, something to help explain when the murderous short circuit inside Rader’s brain occurred. Just as I stumbled on several pictures of Rader in a feminine mask, buried up to his neck in a grave, Landwehr marched back into my room and took a seat in the chair by the window.

  “These damn journals of Raders,” I said. “They really start playing tricks on your head if you spend too much time reading them.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But that’s your specialty, right? I don’t need to read his diaries to know he’s a sick little pervert.”

  “You have any idea what Rader was thinking about on the morning you arrested him?” I asked.

  “Haven’t a clue,” he replied. “But I know he didn’t have any idea what we had planned for him.”

  I recounted how Rader later told one of my sources that the morning before his arrest, Dennis woke up and started thinking about what his next move should be. Part of him wanted to send police another package. He was just dying to unload one more of his specially prepared dolls, which he stored in a closet in Brian’s old bedroom. He wanted this one to represent Shirley Vian, and on his last morning as a free man, he was thinking about how he planned to tie a little plastic baggie over its head—just like he’d done to Vian in real life. But another part of him told him to back off for a bit, especially as it appeared that he could now start communicating via computer disk.

  “Had a lot on his mind, didn’t he?” Landwehr smiled.

  Then he proceeded to tell me about the day it all went down: February 25, 2005.

  The weather had held, he said. Winter appeared to have skipped town early. The sun glowed like a searchlight up in the blue sky. Shortly after 9:30 on that morning, Landwehr’s cell phone rang. One of his buddies was calling, wanting to know if he had time to play a round of golf later that afternoon.

  “No,” Landwehr told him, trying not to chuckle at the understatement. “I’d love to, but it looks like I’m probably gonna be a bit tied up most of the day.”

  All morning long, a contingent of Landwehr’s men, along with agents from the FBI and KBI, had been on edge. In other parts of Sedgwick County—and in the town of Farmington, Michigan, and Groton, Connecticut—FBI agents were in place, ready to serve search warrants and go to work interviewing Rader’s relatives and coworkers.

  Everything, it seemed, was ready. Now all they needed was for the guest of honor to arrive.

  From what Landwehr’s detectives had learned, Rader was a creature of habit. He left his office for lunch every day at precisely 12:15. Three minutes later he would arrive home to find that Paula had lunch waiting for him on the kitchen table. That morning was no exception. At 12:15, he walked out of his office, strode across the black asphalt, climbed into his GMC truck, and started the engine.

  Less than thirty seconds later, after he turned right out of the Park City Municipal Building parking lot, Rader’s life started coming apart.

  “Click on the folder that says ‘arrest photos,’” Landwehr told me, pointing to my computer screen.

  I did. A moment later I was staring at thumbnails of roughly seventy photographs, aerial shots of what I assumed marked the progression of Rader’s arrest.

  “They were shot from a helicopter,” he explained.

  It was fascinating to click my way through the pictures, one after the other, knowing that it marked the last few moments that BTK would ever know freedom. The action started moments after he turned onto Frontage Road, a tiny side street that paralleled 61st Street, the busy four-lane arterial that led to I-135. A white sedan could be seen waiting for Rader to make the turn. The moment he did, I watched as it moved up behind him. One block away on a side street, four brown and black sedans stood ready.

  The group sat in a tight little convoy on a side street, listening to their radios for a report of Rader’s progress. Landwehr was in the backseat of one of the vehicles. Wichita’s chief of police, Norman Williams, was in another. The consensus was that Rader might not go down without a bloody fight.

  “I’ve faced a lot of these violent guys over the years, even some who don’t want to go to jail for five years, and they try to force the cops to kill them,” KBI special agent Ray Lundin told me a few days before my arrival in Wichita. Not that he had to. I knew from my own experience arresting fugitives just how dangerous the next few minutes could be. At a task force meeting the night before Rader’s arrest, there was talk of using the city’s SWAT team to take him down. The idea was scrapped when task force members voiced frustration over the idea of having some outside group put the cuffs on the man they’d spent so much time trying to catch.

  “The last thing Ken said to us,” Lundin told me later, “was, ‘Be ready and be careful.’”

  Word came over the radio that Rader was on the move. The moment his white truck drove past the side street, the group swooped after him like wolves. Lundin was piloting a black Crown Victoria. A swarm of butterflies was flapping inside his gut. Strapped to his side was a Sigsauer 9 mm semiautomatic. Beside him in the passenger seat was Wichita police homicide detective Kelly Otis, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun rested in his lap. The lead car, an unmarked white Impala, roared up behind Rader and hit the lights, causing the grillwork to explode in flashing bursts of red and white. Another dozen officers waited on the next street in case Rader tried to make a run for it. He didn’t. The moment he spotted the unmarked car behind him, he steered his truck to the side of the road as Lundin and others rolled into place, forming what resembled a wedge in the aerial photos.

  Lundin pulled up so close to the chief’s vehicle that Otis, a stocky former college football player, couldn’t get his door open enough to hop out. So he propped it open, rested his shotgun on the door frame and took aim at Rader, who immediately pushed open his door and climbed out of his truck.

  “I had barely stopped the car when Rader jumped out,” Lundin said. “It happened much quicker than any of us thought it would, which is why I made a run for him. He had a pretty aggressive look on his face, and we still didn’t know if he’d be armed. We figured he’d either shoot at us or flash a gun at us, trying to make us shoot him.”

  In the seconds it took Lundin to traverse those thirty feet between his sedan and Rader, he marveled at how the man’s uniform resembled the one worn by Wichita police. Lundin also told me that he couldn’t shake the feeling that this arrest might turn violent, ugly.

  “Rader knew why we were there,” he said. “And he knew he was going to prison and not coming out.”

  Ray Lundin is the kind of man that most people wouldn’t want to see charging toward them at full gallop. A former power lifter who competed nationally while in college, he stands six feet tall and weighs 225 pounds. In a flash, he grabbed Rader’s right arm with one beefy hand, then quickly clenched the collar of his jacket in the other.

  “I took him down to the asphalt,” Lundin said. “He went quickly, without much effort.”

  A moment later, another officer slapped cuffs on Rader’s wrists, and Lundin yanked him back upright. But as he tugged on Rader’s body, lifting him upright, the eighteen-year veteran special agent noticed something peculiar.

  “His heart wasn’t racing,” he recalled. “He wasn’t breathing hard or perspiring in the least. I’d never seen anything like it, never seen anyone look so calm at a moment like that. It was pretty chilling, really. Kind of
summed up everything about who this guy was. It was as though he felt absolutely nothing. When I got him back to his feet, he turned slowly and looked me straight in the eye. Everything about him was calm, cool, flat. He said, ‘Tell my wife I won’t be home for lunch . . . I assume you know where I live.’”

  Lundin replied, “Yeah, we’ll take care of it.”

  Lundin told me that he had tried to make sense of the expression he glimpsed in Rader’s face on that afternoon. But what he saw there defied any permutation of evil he’d ever encountered.

  “A long time ago, I heard someone describe a Nazi war criminal in a way that I think works for Rader,” he said. “They referred to him as an ‘unfinished soul.’ I can’t think of a better term—unfinished soul. Just seems to fit. This guy just doesn’t have the capability to care, and I have no idea why. Normally, with these guys, you can link it back to their childhood. But his was so average and run-of-the-mill, it doesn’t make sense. He was proud of what he did. Didn’t have a single shred of sadness or remorse—not even for himself. He had nothing. Absolutely nothing.”