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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them.
Speaker 5: Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker BTK.
Speaker 2: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 2: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 2: your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening. In
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy four, Dennis Lynn Rader stocked and murdered a
Speaker 2: family of four in Wichita, Kansas, since lessons he had
Speaker 2: read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon after
Speaker 2: killing the family, he murdered a young woman and then another,
Speaker 2: until he had ten victims. He named himself b t
Speaker 2: K Mind Torture Kill and wrote notes that terrorized the city.
Speaker 2: He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one
Speaker 2: who knew him guessed his dark secret.
Speaker 5: He nearly got away with his crimes, but in two
Speaker 5: thousand and four he began to play risky games with
Speaker 5: the police. He made a mistake. When he was arrested,
Speaker 5: Raider's family, friends, and co workers were shocked to discover
Speaker 5: that bt K had been among them, going to work,
Speaker 5: raising his children, and acting normal. This case stands out
Speaker 5: both for the brutal treatment of victims and for the
Speaker 5: ordinary public face that Raider, a church council president, had
Speaker 5: shown to the outside world through jail house visits, telephone calls,
Speaker 5: and written correspondence. Katherine Ramslin worked with Raider himself to
Speaker 5: analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews,
Speaker 5: and Raider's unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the
Speaker 5: childhood roots and development of one man's motivation to stock, torture,
Speaker 5: and kill. She reveals aspects of the dark motivations of
Speaker 5: this most famous of living serial killers that have never
Speaker 5: before been revealed. In this book, Katherine Ramslin presents an intelligent, original,
Speaker 5: and rare glimpse into the making of a serial killer
Speaker 5: and the potential darkness that lives next door. The book
Speaker 5: they were featuring this evening, It's Confession of a serial Killer,
Speaker 5: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, with
Speaker 5: my special guest journalists and author and professor Katherine Ramslin,
Speaker 5: Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much
Speaker 5: for agreeing this interview. Katherine Ramslin.
Speaker 3: A right, happy to be here again.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much. Catherine. This is I always say incredible,
Speaker 5: I overuse that word, but this is fantastic, incredible, comprehensive, amazing,
Speaker 5: and let's get right to it. You talk about in
Speaker 5: the book that we'll use a code name Donnette, and
Speaker 5: that there was correspondence back with Dennis Rader in two
Speaker 5: thousand and five. So tell us about that correspondence and
Speaker 5: how you came to become involved in this project. Why
Speaker 5: Dennis Rader tell us when you began correspondence. Tell us
Speaker 5: a little bit about the genesis of this project.
Speaker 3: Well, it happened. What happened in two thousand and five
Speaker 3: when he got arrested is Donnette approached him about writing
Speaker 3: a book about his sort of dark journey, as he
Speaker 3: called that, and he agreed to do it. They became correspondent.
Speaker 3: She visited him quite a few times at the jail
Speaker 3: and then later at the maximum security prison, collecting a
Speaker 3: massive amount of material over the period of five years.
Speaker 3: And I knew about her from newspaper reports that she
Speaker 3: was doing this, But then I saw her on Facebook
Speaker 3: in twenty ten and I asked her what happened, whatever
Speaker 3: happened to her book, and she immediately asked me if
Speaker 3: I would take it over. She didn't want to, She
Speaker 3: couldn't do it for a variety of reasons, and she would.
Speaker 3: Reader had signed over his METEA rites to the victim's family.
Speaker 3: It was like a trust fund for the victim's families
Speaker 3: who participated in it, and so she had given all
Speaker 3: of her documents to the victim's family trust, which would
Speaker 3: be accessible to me if I were to be approved
Speaker 3: by the attorney for this trust and by the victims'
Speaker 3: family members. So I decided I would take it on.
Speaker 3: I wrote a proposal that I thought would use his
Speaker 3: story to benefit criminology, psychology, and law enforcement, and that
Speaker 3: just be a tale of some serial killer wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about himself, but would be really something that would
Speaker 3: be a valuable would be a value to my colleagues
Speaker 3: and offers to investigators. So I wrote a proposal with
Speaker 3: that in mind, and they appreciated that they didn't really
Speaker 3: want a book of this nature out there, but they
Speaker 3: knew it was inevitable. And if we're going to be written.
