It was all over in two minutes. Lundin handed Rader off to several officers in bulletproof vests who hustled the handcuffed man to a nearby brown Chevy Impala with tinted windows, parked up the street. Landwehr sat in the backseat. By this point, Rader’s look of aggression had disappeared, and he appeared dazed.
Rader later told one of my sources that it had all gone down so quickly that he couldn’t understand what had happened. He never saw it coming, he confided. He racked his brain, trying to figure out where he’d slipped up.
Landwehr told me that the moment he laid eyes on Rader, he thought the guy looked confused, lost in thought. When the back door to the Impala opened, Rader peered inside expectantly and looked relieved when he spotted the familiar-looking face he had seen on TV press conferences.
“What happened then?” I asked. “You were about to come face-to-face with the guy you’d been looking for for over two decades.”
Landwehr took a deep breath and sighed. “He looked in at me and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Landwehr.’ So I replied, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Rader.’”
At that instant, for a few brief moments the world outside grew muffled and still. Suddenly it was just the two of them—Dennis and Ken. Just the way my source told me Rader had always hoped it would be. Just the way I’d always imagined he dreamed about.
One of Landwehr’s detectives sat behind the wheel, and the car sped off toward I-135, racing back toward the Epic Center in downtown Wichita where the FBI had offices. An interrogation room on the fourth floor was about to get very busy.
There are moments in life when things become as clear as a freshly cleaned windshield. Landwehr told me that this was one of those moments. Because it was at that exact instant when Dennis Rader uttered his name that he knew the man he’d been pursuing for the last two decades was going to sing until someone told him to shut up.
For the first few minutes of the short drive, the three men sat quietly as the community that Rader had terrorized for over three decades rolled past the windows. Rader told my source that he tried to keep his eyes riveted on the passing scenery, doing his best to look cool and unflustered. He glanced up at the helicopter flying overhead.
After a few minutes, Landwehr told me, he turned toward Rader and said, “Nice day outside. Good golfing weather. You play golf, Mr. Rader?”
The expression on the handcuffed man’s face instantly softened.
“No,” he said, “Not much of a golfer. I garden and fish, mostly.”
He paused, peered back out the window and up at the helicopter. He looked almost pleased, Landwehr told me.
“It certainly is a nice day,” he continued, starting to open up now. “Spring is coming. I made some notes about that just the other day. The flowers are coming up. You know, I saw some robins in the area the other day. Canadian robins, I imagine. Probably just passing through the area. I feed the birds, you know. Just to keep an eye on them.”
Within minutes of arriving at the Epic Center, Rader was taken to the fourth floor interrogation room, which was filled with computers, printers, radios, and fax machines. He was still wearing his compliance uniform. One of the men waiting for him in the room wiped the inside of his mouth with cotton swabs, gathering saliva for a DNA test. Crime technicians at the KBI’s crime lab were anxiously awaiting the sample.
He was led to a chair and asked to take a seat.
Because a police wannabe and egomaniac like Rader would probably be excited to know that an FBI agent had traveled to Wichita from FBI headquarters just to interview him, Landwehr asked FBI behavioral analyst Bob Morton to join in on this phase of the interview. Morton sat at the table beside Landwehr. They both wore black suits.
“I’m from Quantico,” Morton said. “I flew all the way out here for this . . . because this is a very, very interesting investigation for us. I mean, we’ve been looking at it off and on for thirty years.”
As Rader nodded, the expression on his face softened. “Uh-huh,” he mumbled. Morton continued stroking him.
“This is such a dramatic crime,” he said. “Kind of an unheralded crime, if you want to think about it, in history. That’s why there’s so much attention about it.”
Rader continued nodding like some bobblehead doll.
“Yeah, a lot,” Rader said. “A lot. A lot of media attention. A lot of stuff going on.”
A faint grin spread across Landwehr’s face when I asked him about the incident. “At first, I thought it would be a good idea to have an FBI agent there,” he told me. “But it started to become pretty evident that he was so excited to be there, to be the center of this much attention, that he would have talked anyway.”
By now, the world knows that Rader eventually confessed to being BTK, but what I found most interesting were those hours that elapsed between the time when this dazed, handcuffed nobody from Park City, Kansas, was read his Miranda rights and when he finally began spilling his guts. During those hours, before Rader’s dark, perverse world got thrust out into the light for everyone to see, Landwehr received a firsthand glimpse at the façade Rader had lived behind for decades.
“It’s all there in one of those folders on your computer, the folder named ‘interrogation,’” Landwehr told me. “It’s a transcript of what happened.”
After a few seconds spent searching for it, I found the folder, clicked it open, and began reading, noticing that Landwehr didn’t waste much time in getting to the point about why he’d hauled Rader up to this room.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked.
“Well, probably for the BTK thing,” Rader replied. “I assume I’m a suspect at this point in time.”
