Eventually, the killer garroted the girl, marveling at how her face became bloated with blood and the wire buried itself beneath her flesh. He tossed her into grave beside her friend, tidied up the barn, then drove home. A few days later, after reading about the disappearance of the two girls in the newspaper, he was able to track down where their parents lived. The killer mailed them their daughters’ panties, which he enclosed with a little note.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL,” Rader wrote. “As the letter went on, to say, he hope this small present of goodwill will brighten your day up, for now you know that the girl in not in her pants, so where is she? Have a good day.”
As an extra touch, Rader had his main character sign his letter with four capital letters—DTPG, which stood for Death To Pretty Girls.
End of story.
Over the next few days, Rader mused in his journal about his curiosity over what it would be like to take that next step. True, he’d often thought about that sort of thing, but now he was fantasizing about it in a different way. It all seemed so within the realm of possibility now, so close to happening. As if all he’d have to do is reach out his hand; he could wrap his fingers around it and squeeze. It was his for the taking now. His entire life had prepared him for this moment—all those drawings he’d been making since he was a kid, all those daydreams, all those cats and dogs out in the barn . . .
The fire inside him seemed to be growing hotter, igniting everything around it. Such a fine line seemed to exist between creating a fantasy in his head and unleashing one in real life.
Christmas came and went. None of the things he used to do could put out that fire now. He’d never wanted something so badly before. He’d crept up to the edge of the abyss and peered over so many times that he told himself he was finally ready now. All he needed was the right situation, and he’d know exactly what to do and how to do it.
According to his journal, one night after Paula went to sleep, he crept out of the house and drove into the sticks, parked his car, and walked to an all-night grocery. He pretended to be talking on the telephone, but he was really studying the women who wandered into the store and then emerged a few minutes later carrying a sack or two of food. It was 11:30 by the time he finally spotted the woman he wanted. She’d parked her car in the corner of the lot and walked into the store. He waited for her to disappear inside, then hung up the phone and casually walked over to her vehicle and tried opening the back door. It wasn’t locked.
Only the Lord knew how desperately he wanted to climb inside and lie down on the floor in the shadows, behind the front seat. He’d rehearsed it over and over again in his mind. Inside his head, it always played out the same way. She’d place her groceries in the front seat, start the car, and pull out onto the highway, and he’d surprise her by pressing his .22-caliber handgun against her temple.
“Drive out into the country,” he yearned to order her.
Once they arrived at that perfect spot he had in mind, he’d bind her, rape her, strangle her, and dump her body out into a culvert. But as he stood there in the parking lot of the market, he suddenly realized there were variables he’d never considered before that moment.
What if she spotted him lying there and started screaming? What if she asked a clerk to help load her groceries into the car?
He’d never get away with it, he told himself. So he walked back down the highway to his car and drove home.
But that was hardly the end of it. He now understood that he needed to be much more systematic in his planning. If he was going to pull off a bold crime, he needed to anticipate every single worst-case scenario imaginable. Nothing could be left to chance. All those guys he read about in the detective magazines—they might have pulled off big rapes, kidnappings, and mass murders, but they’d all gotten caught because of some foolish mistake. They were lazy. He vowed not to let that happen to him. He would be different. He was always an organized guy—a detail freak. He couldn’t help himself. He was the type of guy who would walk into a room and want first thing to straighten it up, organize it, put everything back in order. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could use this trait to his advantage. He’d use his love of order to help him kill. The devil, he thought, really was in the details.
So he spent the next few days plotting, fantasizing. After dropping Paula off at work each day, he began hanging out in the parking lot of the Twin Lakes Mall, he later confessed, studying the girls as they walked to and from their cars. He’d lose himself in his daydreams, shutting his eyes and trying to imagine all the powerful things he could do with victims. He wanted one so badly.
One morning it came to him. He’d snatch the thirty-something-year-old brunette he’d often seen walking across parking lot, the one who he knew worked in a bank located in the mall.
“I can do this,” he told himself. “I can do this. People kidnap people and hold them for ransom all the time.”
Rader knew, however, that he wasn’t going to bother with any of that ransom nonsense. He’d bind her, force her to have sex with him, then garrote her. Afterward, he’d toss her body on the side of a highway outside of town. A few days earlier, he’d begun driving around with his bowling bag filled with his pistol, some ropes, and a hunting knife; he referred to the bag as his “hit kit” because that was the slang term that all those killers in his detective magazines used to describe the tools of their trade.
According to the entry I read in his journal, it was early evening when he finally decided to make his move. The brunette always seemed to depart the bank at about 5:35 P.M. and walk to her car. So he left his car on the other side of the parking lot, walked across to where she parked, and waited. When she appeared, he pulled the hood of his parka down over his head, walked up to her, and grabbed her, which was how everyone seemed to do it in the pages of his detective magazines. But everything went wrong. The moment he lay his hands on her, she began screaming and punching at him. He couldn’t control her arms. She’d gone insane on him. He didn’t realize that a woman could be so strong. So he shoved her down onto the asphalt and ran like hell back toward his car.
“That was a big mistake,” he muttered to himself while heading back home to Park City.
13
The conversations in my head had begun. After spending hours clicking my way through the digital remains of Dennis Rader’s secret inner life, I’d begun conversing with myself, giving myself instructions.
Fight it,
I said.
