Still, Rader was hardly an automaton. He enjoyed a good laugh, but he wasn’t the type to tell a joke. Yet he knew how to make his buddies laugh. It’s just that the gags he employed were a bit . . . well, dark. And the laughter that followed always had more to do with a sense of relief than with hilarity.
One of Dennis Rader’s favorite gags, according to a friend, involved a trick he would play on his buddies while cruising around town in his old Chevy, the one he spent so much time tinkering on. It always happened the same way. He’d have a few of his pals with him, and he’d be driving beside the railroad tracks that ran through town. Everybody would be carrying on, yakking away, not paying a lick of attention to the scenery rolling by outside.
Nobody, of course, except Rader.
He always knew exactly where he was. And when the moment was just right, he’d crank the wheel and drive over the railroad crossing. Only just before his front tires would come in contact with the rails, Rader would let out the kind of fake train whistle that not even Boxcar Willie could match. It sounded just like the ear-splitting sonic blast a diesel locomotive might make seconds before it came tearing through the side of your car, annihilating everything in its path. It was enough, recalled one of his friends, to make the hair on the back of everyone’s neck stand straight up.
Afterwards, Rader would roar with laughter, chuckling over the wide-eyed look of panic he glimpsed on the faces of his pals, who believed they were seconds away from death. It was all too perfect. Nobody ever saw it coming.
If Dennis Rader’s childhood was spent exploring the landscape of that dark, violent world within his head, his teenage years were consumed with another type of passion—hiding it.
By the time he was a teenager, he’d sensed that whatever this thing was that lurked inside him, it needed to be hidden. To let it out in front of others would be tantamount to suicide. Which was why he loved retreating to the empty barns near his house, where he could not only dream of his bondage fantasies but also act them out on animals.
When it came to cloaking his true identity, Rader was a quick study, a natural. This was when he first began to feel like a spy, as though he had two identities, his ostensible life as a straight shooter and his secret life as a perpetrator of violent sexual fantasies. Keeping the two lives and two identities separate wasn’t really that hard to pull off, if he really focused on it. Still, there were a few moments when he slipped up and let his guard down in front of someone else, when he allowed himself to get so caught up in the excitement of the moment that the next thing he knew, the darkness inside his head had grabbed hold of him and carried him away. It scared him when that happened, when he lost control like that and allowed someone else to glimpse that secret part of him.
According to one of his high school friends, this happened one evening when he and Rader were driving back from a youth group gathering at their church.
Rader loved to drive. His friends told me that acquiring a driving permit was incredibly important for him. The reason, I realized, wasn’t so much that he equated a license with freedom. It had more to with the fact that driving represented power and control. It meant he could borrow his folks’ car and, in a few sweet minutes, vanish from the world he believed was always watching him. He could drive out into the country and do all those secret things he so enjoyed.
The night of this incident, patches of thick fog rolled over the fields outside Wichita like smoke. Rader had just attended a church youth group meeting and was driving down the road with one of his friends, who recounted the story to me during an interview the week before my arrival in town.
The friend told me that Rader was usually a careful driver, always in control and strangely serious about the responsibilities that came with operating a vehicle. But something odd happened on that particular night as he and Rader were driving down a deserted country road near Wichita. A group of guys who’d also been at the church pulled up next to him in another car. They started honking and flashing their lights.
Rader looked at them and laughed as the other vehicle shot off ahead, disappearing into the darkness. The glowing red of taillights were just visible in the fog covering the empty dirt road.
It was at that moment the change occurred. All at once, Rader’s face tensed. His eyes, which had begun to bulge, burned with an intensity that his friend sitting in the passenger seat had never seen before. Rader stomped on the accelerator, gunning the engine in his parents’ ’58 Plymouth station wagon so hard that his buddy felt as though he were sitting in a rocket.
“SLOW DOWN, DENNIS,” he yelled.
But Rader didn’t hear him. He was clenching his teeth so tightly that the muscles in his jaws were visible. His buddy couldn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t figure out where Rader had gone. What on earth had happened to him? he wondered. They were barreling down the bumpy road at over seventy miles per hour by the time they caught up with the other car, then flew past it.
“OK, SO YOU PASSED ’EM,” his friend shouted, hoping Rader would come to his senses. “YOU CAN SLOW DOWN NOW.”
But Rader was still hunched over the wheel, squeezing it so tightly that he seemed to be trying to crush it. His buddy just sat there, wishing to God he were somewhere else.
“COME ON, CUT IT OUT,” he pleaded. “THIS IS CRAZY, DENNIS. CAN YOU HEAR ME? YOU GOTTA STOP NOW.”
The headlights of the other car had long ago faded away behind them in the fog. Yet Rader kept his foot pressed firmly down on the accelerator, even as the road began to kink and weave in increasingly unpredictable directions. Something bad was on the verge of happening, his buddy thought to himself. There was no getting through to Rader. The lines were all down. So he just gave up trying to talk any sense into him. And because they were moving far too fast for him to jump, he braced for the worst.
A few minutes later, Rader missed a turn in the road, and the station wagon careened over a dirt embankment and plunged into a shallow ditch, caving in the right side of the vehicle. The impact caused his pal to slam his head into the ceiling, temporarily knocking him out. By the time he felt himself coming to, he saw Rader staring at the bashed-in grillwork, hysterical, sobbing.
A few minutes later, they sat together on the roadside, waiting for their friends to catch up. All Rader could talk about was the hell he would surely catch upon arriving home and breaking the news to his folks.
