Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (43 page)

The pastor, sitting behind Rader in the gallery, grimaced. District Attorney Nola Foulston turned toward
Eagle
legal affairs reporter Ron Sylvester and, with eyes wide, mouthed the words: “In the church!”

At one point, trying to remember the details of Dee Davis’s murder, Rader rolled his eyes upward and made noises that the court transcriber tried to describe:

RADER
: “I took her out of her car…this gets complicated, then the stuff I had�clothes, guns, whatever�I took that to another spot in her car, dumped that off. Okay, then took her car back to her house, left that…let me think, now [makes popping noise with his mouth several times].”

Landwehr, looking embarrassed, turned to Relph and Otis and spoke in a stage whisper as though addressing Rader: “Jesus, you stupid son of a bitch, can you look any goddamned stupider? You’ll make anybody watching think that
anybody
could have caught you anytime.”

Relph and Otis stifled their laughter, but they were embarrassed too.

The cops, with Otis taking the point position, escorted the families out of the courthouse. This time they were surrounded by cameras and a more aggressive attitude.

“How do you feel?” reporters asked. “How do you feel?”

The families said nothing.

Landwehr walked with them.

“Any comment, Lieutenant?” someone asked.

“Not now, thanks,” he said.

A few steps away, Steve Relford walked slowly, staring straight ahead.

As a little boy, he had let Rader into his home, then cried in the bathroom as Rader pulled a bag over his mother’s head. He had spent most of his life since then drifting, getting high, and getting tattooed with human skulls.

He had made several threats against Rader. The cops had lectured him, and now he was trying to stay silent.

“How do you feel?”

“Fine,” Relford said. He kept walking, his face turning red.

“Do you feel you have closure?”

“No.”

50

July 2, 2005

Demons Within Me

KAKE’s newsroom phones would not accept collect calls, so all three of the station’s anchors had included their home numbers in letters asking Rader to talk to them.

By the time he wrote to Rader, Larry Hatteberg had spent thirty-one years on the story. He had been twenty-nine when he filmed the scene outside the Otero house in 1974. He was fifty-nine when he helped report BTK’s return in 2004.

For years, he’d worked on his three-minute “Hatteberg’s People” vignettes from his home office. He liked solitude and owned better camera and editing equipment than KAKE had in the studio. Still, he wasn’t prepared when his phone rang at 10:20
AM
on Saturday, July 2, summoning him from drinking a tall Americano from Starbucks on his back deck. On the phone he heard a computer asking whether he would accept a collect call from the Sedgwick County jail. He said yes. Then a voice spoke.

“This is Dennis L. Rader.”

Hatteberg was suddenly nervous. This was the first BTK news media interview. Hatteberg had left most of his notes at KAKE, he didn’t have his recording equipment hooked up, and he was feeling small terrors about saying something stupid to a serial killer, like “good to hear from you” or “thanks for calling.”

So Hatteberg took a risk. He asked Rader to hang up and call back in a few minutes, giving Hatteberg time to hook up his recorder. Rader agreed, and in the moments that followed Hatteberg agonized over whether he’d lost the interview. But Rader did call back; he seemed eager to talk.

In the measured, warm voice that Rader had heard coming from his television for decades, Hatteberg asked about the recitation of BTK crimes in court five days earlier: “It seemed that you were incredibly cold about it, and you were talking about it the same as you would be talking about items at a grocery store. Can you talk about that?”

For about thirty seconds, Rader rambled in the odd tangent-upon-tangent way he had at the hearing, then settled down.

“I was totally unprepared for what the court asked me. I was a little shocked that the defense didn’t step up to tap me on the shoulder to say ‘Let’s reconsider this,’ or approach the bench.

“I basically just shot from the hip. I realized that was very cold and everything, but I just wanted to get the facts out just as quick as I could, try not to get too emotionally involved. If I sat down and actually�somebody sits with me in a room and we start talking about the cases, I get pretty emotional about it. Even right now it cracks my voice a little bit.”