Speaker 3: They preferred that it be something that would be valuable
Speaker 3: to scholars, to practitioners, to investigators. So they approved me
Speaker 3: and it went forward from there. So I worked with
Speaker 3: him for five years, but I really had ten years
Speaker 3: worth of material.
Speaker 5: Now you talk about this first correspondence was split between
Speaker 5: Donnette and another part was to you, or at least
Speaker 5: part of the inevitable correspondence was done that way. You
Speaker 5: tell us about you say, there's a series of letters
Speaker 5: about hummingbirds and moon cycles. But tell us about the
Speaker 5: early correspondence and what you soon after the hummingbirds and
Speaker 5: moon cycles, what you asked him specifically for what information
Speaker 5: you asked him specifically to send you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he had to be introduced to me
Speaker 3: as well. It couldn't just be the families saying okay,
Speaker 3: that's fine. So he had to also accept that I
Speaker 3: would be the person to do this. So there was
Speaker 3: a little bit of like small talk through letters. You know,
Speaker 3: this is who I am, this is what I want
Speaker 3: to do. And then I said, in order to really
Speaker 3: write a proposal to move this book, I need your
Speaker 3: you know, a torture one of your torture fantasies and
Speaker 3: so he decided for several reasons that he wanted to
Speaker 3: put this into code. The first reason being that he
Speaker 3: didn't want this to end up on the internet somewhere
Speaker 3: like one of the prison guards might see it and
Speaker 3: sell it or something like that, so he wanted to
Speaker 3: keep it under under wraps. So that was one reason.
Speaker 3: A second reason is that he liked to talk through
Speaker 3: codes because he thought of himself like a spy and
Speaker 3: that was kind of a thing he liked, he liked
Speaker 3: to do. And the third was a challenge to me
Speaker 3: to see if I would play along, so to speak,
Speaker 3: and also figure out the codes. So the first thing
Speaker 3: is that he was going to give half of the
Speaker 3: code to Donnette and half to me, and he sent
Speaker 3: me a series of newspaper articles and magazine pictures and
Speaker 3: whatnot that things were circled and they with ABCD etc.
Speaker 3: On it, and that would correspond with a list of
Speaker 3: things that he talked about in his letters. So here
Speaker 3: and there I would find ABC in the letters, which
Speaker 3: wasn't easy. And then once I populated my half, I
Speaker 3: was to see what Dawnette's half did. And once you
Speaker 3: put it all together, then we would tell him what
Speaker 3: we got and then I would pass the test.
Speaker 5: Now, you talk about the previous book that you had
Speaker 5: a few years before this, a few years ago, and
Speaker 5: it was called The Mind, The Mind of a Murderer,
Speaker 5: and it dealt with how mental health experts looked at
Speaker 5: extreme offenders. You mentioned it because it had some bearing
Speaker 5: on this, or it prepared you in some way. What
Speaker 5: did you get from that project that helped you to
Speaker 5: understand or prepare for this.
Speaker 3: That was an interesting project because I had been doing
Speaker 3: a lot of research in forensic science history and one
Speaker 3: of my favorite people was a French pathologist named Alexander Lakasania,
Speaker 3: and one of the innovative things he did in the
Speaker 3: eighteen nineties was to get offenders, incarcerated offenders to write
Speaker 3: about themselves, right about their lives, and write about their motives,
Speaker 3: what they think were their influences and becoming criminals, some
Speaker 3: of whom wrote extensively. And then so he would go
Speaker 3: in each week and look at what they wrote and
Speaker 3: encourage them and sometimes even publish them in one of
Speaker 3: his journals. And he sort of started this thing called
Speaker 3: criminal autobiographies. And not many people have taken that up
Speaker 3: since him. You know, over one hundred years ago, but
Speaker 3: a few have, and so I thought it would be
Speaker 3: interesting to look back across the century to see what
Speaker 3: other psychologists or psychiatrists, you know, mental health experts of
Speaker 3: some kind, had really taken the time to go beyond
Speaker 3: the typical standardized assessments and clinical interviews, to spend time
Speaker 3: with an extreme offender, meaning a mass murderer or a
Speaker 3: serial killer, to see, you know, to have them tell
Speaker 3: their stories, to be trusted, to really try to document
Speaker 3: the trajectory of their path toward violence in their lives,
Speaker 3: knowing that sometimes they're going to lie or exaggerate, or
Speaker 3: have memory issues or whatever. But and it's a very
Speaker 3: time consuming thing. But I found a dozen cases of
Speaker 3: mental health experts who are willing to really spend a
Speaker 3: lot of time with an offender to learn their life story.
Speaker 3: And so I wrote a book that might have been two.
Speaker 3: Each chapter represents one of these efforts, you know, without
Speaker 3: ever imagining I was going to do this too, but
Speaker 3: this book got published, and then almost immediately I ended
Speaker 3: up with this opportunity to do exactly what I had
Speaker 3: just done, you know, documented to do this with Raider.
Speaker 3: So I had these role models, both both in terms
Speaker 3: of the mistakes they made and in terms of the
Speaker 3: innovations they they created to try to figure out how
Speaker 3: did I want to approach Rader? So it was really
Speaker 3: quite an interesting schooling just it was just something that
Speaker 3: I wanted to do and it turned out to be,
Speaker 3: you know, pretty beneficial for me.
Speaker 5: You talked about this criminal autobiography, and then you talk
Speaker 5: about how you were approaching Dennis Rader, and you talk
Speaker 5: about this being an assisted auto biography. So yeah, tell
Speaker 5: us what that assistance entailed.
Speaker 3: Okay, I get I think I've probably started calling it
Speaker 3: a guided autobiography in that it's certainly his story and
Speaker 3: about eighty percent of it is in his words. But
Speaker 3: there are a couple of things. There are a couple
Speaker 3: of reasons why you wouldn't just want to read his
Speaker 3: words straight out. And he agrees with me on this one.
Speaker 3: Is that he has a lot of language processing issues,
Speaker 3: so his grammars can be very difficult, and the spelling
Speaker 3: and even his phrasing sometimes he has processing difficulties. So
Speaker 3: it was better for me to try to take his
Speaker 3: words and make them a little bit more accessible to readers.
Speaker 3: So that was that was one thing. But the other
Speaker 3: thing was that if he were just left to his
Speaker 3: own devices, he would, you know, his insights, whatever they
Speaker 3: would be, would be limited. And so what I was
Speaker 3: trying to do was put triggers in, give him him primers,
Speaker 3: things to think about. Like I would send him articles
Speaker 3: about psychopathy, for example, because he had actually watched the
Speaker 3: Charlie Rose special on the Brain, so he had some ideas,
Speaker 3: and I sent him some more material. We read a book,
Speaker 3: Adrian Rayne's The Anatomy of Violence. It took him two years,
Speaker 3: but he made his way through the whole thing and
Speaker 3: talked about this is how he thought it applied to him,
Speaker 3: so it's a guided autobiography, and that these were not
Speaker 3: things that wouldn't necessarily have occurred to him to be
Speaker 3: thinking about in terms of himself. But because I was there,
Speaker 3: and because I brought to it clinical and forensic expertise,
Speaker 3: I was able to structure it in a way that
Speaker 3: helped him along. But still it's him, you know, I
Speaker 3: didn't feed him any thoughts about here's how you interpret this,
Speaker 3: but but it's still him trying to figure out who
Speaker 3: he is and why he became a serial killer. So
Speaker 3: you get him. It's really about eighty percent in his words,
Speaker 3: but I still guided it. And also there are things
Speaker 3: like if he mentioned HH Holmes or Harvey Glatman or
Speaker 3: Ted Bundy or some of these cases, or he talked
Speaker 3: about a movie or a book that inspired him or
Speaker 3: frightened him, well, then I would read the book, and
Speaker 3: I would watch the movie, and I would would provide
Speaker 3: the frame so that readers wouldn't you know, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: You wouldn't just assume that readers know exactly who Ted
Speaker 3: Bundy is or H. H. Holmes or you know, the
Speaker 3: wax Museum or any of those things. So the other
Speaker 3: part of what I did in this was to provide
Speaker 3: the frame for some of the things he talked about.
