Read Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer for Free Online

like Berkowitz, could a guy like BTK just turn it on and off like he did?
     
    I’d already concluded that one of the reasons he’d managed to elude us was his consummate ability to compartmentalize his life—to appear normal on the outside and keep his perverted, murderous alter ego locked up inside. He’d somehow found a way to prevent his dark inner world from seeping out and infecting his outer world.
     
    I was dying to know how he’d managed to do it. When they catch this son of a bitch, I thought to myself, I’m gonna look him up and get him to tell me.
     
    Inside my briefcase were the notes I’d penciled from my meeting earlier that day with the two detectives from Wichita. Together with a group of my profilers and a handful of the agency’s top criminologists, we listened as the men walked us through the case. This time they’d come to us looking not so much for a profile of the UNSUB, but for some proactive techniques they could use to flush the killer out into the open.
     
    After we listened to the presentation, the one idea that came to mind was that police should organize a community-wide public meeting where the BTK murders would be discussed. The purpose of the gathering, held in a location central to all the crime scenes, would be to get the UNSUB to attend. From my experience with many of the serial killers I’d hunted in the past, I knew that their enormous egos and feeling of invincible superiority make it difficult for them to stay away from such meetings.
     
    My plan was that investigators would covertly photograph those in attendance and identify all the vehicles outside the community hall. And because I was convinced that the killer was a police buff, I suggested that an announcement should be made that the authorities were looking for potential volunteers “if the need should arise in the future when the police might need help.” The only requirements were that the applicants needed their own transportation and some law enforcement training or education.
     
    The two detectives from Wichita scribbled down my suggestion, but it ate at me that there was something more that could be done, something altogether new.
     
     
    Sitting there in my study, all I could think about were the eyes of Josephine Otero, BTK’s eleven-year-old victim in his first series of murders, the one he’d hung from a pipe in the basement of her family’s house, after strangling her parents and younger brother. Nothing in my career could ever prepare me for what I imagined this innocent little girl must have endured before finally dying of asphyxiation. I’d worked more child homicide cases than I cared to remember, but something about this one was different.
     
    This killer didn’t feel human to me. All the guys I’d chased and studied were monsters, but even with the worst of them I usually sensed something familiar and human. No matter how horrific their butchery, I found some shred of fragility within them. But I didn’t get that with this killer in Wichita. Just when I thought I’d studied and classified every variation of evil, along comes this freak. He resided in a class all by himself.
     
    I wandered back upstairs and climbed into bed. Before long, I felt myself begin to drift, but I fought the urge, trying to remain in that strange region between wakefulness and sleep. It was a place where I’d sometimes retrieved the information that helped me put together a profile. I waited for my mind to unearth something on the ghost I was chasing, but nothing came.
     
    After a few minutes, my lids grew unbearably heavy. How does someone like this start? I whispered to myself as I began to fade. And how can I put an end to him?
     

2
     
    The sun had yet to appear in the sky when I awoke the next morning, a few hours after finally drifting back to sleep. Out of habit, I quickly rolled over to check the legal pad sitting on my bedside table. Years before, I’d trained myself to dream about whatever case I