The Rader family lived in a three-bedroom house in the 4300 block of North Seneca Street. Despite being located on the north-western edge of town, the neighborhood had a fairly rural feel to it. Rader hung out with a close-knit group of nearly a dozen kids. When school let out, they’d could often be found walking home together and exploring the sandy banks of the Little Arkansas River, which snaked its way through town. On nearly every afternoon, most of the boys played baseball in a nearby empty field.
But not Dennis. He wasn’t much of a sportsman. By the time he was nine years old, his friends told me, he wasn’t much of anything—other than a quiet kid who seemed to have a knack for never standing out. And that was why his absences from those neighborhood ball games never felt odd. Even if he had participated in those games, chances are that nobody would have noticed him. He kept to himself, but not because he was shy. Rader had other reasons. Reasons that only he knew about.
Rader wrote in his journals that by that point in his life, he was obsessed with strings and cords. There was just something magical about them. It was hard for him to put it into words.
In an effort to add to his collection, he was forever scouting the back alleys of his neighborhood and the rubbish bins behind local stores. He also loved to draw pictures of mummies, like the ones he’d sometimes see chasing archeologists during the Saturday matinees at the local theater.
Something about being wrapped up tight in all those strips of cloth, feeling the pressure of all those bindings, just seemed so wonderful. All he had to do was think about it for just a few seconds, and he’d get an erection.
The fantasies were beginning, although the details were still fuzzy and unresolved in his mind. All he knew was that he possessed an insatiable need to find a pretty girl, then bind her arms and legs together. Sort of like a mummy, he told himself, only it would be different.
The young Rader instinctively wanted his victim to be alive. After a while, this longing to either wrap up a victim or have someone wrap him up grew inside him like a tumor. One afternoon, his journals reveal, he placed some of his precious ropes into his pocket and wandered to the distant outskirts of his neighborhood, out to a hedgerow. He scouted the area like a soldier, searching to make sure he was alone.
Eventually, after determining that all was safe, he lay down in the warm dirt and awkwardly wrapped string around his ankles, yanked it tight, then tied it off with a quick knot. The next step was a little trickier, but he managed to pull it off. After placing his wrists together, he passed his hands through a slipknot and, with the string clenched between his teeth, pulled his bindings tight. He lay there hidden away from the world, the hot afternoon sun warming his skin, feeling himself get aroused in a way he never had before. Off in the distance, a tractor rumbled, but he didn’t pay it any mind.
Then one afternoon, during one of his solo bondage sessions, it happened: after a few minutes, he ejaculated. He’d never felt anything like it. The sensation was so euphoric that he sneaked out of his house the next afternoon and did it again. It wasn’t long before he was tying himself up whenever he could find a few minutes alone. He wrote about enjoying imagining himself to be helpless and weak, always just minutes away from death, completely at the mercy of some bad stranger who possessed complete control over him. It was even better than the fantasies he used to drum up in his head after rifling through his mother’s lingerie drawer, then stealing a pair of her underwear and disappearing into a nearby barn with it to masturbate.
One afternoon, when Rader was in sixth grade, a snowstorm blanketed Wichita under a pile of white. I learned from one of Rader’s friends that because the weather was so nasty outside on the play-ground, his teacher, Mrs. Hadon, made all the kids stay inside for recess. According to the friend, Dennis and two of his buddies got a sheet of paper, grabbed some pencils, and decided to pass the time by drawing what Rader referred to as a “girl trap.”
Both his pals thought it sounded like a good idea. After all, plenty of the girls they knew had the tendency to be pretty annoying, always showing off by winning the class spelling bees and arithmetic contests. Rader had other reasons for wanting to trap girls, but he kept them to himself, and within minutes the group was busy drawing.
The first thing Dennis did was sketch out a giant castle, like the one he’d heard about in Chicago, built in the early 1890s by Dr. Henry Holmes, a wealthy physician later convicted of butchering over twenty-seven people. (Some estimate that his total number of kills may have reached two hundred.) Rader had become fixated on Dr. Holmes ever since he’d read about the details of the hotel Holmes had built—filled with trap doors, secret passageways, and a hidden dungeon where he performed experiments on his victims.
The three boys sketched the interior of the hotel while Rader drew the various contraptions, which included massive combines and threshing machines that he imagined would subdue his unsuspecting prey. As Dennis worked on his drawing, one of his friends noticed that something peculiar was happening to him. While Dennis was drawing the blades on his threshing machine, along with the steel cages and the flames that shot out of the walls to roast his victims, a look washed over his face. It was an expression that went far beyond intensity or passion for the task at hand.
It seemed more like a possession.
On that afternoon in sixth grade when Mrs. Hadon walked up to the table where the three boys were putting the finishing touches on their girl trap, Dennis was clearly excited. His face was lit up like a Christmas tree doused in kerosene. When the boys were asked about their drawing, his two friends grew embarrassed by their little house of horrors. A tiny voice inside them, my source said, seemed to be telling them that what they were doing was . . . something they probably shouldn’t be proud of.
Both boys grew quiet under the gaze of Mrs. Hadon.
Not Rader, though. He began jabbering nonstop about all the intricate details of his diabolical creation—how the unsuspecting girls would enter through an ordinary front door, only to be quickly bound by a web of ropes. In the depths below lay a labyrinth of dungeons and subdungeons where the bewildered victim would be transported via conveyor belt. His imagination went wild, spinning out dark scenarios so intricate that his friends’ mouths hung open in dumbfounded amazement. But they were embarrassed by what Rader was telling Mrs. Hadon, who looked bewildered and shocked by what she heard.