Speaker 5: Let's go right to that, because not everybody knows the
Speaker 5: HH Holms story, but most people do. But let's put
Speaker 5: it in relation to the influence that had had on
Speaker 5: Dennis Raider. And because it's again where we just talked
Speaker 5: about the correspondence where you asked for the torture fantasy.
Speaker 5: There's some codes involved, and you have to figure those
Speaker 5: codes out to be able to understand what he's trying
Speaker 5: to say in that, but you also have to explain
Speaker 5: and you say, it's important to understand his torture fantasy
Speaker 5: in relation to what he had learned about HH Silms
Speaker 5: and what he had respected and was influenced by from
Speaker 5: HH Holms. So tell us about Herman Mudget and his
Speaker 5: influence and what Dennis Rader got from it.
Speaker 3: Well, you have to kind of start a little bit
Speaker 3: earlier with Writer's own development of what was arousing to him.
Speaker 3: And he liked to bind himself with ropes because he
Speaker 3: found that particular pleasant and arousing, even before he was
Speaker 3: a sexual person. He just enjoyed that. So when he
Speaker 3: as a teenager, he found these two detective magazines under
Speaker 3: the seat of his father's car, and one of them
Speaker 3: was Harvey Glatman, who was a serial killer who posted
Speaker 3: as a photographer inviting women into, you know, into his
Speaker 3: apartment and then tying them up, pretending he's going to
Speaker 3: photograph them for the cover of a magazine and then
Speaker 3: telling them they're going to die so he'd get the
Speaker 3: photographs of their terror. That was the first one that
Speaker 3: really impressed itself on Raider because he loved the binding,
Speaker 3: the ropes and then their look of terror and the
Speaker 3: knowledge that it was total control over them. So that
Speaker 3: was the first one. And then along came a front
Speaker 3: cover about you know, the White City and HH Holmes
Speaker 3: in his Murder Castle, which was a hotel he had
Speaker 3: built in the eighteen nineties as the World's Fair was
Speaker 3: coming into Chicago, and the idea, you know, he was
Speaker 3: going to allow these young women to register for a
Speaker 3: room and then he would put them into a special
Speaker 3: special rooms that he had that were torture devices or
Speaker 3: something where he could spy on them dying, being gassed,
Speaker 3: things like that, and then he would strip the flesh
Speaker 3: from their bodies and sellthers skeletons to medical schools and whatnot.
Speaker 3: So he was quite the con artist kind of put
Speaker 3: himself to a medical school that way. And it was
Speaker 3: the idea of him having this hotel, this three story
Speaker 3: hotel with torture devices that got to Raider and so
Speaker 3: he would think about barns in Kansas that they drew
Speaker 3: his attention. He would look at the barns and the
Speaker 3: silos with their layers and think about what torture devices
Speaker 3: could he put into these barns if it were him.
Speaker 3: Among them being a railroad track. He wanted to have
Speaker 3: a train inside a barn because he had a particular
Speaker 3: fantasy about tying girls to railroad tracks and having the
Speaker 3: trains run over them, and so he needed to have
Speaker 3: a big barn that would somehow have a train track
Speaker 3: fantasy is what it is. That's all I have to say,
Speaker 3: because obviously that wouldn't be very practical, but in his fantasy,
Speaker 3: that's exactly what he had. So modeling it off of
Speaker 3: HH Holmes with some touch of the Harvey Glatman influence
Speaker 3: with the bindings really and then Dudley do Right with
Speaker 3: the nell tied to the railroad track, that kind of
Speaker 3: mixed all together to influence his teenage fantasies.
Speaker 5: You also mentioned even things like everything sort of factored
Speaker 5: into this with something about the bound chickens and the
Speaker 5: things he did with cats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that would be. The other thing is he
Speaker 3: spent a lot of time in his grandparents' farm, and
Speaker 3: apparently his aunt or his grandmother didn't really like the
Speaker 3: barn cats, and he also saw them as kind of mysterious.
Speaker 3: He didn't like the way females made him feel off balance.
Speaker 3: He's a very controlling individual, and so to him, cats
Speaker 3: were female. Whether they were or not, they just had
Speaker 3: that kind of effect on him that they seemed as
Speaker 3: mysterious as females. So he would hang them in the barn.
Speaker 3: And so that again becomes the barn is the place
Speaker 3: you do these secretive things with bindings and whatnot. And
Speaker 3: with the chickens that wasn't actually on the farm, that
Speaker 3: was his father raised chickens in the backyard. When they
Speaker 3: moved to Wichita, one of his duties was to assist
Speaker 3: with killing the chickens for dinner. So watching their heads
Speaker 3: get cut off and watching their bodies run around and
Speaker 3: you know, horror stories like that.
Speaker 5: At the same time that he has this psycho sexual development,
Speaker 5: yet he still has these motivations. He's a guy that
Speaker 5: goes into the military eventually. So tell us what he
Speaker 5: was like as a student. And again, where do you
Speaker 5: dispel the myth of having this tread of characteristics that
Speaker 5: all serial killers are have to have, and that one
Speaker 5: of those includes abuse in his early childhood. So tell
Speaker 5: us a little bit about what he said about his childhood,
Speaker 5: his upbringing and what you found out as well.
Speaker 3: To yeah, yeah, and that was one of the things
Speaker 3: he too thought about. It was called the McDonald triad,
Speaker 3: which his animal abuse bed wedding and fire setting, and
Speaker 3: he wondered, you know that, why don't I have these things?
Speaker 3: He certainly had some animal abuse, but not he didn't
Speaker 3: abuse all animals. He liked dogs, He loved his own dog.
Speaker 3: It was really just cats that he set out to
Speaker 3: abuse him. Not really that often either, so but he didn't.
Speaker 3: He set a couple of fires, but he certainly wasn't
Speaker 3: doing repetitive fire setting, and not bed wedding according to him.
Speaker 3: And he did not have what many serial codes have
Speaker 3: in their background, is abuse, child abuse, verbal or physical
Speaker 3: or sexual or anything like that. But there is a
Speaker 3: possibility he had a head injury. His mother dropped him
Speaker 3: on his head when he was a child a baby.
Speaker 3: He turned blue, They didn't get him any help and
Speaker 3: get him too a hospital. She also had fallen off
Speaker 3: a horse when she was pregnant with him, and then
Speaker 3: later when he's a teenager, he was in a car
Speaker 3: accident where he hit his head. Now we don't know
Speaker 3: that that these head injuries have anything to do with it,
Speaker 3: but we do know that the brains of violent individuals
Speaker 3: certainly have some issues with areas of the brain that
Speaker 3: process moral information, that make decisions and do behavioral inhibition,
Speaker 3: and we do find that sometimes when people have these
Speaker 3: head injuries, it replicates what we also find in the
Speaker 3: violent brain. We're not at the point where we can
Speaker 3: say that this is causal, and I don't have an
Speaker 3: MRI of raider's brain to point out any of these issues,
Speaker 3: but we can't say that this isn't an influence either,
Speaker 3: because we've certainly seen it in the brains of violent individuals.
Speaker 5: Now, in the beginning of this five year correspondent, you
Speaker 5: ask him again for right away, you ask him for
Speaker 5: his torture fantasy. After you break those codes, what is
Speaker 5: it about that first correspondence, that torture fantasy? What do
Speaker 5: you learn specifically that you take and move on to
Speaker 5: the next correspondence, which is mostly letters and phone calls.
Speaker 5: You say, there was some visits, but they weren't as productive.
Speaker 5: So what was right from the very beginning, what did
Speaker 5: you learn from that very first must have been informative
Speaker 5: letter from package from demonstrator.
Speaker 3: I'd say that first package was informative, but then it
Speaker 3: kind of dropped into there was a point where I
Speaker 3: really didn't think there would be a book because the
Speaker 3: kinds of things that he was sending to me were
Speaker 3: not what I would have considered of any interest. Really,
Speaker 3: it was like the genealogy of his family who came
Speaker 3: over from Germany and things like that, long long letters.
