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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 5: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about him Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening.
Speaker 7: In nineteen seventy four, Dennis Lynn Raider stocked and murdered
Speaker 7: a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he
Speaker 7: had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon
Speaker 7: after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and
Speaker 7: then another, until they had ten victims. He named it
Speaker 7: himself BTK, Bind Torture Kill, and wrote notes that terrorized
Speaker 7: the city. He remained on the loose for thirty years.
Speaker 7: No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He
Speaker 7: nearly got away with his crimes, but in two thousand
Speaker 7: and four he began to play risky games with the police.
Speaker 7: He made a mistake. When he was arrested. Raider's family, friends,
Speaker 7: and coworkers were shocked to discover that BTK had been
Speaker 7: among them, going to work, raising his children, and acting normal.
Speaker 7: This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of
Speaker 7: victims and for the ordinary public face that Raider, a
Speaker 7: church council president, had shown to the outside world through
Speaker 7: jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondents. Katherine Ramslin worked
Speaker 7: with Raider himself to analyze the layers of his psyche.
Speaker 7: Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Raiders' unique codes. She
Speaker 7: presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of
Speaker 7: one man's motivation the stock, torture, and kill. He reveals
Speaker 7: aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous of
Speaker 7: living serial killers that have never before been revealed. The
Speaker 7: documentary BTK Confession of a Serial Killer premiers January eighth
Speaker 7: and ninth on A and E. The two night event
Speaker 7: sheds new light on Raider's double life as both an
Speaker 7: upstanding citizen and a heartless killer. Doctor Katherlin Ramslin, the
Speaker 7: renowned professor of forensic psychology and author, leads the examination
Speaker 7: of raiders transformation from an American boy to an American
Speaker 7: monster who wreak havoc in Wichita Canvas and went uncaptured
Speaker 7: for thirty years. With exclusive conversations with Raider himself, eye
Speaker 7: opening new archival, comprehensive interviews, and access to raiders drawings
Speaker 7: and coded diaries. All paired with doctor Ramslin's expertise, Viewers
Speaker 7: get to know the man behind the moniker, the truth
Speaker 7: behind the headline, and a glimpse at the secrets Raider
Speaker 7: is still holding onto. The documentary we are discussing tonight
Speaker 7: is BTK Confession of a Serial Killer, with my special guests,
Speaker 7: journalist and author and professor doctor Katherine Ramslin. Welcome back
Speaker 7: to program, and thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 7: Doctor Katherine Ramseln always enjoy being here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: It's always a fantastic pleasure and a great thrill.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about the origins of this documentary project, how
Speaker 7: it came about.
Speaker 6: Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: We started with the publication of the book, and then
Speaker 4: we began to look for people who might be interested
Speaker 4: in making it, you know, visual, and we had several takers.
Speaker 4: We sold the option a couple of times, and then
Speaker 4: the pandemic, so right, the pandemic was a pretty big
Speaker 4: interruption because we did have somebody who was going to
Speaker 4: do it, and then A and E decided that they
Speaker 4: wanted to do it as a four part documentary, which
Speaker 4: that's pretty daunting, and there was a lot of work involved,
Speaker 4: but in the end, the director's vision and the vision
Speaker 4: of all the production people really came through in terms
Speaker 4: of the goal I had had for the book, and
Speaker 4: I thought that was really quite an achievement because my
Speaker 4: goal is kind of academic. I really wanted this to
Speaker 4: use what a serial killer has to say about himself
Speaker 4: to benefit law enforcement, criminal justice, and forensic psychology. So
Speaker 4: it wasn't just a serial killer lathering on. It was
Speaker 4: formed for a specific purpose, and the documentary achieves that,
Speaker 4: which I'm very pleased to bet.
Speaker 7: We're talking about the book that's twenty and sixteen, and
Speaker 7: that book is The Confession of a Serial Killer, The
Speaker 7: Untold Story of Dennis Raider, the BTK Killer again released
Speaker 7: in twenty sixteen, and the audiobook edition is going to
Speaker 7: be from Blackstone Publishing. It will be released January eleven.
Speaker 7: So let's get to this very very important book and
Speaker 7: very important project that you undertook with Dennis Raider. Tell
Speaker 7: us a little bit about some of the people that
Speaker 7: were including Jim Thompson, some of the people that were
Speaker 7: involved in the very beginning of the book. That you
Speaker 7: say that wouldn't happened otherwise.
Speaker 4: Well, right from the start, it wasn't even my book.
Speaker 4: What had happened is Rader was arrested in two thousand
Speaker 4: and five, and a woman whose code name we ended
Speaker 4: up using, we called her True Grit, had decided to
Speaker 4: write this book and contacted him, and he agreed to
Speaker 4: do it with her, and they had several years of correspondence,
Speaker 4: and apparently she had decided she wasn't going to do
Speaker 4: this book. It had been a lot more difficult for
Speaker 4: her than she imagined it to be. She had been
Speaker 4: under attack a lot from because she was kind of
Speaker 4: the gatekeeper for Rader. And I saw her on Facebook
Speaker 4: and asked her whatever happened to her book, because I
Speaker 4: had heard about her through news reports, And she asked
Speaker 4: me if I would take it over, which was not
Speaker 4: as simple as it sounds, because it was an easy
Speaker 4: yes for me because I had already written a book
Speaker 4: about how health experts over the past century had spent
Speaker 4: a lot of time with extreme offenders to learn about
Speaker 4: their development and their crimes and their attitudes, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So I already had a template and it was a
Speaker 4: great opportunity, but I needed to be approved by this
Speaker 4: concertium of the victim's family members, their surviving family members,
Speaker 4: because they wanted to have some control over the kind
Speaker 4: of thing that would be put out that they didn't
Speaker 4: want anything out there. Certainly something was going to be
Speaker 4: and they wanted some control over it and as well
Speaker 4: as benefiting from it, which was fine with me. So
Speaker 4: I wrote a proposal. I sent it to the attorney
Speaker 4: Jim Thompson for the families and told them what I
Speaker 4: wanted to do, and they did like what I wanted
Speaker 4: to do. They liked my credentials and you know, in
Speaker 4: the academic world in terms of teaching forensic psychology and
Speaker 4: being very prominent in the research arena for serial killers
Speaker 4: and mass murderers. So they liked all that. But still
Speaker 4: it was a long drawn out process. And during this
Speaker 4: time I also got to know Raider, who wasn't so
Speaker 4: keen about transferring all this from the original person because
Speaker 4: he really liked to someone he didn't know. So we
Speaker 4: ended up playing chess, and he also wanted me to
Speaker 4: solve a series of codes in part because he liked
Speaker 4: to communicate with codes, because he founded himself as kind
Speaker 4: of a spy, and it was also a way to
Speaker 4: keep prison guards from knowing what he was saying doing.
Speaker 4: But also it was a test for me to see
Speaker 4: what I play. But I played the code game, and
Speaker 4: of course I will because my interest in him was
Speaker 4: the whole picture. Who is this guy? What motivates him?
Speaker 4: How does he create these codes and respond to them?
Speaker 4: And so fine. I mean, it was actually pretty intriguing
Speaker 4: to be sent these weird codes to see if I
Speaker 4: could figure them out. And I needed the other person
Speaker 4: true grit to help me because she had He had
Speaker 4: sent part to me in part to her, and you know,
Speaker 4: kind of a zoniac thing. Everybody get together and figure
Speaker 4: this out. But for me, that was all behavior. I
Speaker 4: was interested in everything that he would do, whether it
Speaker 4: was manipulating, lying, telling the truth, whatever, it didn't matter.
Speaker 4: I wanted to see all the layers.
Speaker 6: In that as well.
Speaker 7: That you talk about these layers that you wanted to see,
Speaker 7: what are some of the things that he told you about,
Speaker 7: influence from other serial killers and some of the fatasies
Speaker 7: that it seemed that he shared with some of these
Speaker 7: role models.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of that came along the way. We
Speaker 4: worked for five years on this book. Initially, he of
Speaker 4: course talked about what everybody knows that he who has
Speaker 4: read anything about him, that he had role models. H. H.
Speaker 4: Holmes for his his tortured castles, and Raider would put
Speaker 4: his torture fantasies into a barn because he's from Kansas.
Speaker 4: And also Harvey Glatman, who would bind his victims with ropes,
Speaker 4: because for Rader, rope was a pretty significant fetish object
Speaker 4: in his own fantasies. So those are the two that
Speaker 4: many people are aware he uses role models. But along
Speaker 4: the way, as we were talking and reading and looking
Speaker 4: at comparisons to others, you know, he honed some of that,
Speaker 4: and he got interested in some that he didn't know
Speaker 4: about before, and talked more about some of the readings
Speaker 4: he had done, and it was pretty clear that most
Speaker 4: of what he did wasn't really original to him. He
Speaker 4: had gotten it either out of true crime magazines or fiction.
Speaker 4: He read about what some serial killers had done in novels,
Speaker 4: and some of the things he was doing was trying
Speaker 4: to replicate all of that. So he wasn't really that imaginative,
Speaker 4: and you know, unfortunately in fiction and film, we get
Speaker 4: this notion of this mastermind mentality, you know, the great puppeteer, manipulator,
Speaker 4: and most of that just isn't what these serial killers
Speaker 4: are like. They're just out to achieve their goals and
Speaker 4: get it the way they need to get it. So
Speaker 4: he would find ideas in these various sources and try
Speaker 4: them out.
Speaker 7: He'd used a lot of Again, he didn't make this
Speaker 7: easy for you, and you had to collaborate with the
Speaker 7: initial contact to be able to do any of this
Speaker 7: and figure out a bunch of things.
Speaker 6: Because he mentioned is trying to be.
