Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (58 page)

By recounting the story of the coward and loser that Rader—and every other serial killer—really is, I hope to cut the “legend” down to size.

Most of all, I believe that by explaining how the mind of a serial killer works, I can begin to help readers understand how to avoid ending up as a victim of violent crime.

Another hour had passed. I’d been so lost inside my head that I hadn’t noticed the sky. It had turned the darkest shade of black I’d ever seen. I pulled over to the side of the highway, realizing that everything around me was illuminated by a greenish glow.

My heart began pounding. I killed the engine and climbed out of the car. Such stillness. The air felt dead. Nothing moved. I stared at the iridescent black sky above, trying to remember the last time I’d seen it go so dark in the middle of the afternoon. I climbed back into the car and switched on the radio.

Further on down the road, I began to see jagged veins of lightning flashing, causing the radio to crackle. According to a news report, flash floods had just torn through several nearby towns. Looking out the passenger window, I noticed the vague outline of tiny shadowy funnels dangling beneath a ceiling of roiling clouds on the horizon.

Tornado, I thought to myself.

There was nothing to do but sit there and watch the shapes forming overhead. From out of nowhere, a thought swirled inside my brain, and I found myself thinking about a dream Rader had recited to Casarona a few days before my arrival.

The first portion was blurry in my memory, but what I remembered most was the tornado. According to Rader, a twister had just ripped through Wichita, and afterwards he found himself walking through the wreckage, picking his way through the debris strewn across the ground. Everywhere he looked, houses, cars, and trailers had been smashed into millions of tiny splintered pieces. And every few feet he walked, he stopped to pick up a tattered photograph or what had once been a child’s toy from the rubble. He held the torn, ripped bits of life in his fingers, inspecting each piece, wondering . . .

If any single image summed up the devastation Rader inflicted on the community of Wichita, and on his own family, this was it. He was that dark, dirty, swirling twister, dropping out of the sky, destroying whatever he touched.

The thought of it made me tired. I wished I could be done with Rader and put him behind me completely, although I knew that would never happen. He and those like him were my calling. Like it or not, I’ll be attempting to understand how their minds work for as long as blood and air flow through my body.

The rain had come; it poured down in thick sheets. The highway was empty. I sat there on the side of the road, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time. A tiny ribbon of blue sky and golden sunlight shimmered on the horizon, just below the curtain of black clouds. So I twisted the ignition, stomped on the accelerator, and drove like hell straight toward it, straight for the light.

About the Authors

John E. Douglas
, Ed.D., entered duty with the FBI in 1970 after serving four years in the U.S. Air Force. He gained investigative experience in violent crime in Detroit and Milwaukee field offices and also served as a hostage negotiator. In 1977 Douglas was appointed to the FBI Academy as an instructor in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, where he taught hostage negotiation and applied criminal psychology.

In 1990 he was promoted as unit chief within the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Serving in that capacity, he had overall supervision of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (better known as criminal profiling), and the Arson and Bombing Investigative Services Program.

Douglas was a coparticipant in the FBI’s first research program of serial killers and, based on that study, coauthored
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives.
The University of Virginia awarded Douglas the prestigious Jefferson Award for academic excellence for his work on that study.

In 1992 Douglas coauthored the first edition of the
Crime Classification Manual (CCM),
the first study of violent crime to define and standardize techniques and terminology to be used by the criminal justice system and academia. Douglas again received the Jefferson Award for this research and the publication of the
CCM.

Douglas has consulted on thousands of cases worldwide, providing case analysis, interview and interrogation techniques, investigative strategies, prosecutorial strategies, and expert testimony. Included in the list of Douglas’s cases are Seattle’s “Green River Killer,” Wichita’s “BTK Strangler,” the O. J. Simpson civil case, and the JonBenet Ramsey homicide.

Since his retirement in 1995 from the FBI, Douglas has been providing pro bono assistance whenever possible to police and victims of violent crime.

Douglas has coauthored both fiction and nonfiction books, including two New York Times best sellers,
Mindhunter
and
Journey into Darkness.
He also has coauthored
Obsession, Anatomy of Motive, Cases That Haunt Us, Anyone You Want Me to Be,
and
Broken Wings.

Douglas does numerous public presentations yearly, belonging to the Greater Talent Network agency in New York. His personal Web site,
johndouglasmindhunter.com
, contains crime information as well as an active online discussion board.

Johnny Dodd
has been a writer at
People
magazine for over a decade. He has reported on some of pop culture’s biggest stories—and some of its most tragic crimes. From the savage murder of Nicole Brown Simpson to the cold-blooded killing of Laci Peterson, he has written about a wide assortment of thugs, cads, and psychopaths. His work, which has won numerous journalism awards, has appeared in dozens of publications. Johnny grew up in Kansas City, a three-hour drive from where BTK lived, plotted, and murdered. He now lives in Santa Monica, California. More information on Johnny’s writing projects can be found at his Web site—
www.acmewordcorp.com
.

Photo Insert

Dennis L. Rader, from boy to family man to convicted serial killer.

CREDIT: Courtesy of the Wichita Police Department

Originally published in 2005, this map from
The Wichita Eagle
shows the locations of the BTK crime scenes and a timeline of the activity that led to the arrest of Dennis Rader.

CREDIT: Mike Sullivan and Paul Soutar/
The Wichita Eagle
/Newscom