Speaker 3: He had what I call hypergraphia where he liked writing
Speaker 3: a lot. He would send daily logs, pages and pages
Speaker 3: of daily logs, and he would write long letters. And
Speaker 3: many of the letters he wrote to Donnette also were
Speaker 3: not really very valuable for the kinds of things I
Speaker 3: wanted to try to find out. But I think it
Speaker 3: took a while for him to settle in and understand
Speaker 3: we're really trying to plumb the depths here. It was
Speaker 3: actually me who ended up writing the code we were
Speaker 3: going to use for the book, and I put that
Speaker 3: in the introduction where in the end I wrote a
Speaker 3: code that I thought would be complex enough to really
Speaker 3: cover everything and also would appeal to him because he
Speaker 3: liked the number three particularly, so I did a lot
Speaker 3: of things like three different tools and three different layers
Speaker 3: of soil and such things as that. But the ability
Speaker 3: to use a code that actually had a lot of
Speaker 3: complexity to it began to open things up a little
Speaker 3: bit more. But I'd say it took a couple of
Speaker 3: years before I thought, we really are We really do
Speaker 3: have a book here, and he really can reach in
Speaker 3: and start thinking about things. The initial letter, you know,
Speaker 3: was very interesting, but what followed after that wasn't. And
Speaker 3: it did take a while, but finally, when I think
Speaker 3: when he really started to think about what it was
Speaker 3: like to plan to stalk, to kill someone, to keep
Speaker 3: journals about it, to keep trophies, to form Heidi holes,
Speaker 3: that all became very you know, I hate to say it,
Speaker 3: but it was quite rich for a book of this
Speaker 3: nature to have him really get the raw material down.
Speaker 3: But one of the best things that happened, which was
Speaker 3: completely unexpected, was we began to watch some television shows,
Speaker 3: and some of the television shows actually gave us some
Speaker 3: really rich material in a metaphorical way. He told me
Speaker 3: to start watching Bates Motel, which is not one I
Speaker 3: thought I would ever watch, but I ended up being
Speaker 3: very addicted to it because it really was good writing.
Speaker 3: It was really tremendously interesting about the development of somebody
Speaker 3: who already had a latent kind of mental or vulnerability
Speaker 3: into a killer because of the way his mother and
Speaker 3: her condition trespasses on him. That wasn't really like Rater.
Speaker 3: But the one that really was interesting was The Americans,
Speaker 3: which is a show about a couple of Soviet spies
Speaker 3: who are planted in the United States during the Reagan years,
Speaker 3: and they raise kids and they act like they're your neighbor,
Speaker 3: and they're like everybody else, but they have all these
Speaker 3: missions they have to go on, so they leave this
Speaker 3: double life that's very edgy and very risky. Their kids
Speaker 3: don't know anything about it. But weirdly, the way one
Speaker 3: of the kids begins to realize something's up, it was
Speaker 3: very similar to some of the sentiments that Raider's own
Speaker 3: daughter actually stated when she did give her one interview
Speaker 3: to the newspaper, and the sort of betrayal she felt
Speaker 3: in the sense that I don't even know it's real anymore.
Speaker 3: I don't have any idea. So this daughter is talking
Speaker 3: a lot about that, and it was interesting to me
Speaker 3: that Rader failed to see the parallels. I mean, he
Speaker 3: could see exactly what his daughter said, he could hear
Speaker 3: what this character page was saying. He could not see
Speaker 3: that they were the same thing. And so that began
Speaker 3: to show me the buffers he had up in his
Speaker 3: life against actually realizing the impact he was having on
Speaker 3: people that he claimed that he loved, and it was
Speaker 3: very similar to the show The Americans, very similar, just
Speaker 3: the way the parents didn't seem to really have a
Speaker 3: clue that their devotion to their missions and Water had
Speaker 3: his devotion to his mission would have terrible reverberations in
Speaker 3: the lives of people they knew if anything was ever revealed,
Speaker 3: And they built up these compartments psychological compartments, very similar
Speaker 3: to the way that he did. And so that show
Speaker 3: was amazing. So as we talked about each episode, there
Speaker 3: were things revealed about him, almost similar actually to the
Speaker 3: way Ted Bundy when he was telling the detectives about
Speaker 3: trying to help them with the Green River serial killer case.