Fight the urge to hate Dennis Rader. You don’t have time for that. Just keep reading, keep moving downward through all his words. Think of those he killed. That’s really why you’re here,
I reminded myself.
Think of how he decided to make them suffer before stealing their lives away. Don’t think about how badly you’d enjoy burying your fist squarely into the middle of his face, hitting him with the type of punch that drives the cartilage of a man’s nose into the base of his brain, sending him packing to the next world.
Don’t think about those things,
I ordered myself.
It’ll only cloud your judgment, preventing you from glimpsing all the things you need to see, facts you might have overlooked decades ago. Your job now is to determine what you missed, what you could have done differently.
Then I shut the hell up and kept reading.
In an entry from early January 1974, Rader wrote that Paula didn’t like driving in the snow and ice. The stuff just made her nervous. So whenever the city got a dumping of snow or the streets were glazed with ice, Rader became the designated chauffeur, often carting her to and from work. He didn’t mind. Deep down, there was something soothing about sitting behind the wheel of a car. It made him feel more powerful, more in control. It was one of the few socially acceptable activities he could engage in that possessed the necessary juice to quiet his mind whenever all the clamor started.
According to his journal, it was during one of those drives in the first week of January 1974 that he first spotted them—a mother and three or four kids, climbing into a station wagon and backing out of the driveway. He couldn’t quite make out their nationality, but the moment he spotted their dark skin, his brain flew into overdrive. The fantasies started.
There was just something about dark-skinned people that turned him on, he told one of my sources.
What was it?
he wondered. Something about their dark eyes and dark hair. A few of the prostitutes he’d been with in the service were Hispanic, he recalled. Then again, some of his favorite detective magazines sported pictures of sexy-looking dark-skinned models on their covers. So maybe that was it?
According to what Landwehr told me, Rader was never quite sure why he’d targeted the Otero family—other than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whatever the reason, that next morning he drove back to their neighborhood, parked down the street from their house, and waited. It was almost 8 A.M. Sure enough, just like clockwork, the mother and children climbed into a station wagon and drove away. He began to daydream about all the terrible things he wanted to do with the mother and her daughter. A couple of days later, he followed the family station wagon on its morning drive to school and back. He did this for several days. One afternoon, he later admitted, he drove over to the public library and used a reverse directory to look up the Oteros’ phone number and identity. He even dialed their number a few times and listened to who answered the phone. He was desperate to figure out if any males lived at the residence. The last thing he needed was some guy to waltz onto the scene and ruin what was shaping up to be the perfect fantasy. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe he could overpower any man—that had nothing to do with it, he told himself. He just didn’t need the hassle.
And then one day it happened. He told himself that
it
would be OK. The dark-skinned woman with the three or four children offered the prime setup. From what I knew about these sorts of violent killers, I could almost read Rader’s mind. He convinced himself that it would be just she and the kids. Which was a good thing. It meant that she’d comply with his demands in order to protect her children. Even the location of her house was perfect: it was situated on a corner lot; there was a garage set off from the house, a fenced yard, and plenty of space between the neighbor’s house and the back door. This time, he told himself, things would turn out differently than they had a month before. This time everything would go down just as he’d planned.
Rader typed up his chilling, utterly heartless account of what happened on that day in January, not long after it all went down. It was part of the stash on the disc in my computer.
He wrote that he awoke early that morning, drove over to the mall parking lot, and started walking. A light dusting of snow was tumbling out of the gray sky.
Damn, it was cold out,
he muttered to himself. He couldn’t remember feeling a cold quite like it ever before. He pulled his Air Force parka up tight around his face and started walking toward the house in the 800 block of North Edgemoor Street. Once he got there, he walked straight toward the backyard, jumped a fence, and crouched down in the snow next to the house. That was when he spotted the dog pawprints in the snow. For a few brief moments, he panicked. Why hadn’t he ever stopped to consider that the family might own a dog? Part of him wanted to get the hell out of there, but whatever it was that had control of him wouldn’t hear of it. There would be no backing out now. He’d come too far for that.
In his journal, Rader wrote that he made a few soft whistling sounds, trying to flush out the dog. But the backyard seemed clear, and before he knew it, he was reviewing his three plans. The first involved waiting until the mother left to take her kids to school, then creeping into the garage. When she returned, he’d force her into the house. His second idea was to hide in the garage and overpower the mother and her two kids when they attempted to leave for school, then force them back inside. The last scenario had him sitting tight out there in the snow, then waiting for someone to open the back door, which was when he’d force himself inside.
He didn’t have much time. If a neighbor glanced out a back window, he was a sitting duck. He decided he’d take the three of them in the house, and crept up next to the door. He reached his hand out and tried to quietly open it, but the door was locked. Pulling a pair of wire cutters from his pocket, he snipped a nearby telephone line, then pulled a black nylon ski mask over his face. From another pocket, he retrieved his knife and pistol. A few minutes later, at 8:40, the back door opened and a young boy appeared, clutching a bag of garbage. Rader bolted toward the door before the boy spotted him; he grabbed the child.
The next moment, Rader wrote in his journal, he was standing inside the kitchen, sizing up the scene. The boy whose shoulder he clutched, along with his sister who sat at a nearby table, had been making their lunches just moments before he burst inside the house. Their coats were piled beside their lunch boxes. They were just about to leave for school. Standing beside the stove was his worst nightmare—the father.