The friend explained that he carried the memory of that strange, intense look with him for the next five decades. The haunting vision of his friend’s face always made him uneasy in a way he never could quite put his finger on. And on more than a few occasions after BTK’s murders had begun, he would quietly tell himself that this image held the key to some enormous mystery—although he was never quite sure what it was.
“I know this sounds crazy, but back during the height of all the BTK hysteria, I used to tell myself that I knew who BTK was,” said Rader’s old friend. “I knew who he was, but I just couldn’t remember his name. It was like I had amnesia.”
Rader’s friend sobbed uncontrollably as he told me this, unable to fathom that he had once been close friends with a serial killer. “I don’t understand how any of this could have happened. I’m buffaloed by the whole thing. As long as I live, it’ll never make sense to me.”
According to an entry I read in his journal, Rader’s family bought their first TV set in 1955, when Rader was around ten years old.
The Rader boys loved watching
The Mickey Mouse Club.
But Dennis enjoyed the Mouseketeers for reasons other than their zany songs and adventures. By the time he entered junior high, he’d developed an obsessive and violent crush on America’s newest teen sweetheart—Annette Funicello. He told Landwehr about how he longed to drive out to California, kidnap her, tie her up in ropes, then take her to an abandoned house—always situated atop a lonely hill outside of town. He loved to shut his eyes and think about the
sexual things
he’d do to her, relishing the frightened look she’d wear once she realized that her fate rested in his hands.
Rader’s notes about that period of his young life never make it quite clear what these
sexual things
would entail. I doubt Rader even knew. Yet. He didn’t particularly want to kill Annette, although she usually had the tendency to expire at the end of his imagined torture sessions. More than anything, he loved the feeling of having total and absolute power over another. He’d begun to realize that nothing could compare to it.
By eighth grade, Rader could usually be found sitting in the back row of class, losing himself in the increasingly dark world that festered inside his head. School was boring, he wrote, probably because it took him away from his fantasies. Although he possessed a vivid imagination, he never quite figured out how to put it to use in school. He would rather use it to create dungeons, living mummies, and torture devices. He did fairly well in mathematics, but no matter how hard he tried he could never get his mind around his English classes—despite his enjoyment of penning poorly structured limericks. The only problem was that his verbal creations weren’t the types of things he could ever show a teacher. Here is one I found in his notes:
There once was a girl who had all the right curves
and a large tummy.
All the better to wrap up tight
and make a mummy.
Rader did the minimum amount of work necessary for him to slide through school, saving the rest of his neural activity for other tasks. He’d often sit there in class, half asleep, allowing himself to be pulled away to all those dark places he fantasized about. No one really paid attention to him back there, and he got the biggest kick out of watching how his teachers would come unglued when one of his fellow students slipped up and got caught nodding off in class. He loved how it would cause the teachers to smash their rulers down on the offending student’s desk.
Despite telling himself that he was bored out of his wits, Rader wrote that he always plastered a perpetually attentive, serious look on his face, as if he were following every word the teacher uttered. He wrote that one of his favorite pastimes was to stick the tip of his pencil through the middle of a ruler and spin it around like a propeller. Something about the spinning motion lulled and calmed him, allowing that wall that existed between his mind and his fantasies to dissolve. All he needed to do was stare into that blurry rotor for a few moments, and all those things inside his head felt much more real. He wrote that it was as if his thoughts were a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering speed and energy with every inch it moved. In his journal, he wondered if this sensation was one of those so-called hypnotic . . .
stances
? He knew that wasn’t the correct term, but it never occurred to him to try to figure out just what the proper word actually was.
That wasn’t how his brain operated.
So he’d sit there in class, daydreaming about the girls seated around him, wondering what it would feel like to capture one, two, or three of them, then tie their hands and legs together with a heavy rope. Next, he yearned to bind their bodies to the icy cold iron train tracks.
I rubbed my eyes for a moment, leaning back in the chair I’d pulled up to the little desk in my room, staring at the screen of my laptop, not quite believing what I was reading. It felt as though I’d taken a radial saw and sliced away the top of the skull of this man I’d been chasing for decades, and now I was peering inside. The view was ugly, but was helping me understand how this monster evolved.
He loved to imagine how the ropes would bite even deeper into the girls’ soft flesh, causing their wrists and legs to turn a bloody shade of pink. But the best part was when the locomotive came into view. And as it bore down on his victims, he grew so excited that his heart would practically rip out of his chest. The pitiful way they’d attempt to raise their heads in order to catch a glimpse of the thousand-ton steel monster hurtling toward them was absolutely priceless.
But the best part came at that moment when his victims realized that he’d bound their necks so tight to the tracks that their heads couldn’t move. All they could do was listen as the locomotive drew closer and closer. It was all so wonderful, he told himself. They were his captives, completely at his mercy. And when they tried to scream (they always tried to scream at the end), when they attempted to make their voice heard through the gag he’d tied across their mouths, all he ever heard was a soft mumble. Because by then the train was on top of them, and it was too late.
Sometimes he’d get so worked up over the scene that he’d hold it in his mind until he went to bed later that night, then travel back to those tracks and masturbate to the image of those hopeless girls. Before long, he later confessed to police, he began to think of it like a picture show—only he had the power to put himself inside the action. He not only served as the producer and director but also got to star in it. He created entire worlds inside his head, all of them bad, hurtful, and thrilling. Yet he never told a soul about them. He kept it all locked up inside his head. The only people who knew were his female costars, but they weren’t talking.