Inside the Mind of BTK Quotes

“The fact that VICAP isn’t a mandatory program not only saddens me but sometimes keeps me awake at night. Our nation has more than seventeen thousand different law enforcement agencies operating within its borders. For whatever the reason, precious few communicate with one another, nor do many feel compelled to share information. This needs to change—and fast. We desperately need a mandatory VICAP program in this country. It won’t eradicate serial violent offenders, but it will allow the authorities to intercept them much earlier in their criminal careers.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Depending on how optimistic you are, twenty years represents a quarter of a man’s life—the time it takes for him to move from maturity to redundancy.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“She was a large woman, probably tipping the scales at 160 pounds. She wasn’t the type whom most people might assume a serial killer would target. Rader seemed to pride himself in that fact.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“More than anything else, what the BTK case did was reinforce my belief that the authorities need to supply information to the general public the moment they’ve exhausted all logical leads. More often than not, this can occur within a few days or sometimes within a few hours of launching an investigation.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Several years ago, one of my former profilers working a triple homicide in the Tampa area came up with the idea of plastering a portion of a note written by the UNSUB on billboards in select parts of the city. Within twenty-four hours, someone recognized the handwriting, and the perp was arrested not long afterwards.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Once the leads begin to dry up, law enforcement departments need to begin releasing more information. It’s crucial to get the community involved, to give people enough background into the case that they can better understand what drives the UNSUB, allowing them to become extra eyes and ears for law enforcement. Police also had examples of BTK’s handwriting and did, at one point, release a sample of the writing to the media. That Paula, who once noted the similarities between BTK’s poor spelling and that of her husband, reportedly never saw this sample tells me that this release should have been handled in a different manner.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“My hunch was spot-on. It had gone down much the way I’d imagined. According to my letter, the first time Rader had to go underground was in the autumn of 1978, when Paula walked into the tiny bedroom she shared with her husband and found herself staring at something that just about killed her. Her husband. Dennis had tied a rope around his neck and was hanging himself from a door in front of the bathroom mirror. He wore a dress, probably stolen during one of the countless home burglaries he had committed. Nothing in Paula’s sheltered, cloistered life spent in sleepy Park City could have prepared her for that strange sight. Rader told my source that this happened a few months after Kerri’s birth in June 1978.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Yet Rader’s twist on autoeroticism was unique. Unlike all the other case studies I’d researched, he didn’t hang or suffocate himself in order to intensify an orgasm. It turned out that his sense of what caused him to get aroused was so tweaked that merely the sensation of being hung or suffocated was enough to induce an orgasm. I’d never heard of anything like this. Sitting there thinking about Rader stringing himself up made me think about Paula Rader. Plenty of the killers I’d tracked were married to women all cut from the same cloth—placid, easy-to-please, the kind of woman who wouldn’t snoop around in her husband’s belongings.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Amazing. Rader still believed that he and the police shared some sort of professional camaraderie. I’d suspected that BTK was a wannabe cop back when I first looked at the case in 1979, but until sitting here and listening to him speak, I hadn’t realized how entrenched his delusion was. If only we’d been able to better capitalize on this frailty of his, to use it against him. Part of me wanted to reach through the TV monitor and beat some sense into his brain. Talk about paradoxes. Rader was too savvy to visit one of his victim’s graves or attend a community meeting, yet he somehow believed that Landwehr or LaMunyon would actually sit down to have a cup of coffee with him and chew the fat.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“You know, I used to love driving around with classical music on, looking for projects in areas where I felt comfortable, where I knew my way around and felt familiar with the streets. I can’t tell you how many times I cruised past the homes of my past victims over the years. I’d slow down and stare at the house and felt this feeling of accomplishment settle over me because that house was my trophy. It reminded me of what I’d gotten away with, of a secret I knew and nobody else did.” “Did you ever visit the graves of any of your victims?” I asked. “No, but I cut their obituaries out of the newspaper and read them over and over again. But I never went to the cemeteries, though. I’d read that the cops sometimes staked out those places, so it didn’t seem to be a safe place to go.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“know all about John Robinson,” I told him. “I wrote a book about him several years ago.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Harvey Glatman.