Speaker 7: Clever, but you talk about him talking about the victims
Speaker 7: and talking about the murders and using expressions like going
Speaker 7: into the cookie jar and meals.
Speaker 6: So explain that language that you deciphered.
Speaker 4: That was probably one of the very first things that
Speaker 4: he did was send me clippings from newspapers and magazines
Speaker 4: with things circled, and then he would write a letter,
Speaker 4: sometimes a twenty page letter. In his handwriting is pretty
Speaker 4: terrible in he'dnt bed in the letter along the way
Speaker 4: the clues to what he had circled. So I had
Speaker 4: to make my way through the letter and then look
Speaker 4: back at the clippings. And for example, one of the
Speaker 4: most puzzling to me was when he talked about that
Speaker 4: my interest in recipes of the three layer kind, and
Speaker 4: I thought, what, I don't cook the talking about. But
Speaker 4: then I realized as I saw what he circled would
Speaker 4: have a B, a T, or a K, and so
Speaker 4: I realized, oh, that's the that's the three layer thing.
Speaker 4: And subsequently I learned about his magical number three. He
Speaker 4: thinks the whole world is sort of organized around threes
Speaker 4: and that threes had somehow protected him, and so he
Speaker 4: has this attunement to threes. So there was that, and
Speaker 4: then then he had some metaphors like castles and trains
Speaker 4: and such things as that, but it became unwieldy. I
Speaker 4: mean we'd be talking along about, you know, using trains
Speaker 4: and canyons and passengers and whatnot, as we were talking
Speaker 4: about whether this book was even going to sell or not,
Speaker 4: because I did have a lot of issues with that,
Speaker 4: and then we had finally, when the book did sell,
Speaker 4: I decided I would make the metaphor the codes that
Speaker 4: we would use. So it's kind of an irony because
Speaker 4: he did not want any woman kind of dominating him
Speaker 4: in any way. That was That was one of his
Speaker 4: key issues is how females threw him off ballots. And
Speaker 4: there I was making the code, but I used threes,
Speaker 4: and I used the cave and all the stuff that
Speaker 4: was appealing to him. And also he sometimes would forget
Speaker 4: what sort of this code's meant. So well, you know,
Speaker 4: so this way we had a record, you know, that
Speaker 4: we could both refer to. And but in the end
Speaker 4: the irony is that I to the book to my
Speaker 4: codes using when I knew it would be his preferential style.
Speaker 7: You had already done with your book The Mind of
Speaker 7: a Murderer. You already had extensive experience dealing with extreme offenders.
Speaker 7: How did that help you in this regard with BTK?
Speaker 4: Well, the Mind of a Murderer is really looking at
Speaker 4: what others had done. I wanted to look at accounts
Speaker 4: not by detectives or journalists, but by mental health experts
Speaker 4: to see how they had approached extreme offenders, mass and
Speaker 4: serial killers. So that wasn't really my work, although I've
Speaker 4: certainly approached other offenders, but not to this degree and
Speaker 4: not to the degree that those professionals had done. So
Speaker 4: they really gave me role models in terms of the
Speaker 4: persistence and the kinds of things you had to put
Speaker 4: up with the way to approach somebody who's very egotistical
Speaker 4: or narcissistic, you know. And I also trained. I have
Speaker 4: one master's degree in clinical psychology that has a specific
Speaker 4: type of training of really bracketing your preconceptions and your
Speaker 4: biases so that you could listen and let that person's
Speaker 4: world be what it is, rather than you imposing some
Speaker 4: theoretical perspective on them. But it's listening to them. So
Speaker 4: I already had really been solidly trained in that approach,
Speaker 4: and that's certainly the one I used to with Rader
Speaker 4: and would use with anybody else. Is what is your world?
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter if it corresponds to reality or corresponds
Speaker 4: to morality. It matters that you yield to me, what
Speaker 4: your experience is, what your perspective is, and how you
Speaker 4: came to be this way. So that's I learned from
Speaker 4: looking to others as well as my own training in
Speaker 4: clinical psychology.
Speaker 7: Now, an important part of this is when you asked
Speaker 7: him the crucial important question about his torture fantasies, how
Speaker 7: did you approach.
Speaker 4: That One of the things I did was to collect
Speaker 4: what I knew from others. And I knew I was
Speaker 4: already friends with the DA on that case, right, so
Speaker 4: she wasn't keen about me doing this, but she was
Speaker 4: one over and she showed me her whole stashus stuff.
Speaker 4: I saw the interrogation, the whole police interrogation notes, so
Speaker 4: I had the way he presented himself to them. I
Speaker 4: had letters from the first person, I had letters from
Speaker 4: other people, so I had this multiple perspectives on him
Speaker 4: in terms of the way, you know, he'd spent doctor
Speaker 4: really everything for you know, whoever he was talking to.
Speaker 4: So this way I had. If you wanted to talk
Speaker 4: about torturing animals, for example, I already knew some things
Speaker 4: that I knew he didn't want to tell me, so
Speaker 4: then I could call him out on it. But I
Speaker 4: didn't call him out on it in a confrontational way.
Speaker 4: I would simply say, oh, well, you know you told
Speaker 4: them this, so you're telling me something a little different.
Speaker 4: How do you how do you make sense of that?
Speaker 4: And then and he'd sometimes get upset if we're on
Speaker 4: the phone, but then he'd write a long letter justifying
Speaker 4: everything'sid And again, for me, that's behavior. It's not necessarily
Speaker 4: that I'm after the truth, because really you can look
Speaker 4: at any of us. We all form our narratives to
Speaker 4: serve our purposes out of earth system. So I'm looking
Speaker 4: at how does he approach being confronted, how does he
Speaker 4: approach being told, well, I know that you also tortured rabbits?
Speaker 4: What was he going to do with that? Since he
Speaker 4: didn't tell it to me, but I knew about it,
Speaker 4: so it really was. And again you're looking at a
Speaker 4: very extended investment of time, which very few people can do.
Speaker 4: And psychologists they charge and they know nobody's paying them
Speaker 4: for this kind of time. So you have to see
Speaker 4: this as an opportunity the way I did and be
Speaker 4: willing to take the hit in terms of the investment
Speaker 4: of time and money. And I was because I really
Speaker 4: believe in this kind of work. I think it's very
Speaker 4: valuable and beneficial. It helps us to prevent us from
Speaker 4: seeing the serial killers as all collected under a profile
Speaker 4: where it's a coopee cutter approach, and I think that's
Speaker 4: a mistake that I'm hoping this book can rectify.
Speaker 7: What did the late doctor al Carlyle contribute to this.
Speaker 6: How did he help in what area?
Speaker 4: Oh? Al Carlisle was so terrific, He's such a loss.
Speaker 4: He had interviewed He was a Utah prison psychologist who
Speaker 4: had interviewed Ted Bundy when Bundy was first picked up
Speaker 4: on suspicion of burglary and then attempted abduction, and Carlisle
Speaker 4: had gone to have been at the prison and he'd
Speaker 4: given him a number of assessments. He wasn't the only one.
Speaker 4: There was another psychologists or psychiatrist who put him through
Speaker 4: a bunch of things. But Carlile's task was to decide
Speaker 4: if Bundy might be a danger if he were released,
Speaker 4: and so he did a lot of work. He interviewed
Speaker 4: a number of people in knew Bundy and really again
Speaker 4: gave us a very nice approach to how do you
Speaker 4: look at someone like this. You can't just go with
Speaker 4: what they say because they're going to put themselves in
Speaker 4: the very best light. And Bundy was a master at that.
Speaker 4: So Carlisle had not just done this assessment of Bundy,
Speaker 4: but he also had interviewed a few other serial killers
Speaker 4: while there, and so he came up with this idea
Speaker 4: of how are they able to pass as if they
Speaker 4: are like us and yet have this very very dark,
Speaker 4: awful side to them and then not have any remorse
Speaker 4: and etc. So, because he had come up with this
Speaker 4: very interesting description of a compartmentalized person, I asked him
Speaker 4: if I could show this to Raider, as I want
Speaker 4: to see Raider's response to it, because one of the
Speaker 4: things I was trying to do is get Raider to
Speaker 4: not just say what he knew, but to look at
Speaker 4: one of the people had said and reflect on that
Speaker 4: in terms of how it applied to him. And he
Speaker 4: worked hard at it. I have to give him a
Speaker 4: lot of credit. When he saw Harlysle's analysis of Bundy
Speaker 4: as being like an actor taken on a lot of
Speaker 4: different roles, he said, yeah, that's that's very very accurate.
Speaker 4: That really captures it. But then he responded with what
Speaker 4: I thought was even more interesting than what Al gave me,
Speaker 4: which was this idea of cubing instead of compartmentalizing, because
Speaker 4: when you think about like compartments on the shelving unit,
Speaker 4: for example, right, and as if they're all distinctly different
Speaker 4: and almost unrelated to one another, it's just a bunch
Speaker 4: of different personalities and similar to an actor. They take
Speaker 4: on different roles, but those roles aren't related to one another.
Speaker 4: When Raider came up with his metaphor, which is cubing,
Speaker 4: it's the idea that all the faces are there, but
Speaker 4: you only show one face at a time in any
Speaker 4: given circumstance. So if you need to be the good
Speaker 4: father or good husband or churchgoer, you show that face
Speaker 4: and then but if you see someone you want to stalk,
Speaker 4: you immediately can switch out. Because all the faces are
Speaker 4: part of you, they are all connected and associated to you.
Speaker 4: And because people like Rater are not emotionally rooted in
Speaker 4: the notion of integrity or truth or morality, they can
Speaker 4: make that switch very easily. They're really mentally dexterous in
Speaker 4: terms of being able to adopt a different persona for
Speaker 4: a different circumstance. So to me, not only is c
Speaker 4: being easier to spell than compartmentalizing, I think it gets
Speaker 4: out of better and I kind of wish I could
Speaker 4: have talked with Carlisle about that, but orsay has passed on,
Speaker 4: and I think you would have really appreciated that metaphor
Speaker 4: because I think it works very well.
Speaker 7: When you talk to BTK Dennis Reader. He mentions this
Speaker 7: mythical figure, this minutor, and he calls it the minutor.
Speaker 7: Sense tell us more about this mythological symbol that he
Speaker 7: uses to describe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, then the minotaur was a code name for serial killers.
Speaker 4: So he'll talk about the Kansas Minotaur, or he'll read
Speaker 4: about somebody like there was a guy in South Carolina
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago who about calling He'll call
Speaker 4: him the South Carolina Minotaur. So that's just a way
Speaker 4: to be able to write about this in letters without
Speaker 4: guards confiscating it, you know, because I've had a few
Speaker 4: letters sent back to me by the prison. You may
Speaker 4: not do this, you may not do that. Well, they
Speaker 4: have to always be careful about the how he'll contraband angle,
Speaker 4: And so I think he adopted that. But also he
Speaker 4: had read about it in a novel and he liked
Speaker 4: the image of that, of this this beast that's inside
Speaker 4: this maze, that's that's fed these innocent virgins, and you know,
Speaker 4: he just he liked that to use to describe what
Speaker 4: a serial killer was like. And then for him that
Speaker 4: would be a cave like a cave monster. And he
Speaker 4: thinks that these cave monsters are part of him, not
Speaker 4: like he's demon possessed. That was a that was a
Speaker 4: narrative he initially had used after his minister had visited
Speaker 4: him and spaid to him. The only way I can
Speaker 4: make sense of this is if your demon possessed, so
Speaker 4: ritogred on to that. He does that. He immediately absorbs
Speaker 4: things that make sense, and then for a little while
Speaker 4: he'll use he'll use the narrative, but he doesn't any
Speaker 4: longer think of it that way. But he does think
Speaker 4: about that there is this monstrous part of him that
Speaker 4: he himself doesn't understand. Well. It's really compulsion that comes
Speaker 4: from his fantasy life, from a very vivid fantasy life
Speaker 4: in which he's highly invested for his identity. So he
Speaker 4: has more control than he often will say. But the
Speaker 4: minotaur image or metaphor peeled to him in that way.
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Speaker 7: Now we're talking about some of the things that Dennis
Speaker 7: Raider used and utilized to describe some of the things
Speaker 7: A statasies to evade a censorship through the prison guards
Speaker 7: that would read this material. So there was an underlying reason,
Speaker 7: but also he was being clever and getting you to
Speaker 7: work a little bit what about which was really the
Speaker 7: crux of what you're doing, to try to find out
Speaker 7: what his cycle sexual development was when he was young,
Speaker 7: how murder and sexuality got all mixed up and saw
Speaker 7: these fantasies and this murderous rampage.
Speaker 6: So tell us a little bit about what you discovered.
Speaker 4: Well, one of the difficulties of working with him was
Speaker 4: he's really a minutia collector, and so many of his
Speaker 4: early letters were long, long, long descriptions out of his
Speaker 4: family history and things that really had no bearing on
Speaker 4: what I was trying to do. But I had to
Speaker 4: be patient and showed certainly show interest and finally he
Speaker 4: suddenly realized this book was the book for him to
Speaker 4: get his story out to be the definitive one, and
Speaker 4: he might never have this opportunity again. And all of
Speaker 4: a sudden, and the letters just turned many shades darker
Speaker 4: in terms of the things he wanted to explore. Part
Speaker 4: of that was he had done through a lot of
Speaker 4: the papers he keeps in his cell, and he had
Speaker 4: found original police reports. They were summaries of police reports,
Speaker 4: and he sent them to me, all marked up with
Speaker 4: what they got wrong and what this meant or what
Speaker 4: that meant. So here's the whole description of when they
Speaker 4: went into the Otaro's and what they saw. And he
Speaker 4: then elaborate on what did that mean? And that's basically
Speaker 4: how I presented in the book. Here's the report, and
Speaker 4: here are the things that he had to say about
Speaker 4: various aspects of this report. How about his experience of
Speaker 4: stalking a particular victim, or what did he do afterward?
