In 1985, I was present when French Smith, then the U.S. attorney general, cut the ceremonial ribbon, launching VICAP. Over two decades later, the program still depends on departments voluntarily submitting their unsolved cases for review and analysis.
The fact that VICAP isn’t a mandatory program not only saddens me but sometimes keeps me awake at night. Our nation has more than seventeen thousand different law enforcement agencies operating within its borders. For whatever the reason, precious few communicate with one another, nor do many feel compelled to share information. This needs to change—and fast. We desperately need a mandatory VICAP program in this country. It won’t eradicate serial violent offenders, but it will allow the authorities to intercept them much earlier in their criminal careers.
Shafts of white sunlight shone down on the fields dotted with alfalfa rolled up in tractor-sized clumps resembling giant pieces of shredded wheat. The odor of skunk hung in the air. Warm blasts of highway wind slammed against my elbow as I drove with it jutting out the window. In the distance, that dark bank of clouds I’d first spotted hours earlier in Rader’s backyard loomed closer. Their color reminded me of a deep, painful bruise.
I was trying to put Dennis Rader far behind me, but couldn’t. I was too tangled up inside my head, sifting though the past few days. It isn’t wrong for us to be interested in heartless predators like Rader, I thought to myself. What is wrong and pathetic is the deep, powerful craving we have to get inside their skin.
People often ask me why I want to write books about inhuman monsters like Dennis Rader. My answer is always the same: I’ve always believed that by taking the sensationalism out of the crimes, I can destroy the myth. I describe the gory details of their crimes, but never try and sensationalize their actions.
By recounting the story of the coward and loser that Rader—and every other serial killer—really is, I hope to cut the “legend” down to size.
Most of all, I believe that by explaining how the mind of a serial killer works, I can begin to help readers understand how to avoid ending up as a victim of violent crime.
Another hour had passed. I’d been so lost inside my head that I hadn’t noticed the sky. It had turned the darkest shade of black I’d ever seen. I pulled over to the side of the highway, realizing that everything around me was illuminated by a greenish glow.
My heart began pounding. I killed the engine and climbed out of the car. Such stillness. The air felt dead. Nothing moved. I stared at the iridescent black sky above, trying to remember the last time I’d seen it go so dark in the middle of the afternoon. I climbed back into the car and switched on the radio.
Further on down the road, I began to see jagged veins of lightning flashing, causing the radio to crackle. According to a news report, flash floods had just torn through several nearby towns. Looking out the passenger window, I noticed the vague outline of tiny shadowy funnels dangling beneath a ceiling of roiling clouds on the horizon.
Tornado, I thought to myself.
There was nothing to do but sit there and watch the shapes forming overhead. From out of nowhere, a thought swirled inside my brain, and I found myself thinking about a dream Rader had recited to Casarona a few days before my arrival.
The first portion was blurry in my memory, but what I remembered most was the tornado. According to Rader, a twister had just ripped through Wichita, and afterwards he found himself walking through the wreckage, picking his way through the debris strewn across the ground. Everywhere he looked, houses, cars, and trailers had been smashed into millions of tiny splintered pieces. And every few feet he walked, he stopped to pick up a tattered photograph or what had once been a child’s toy from the rubble. He held the torn, ripped bits of life in his fingers, inspecting each piece, wondering . . .
If any single image summed up the devastation Rader inflicted on the community of Wichita, and on his own family, this was it. He was that dark, dirty, swirling twister, dropping out of the sky, destroying whatever he touched.
The thought of it made me tired. I wished I could be done with Rader and put him behind me completely, although I knew that would never happen. He and those like him were my calling. Like it or not, I’ll be attempting to understand how their minds work for as long as blood and air flow through my body.
The rain had come; it poured down in thick sheets. The highway was empty. I sat there on the side of the road, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time. A tiny ribbon of blue sky and golden sunlight shimmered on the horizon, just below the curtain of black clouds. So I twisted the ignition, stomped on the accelerator, and drove like hell straight toward it, straight for the light.
About the Authors
John E. Douglas, Ed.D., entered duty with the FBI in 1970 after serving four years in the U.S. Air Force. He gained investigative experience in violent crime in Detroit and Milwaukee field offices and also served as a hostage negotiator. In 1977 Douglas was appointed to the FBI Academy as an instructor in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, where he taught hostage negotiation and applied criminal psychology.
In 1990 he was promoted as unit chief within the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Serving in that capacity, he had overall supervision of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (better known as criminal profiling), and the Arson and Bombing Investigative Services Program.
Douglas was a coparticipant in the FBI’s first research program of serial killers and, based on that study, coauthored Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. The University of Virginia awarded Douglas the prestigious Jefferson Award for academic excellence for his work on that study.
In 1992 Douglas coauthored the first edition of the Crime Classification Manual (CCM), the first study of violent crime to define and standardize techniques and terminology to be used by the criminal justice system and academia. Douglas again received the Jefferson Award for this research and the publication of the CCM.
Douglas has consulted on thousands of cases worldwide, providing case analysis, interview and interrogation techniques, investigative strategies, prosecutorial strategies, and expert testimony. Included in the list of Douglas’s cases are Seattle’s “Green River Killer,” Wichita’s “BTK Strangler,” the O. J. Simpson civil case, and the JonBenet Ramsey homicide.
Since his retirement in 1995 from the FBI, Douglas has been providing pro bono assistance whenever possible to police and victims of violent crime.
Douglas has coauthored both fiction and nonfiction books, including two New York Times best sellers, Mindhunter and Journey into Darkness. He also has coauthored Obsession, Anatomy of Motive, Cases That Haunt Us, Anyone You Want Me to Be, and Broken Wings.
Douglas does numerous public presentations yearly, belonging to the Greater Talent Network agency in New York. His personal Web site, johndouglasmindhunter.com, contains crime information as well as an active online discussion board.
Johnny Dodd has been a writer at People magazine for over a decade. He has reported on some of pop culture’s biggest stories—and some of its most tragic crimes. From the savage murder of Nicole Brown Simpson to the cold-blooded killing of Laci Peterson, he has written about a wide assortment of thugs, cads, and psychopaths. His work, which has won numerous journalism awards, has appeared in dozens of publications. Johnny grew up in Kansas City, a three-hour drive from where BTK lived, plotted, and murdered. He now lives in Santa Monica, California. More information on Johnny’s writing projects can be found at his Web site—www.acmewordcorp.com.
Photo Insert
Dennis L. Rader, from boy to family man to convicted serial killer.
CREDIT: Courtesy of the Wichita Police Department
Originally published in 2005, this map from The Wichita Eagle shows the locations of the BTK crime scenes and a timeline of the activity that led to the arrest of Dennis Rader.
CREDIT: Mike Sullivan and Paul Soutar/The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Joseph Otero, undated photo
, murdered on January 15, 1974
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Julie Otero, undated photo, murdered on January 15, 1974
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Josephine Otero, age 11, murdered on January 15, 1974
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Joseph Otero II, age 9, murdered on January 15, 1974
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Kathryn Bright, undated photo, murdered on April 4, 1974
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Shirley Vian, undated photo, murdered on March 17, 1977
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Nancy Fox, undated photo, murdered on December 8, 1977
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Marine Hedge, undated photo, murdered on April 27, 1985
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Vicki Wegerle, undated photo, murdered on September 16, 1986
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Dolores Davis, undated photo, murdered on January 19, 1991
CREDIT: The Wichita Eagle/Newscom
Dennis Rader took these photos of himself in the late 1980s during one of his so-called motel parties. One of Rader’s favorite pastimes was to check into a motel, dress up in women’s clothing, then bind his arms and legs in ropes and handcuffs.
Two examples of Dennis Rader’s hand-drawn torture chambers where the serial killer fantasized about taking his victims. Rader kept these drawings with his enormous stash of photos taken of his victims, sketches, and journal entries.
Police and KBI agents stand over Dennis Rader, moments after his arrest shortly after noon on February 26, 2005. Rader was driving to lunch when dozens of law enforcement agents in unmarked cars swooped in to arrest him, not far from his home in Park City.
CREDIT: Courtesy of the Wichita Police Department
Lieutenant Ken Landwehr holds up a pair of handcuffs, which were used in one of the crimes, during Dennis Rader’s sentencing hearing, August 18, 2005.
Wichita Police Detective Sam Houston shows a mask, which was used in one of the crimes, during Dennis Rader’s sentencing hearing, August 18, 2005.
Dennis Rader arrives in court on the fi rst day of his sentencing at the Sedgwick County Courthouse, Wichita, Kansas, August 17, 2005.
CREDIT: Bo Rader/Getty Images
CREDIT: Bo Rader/Getty Images
CREDIT: Bo Rader/AFP/Getty Images
Dennis Rader is escorted into the El Dorado Correctional Facility on August 19, 2005, in El Dorado, Kansas.
The Park City home where Rader lived with his wife for more than three decades. The residence was demolished by the city in March 2007 to provide an access-way to the park located behind the property.
Members of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s BTK Task Force, from left: KBI Assistant Director Larry Thomas, KBI Director Larry Welch, DNA expert Sindey Schueler, and Senior Special Agent Ray Lundin, with Wichita Police Department Lt. Ken Landwehr (second from right).
CREDIT: Jeff Tuttle/Getty Images
CREDIT: Johnny Dodd
CREDIT: Courtesy of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation
Kris Casarona, who began meeting with Dennis Rader shortly after his arrest in 2005 in an effort to write a book about him, seated with John Douglas (right) and coauthor Johnny Dodd (left) in Wichita.
CREDIT: Johnny Dodd
John Douglas, with coauthor Johnny Dodd, pictured below a guard tower in the parking lot of the El Dorado Correctional Facility, shorthly after interviewing serial killer Dennis Rader.
CREDIT: Johnny Dodd
John Douglas at the entrance to the prison where Rader began serving his ten life sentences in August 2005. Because the state of Kansas did not have the death penalty when Rader committed his ten murders, he escaped lethal injection.
CREDIT: Johnny Dodd
Index
A
ABC
ADT Security
Alaska
Allen, Jake
Amelia fantasy
America’s Most Wanted (television show)
Animals, torture of
Argonia, Kansas
Arkansas
Arkansas River
Asphyxiation; autoerotic
Atlanta child murderer
Attica Correctional Facility
Austin, Texas
Autoeroticism
B
Bad Seed (film)
Barbie doll. See also Dolls
Barns
Bavaria
Beacon (Wichita newspaper)
Beattie, Robert
Belleville, Kansas
Berkowitz, David ; interview with Biological evidence
Bittaker, Lawrence
Blackout tavern
Bondage
Borrelli, Joseph
Boston Strangler
Boundaries
Boy Scouts
Bremer, Arthur
Bright case; Rader journal account of
Bright, Kathryn (BTK victim)
Bright, Kevin (BTK survivor)
Brookley Air Force Base (Mobile, Alabama)
Brooks, Pierce
“BTK Case UnsolvedYears Later” (Wichita Eagle)
BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer ; “BTK Story,”; childhood reflections of; Communication #; Communication #; communiqués with police ; early profile on; evolving method of; Field Grams; first linking of crimes of; journal account of Bright murder ; journal account of Davis murder; journal account of Hedge murder; journal account of Otero murders; journal account of Wegerle murder ; Kevin Bright description of; killings; letter of, on Otero case; obsession with strings and cords; poems of ; question of lapsed time between murders by; signature of ; visual orientation of; visual statements of
“Bucar,”
Buffalo Bill (fictional serial killer)
Bulla, Robert
Bundy, Ted
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad
Butell’s Menswear
C
California
California Men’s Colony (San Luis Obispo, California)
Capote, Truman
Casarona, Kris
Cessna Aircraft Company
Chicago, Illinois
“Children Without a Conscience Dangerous But Can Be Helped” (Wichita Eagle)
Christ Lutheran Church (Park City, Kansas)
Cibola
Clark, Michael
Clove hitch. See also Knots
Clutter family murders
Code
Coleman Company “Collectors,”
Colorado
Columbus, Kansas
Comer, Kimmie
Compliance supervisor job
Conscience, lack of
Control, need for
Cornwell, Bill
Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de
Criminology interest
Cross-dressing
CSI (television show)
“Curley Locks” (Mother Goose rhyme)
Cyanoacrylate
D
Dark skin, fascination with
Davis, Delores “Dee” (BTK victim)
Davis, Wayne
Dawson, Liza
Death penalty
Delaware
Detective magazines
Detroit, Michigan
Devil’s delight project
Dilantin
Dillon’s grocery
DNA
Dolls. See also Barbie doll
Dotson, Paul
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 43