I opened it, walked through a metal detector, and proceeded down a hallway lined on either side with bullet-resistant glass. Compared to Attica or San Quentin, El Dorado hardly felt intimidating. It was a clean, well-lit place that gave off a just-built vibe. It reeked of fresh paint instead of stale urine. And unlike nearly every facility I’d ever visited, it had actually been landscaped.
A guard met me at the end and stamped some sort of invisible ink on top of my hand, and I made my way into a room that resembled a community college cafeteria. Men and women sat across from one another at long tables, holding hands, speaking in hushed tones. A few of the men, all dressed in prison-issue jeans and blue T-shirts, bounced children on their knees. Violent offenders like Rader posed far too great a risk to be allowed the luxury of a face-to-face meeting with visitors. These guys, I thought to myself, must be the best of the worst.
Another clerk, standing behind another desk, waved to me. After handing her the piece of paper I carried with me, she studied it and announced, “You got two and a half hours.”
Her words didn’t sit well with the heavyset woman in Lycra shorts, standing nearby. “Hey, that’s not fair,” she shouted. “How come I only get one hour and he gets two and a half?”
I looked into her angry eyes as she gripped the hand of a chubby-cheeked toddler in a dirty NASCAR T-shirt.
“I’ve been waiting thirty years to get in here to talk to this guy,” I told her, then watched the expression on her face soften.
The clerk handed me a key to a locker, directing me to place my sunglasses and wallet inside. Another guard led me to a row of four tiny wooden three-sided cubicles in a far corner of the room, each just wide enough to fit a chair. I took a seat and noticed the two TV screens, stacked one on top of the other, on the table in front of me on a wooden shelf. On top of the monitors was perched a tiny camera with a lens that resembled the barrel of 12-gauge.
The top screen displayed my image, the same one Rader would be seeing. On the lower monitor, I glimpsed a nondescript room painted the color of week-old custard. An empty chair sat in the middle of the floor. Dull white light shone in through a steel-barred window on a distant wall. I was dying to ask the guard where on the grounds of this massive prison facility the room on my monitor was located, but I decided against it. Everyone in here seemed so paranoid about security that I knew my question would only make them more nervous.
The room was empty. So I sat there for several minutes, marveling at how hot and sticky the air felt. Patches of sweat, I could feel, had begun to seep through my shirt.
Minutes passed . . . Where the hell was Rader? I wondered. A guard walked over and apologized for the delay, explaining that something had gone screwy with the audio feed between the two rooms.
Waiting for the guest of dishonor to appear, I thought back to something Casarona had mentioned the night before. Rader’s mood had grown dark lately. A few days earlier, one of his violent fellow inmates thought it would be funny to forge Rader’s signature on a “Do Not Resuscitate” form. Prison humor, I suppose. Not long afterward, one of the guards showed up at Rader’s cell to make sure he had actually signed the form. Rader apparently stood there in the middle of the cell, staring at the piece of paper and reading the legal jargon over and over again, then informed the guard that the signature was bogus.
“Kind of thought as much,” the man told him, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” Rader said. He walked over to the tiny desk bolted into the wall, grabbed a pen, crossed out the imposter’s scrawl, then wrote his name across the form.
“Here,” he said. “Now I signed it.”
I attempted to hold in my head that image of Rader standing there, reading that document. He was beginning to settle in. The novelty of his new life behind bars was starting to wear off, and that do-not-resuscitate form reminded him that the only way he would ever leave El Dorado—outside of being transferred to another prison—was zipped up in a rubber body bag, atop a gurney.
Fifteen minutes later, the screen of the lower monitor showed a door opening. Rader shuffled into the room, led by a guard. His wrists were handcuffed, and his legs were shackled in chains.
It hit me that Rader was far thinner and more gaunt than I could ever recall seeing him in photographs or on TV. He must have lost a lot of weight since he had been incarcerated. Maybe he didn’t like the prison food.
Rader dropped down onto the chair and squinted in the direction of the camera. The blank expression on his face told me that the monitors on his end must still be black. He had no idea I was watching him.
I moved closer to the screen and observed beads of sweat glistening on his face. After a few moments he attempted to wipe away the wetness, but because of the thick steel chain extending upward from his legs to his wrists, he was unable to lift his hands more than an inch or two up from his lap. Instead, he was forced to double over and place his head into his knees in order to rub away the perspiration by sliding his face back and forth across his hands.
You’d think that for a guy who loved bondage, he’d be enjoying himself but the bored scowl on his face certainly didn’t give any indication of that. A minute later, the sound of human breathing erupted from the speakers positioned in front of me. Judging by the self-conscious shift in Rader’s void demeanor, I could tell that he was now staring at my image on the screen in front of him.
“Hello, sir,” he said.
His use of the word sir startled me. It seemed terribly naïve and a bit calculated, especially considering that we were both the same age.