Speaker 4: And how did he feel after it? So it was
Speaker 4: like all of a sudden, he felt the pressure of
Speaker 4: a deadline. Oh my god, I have to get busy
Speaker 4: because I wanted this to be my dark journey, and
Speaker 4: all of the other stuff that was about his family
Speaker 4: dropped away, but he then began to start thinking about
Speaker 4: where does this originate. He talked a lot about his boyhood,
Speaker 4: and then it was up to me really to look
Speaker 4: at the themes of that and see how they related
Speaker 4: to potential development. The kind of dark fantasies he had
Speaker 4: that then really led the dance for him. So it
Speaker 4: was really kind of figuring out he needed to do
Speaker 4: some work and me finding through this. I mean lots
Speaker 4: and lots of lots of detail the things that would
Speaker 4: be useful for my goals. So hard thing about doing
Speaker 4: a book of this length is all the data UMSS
Speaker 4: and keeping your goals always in front, so you know
Speaker 4: what you're focusing on, but not to the point where
Speaker 4: you're working with tunnel vision or you know, a cognitive
Speaker 4: bias that limits the world. So I had to watch
Speaker 4: my own expectations and what I was hoping to see,
Speaker 4: but also I needed to guide him away from all
Speaker 4: the minutia. Like one of the earliest letters he sent
Speaker 4: me had a journal of his day and it was
Speaker 4: like minute by minute, Oh, getting up at this time,
Speaker 4: and this is what they gave me for breakfast. And
Speaker 4: then I did this, and then I did that, and
Speaker 4: he and he kept one for every single day, thinking
Speaker 4: someone was going to really find this to be very important.
Speaker 4: He's just sitting in a single prison cell. He's not
Speaker 4: in general population. He doesn't interact with anybody. You know,
Speaker 4: he'll read he was at the time. He's listening to
Speaker 4: the stock report because he had imaginary stocks and listened
Speaker 4: to the farmer's reports.
Speaker 3: So what not.
Speaker 4: But wow, it was up to me to make my
Speaker 4: way through all this data and see the things that
Speaker 4: were really going to make this into a book. And
Speaker 4: I will admit there were times I didn't think I
Speaker 4: had a book, really yeah, because I just I didn't
Speaker 4: think he was up to it. And then all of
Speaker 4: a sudden will come letters filled with very rich eye
Speaker 4: ideas and memories and reflections. Okay, now I can move forward.
Speaker 4: But I'd say for the first two years I wasn't sure.
Speaker 7: You were trying to get him to be insightful about
Speaker 7: his own life. And you say, this is a guided autobiography,
Speaker 7: so you had to help him be able to learn
Speaker 7: and decipher some of the things that have happened when
Speaker 7: he got to his development. When he talks about his childhood,
Speaker 7: and some of the things that again seemed to turn
Speaker 7: are directly related to his sexual fantasies. What did he
Speaker 7: tell you about his early childhood and bullying and the
Speaker 7: barn tell us a little bit about some of the
Speaker 7: things that he finally divorced to you.
Speaker 4: About that, Yeah, I mean, he would always kind of
Speaker 4: go to what had excited him, whether and even very young.
Speaker 4: It wasn't necessarily sexual, but it was certainly physical, right,
Speaker 4: and so he would talk about that. But I will say, like,
Speaker 4: at one point he told me about a movie he
Speaker 4: had a thing with his mother. She was a brunette
Speaker 4: and she had kind of movie star looks, as as
Speaker 4: many people described her, and he would go to the
Speaker 4: movies with her. And he told me he had the
Speaker 4: movies he had watched. So I watched them to get
Speaker 4: a sense of that little voice perspective sitting with his
Speaker 4: beautiful mother. And there was one the House of Wax.
Speaker 1: Guy.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, it's a naked woman bound in this thing.
Speaker 4: She's brunette, naked, struggling in all the most titillating ways.
Speaker 4: It's not that, oh lord, it's exactly I watched this
Speaker 4: rather than just heard him say, we watched the House
Speaker 4: of Wax, and that had an effect on me. Well,
Speaker 4: I can imagine it did, because he already was thinking
Speaker 4: about binding girls who made him feel uncomfortable or took
Speaker 4: away his self esteem. He was thinking of binding them
Speaker 4: at railroad tracks or building girl traps for them. And
Speaker 4: so here he is with his mother who's already humiliated him,
Speaker 4: and he's seen her stuck helpless, and he's seen the
Speaker 4: look on her face that made him feel powerful. And
Speaker 4: now he's watching this movie with it clearly showing obviously
Speaker 4: full frontal nudity back in those days. But oh, the
Speaker 4: suggestion of it was very strong in that movie, And
Speaker 4: I thought, whoa right there? That's the kind of thing.
Speaker 4: And the weird wolf who can shape shift, and that's
Speaker 4: the kind of thing. What's a little boy thinking about.
Speaker 4: So he's seen, not just seeing these movies, but they
Speaker 4: haunt him. He has nightmares, he has dreams about them,
Speaker 4: he thinks about them. And how is that affecting the
Speaker 4: kinds of fantasy fantasy life he is going to develop
Speaker 4: as he enters into puberty, and it does become all
Speaker 4: about sexual arousal. So he had the sexual arousal as
Speaker 4: a boy getting tied up playing the cowboy games, and
Speaker 4: he got trapped once in a silo and it was scared,
Speaker 4: but also it was exciting. So he had some of
Speaker 4: those experiences early to the point where he would tie
Speaker 4: ropes around his waist because it felt good. And as
Speaker 4: he's developing into his sexual being, it feels very good.
Speaker 4: It's the kind of thing he's not going to give up.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you also talk about innocuous things were seemingly like
Speaker 7: the Dudley do Write cartoon that we all watched.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I mean for Raider, immediately it was tying
Speaker 4: the redheaded girl on the train track. It wasn't about
Speaker 4: hur getting rescued. It was about get that train to
Speaker 4: hit her and run her over so that she was
Speaker 4: bound and helpless though was the thing. And then as
Speaker 4: a fourteen year old, he found a True Detective magazine
Speaker 4: that had the Harvey Glatman pictures on the cover and
Speaker 4: saw this image of this utterly helpless, bound woman who
Speaker 4: was about to be murdered, and he masturbated to that.
Speaker 4: That was highly exciting to him. And we do know
Speaker 4: that when certain stimuli are paired with masturbation as a
Speaker 4: young boy is becoming a young man, that becomes part
Speaker 4: of the sexual fetish, and it might need something that
Speaker 4: less the rest of his life because it gets paired
Speaker 4: and it gets fused together with the process of sexual development.
Speaker 4: And for him, that was the image he wanted to
Speaker 4: replicate in his own victims, so.
Speaker 6: He graduated to stalking.
Speaker 7: Initially, that was his first foray into criminality.
Speaker 4: Was the stalking. Well, it's hard to say. You know,
Speaker 4: he went into the military and he was in countries,
Speaker 4: and I think he did a lot of voyeuristic activity
Speaker 4: at that point, and then that became stalking. So the
Speaker 4: voyeurism was looking into people's windows, imagining power over them,
Speaker 4: and then as he would see someone, he might follow
Speaker 4: that person. So I think the voyeurism came before the stocking.
Speaker 4: But then the stocking arrived with the idea that he
Speaker 4: would kidnap somebody. And he did make an attempt to
Speaker 4: kidnap a bank clerk and it failed utterly, and he
Speaker 4: got scared and he was going to get identified. So
Speaker 4: he began to break into houses and when he did that,
Speaker 4: it made him feel very powerful. Were the people who
Speaker 4: lived there, I mean often they weren't home, but just
Speaker 4: he would take something like a hammer, you know, whatever,
Speaker 4: just because he had invaded their space, he owned the place,
Speaker 4: he had a position over them, and so that then
Speaker 4: became he's not going to try to capture someone and
Speaker 4: kidnap her. He's going to go into a house and
Speaker 4: subdue the person he wants. And then that leads, of
Speaker 4: course to the Otero murders.
Speaker 7: You utilized for this documentary, but also for this book.
Speaker 7: Letters and drawings that he had sent you explain what
Speaker 7: we'll be on this documentary regarding those letters and those drawings.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I have thousands of pages of his handwriting,
Speaker 4: and God bless the documentary maker, Prisp going through all
Speaker 4: about to pick out passages, but there will be passages highlighted.
Speaker 4: We also interviewed him and recorded it, so you will
Speaker 4: hear him responding to some of my questions. Well highlighted
Speaker 4: passages of things he said that are either ironic in
Speaker 4: terms of how can he not see how this makes
Speaker 4: no sense in the polarization morally in the same person.
Speaker 4: You'll see drawings that he's done. For example, he drew
Speaker 4: for me what he had hoped one day to build
Speaker 4: was the silo filled with torture instruments similar to aj
Speaker 4: toungs and his castle, right, and so it's very meticulous,
Speaker 4: full color. And you know, he said to me it
Speaker 4: wasn't He really had not wanted to do this because
Speaker 4: it took him back into the world he knew he
Speaker 4: had to avoid. And yet when you look at all
Speaker 4: the detail, you see how much Funny had doing it.
Speaker 4: He did want to do it. He wanted to do
Speaker 4: it very much. And so that's the interesting dynamic I
Speaker 4: had with him, as he had a verbal narrative and
Speaker 4: he's kind of like Ted Bundy in that thinking when
Speaker 4: he says something that controls reality, right, language controls reality,
Speaker 4: and Bundy was very much like that too. But then
Speaker 4: you see he's presenting one thing and he's showing in
Speaker 4: his behavior something altogether different. For me, that's the most
Speaker 4: interesting and intriguing aspect of him is how does he
Speaker 4: not see? How does he develop these blind spots, these
Speaker 4: walls between what he says about him so up and
Speaker 4: what he's showing about himself. Well, we all do it.
Speaker 4: It's a human tendency, but in a serial killer's particularly interesting.
Speaker 7: It's much more profound and seems much more out of
Speaker 7: touch from reality. Despite being a fairly intelligent person, it
Speaker 7: would seem that there's this out of touch with reality
Speaker 7: completely even at this time, even after this many years, right,
Speaker 7: there's not a recognition or realization by him.
Speaker 4: And that is the role of a very rich and
Speaker 4: real feeling fantasy life. That's where he comes alive. That's
Speaker 4: where his whole identity is wrapped up in the fantasy person.