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“When I learned about his longtime ties with Park City’s Christ Lutheran Church, I wanted to shout: “Of course he was!” Our landmark ten-year study on serial killers revealed as much. We learned that if these guys could choose a profession, it would be minister, police officer, or counselor. Why? Because of the perks, of course. The single most obvious one being that all these professions involve some type of power and control over others. It’s not surprising that in prison many violent offenders gravitate toward religion—not merely to be a member of a group, but rather to lead the group. Charles “Tex” Watson of the Charles Manson family and David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) are now jailhouse preachers.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Like me, she’d discovered no examples of sexual or physical abuse in Rader’s past. Although he steadfastly denied ever being victimized as a child, I didn’t buy it. Either he didn’t want to admit it or his psyche had been so shattered by the trauma that he couldn’t retrieve the memory. I refused to believe that Rader was a natural-born killer. It was far too easy an explanation.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Nobody said that dancing with the devil was easy.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Roughly twelve hours into his interrogation, Rader looked across the table at his inquisitors and said, “Could one of you guys do me a favor? Just shoot me in the head. Put me out of my misery. I know you would be in big trouble for that. But just shoot me like a mad dog. Just shoot me and be done with it. Sneak up behind me and shoot me. BOOM! I won’t know what hit me.” The detectives seated across from him would have been happy to oblige, but they didn’t. A bullet to the back of the head would be far too easy an out for Rader.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“At one point, he shook his head and muttered, “A little thirty-nine-cent piece of plastic floppy was my demise . . . That’s what cooked my goose.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“To hell with the fact that he’d just confessed to being the man who had killed ten people. Deep down, part of him always knew that one day he might be caught. That was practically a given in his business. What really bothered him, though, was how he’d been caught. It just didn’t seem . . . fair, Rader told my source. Over that past year, he’d begun to feel that he and Landwehr had formed a professional bond. And why wouldn’t he? Ken played the role of the no-nonsense super-cop just as I had envisioned it two decades earlier. For the past eleven months, Landwehr had appeared on the color TV set in Rader’s family room and spoken directly to Dennis, stroking his oversized ego, slowly convincing him that theirs was a relationship built on trust and respect. The way Dennis saw it, they needed each other—Rader played the role of the bad guy, and Ken played the cop. They had a good thing going, a rapport. “I need to ask you, how come you lied to me?” Rader said. “How come you lied to me?” Landwehr listened to the question, but he told me that he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard. Could Rader really be that dense? Was he so hopelessly deluded as to imagine that the past three decades had been nothing more than a big game? He bit his lip to keep from laughing. But Rader was serious. He sat there across the table, staring at Landwehr, not blinking, patiently waiting for an answer to his question. Finally, the tired homicide detective shook his head and muttered, “Because I was trying to catch you.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“To hell with the fact that he’d just confessed to being the man who had killed ten people. Deep down, part of him always knew that one day he might be caught. That was practically a given in his business. What really bothered him, though, was how he’d been caught. It just didn’t seem . . . fair, Rader told my source. Over that past year, he’d begun to feel that he and Landwehr had formed a professional bond. And why wouldn’t he? Ken played the role of the no-nonsense super-cop just as I had envisioned it two decades earlier. For the past eleven months, Landwehr had appeared on the color TV set in Rader’s family room and spoken directly to Dennis, stroking his oversized ego, slowly convincing him that theirs was a relationship built on trust and respect. The way Dennis saw it, they needed each other—Rader played the role of the bad guy, and Ken played the cop. They had a good thing going, a rapport. “I need to ask you, how come you lied to me?” Rader said. “How come you lied to me?”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Three and a half hours had elapsed since Rader had first been seated in that interrogation room. Morton looked at him and said, “Say who you are.” Rader lifted his gaze and stared at the wall behind the two men. After a few moments, he opened his mouth and finally said it: “BTK.” And that was that. In a matter of seconds, it was all over.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“He took a deep breath, then muttered, “People have problems and probably always will have problems.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“the eighteen-year veteran special agent noticed something peculiar. “His heart wasn’t racing,” he recalled. “He wasn’t breathing hard or perspiring in the least. I’d never seen anything like it, never seen anyone look so calm at a moment like that. It was pretty chilling, really. Kind of summed up everything about who this guy was. It was as though he felt absolutely nothing. When I got him back to his feet, he turned slowly and looked me straight in the eye. Everything about him was calm, cool, flat. He said, ‘Tell my wife I won’t be home for lunch . . . I assume you know where I live.’” Lundin replied, “Yeah, we’ll take care of it.” Lundin told me that he had tried to make sense of the expression he glimpsed in Rader’s face on that afternoon. But what he saw there defied any permutation of evil he’d ever encountered. “A long time ago, I heard someone describe a Nazi war criminal in a way that I think works for Rader,” he said. “They referred to him as an ‘unfinished soul.’ I can’t think of a better term—unfinished soul. Just seems to fit. This guy just doesn’t have the capability to care, and I have no idea why. Normally, with these guys, you can link it back to their childhood. But his was so average and run-of-the-mill, it doesn’t make sense. He was proud of what he did. Didn’t have a single shred of sadness or remorse—not even for himself. He had nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“He had another close call a few days later. As Landwehr told me, Rader was at home writing a letter to his brother Paul, who was stationed over in “the big sandbox,” which was how Rader enjoyed describing Iraq. Paula happened to walk by and glance over her husband’s shoulder at the letter, reading the words he’d written. Suddenly, he heard her exclaim, “You know, you spell just like BTK.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“As Landwehr later learned when he interrogated him, BTK was growing frustrated with the elaborate, complicated logistics involved with dropping off his communiqués around the Wichita area. He wanted to go digital and begin submitting his messages to them via computer disk. Because the police knew about these high-tech matters, he truly believed he could trust them to give it to him straight.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“The killer had begun to trust the super-cop—which was exactly what I had envisioned when I began suggesting this technique back in 1984.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“But the part of the communication that caught Landwehr’s eye was the pithy message BTK had tacked onto the final page. It read, “Look, be honest with me. If I send you a disk will it be traceable? Just put (the answer) in the newspaper under Miscellaneous Section 494 (Rex, it will be OK). Run it for a few day in case I’m out of town—etc. I will try a floppy for a test run some time in the near future—February or March.” This marked the beginning of the end for BTK.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“CHILDHOOD REFLECTIONS: 1-8 Years Old: Only memories float around in the mind, but never seem to disappear, but you almost see them (possible sexual overtures or early childhood problems that develop into sexual variant later on in life). . . . Mother slept beside me at times, the smells, the feel of underclothes and she let me rub her hair. . . . 10-11 years old: If you masturbate god will come and kill you, mom words after she found seminal yellow stain in her underwear one day. She tried to beat me. I fought back. She held my hands behind my back and used the man’s belt to whip me. Funny it hurt but Sparky liked it. Mother finally quit and said, ‘Oh my god what have I done?’ She kiss me. I was close to her, tears and moisture upon her and my cheeks. I could feel her heart beating and smell those wonderful motherly aromas. After consulting with the FBI, investigators sat on the contents of the bizarre story for over a month before releasing them to the community.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Two of those pages detailed BTK’s involvement in the death of a troubled nineteen-year-old young man named Jake Allen, whose suicide had been reported in the local press a few weeks earlier. Of course, everything Rader wrote in that communiqué was pure bullshit, but the Wichita police didn’t know that at the time. According to Landwehr, Allen, a star athlete and high school valedictorian, had dreamed of becoming an optometrist, but weeks before his death he and some buddies had gotten caught by local cops for having beer in their car. Allen soon convinced himself that he’d blown his chances of ever getting into optometry school and, in the early morning hours of July 5, lay down on the train tracks near his home in tiny Argonia, Kansas, forty miles from Wichita. Not long afterwards, a passing Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train barreled over his body, crushing it almost beyond recognition.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“Landwehr reached across the table to the folder he’d placed atop the napkin dispenser. He opened it, quietly fished out a sheet of paper encased in plastic, and handed it to me. It looked like this: 1. A SERIAL KILLER IS BORN 2. DAWN 3. FETISH 4. FANTASY WORLD 5. THE SEARCH BEGINS 6. BTK’S HAUNTS 7. PJ’S 8. MO-ID-RUSE 9. HITS 10. TREASURED MEMORIES 11. FINAL CURTAIN CALL 12. DUSK 13. WILL THERE MORE? The next page contained a computer-generated word-search puzzle that at first felt reminiscent of something that a diabolical master-mind like the fictional Hannibal Lecter might create to confound authorities. But the more investigators scrutinized it, the more they realized that this guy was no better at designing a puzzle (he couldn’t quite seem to line the numbers up with the letters) than he was at spelling.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer

“what the hell you were doing when he poked his head up.” Landwehr nodded at the waitress to come dump some more coffee into his cup. He was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie. He ran his fingers along his neck, just inside his stiff white collar. Then he told me. The morning it happened, he was standing beside his wife’s hospital bed. She’d just had stomach surgery, and he was waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. It was March 17, 2004, the twenty-seventh anniversary of Shirley Vian’s murder. “My phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a detective in my unit. ‘We just got a letter,’ he said. ‘Looks like it could be from BTK.’” “How’d that make you feel?” I asked, sipping my coffee. “Sick to my stomach,” Landwehr said. “I thought, ‘We could be in a lot of trouble, here’ . . . But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we had a chance to finally catch this guy.”
― John E. Douglas, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer