Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (38 page)

Gouge, unamused, took four swabs of the inside of Rader’s cheek. Two were sent immediately to the county forensics lab; two more went to the KBI lab in Topeka. Rader was read his Miranda rights: “You have the right to remain silent….”

Rader agreed to talk.

For the next three hours, as Gouge, Otis, and others watched on closed-circuit television, the dogcatcher from Park City ducked questions and talked in the third person as though “Dennis Rader” were someone else. Gouge fumed: Landwehr was letting Rader drag this out.

Rader did not ask why the police had arrested him.

Landwehr and Morton took an exceedingly long time before they asked the set-the-table question of “Do you know why we are here?” They started with tame questions: who Rader was, where he worked. At first they kept him handcuffed to the table. At one point, Rader made a boasting threat: “It’s a good thing I’m cuffed.”

After a while, Rader asked to go to the restroom. When they brought him back to the interview room, Landwehr left the cuffs off. It was a subtle move, meant to relax him.

Rader gave away nothing, but he seemed impressed that he was talking to Landwehr and that an FBI agent had flown to Wichita to meet him. He spoke to them as equals, noting that he too was in law enforcement. Rader seemed antsy but not nervous. He fiddled with the pens, paper, and napkins in front of him, arranging them neatly, compulsively. Landwehr was tempted to reach out and nudge a few things to mess with Rader’s head. But he did not. Gouge and Otis might think this was taking too long, but Landwehr thought patience was vital.

“Why do you think we are here?” Landwehr asked. Rader said he assumed they wanted to talk about a case.

Had he ever followed the BTK investigation?

“Yeah,” Rader said, appearing unsurprised. “I’ve been a BTK fan for years, watching it.” When they reminded Rader that they had taken his DNA, he nodded. “I assume I’m a main suspect.”

Three months earlier, Roger Valadez had been angry at being suspected; Rader cracked a joke about it. His soft drink was in a fast-food cup: “Put ‘BTK’ on the lid,” he said with a grin.

“There is no way my husband could be the man you want,” Paula Rader said. “He’s a good man. He’s a great father. He would never hurt anyone!”

Relph felt sorry for her. She seemed kind and incapable of lying. As soon as Dennis Rader was in custody, police had rounded up his relatives.

“I’m not here to convince you of anything, Mrs. Rader,” he said. “I’m just here to tell you that we have arrested your husband, and why.”

Had she ever noticed anything unusual about him?

“No!”

She had followed the BTK investigation in the news. She knew that the cops had broken down Valadez’s door in December�and that he was not BTK.

“You were wrong about Valadez then,” she said, “and you are wrong about my husband now.”

Landwehr heard later about how the detectives who watched him thought he took too long. But Landwehr had sat on the outside of many interviews, watching his own detectives�and he’d also thought that they took too long. The fact is, when you’re actually doing an interview, time seems to fly.

Morton now began to get to the point. “Do you know why we came to you?” Rader demurred.

“Do you remember anything about the Otero murders?” Landwehr asked at last.

“Yes,” Rader said. “Four�well, whatever was in the paper. A man and a wife, two kids. And the way the paper indicated, it was pretty�pretty brutal.”

“Why do you think the Oteros were murdered?” Landwehr asked.

“Well, if you take that murder and some of the others, I would say you’ve got a serial killer loose.”

What did he think about BTK?

The killer was like “a lone wolf,” Rader said. “Kind of like a spy or something.”

The beginning of the BTK media circus found the newsroom of
Wichita Eagle
nearly empty, most of the reporters at lunch. Hurst Laviana was at the vet with one of his daughters’ cats when his cell phone rang.

“Something’s brewing up in Park City,” said his boss, L. Kelly. Not only were there a lot of WPD vehicles up there, the
Eagle
had gotten a couple of calls from Kansas City reporters who’d heard rumors of an impending BTK arrest from well-connected sources. Kelly had been in a Taco Bell drive-thru when she got the first alert.

“I’m on my way,” Laviana said. He paid the vet, dropped the animal at home, then drove twenty minutes to Park City, where he found Independence blocked off at both ends of the street. Reporters and residents started to gather.

Do you know who they’ve arrested? Laviana asked a neighbor. “Dennis Rader,” someone told him. “He’s the dogcatcher.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s a complete jerk,” the man said. “Everybody thinks so.”

It was a nice day. People were watching the police helicopter buzz overhead. Someone pointed to a house not far from Rader’s.

“That’s Marine Hedge’s house.”

That surprised Laviana. An arrest on the same block as one of the murders? While covering the case twenty years earlier, Laviana had knocked on doors, asking about Hedge. He looked at Rader’s house now and tried to remember whether he’d talked to anyone there.

By the time she got back to the newsroom, Kelly had dispatched a squad of reporters and photographers to Park City by cell phone. But she was frantically trying to reach Potter in Kansas City�he had left his cell phone in his hotel room. When he picked it up hours later, he apologized to his wife and drove immediately back to Wichita. He and many others would work the next fourteen days with no days off.

“What do you think would happen if your DNA matched BTK’s DNA?” Morton asked.

Rader nodded.

“I guess that might be it then.”

He thought for a moment.

“See, it’s always�it’s always intrigued me,” Rader said. “I assume this person left something at the crime scenes that you guys could match up with DNA. But after all of these years, they still have that stuff?”

Yes, they said. They still had it.

It was time to spring the trap.

Landwehr pulled out a purple computer disk. Landwehr told Rader that this disk, sent by BTK, had pointed the cops to Rader’s church and to him. Could he explain that?

“When did you type this?” Landwehr asked.

Rader looked crestfallen. “You have the answer to that right here,” he said. He began to fumble around. To Landwehr’s delight, he even asked for a calendar. Landwehr, poker-faced but gleeful, offered him a pen. Maybe Rader would just start writing it out.

“There’s no way I can weasel out of that or lie,” Rader said.

Rader asked about the law: did the death penalty apply to BTK’s murders?

No.

What about prison? Rader wondered. BTK might have trouble in prison. “BTK has killed some kids and stuff.”

The talking had gone on for nearly three hours�but Landwehr could tell Rader wanted to keep going.

Rader asked if he could see his pastor. “Maybe,” Landwehr said. They talked some more. Rader brought up the minister again. His name was Michael Clark; could he please see him? He needed him because he was about to break down emotionally, Rader said.

“Sure,” Landwehr said. “I’ll go see about it.” Landwehr left the room and stayed out for a few minutes, but he had no intention of bringing in someone else�especially not someone who might counsel Rader to stop talking. When Landwehr returned, Rader told him, “I really need help.”

Landwehr said he could have all the help he wanted. “But first you need to talk.”

Rader said he worried about how his children would take his arrest and about “Park City getting a black eye.”

“What would happen to BTK’s house?” Rader asked.

“We’d tear it up looking for evidence unless we know where to find the evidence,” Landwehr replied.

Rader winced.

“You guys have got me…. How can I get out of it?”

Landwehr and Morton told him they did not see how he could get out of it.

Rader pondered the swabbing. “Isn’t any way you can get out of the DNA, right?”

He sat still, his elbow propped on the tabletop, his chin resting on his upraised hand. It was the FBI profiler, Morton, who lost patience first:

“Enough, enough! You got to say it! Just say who you are!”

“I’m BTK,” Rader said.

“Jesus,” Otis said, watching from the other room. “It’s about time.”

Landwehr and FBI profiler Bob Morton grilled Rader for three hours before getting him to admit he was BTK.

“How much money you got?”

Sam Houston, a sheriff’s captain, was hearing a familiar voice on the phone: Deputy Chief Robert Lee, commander of WPD’s investigations division.

“Why do you ask?”