Speaker 4: And so it's very easy for him to develop these
Speaker 4: blind spots and these walls between what's real and what
Speaker 4: he thinks is real because he's so immersed in to
Speaker 4: you know, this image of himself again a human tendency.
Speaker 4: And at the end of the book I talk about this,
Speaker 4: it's it's not that he's such a different creature, but
Speaker 4: as you use the word profound, he's profoundly different in
Speaker 4: some ways. But all of those ways are attached to
Speaker 4: who we all are to some degree. But he just
Speaker 4: doesn't have the emotional rootedness in wanting a sense of
Speaker 4: integrity of presenting. You know, a lot of us want
Speaker 4: to present ourselves with uniformity. Whatever I do in this
Speaker 4: situation would come through in a different situation because I'm
Speaker 4: who I am. That's often how we think of ourselves.
Speaker 4: That isn't the way someone like him operates is whatever
Speaker 4: I need for this situation is what matters, not presenting
Speaker 4: myself in the same way all the time.
Speaker 7: Was there any reaction from him to say that he
Speaker 7: discovered things through this process that you asked him specifically
Speaker 7: questions so that he could learn to be able to
Speaker 7: respond in the way you would like him to respond
Speaker 7: rather than just talking. You say that lots of his
Speaker 7: thinking was convoluted. What was his reaction to some of
Speaker 7: this if there was some of this discovery of the
Speaker 7: connection the psycho sexual development, was there any recognition that
Speaker 7: he had learned something from this and what was that reaction?
Speaker 4: Yeah, he hasn't read the book, by the way, He
Speaker 4: has no response to that because it's contraband right, But
Speaker 4: yes he had. There's a chapter in which it's really
Speaker 4: his thinking about himself to some extent, guided by assessment
Speaker 4: instruments that I use. But he's thinking his way through
Speaker 4: where does this all come from? What's salient in his
Speaker 4: memory and his reflective process that keeps coming back to
Speaker 4: him over and over and he makes the list. See,
Speaker 4: but he does do it. And also I used a
Speaker 4: few books like Adrian Raine's Things anatomy of violence that
Speaker 4: helped him frame it out. Al Carlisle's ideas helped him
Speaker 4: to articulate things that he had really been able to understand.
Speaker 4: But in the end he did his own self analysis,
Speaker 4: which I thought was, you know, to some extent, insightful.
Speaker 4: I mean, he's not he's a particularly bright guy. He
Speaker 4: didn't do well in school, but he's certainly worked at
Speaker 4: trying to understand this. And of course I will hear
Speaker 4: from people saying, oh, he just he's just squirrel with you.
Speaker 4: He's manipulating him. Certainly he's manipulating me to some extent.
Speaker 4: But I think everybody wants to try to understand themselves,
Speaker 4: particularly narcissists, And I think he did want to take
Speaker 4: advantage of the fact that he had someone here with crudentials,
Speaker 4: with the sense of structure, who could possibly guide him
Speaker 4: through some of this. And I think I think I
Speaker 4: guided him through some I don't know that I have
Speaker 4: the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I
Speaker 4: have a lot from him for which I think he needs,
Speaker 4: he deserves some credit.
Speaker 6: It's an extraordinary book. Is he sure that?
Speaker 7: When I interviewed you in twenty sixteen about this book,
Speaker 7: Confession of a Serial Killer, The Untold Story of Dennis Raider,
Speaker 7: the BTK Killer, which was released in twenty sixteen. Just
Speaker 7: tell our audience before I let you go about the
Speaker 7: A and E two part documentary Confession of a Serial
Speaker 7: Killer a BTK Killer, tell us just a little bit
Speaker 7: about when that will air and when that will air.
Speaker 4: On any Okay on any is actually a four parts,
Speaker 4: two nights, but four parts, and it's an arc over
Speaker 4: the whole story. But there's a lot more in it
Speaker 4: than just what's in the book. We've found people to
Speaker 4: talk to who had more to say and also there
Speaker 4: like I did not interview the victim's family, so we
Speaker 4: do have some of them in the documentary. I did
Speaker 4: not interview the impact on people in which Stah because
Speaker 4: I was doing an autobiography. So there's a lot more
Speaker 4: about Wichita, the effect of a serial killer in town
Speaker 4: and anyway. So it's it's on A and E January
Speaker 4: eighth and ninth, four parts, so two hours each night.
Speaker 4: And I think it personally, I think that's very it's multifaceted.
Speaker 4: There's there's a lot there that may never have heard
Speaker 4: or read before about Dennis Raider.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, I want to thank you so much, Katherine Ramslin
Speaker 7: for coming on and talking about first your book Confession
Speaker 7: of a Serial Killer, the untold story of Dennis Raider,
Speaker 7: the BTK Killer, and also the documentary BTK Confession of
Speaker 7: a Serial Killer premiers on a Andy. Thank you so much,
Speaker 7: doctor Kathleen Ramsland for this interview. Thank you so much,
Speaker 7: and have a great evening.
Speaker 4: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
Speaker 6: Thank you, good night, Bi