Roughly forty-five minutes later when the group pulled up in front of the Rader family home, Rader jumped out of the car, wailing and frantically shouting about how he’d wrecked the family station wagon. He failed to mention anything about his injured friend. The other kids sat there watching him go to pieces in the front yard, then they left him there and drove his dazed passenger to a nearby hospital, where doctors treated him for a concussion.
His injured buddy told me that he never could make sense out of Rader’s strange behavior that night. How could anyone be that oblivious to another person’s pain, he wondered. It was as if nothing else mattered to Dennis Rader other than Dennis Rader.
The incident was one of the most revealing moments in Rader’s young life. Yet it would take decades before the rest of the world understood just how selfish a person he actually was.
Besides his church youth group, Rader was active in Boy Scouts. He liked the structure of the organization, the order and predictability. I bet he liked the uniforms too. Rader showed a lifelong propensity for paramilitary, police, or, as in his case, low-level municipal enforcer uniforms. He felt safe in the Boy Scout culture and environment. He slowly but systematically worked his way from one merit badge to the next.
Scouting also allowed him to put his fascination with string and bindings to productive use, especially when it came time to begin learning how to tie knots. Before long he was showing the same kind of enthusiasm for his knots as he had on that snowy afternoon in sixth grade when he sketched out his ghastly, deadly girl trap. Those close to him couldn’t help but notice how proud he appeared to be of his skills, once displaying them on a board at a meeting, the names of each creation written out on tiny pieces of paper pinned beneath each knot.
His favorite, according to one of his friends, was the clove hitch.
“It’s one of the most elementary types of hitch knots,” he once explained. “But what I like about it is that it’s quick to tie and easy to slip over something. Additionally, it’s one of the easiest to untie, even after a load has been applied.”
One summer, Rader traveled to New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch with his troop and embarked on a fifty-mile hiking expedition through the Sangre de Cristo Range of the Rocky Mountains. Yet Rader, who was a stickler for details and for following instructions, just couldn’t bring himself to abide by one of the most stringent requirements: nobody’s backpack could weigh more than forty-five pounds. The way his friend interpreted it, Rader had clearly taken the Boy Scout motto of always being prepared to heart, insisting on bringing a pack filled with nearly seventy pounds of gear and supplies. The troop leaders were hardly thrilled by the young hiker’s enormous pack, but they told him he could bring it—provided he carry it during the entire trek.
He did. And if it was ever too heavy, he never let on.
But then, Rader hardly divulged much of what was going on inside him to anyone. God only knows what he had stashed away inside his pack. I have a hunch it wasn’t survival gear he carried, but gear for his own self-pleasure. Because the one thing I knew about Rader was that, even at this young age, he’d developed a serious yearning for isolation. It’s likely he anticipated that this trip might provide him the opportunity to act out his self-bondage fantasies while others slept.
During most of his time in high school, Rader put in long hours at Leeker’s Family Foods, working as a bagboy, trying to save up enough money for a car. Working was hardly a sacrifice, as deep down he never felt particularly comfortable hanging out with the other kids. It required too much effort. Yet on some occasions, he actually enjoyed the company of others.
Sometimes at night, Rader and a buddy would drive out to the city dump and blast rats with their .22s. This sort of hunting required plenty of patience, because rats are easily spooked. So the first thing they’d do after shutting off the engine was to kill the headlights. According to the friend, they’d sit there in the darkness, waiting for the city’s vermin to delude themselves that all was safe, that the danger had passed and it was OK to come out of hiding. While passing the time, the two friends would talk about things, whispering—so that the rats couldn’t hear them—about what they wanted to do with their lives.
Like any other teenager, Rader had dreams and ambitions—although to his friend who reported this to me, they sometimes seemed a bit unrealistic for someone with his lackluster student record. For a while there, he was telling his buddies that he wanted to be a rocket scientist when he got older, a profession that seemed so beyond his capabilities that it was hard not to laugh. To most people who knew him, he seemed most likely to end up being some sort of city worker, perhaps a bus driver. If he got lucky and knew someone, maybe he could get hired on somewhere as a cop, they thought.
One of his friends said that by the time high school was finishing up, Rader was contemplating becoming a game warden—which made sense to those who thought they knew him. After all, he certainly seemed to be fond of animals. He was also an avid outdoorsman, the kind of guy who appeared at home in the woods with a shotgun or fishing rod in his hands, just happy to be out there walking through the mud, surrounded by all those elm and poplar trees. Whenever he was hunting for dove, quail, or rabbit, one hunting buddy said, he was the type who always took the “kill” shot. He went out of his way to make sure that none of the animals he shot suffered. And over the years, he’d matured into one of those hunters who didn’t just venture out into the woods in order to bag as many birds as his permit would allow.
Sure, he still loved to hear his gun go boom. And he still enjoyed getting a good shot in from time to time. But more than anything else, Rader just appeared to have an ease about him when he put on his hunting jacket and flannel cap. According to a friend, he didn’t need to be killing something in order to appear content when he traveled into the woods. It was enough to just be out there with his shotgun, going through the rituals of a hunter.
They usually had to wait only about twenty minutes before the rats would come scurrying out into the open. To become a proficient rodent killer, you had to trust your gut and work with your partner as a team. You had to sense exactly when to hit the headlights, which would cause the pupils of any rodent within their reach to glow red as the tip of a cigarette.