“Call me John.”
Rader nodded.
“A mutual friend of ours sends her regards,” I said.
He nodded again, no doubt conjuring up Casarona’s image inside his head. “She’s a very sweet woman,” Rader said. “She’s . . . she’s been quite helpful to me.”
“Yes,” I told him, wondering if he’d already tortured and murdered her in his mind this morning. “I’m sure she has.”
Rader’s face went blank again as though he hadn’t heard me, but I continued.
“There’s something I’m supposed to tell you . . . The lion is strong, and it is very positive.”
Rader squinted into the camera, then bent down, twisted his head sideways, and tapped his right ear with his hand. I could still hear his heavy breathing, but I had a hunch he was attempting to tell me that the sound on his end had gone on the fritz. Once again, we stared into each other’s image on the screen in front of us, waiting in silence until the audio began working.
The moment the sound came back on, his face lit up as if a thought of great importance had just materialized in his mind. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t you have some sort of a code for me?”
This was getting more idiotic with each passing moment. “Yes,” I replied. “The lion is very strong, and it is positive.”
Rader nodded slowly, letting the words soak in. His mouth hung open slightly, causing him to look almost befuddled. I had a sneaking suspicion that he’d already forgotten what Casarona’s damn code was, but decided to wing it.
“Very good,” he said. “That’s very good about the lion.”
23
Dennis Rader sat in the black plastic chair, ramrod straight. The dark circles of sweat on his blue T-shirt were growing larger by the minute around his armpits and beneath his neck. In the past, I’d always paid close attention to the way my interview subjects perspired. It often meant they’d begun to lose control. But here in El Dorado all bets were off. The place felt like a goddamned sauna, and I was dying to take my sport coat off, but decided to keep it on. Rader no doubt was impressed by my feeling compelled to put on a sport coat for him.
“Sorry to hear about your mother,” Rader said, squinting as he peered into the camera. His words hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. I figured Casarona might have told him about my mother’s death three months earlier, but I never imagined that he’d bring it up. Something about a serial killer handing
out condolences over the death of a loved one just seemed ironic. Not only that, he didn’t mean it—because he couldn’t mean it. At least not the way most people do. But he said it anyway, because it was one of those things that normal people said to one another, and Dennis Rader had long ago mastered the art of trying to do and say all the things that were expected of normal people.
“Thanks,” I said.
Rader sat there and listened with a pensive, somber look plastered on his face as I continued to speak about my mother’s death. He appeared as though he were trying to fathom what I was telling him, but I knew he could not. It was physically and psychologically impossible. And after a few moments, a thin, dull glaze had begun to descend over his eyes, so I decided to steer the conversation back to him.
“I had a hell of a time getting in to see you,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “There were a few people who rather we didn’t talk. Two FBI agents came here a couple of months ago and told me that I didn’t need to be speaking to you. They kept telling me, ‘Forget about John Douglas. Talk to us’ . . . I think they’re jealous of you.”
“They’re not jealous,” I told him. “They’re just sore. I’ve butted heads with the FBI a few times since my retirement in cases where I believed they’d made a mistake. The JonBenet Ramsey murder was one of them.”
I spoke slowly, trying not to appear too anxious to talk about his crimes. I wanted to establish myself as a guy who looked at all sides of a case, the kind who wasn’t out to please either prosecutors or defense attorneys. I wanted him to know that I would give him a fair shake.
Rader peered intently into the camera and nodded his head slowly. “You don’t think her parents had something to do with it?”
“No, I don’t,” I told him. “At different times during the investigation I was brought in by both the defense and the prosecution, but I walked away from that one convinced there was no way the family could have committed that murder.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“When a parent kills a child, the body generally doesn’t look like that little girl’s did,” I said. “After the murder, they usually attempt to undo the scene and make it appear more comfortable and peaceful for the victim. But JonBenet had been viciously garroted. Duct tape covered her mouth. Her hands were bound over her head. And shortly before she died, her skull was smashed with a blow that would have brought down a two-hundred-pound man.”
Rader looked bored, fidgety. He’d begun to slouch just a bit. All this talk about some murder he’d played no part in had begun to annoy him, I could tell. He wanted this to be all about him.
Fearful he was on the verge of growing bored because I wasn’t properly stroking his ego, I decided to switch gears and compliment him. I told him that I’d always been impressed with his ability to describe his crime scenes with such uncanny precision. Rader appeared happy to play along with me. His face once again took on that serious look. His head rocked up and down, and his back straightened.
“I remember every detail from every crime,” he replied. “I remember every detail like most people do their favorite movie, and I play it over and over again inside my head. That’s really how it all started back when I was a child. I had these thoughts and images that played out inside my head. The more I thought about them, the stronger they became. I just got so caught up in them that pretty soon . . . they took me over. I couldn’t fight them anymore.”
