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 Page A

different.
     
    I organized the crime scene reports and my extensive notes in front of me in neat piles on the table—one stack for each series of murders. I knew that somewhere within those stacks of paper there existed a single, simple fact, a piece of evidence—either physical or verbal—that I might be able to use against the UNSUB. It wasn’t enough for me to simply serve up some ideas that I believed might prove useful in the case. I was consumed by the idea of helping police find a way of taking this killer down. Before coming up with an effective proactive strategy, I wanted to force-feed all the gruesome, mundane details of the case into my brain one last time. The white eight-by-twelve-inch piles bulged off the table, resembling four freshly dug graves covered with snow.
     
     
    The first thing that came to mind was that the cops in Wichita had done everything right. They’d interviewed thousands of people and tracked down countless potential suspects (including a former police officer), none of whom turned out to be the right guy. For the past four months, the department’s recently assembled task force, composed of six detectives, had sifted through the mountains of old case files that had accumulated over the last decade, familiarizing themselves with every convoluted twist and turn the case had taken.
     
    One thing was certain: our UNSUB was in the driver’s seat. Not only that, he had grown smarter with every kill and seemed to enjoy toying with the police. But perhaps the most unnerving thing about BTK was how he seemed to defy so much of what we took for granted about serial sexual killers. The one thing different we knew about him now that we didn’t in 1979 was that three months after the Otero homicides, he had been responsible for the messy, nearly botched murder of Kathryn Bright.
     
    Kathy Bright’s brother, Kevin, who miraculously survived the attacked despite being shot twice in the face, described how his sister’s killer attempted to convince them that he was a fugitive. He would, of course, need to tie them up, BTK told them. But all he really wanted was some food, money, and their car keys. Then he’d be on his way. Rader lived only a short distance from Kathy and Kevin, and had no intention of leaving them unharmed.
     
    Having a living witness provide a firsthand account of the killer’s technique for calming and lulling his potential victims into allowing him to tie them up gave us a priceless bit of insight into how the UNSUB carried out his crimes. His homicides were difficult to pigeonhole because they possessed elements of both organization and disorganization. He was a control freak who came prepared, often arriving at the homes of his victims with rope, gags, guns, and a knife. He didn’t use force to convince his victims to go along with him. He used bullshit. He pretended to be a relatively harmless thug, using words to manipulate his victims into allowing themselves to be tied up, usually without any struggle.
     
    But he also left some things to chance. If his intended victim wasn’t available, he would strike the next best target he could find. On several occasions, it appeared he had difficulty controlling his victims. And he was hardly the neatest killer I’d encountered, leaving behind semen near the bodies of two of his kills.
     
    Then there was his peculiar way of posing his victims. I’d never come across another killer who did it the way he did. He primped and preened the bodies in erotic positions, clothing, and bindings as fuel for his masturbatory fantasies. But he had also laid out and displayed nearly all the bodies of his victims—except for Kathy Bright, who died of stab wounds—for the investigators who arrived at his crime scenes long after he’d fled.
     
    It was as if he positioned the corpses the way a florist might arrange flowers. He wanted to shock, yet his visual statements were also fairly tame and modest—at least in terms of the work