“Any reason why we should think that you’re BTK?” Landwehr inquired.
Rader nodded again, slowly. “Well, I live in Park City, went to WSU, served in the . . . Uhh. I’m in that age group. Kind of surprised you haven’t been knocking on my door before, wanting a swab.”
Rader grew quiet for a moment, then added, “I’ve been a BTK fan for years.”
Morton, who had remained quiet, broke his silence: “Since the first murder?”
Rader seemed a bit flustered with the question. “Well, I don’t know,” he fumbled. “I’ve always . . . I’ve got a degree in administration of justice, so it’s always been an interest.”
I’m sure Morton must have been smiling at that moment. I would have been if I’d been sitting there with him, smiling one of those stern, no-nonsense smiles that would let Rader know we held all the cards. It would be important to Rader’s ego to appear friendly, but not so friendly that it didn’t ring true.
Then Morton asked, “Do you know why you’re getting swabbed today?”
“Well, I assume I’m a main suspect,” Rader replied.
“So,” Morton continued, “if that swab we just took—”
Rader was getting so excited over what Morton was about to say that he interrupted him with a “Yeah . . . Uh-huh.”
“If it comes back a match,” Morton continued.
“Then I guess that will be it,” replied Rader.
“You’re BTK?” Morton asked.
“Well,” Rader said, “if that’s what the scientists say, you know.”
“Do you think it’ll come back that way?” Morton inquired.
“I don’t know,” Rader said. “Let’s just leave it. I don’t know at this point in time.”
Morton did as Rader asked. He pulled back just a bit, although not much. “Dennis, I have a question to ask you,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Rader grunted.
“How do you think we came to talk to you?”
Rader frowned and bit into his lip. “Well, I don’t know. As a suspect I assume. You must have something on me, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me in.”
Morton held up the floppy disk received by police nine days earlier, then Landwehr proceeded to recount exactly how they’d linked it to him.
“You know, every time you print or every time you save something, it r
egisters in a header that’s hidden, that you can’t alter,” Landwehr said. “So if we get something like that and it would come from BTK, then we can go in there, and we can find out that it came from Christ Lutheran Church. . . . And that’s when we came to you.”
Rader sat there staring at Landwehr, looking like someone had just hit him over the head with a golf club.
“Pretty sharp,” he said, but the words came out faint, almost in a whisper.
It was still early in the party, but the guest of honor had begun to show signs of wear. So Morton decided to keep at it for just a bit longer. He’d hit him with a few more jabs, then give him a chance to catch his breath.
“So what do you think the motivation would be for all of this?” Morton asked.
A forced smile appeared on Rader’s face, and he nodded as if lost in thought. “Motivation?” he asked, slowly rolling the word over and over inside in his brain. “Well, what’s the motivation for a serial killer? I don’t know what causes them to do what it is they do.”
“I’d be curious to know what you think,” Morton told him.
Rader flashed a serious, professorial look at his inquisitors. “I think it’s a . . .” He paused to organize the thoughts that I was sure he’d been mulling over for decades. “I don’t know too much about the genetics, but I think they have one of those off genes. . . . I think that BTK guy said he had a ‘Factor X’ inside him, so I think they must have an extra chromosome or something. Somewhere along the line, if that gets out of kilter, they are going to go. It’s like an alcoholic or something. They sooner or later just want to go. They can’t stop. They can’t stop. They might try to control it, but it’s still there. That impulse is always still there. They are always planning, or thinking, or dreaming, or something. To me, it’s a disease. You know, you’ve got your jails full of people who are hardened criminals. You let them out and they go right back to what they did. A few of them straighten out. They tell themselves, ‘Oh, I’ll never do it again.’ But basically it’s inside them and they are set.”
Landwehr and Morton sat there and listened to Rader ramble. It was all beginning to bubble to the surface, just the way they hoped it would. Just a matter of time, they told themselves, before everything began to gush out of him like vomit. All they needed to do was sit there, keep spoon-feeding his ego, and let him continue talking.
“So what do you think they are dreaming about?” Morton asked. “You said ‘It’s in their dreams.’”
Rader nodded his head, pleased with the agent’s question. He’d grown so intoxicated with all this attention that it never occurred to him that Morton already knew the answer to his question, that all he was doing was tossing bait into the water in order to keep Rader swimming near the surface.
“Well,” Rader intoned. “If you’ll allow me to use an example: let’s say you’re a bank robber. You’re always going to be dreaming about your next big haul—like how you’re going to pull it off. And then one day, you might drive by a bank and look at it, then figure out that what you had in mind might not work. So then you go looking for another one. I mean, it’s always in the back of your mind, just clicking away there all the time, always asking you: ‘How are you going to do it? How are you going to work toward pulling it off?’”