“’Cuz you’re taking me to dinner,” Lee said. “You’re going to owe me a big steak dinner. The guy over here is talking about Hedge and Davis, and he’s confessing.”

“You’re shittin’ me!” Houston said. He had investigated both homicides and had come to know the families. Dee Davis’s daughter was pregnant at the time of her mother’s murder; Dee never got to meet the grandchild. That stuck with Houston because his wife had been pregnant then too.

Lee told Houston to come interrogate BTK.

Rader rapped repeatedly on the computer disk.

“How come you lied to me? How come you lied to me?”

“Because I was trying to catch you,” Landwehr said with a laugh.

Rader seemed stunned. “You know, I thought I would pull it off and retire and have mementos; it didn’t happen, you guys outsmarted me.”

Rader had taken pains with the disk. “I checked the properties and the other stuff, and there was nothing there, nothing…. And I talked to some other people, they said, ‘Oh, floppies can’t be traced, floppies can’t be traced.’”

He felt betrayed.

“I really thought Ken was honest when he gave me�when he gave me the signal it can’t be traced.”

After Landwehr left the room, O’Connor approached him. He could not imagine Landwehr would risk handing BTK a piece of original evidence like that, but he wanted to be sure.

“That disk you showed him,” O’Connor asked. “Was it a dummy, or was it the real one?”

Landwehr’s eyes widened.

“Do you think I’m a fucking
idiot
?” he asked, then laughed.

As they spoke, other detectives were now talking to Rader. Two at a time, they interviewed Rader about each case: the Oteros, Bright, Vian, Fox, Hedge, Wegerle, Davis. Rader greeted every detective who came to see him with an insult. He made a wisecrack about Relph’s chunky build. He told Otis, “You look better on television.”

“It’s the makeup,” Otis replied dryly.

Rader pretended to recognize Gouge: “You worked the Vian scene.”

Gouge was not amused; he was in junior high school back then.

It was all just stupid, Gouge said later. The guy had murdered ten people and was going to prison, but he wanted to insult the cops in some sort of dominance ritual.

By this time, Otis was bored with Rader. He had daydreamed for years about how fascinating it would be to interview BTK. But BTK seemed to be a dork.

The cops had a huge secret to spill to the world now, and they wanted to reveal it with dignified brevity on the national stage. The rumor that BTK had been caught was on the street, the airwaves, and the Internet. They knew the national media were soon going to set up tents and camp out on the front walk of the courthouse. The cops wanted to show Wichita law enforcement in the best light.

They already had a plan for the news conference, drawn up by the chief and Johnson months before. The chief would announce BTK’s arrest. Then Landwehr would announce the name of the suspect and the crimes he was accused of committing. Then they would answer a few questions.

The whole thing was to last ten minutes, tops.

But Johnson now saw that “brief and dignified” was impossible.

The cops had decided to let the politicians in.

Thomas and Lundin sat back in amazement as Rader, recounting the Otero murders, suddenly stood up, put his hands behind his back, and mocked the cries of eleven-year-old Josie Otero as Rader strangled her mother. “Momma! Momma! Momma!” Then Rader laughed�a sharp, high-pitched cackle: “Ha!”

Otis, watching on the closed circuit, found himself praying that Rader would attack the cops in the interview room so that Otis could run in and shoot him.

Lundin told Rader to “be a man” and tell them where he’d put his trophies.

Drawing a map of the inside of his home, Rader said: “Right here is what you call a cupboard, where you put all of your dry goods. Okay, the bottom drawer, you take that out, the bottom one, you’ll see a false bottom.” They should look under that.

And in a closet, they’d find a large plastic tote case filled with pictures he’d cut out of newspaper inserts advertising women’s and children’s clothing. The slick ads were “almost like treasures to me, I’ve been saving these things for years.”

He explained that most of his “stuff” was in his city hall office, though, “because basically what I was doing is phasing the stuff out, because I was shutting this down in about a year. If I got through it, once the story was done, I might get�I might do another hit and I might not do another hit.