“I always felt you had to have had a camera in order to remember all that detail,” I said. “You must have an amazing memory.”
Rader turned his face away from the camera and stared off at a distant wall in the room where he was sitting. For all I knew he was daydreaming; perhaps he had just imagined wrapping a rope around Casarona’s throat. Rader had spent a lifetime doing just that sort of thing—fantasizing not only about murder and torture but also about being famous, powerful, influential, and superior to everyone. When he finally returned and once again made eye contact with the camera, he quickly went to work trying to hoodwink me into believing he was a changed man.
“I’m trying not to think those thoughts anymore,” he said. “I’m trying to have more control over my life, trying to stay away from all those fantasies. It’s the only way for me now. When I wake up each morning, that’s when the fantasies start—that was when they were always the most powerful and uncontrollable. Paula always got up before me, and I’d lay in bed thinking about all that stuff. But now I try and block out the images. I try and think about Paula and the kids and all the things I’m going to read and write for the rest of the day. And instead of drawing bondage pictures, I draw happy faces. And I read the Bible. Ask Kris. I often mention the Bible to her when we talk or when I write her letters.
“I’m a Christian, you know,” he went on. “Always have been. After I killed the Oteros, I began to pray to God for help so I could fight this thing inside me. My greatest fear, even more than being caught, was whether God would allow me into heaven or would I be condemned forever. All my life I thought about that—even before I killed anyone. I wonder if God might not accept me because of my deeds, no matter how many times I ask for forgiveness.”
All this blather about God, the hereafter, and forgiveness made me want to laugh, but I didn’t dare. Religion was part of his façade he had used to fool those around him. Most people were shocked when the news broke that Rader was president of his church congregation, but I wasn’t. When I learned about his longtime ties with Park City’s Christ Lutheran Church, I wanted to shout: “Of course he was!”
Our landmark ten-year study on serial killers revealed as much. We learned that if these guys could choose a profession, it would be minister, police officer, or counselor.
Why? Because of the perks, of course. The single most obvious one being that all these professions involve some type of power and control over others. It’s not surprising that in prison many violent offenders gravitate toward religion—not merely to be a member of a group, but rather to lead the group. Charles “Tex” Watson of the Charles Manson family and David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) are now jailhouse preachers.
But now I could sense that Rader had begun to loosen up, allowing himself to get comfortable with the idea of speaking to someone such as myself who represented the law enforcement community. According to Casarona, he still harbored resentment toward the cops, telling her he was upset with the way they allowed him to figuratively hang himself during his marathon interrogation session.
“I know about you,” he said, chuckling. “I know about what you think of me.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Somebody sent me the newsletter from your Web site, the one you wrote last winter,” he said. “You don’t like guys like me. You think that all of us make choices, so we have to take responsibility for our actions. You said I deserved the death penalty.”
He paused for a moment, chewed on his lip, then continued. “I believe in capital punishment too, you know. And I suppose I deserve the death penalty. But since I never killed anyone after 1994, I’m not eligible for it.”
“Is that what kept you from killing after Dolores Davis’s murder?” I asked, not completely convinced that he hadn’t taken another life after Kansas reinstituted capital punishment in 1994.
“No,” he said.
Rader’s words reinforced my belief that he knew exactly what he was doing when he committed his savage murders. It had nothing to do with any split personality, evil twin, or monster living within him. I thought back to how Rader’s pastor at Christ Lutheran Church wanted to attribute what happened to his parishioner as an example of how a demonic force can corrupt an otherwise healthy, caring, well-adjusted man. I suppose that was the difference between me and a man of the cloth like Rader’s pastor.
“It’s not so bad in here,” Rader went on, switching the subject. “They’ve got me in a twelve-by-nine cell. I have a little window that looks out over the fields. I can see robins out there in the grass. Somet
imes I can even see butterflies. I watch a lot of sunsets, too. Every night I try and write up a little entry in my journal about the sunset I just watched.
“I do a lot of writing in here—letters mostly. I get a lot of mail. I miss being outside and getting to work in my garden. I had a pretty big garden at my house, out in the backyard. Maybe one day I’ll be able to go out into the yard, here. That might be nice. But I guess it could probably be dangerous too. So I don’t know . . .”
“You’d probably be a celebrity out in the yard,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” he smiled. “Kind of like a rock star, I guess.”
He paused again, bent down and wiped sweat—or maybe it could have been tears—out of his eyes, then continued. “This is Memorial Day weekend, isn’t it? . . . You know, ever since my dad died, I’d drive out to the cemetery and stick flowers on his grave. Good guy, my old man. I asked Kris to do it for me. To ask him to forgive me, to tell him he didn’t have anything to do with the way I turned out, to ask if he’d tell all my victims up in heaven to forgive me, but I’m not sure if Kris will.”
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 38