They let Rader collect himself for a few moments. He sat there, not saying a word, beginning to crack but not yet knowing it. “I think it’s in his genes,” he stammered. “I think, well, they call it Factor X. That’s what he called it—Factor X. You don’t have any control over it. You try and put it away, but that doesn’t work. I mean, it’s not accepted by society. But it’s like an alcohol or a drug person. You know, they’re going to blame it on the drugs or alcohol. They are going to say they couldn’t control it.”
He took a deep breath, then muttered, “People have problems and probably always will have problems.”
A few minutes later, his terrible secret continued rising up like bile from that hidden place he’d let it fester his entire life. Landwehr could tell it was all starting to come out, and there was nothing Rader could do to stop it.
He looked straight at Landwehr and said, “Give me a pastor.”
“A pastor?” Landwehr asked.
“Yeah,” Rader replied.
But before Landwehr could leave the room, pretending to arrange for Rader’s minister from Christ Lutheran to be shuttled to the federal building, the handcuffed man began to utter the words that police had been waiting to hear for decades:
“You guys have got me.”
Yet that was all he said. Nothing more. And Landwehr knew he’d need much, much more from Rader.
In the next breath, Rader was trying to figure out whether Morton had taken a regular commuter jet to Wichita that morning or whether his case was a big enough for the FBI to charter a jet. Much to Rader’s disappointment, he didn’t warrant a charter flight. And this, for the next few moments, caused Rader to sulk just a bit, making him reluctant to connect the dots for the two men and admit that he was BTK.
He was inching closer, yet he refused to make that final leap. Simply saying, “You guys have got me” was a far cry from what prosecutors would need to build an ironclad case against Rader. Deep down, Landwehr wasn’t worried. He knew it was just a matter of time before Rader came clean and confessed. But he also knew that getting Rader to admit that he was BTK was just part of what he needed to do.
More than anything, it was crucial that Rader copped to each of the ten murders police now suspected he’d committed, especially those three homicides he’d never publicly claimed responsibility for—Kathy Bright, Marine Hedge, and Dolores Davis.
But now that they’d sent his saliva off to be tested at a crime lab in Topeka, Rader also knew it was just a matter of time.
“I thank you for being so forthright,” agent Morton said.
“Well,” Rader replied, “with DNA folks out there, not much I can do about it. Haven’t really said I’m BTK, but pretty close, I guess.”
“Close?” asked Morton.
“Close,” Rader agreed.
“I think,” Morton said, “you’ll feel better if—”
“Yeah, it’s going to be an emotional drain on me. It’s going to hit me, starting right now.”
But still Rader didn’t say it, did not confess in a definitive way. So Landwehr, in an effort to keep things moving, began to explain the DNA evidence investigators had amassed against him. Rader listened thoughtfully, then asked, “Isn’t any way you can get out of the DNA, right?”
“You can’t get out of your DNA unless you have had a total blood transfer and lost every organ in your body,” Landwehr smiled, slowly tapping the desk with his index finger.
“Wouldn’t that be a bummer if the BTK copycat confessed and then it didn’t match?” Rader asked.
Landwehr looked deep into Rader’s eyes. “With the evidence I got, I know that there’s somebody in your family that knows who BTK is,” he said. “I knew this before we even walked in here, before I could get probable cause to arrest you.”
The detective paused for a moment, then added, “I know that BTK is the father of your children. That’s what brings me to you. That’s why I know your DNA is going to match BTK’s.”
Morton, who had disappeared from the room a few minutes earlier, returned and interrupted the two men.
“The preacher is on his way,” he said. “So why don’t you just say it.”
Rader took a deep breath and looked down at the floor. “I guess you guys got me,” he mumbled. “What else can I say?”
Three and a half hours had elapsed since Rader had first been seated in that interrogation room. Morton looked at him and said, “Say who you are.”
Rader lifted his gaze and stared at the wall behind the two men. After a few moments, he opened his mouth and finally said it:
“BTK.”
And that was that. In a matter of seconds, it was all over.
But a moment later, Rader realized he neede
d to ask Landwehr something. He later told my source that it had been eating away at him ever since the lieutenant informed him that police had caught him by tracing his computer disk to Christ Lutheran Church.
To hell with the fact that he’d just confessed to being the man who had killed ten people. Deep down, part of him always knew that one day he might be caught. That was practically a given in his business.
What really bothered him, though, was how he’d been caught. It just didn’t seem . . . fair, Rader told my source. Over that past year, he’d begun to feel that he and Landwehr had formed a professional bond. And why wouldn’t he? Ken played the role of the no-nonsense super-cop just as I had envisioned it two decades earlier. For the past eleven months, Landwehr had appeared on the color TV set in Rader’s family room and spoken directly to Dennis, stroking his oversized ego, slowly convincing him that theirs was a relationship built on trust and respect. The way Dennis saw it, they needed each other—Rader played the role of the bad guy, and Ken played the cop. They had a good thing going, a rapport.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 34