Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer by John Douglas, Johnny Dodd Read Free Book Online

that he is not a psychotic animal, if the press has already painted him to be this. This approach may reduce the killer’s anxiety concerning his own psychiatric health and reinforce his own guilt feelings by removing the rationalization of the excuse of psychiatric cause and hence non-responsibility for his acts.
     
    Extended periods between his murders may be for reasons when he was absent from the area either as a result of military service, schooling, incarceration, or mental treatment. It is not uncommon for subjects such as yours to frequent police hangouts in an attempt to overhear officers discussing the case. Furthermore, such offenders will be at the crime scene observing detectives investigating the case and looking for clues to the homicide. All this allows the murderer to fulfill his ego and gain a feeling of superiority. He may go so far as to telephonically contact your department and provide information relative to the crime.
     
    Your advantage in this case is that his very strong self-centered attitude will be his downfall. He will provide information to a friend or an acquaintance in a local tavern concerning information that he knows about the case. He may even pretend to be an officer working the case. If the BTK Strangler reads police detective magazines, he probably sent away for a “police badge” that he carries on his person. In fact, he may even use this MO to gain admittance into his victims’ homes. He probably flashes his badge whenever opportunity lends itself. (Example paying for a drink in a tavern.) His egocentricity keeps him in your city and he will probably kill again.
     
     
    Reading an analysis I’d written five years before was nerve wracking. Of course, it was just a thumbnail sketch of what I’d told police when I’d contacted them on the phone, shortly after I’d sent it back to Wichita in 1979. Even though I firmly believed I’d nailed this guy dead-on, I was constantly asking myself if I’d missed something or placed too much the emphasis on the wrong bit of evidence. The pressure to get it right was overwhelming. Knowing that what I wrote could send investigators off in the wrong direction, which could indirectly result in more dead bodies, weighed heavily on me. It was one of the reasons I was so obsessive about my work.
     
    The key to writing the kind of analysis that actually helps investigators do their job is deceptively simple, but it’s something that takes years to teach. In fact, it was only after five years of in-depth training and analysis that I considered one of my wannabes to be an expert. The most important thing is not just to regurgitate back to the police the data they already know.
     
    My profiles were rarely more than five pages. I always ended them with a simple request that investigators pick up the phone and call me. This was why I never inserted any proactive techniques—on how to catch the bad guys—into our reports. I feared that whatever I wrote might get leaked to the press.
     
    In this case, however, I had a hunch that the best use of my expertise would be to develop some proactive recipes to flush this killer out of the woodwork. He’d manipulated the police and the community long enough. The time had come to return the favor and begin messing with his mind. The only question was, How the hell do we do it?
     
     
    I decided to skip lunch, gather up all my notes on the case, and walk over to the third floor of a nearby building on the FBI campus. This was where the bureau’s legal unit did all its research, and I loved to sit up there in the library and gaze out through the massive windows at the green, rolling Virginia countryside. The view of all those oak and maple trees, along with all that sunlight, was definitely a hell of a lot more conducive to clear thought than an often foul-smelling office in the forensic science building. Up there, surrounded by all that blue sky and those green treetops, things just felt