But his voice was not cracking.

“It’s been a very trying and hard thing for me.”

Then the man who had written in 1978 “How many do I have to Kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention” told Hatteberg: “I think the bottom line is I want the people of Sedgwick County and the United States and the world to know that I am a serial killer.

“There are some things you can learn from this. I’m not trying to profit from it. I’m going to pay for it with a life sentence.”

Hatteberg asked, “Do you have any remorse over the killings?”

“Yes, I do…. I fault Factor X,” Rader said, a reference to his 1978 letter. “I have no idea. I’m very compartmentalized. I can live a normal life, quickly switch from one gear to the next. I guess that’s why I survived so well in those thirty-one years; very compartmentalized. I can wear many hats. I can switch gears very rapidly. I can become emotionally involved; I can become cold at it. That’s something maybe I will finally figure out, if I ever figure it out; it’s a mystery.”

Hatteberg asked how he felt about killing children, noting that “a lot of people just shake their head…particularly when you had children of your own.”

“I think in the long run it was a sexual fantasy, the children. If you really look at it they were more of an offshoot, the action of going toward the crime, not so much the crime; the crime afterward was more of a�I guess you call it�a high for me…. There was probably some sexual fantasy in that. More of it was tended toward the adult persons; the kids just happened to be there, I think. That didn’t work, with the adults; Josephine was probably the only one that I really expressed that sexual fantasy.”

Rader then said he hoped Hatteberg would be able to edit their conversation before broadcast so it would not shock the community too much.

This baffled Hatteberg. How could anything be more shocking than Rader’s crimes?

“Can you talk about Factor X a little more? When you wrote to us in the seventies, you said that it was Factor X that made you kill. Can you describe what that is?”

Rader noted that sometimes armed robbers shoot people because they are afraid of getting caught. But what drove him was “a really, really deep subject” that a telephone conversation couldn’t adequately address. “I just know it’s a dark side of me. It kind of controls me. I personally think it’s�I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think it’s demons within me.”

Hatteberg offered Rader another chance to take responsibility for his actions: “What would you want to tell the families at this point? The families who have been hurt so much.”

Rader responded like a project manager: “In the sentencing, it’s going to be very remorseful�very apologetic to them. I’ll be working on that. That’s part of the thing that I and the defense has been working on, is the speech prepared for that. I have a lot of bad thoughts come about that: how can a guy like me�a church member, raised a family�go out and do those sorts of things? The only thing I can figure out is I’m compartmentalized; somewhere in my body I can just do those sorts of things and go back to a normal life. Which is unbelievable…. I looked in Mr. Fox’s eyes on TV once, the tears in his eyes. I could be in the same shoes. I feel for them. I know they don’t understand that, but I do.”

When BTK began communicating in March 2004 after decades of silence, a lot of Wichitans speculated that he wanted to be caught. When Hatteberg asked about that, Rader said: “No, I was not planning on being caught. I just played cat and mouse too long with the police, and they finally figured it out.”

“Were you going to kill again?”

“No. Although I did set some things up for the police and place a couple of spins on it, but I was pretty well shutting things down.”

That didn’t match what authorities had said after Rader’s arrest.

“So you were not going to kill again; you had no projects in the works?”

Rader was coy.

“Well, yes and no. That’s a secret. There was probably one more, I was really thinking about it, but I was beginning to slow down agewise, my thinking process, so it probably would have never went; probably more of an ego thing to tell them that that was going to go….”

“Had you picked the person?”

“Yes…there was one already picked out.”

“Do you know her name?”

“No, not at this time. No no no, I’ll never release that. I don’t want them to get upset.”

Interesting; he was concerned about her feelings.

“Do you have any feeling for the people that you killed?”

“Oh yes, I thought I said that earlier; I went through that a little. I saw Mr. Fox�you talking about the victims? Oh yes, I do. I have a lot of feelings for them; they were a�I guess they were more�more of an achievement or an object…. They were actually just an object to me.”

Prodded to talk about that, Rader said, “When I was in grade school I started having some problems.”

“What kind of problems were they?”

“Sexual fantasies; probably more than normal. You got to remember puberty�all males probably go through some kind of sexual fantasies. It was probably weirder than other people…. I think somewhere along the line, I knew probably by the time I was in the eighth grade, or a freshman in high school, I knew I had some abnormal fantasies. But they exploded on January 15, 1974. That’s when the ball came loose….

“I’ll have a long time to figure it out,” Rader concluded. “Many more years.”

Rader invited Hatteberg and anchor Jeff Herndon to see him two days later, the Fourth of July, at the Sedgwick County jail. They weren’t allowed to take a camera, but they took notes. They asked Rader why he resurfaced when he could have gotten away with murder.

The spark was reading Hurst Laviana’s thirtieth-anniversary BTK story in the
Eagle
in January 2004. Laviana had interviewed a lawyer who was working on a book about the murders, and Rader explained that it bothered him that someone else was writing his story.

He said his wife knew nothing. He had never told anyone about BTK before his arrest; he never would have told anyone.

He was not worried about prison. “It can’t be that bad.” In jail all the inmates did was sit around and learn how to commit crimes�how to rob a bank, how to start a fire. “Crime 101,” he called it.

Had he ever posted a message on the online BTK discussion boards? No, Rader said. He was afraid it would be traceable.

“Did you ever have an accomplice?” Hatteberg asked. Charlie Otero, who had come to court from New Mexico for the plea hearing, had said that he thought there was no way Rader could have killed his father without help.

Rader hesitated.

No, he said.

“But I did have a little friend with me.”

The friend, he said, was an imaginary frog he had named “Batter.” In recent days he had drawn the smiling, winged cartoon frog on envelopes containing his correspondence. As Rader talked, Hatteberg understood him to mean that Batter was the demon within.

51

July 11, 2005

Auction Bizarro

It was a tiny dwelling, only 960 square feet, a 1954 ranch-style home where he and Paula had raised their two children, where he had plotted murders and stored trophies. His crimes had cost Paula her breadwinner and her home. She wanted to sell the house.

Tim Potter talked the auctioneer, Lonny McCurdy, into letting him take a tour of the empty house a few days before the sale. Potter wanted an exclusive story; McCurdy wanted more bidders.

When Potter saw the dust outline of the bed on the hardwood floor of the main bedroom, he realized he was looking at the spot where BTK had slept and planned and daydreamed.

In the bathroom, Potter pondered his own reflection in the mirror, then eased open the medicine cabinet door. This was intimate territory. There were two clippings from the
Eagle
’s feature section taped inside: tips on how to tell if you have a cold or the flu.

For the auction, the
Eagle
sent two photographers, plus Potter, Hurst Laviana, and a young reporter named Brent Wistrom, working his first full shift of night cops. Also present were the
New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
National Enquirer, People
magazine,
Inside Edition,
network, cable, and local TV photographers with their power cords and satellite trucks�all rubbing elbows with home-buyers, the curious, and the just plain nosy.

Police blocked off the street and kept the public away from the property. Some walked up anyway and snapped pictures.

Michelle Borin-Devuono, a strip club owner well known to Wichitans from her wry and seductive ads on late-night local television, walked into Rader’s house with a real estate agent and her muscular, tattooed husband, former Wichita Thunder hockey player Len “Devo” Devuono. She and other bidders gathered around the auctioneer in the backyard. Some bid via cell phone. One couple held a video camera and traded off cradling their Chihuahua.

Park City Police Chief Bill Ball took a picture of his officers monitoring Rader’s backyard. They in turn took a picture of him. Ball then aimed a camera at the reporters and photographers. “Turnabout’s fair play, right?” he said.

Many of the neighbors had put up yellow tape and “Keep out” signs in their yards. In the months since Rader’s arrest, news and film crews from as far away as Denmark had knocked on their doors.