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 B

I’d seen other sociopathic serial killers leave behind. Compared to those maniacs who left severed heads propped up on TV sets or their victims spread-eagled on the floor with various objects inserted into their vaginas or rectums, UNSUB was downright juvenile and soft core. Nevertheless, he used his victims as inanimate props, posing them to resemble a scene out of the pages of a detective magazine, leaving them out in the open so that the first person to discover the body would practically trip over it when entering the front door of the victim’s home.
     
    Without a doubt, BTK was a sadist who inflicted unfathomable horrors upon his victims. Yet he also differed from all the other sexual sadists I’d studied, guys who needed to inflict physical torture in order to be sexually satisfied. He got off by employing a form of torture that was predominantly mental, not physical. Although he seemed obsessed with physical torture, it wasn’t part of what’s referred to as his “signature,” which is what a killer must do to satisfy himself psychologically. BTK’s signature was bondage—not physical torture.
     
    BTK never penetrated any of his victims. It would have been easy to interpret this type of behavior as though he were trying to say You’re not even good enough for me to rape. But I knew better.
     
    His decision to not rape his victims or engage in necrophilia actually told me that despite BTK’s sexual obsessions, deep inside his mind he felt hopelessly inadequate. His opinion of himself was so low—and his fear of women so great—that he could never bring himself to thrust himself so intimately into any of his victims. They were used purely as props. Masturbation was the only sexual activity he enjoyed during his binding, torture, and killing.
     
    When I thought of the UNSUB as a boy, I couldn’t imagine that he had ever raped anyone, which was unlike a lot of sexual predators. I did imagine him learning his craft as a Peeping Tom. If nothing else, this youthful pastime gave him a priceless crash course in surveillance techniques. Monitoring and studying his victims were absolutely crucial to him. He seemed to love the thrill of the hunt probably even more than the actual killing. By the time he actually did strike, he’d spent so much time fantasizing over what he intended to do to his victim that he’d convinced himself that he controlled every aspect of their environment.
     
    As for his victims, he told police in the handful of taunting communiqués he’d sent over the years that he chose them based on both planning and spur-of-the-moment opportunity. His intended victims had to be available when the overpowering urge to kill struck. If they weren’t, he moved on to another target.
     
    There was something else: judging from the way he managed to keep his crime scenes so relatively free of fingerprints and other incriminating evidence, he was an extremely well-organized person, someone fixated on detail. Inwardly he was an insecure, self-hating wreck. Outwardly, however, he exuded a pompous attitude that made it appear as though he possessed a grandiose opinion of himself. It was another one of his crazy, sick paradoxes.
     
    What I also found interesting were those communications he’d sent police over the years, boasting of his prowess as a killer and his ability to elude law enforcement. From the language he used, he was obviously both fascinated by cop subculture and investigative procedure and quite familiar with them. I was convinced that he was either employed in some form of law enforcement, probably low down in rank or status, like a security guard or parking violation officer, or just got off dreaming about the power such a job could bestow on him.
     
    As is often the case with serial killers, his slayings were the most important undertakings of his life, imbuing his otherwise empty existence with meaning. From his letters, it seemed obvious that he was a nobody who, because of his