Speaker 3: The more he talked, the more they realized this about you.
Speaker 3: So it was actually very similar to that because later
Speaker 3: when he would talk and especially when he didn't see
Speaker 3: the blind spots. Now I'm really I'm getting to know
Speaker 3: him in a way that I don't think he realizes.
Speaker 3: I'm seeing how he is engaged, not just what he's saying,
Speaker 3: but how he's engaged with his own thinking processes and
Speaker 3: his words. And that was very interesting to me.
Speaker 5: One of the most fascinating parts of your very very
Speaker 5: fascinating book is the actual before, much before he kills anyone,
Speaker 5: you have him chronicle and plumb these depths, as you say,
Speaker 5: of his own psyche to remember and be able to detail.
Speaker 5: And again, a man of minute date detail is the
Speaker 5: perfect guy for this. And he comes through and tries
Speaker 5: to describe what he calls his factor X and his
Speaker 5: sort of rehearsal projects, and then the fantasy and better
Speaker 5: times in his life. He seems to suppress these desires,
Speaker 5: but tell us before he does anything murderous, how he
Speaker 5: tries to control himself. How does he try to control
Speaker 5: this monster that he certainly much before he commits murder,
Speaker 5: he at least identifies within.
Speaker 3: Himself well he even as an adolescent like One of
Speaker 3: the interesting episodes of his life was the Clutter family
Speaker 3: murder in Kansas, about two hundred miles to the west
Speaker 3: of Wichita, occurred in nineteen fifty nine when he was
Speaker 3: fifteen or fourteen, and he hears this on the radio,
Speaker 3: and his first impulse is that he wants to do
Speaker 3: because they use ropes to bind the family. He wants
Speaker 3: to bind the girl in the car with him and
Speaker 3: kill her so that's you know, early thinking. He's already
Speaker 3: had you know, arousal at the idea of what Glatman
Speaker 3: had done to his victims, binding them and having them
Speaker 3: complete under control. So some of these early thoughts are clear.
Speaker 3: He also begins to understand that he is aspiring to
Speaker 3: be a serial killer, although no one's using that phrase
Speaker 3: at the time, because he's seeing the fame they get,
Speaker 3: they get to be on the cover of you know,
Speaker 3: front page Detective and things like that, and so these
Speaker 3: two things are really working on him, as well as
Speaker 3: the idea that he can control females in this way.
Speaker 3: He does make a hit kit. He goes in. He
Speaker 3: starts to break into houses and do some petty crimes
Speaker 3: and things to see what he can get away with,
Speaker 3: and he in fact does it away with pretty much
Speaker 3: everything that he does, but it begins to feed into
Speaker 3: his sense of power over others. He becomes kind of
Speaker 3: a loner. He goes in and starts engaging in audo
Speaker 3: erotic activities where he binds himself, buries himself. He goes
Speaker 3: off on camping trips or supposed fishing trips so he
Speaker 3: can be alone to to string himself up in a
Speaker 3: tree or something like that. He creates hit kits that
Speaker 3: that are inspired by things he's reading about other serial killers.
Speaker 3: He carries that around. He starts thinking of himself as
Speaker 3: James Bond, and then he begins to cut out pictures
Speaker 3: of women in in magazines he calls his slick ads,
Speaker 3: where he'll he'll take like a seerious catalog of you know,
Speaker 3: women posing in underwear, and he'll cut out the pictures
Speaker 3: and he'll he'll draw gags and bindings on them, and
Speaker 3: you know, various other items, and then he names them.
Speaker 3: He takes them with him places that that sort of
Speaker 3: becomes something that that keeps him from really acting out
Speaker 3: because his fantasy life is getting more and more witch
Speaker 3: but it's still under control. He then he then also
Speaker 3: goes off in the in the Air Force. He's away
Speaker 3: for four years and then comes back and gets married.
Speaker 3: So when he's doing what he calls his social obligations
Speaker 3: or you know, things that distract him, the fantasy life
Speaker 3: isn't isn't as prominent. But he got a job early
Speaker 3: on working on a kind of an assembly line, and
Speaker 3: he had, you know, a great deal of time to
Speaker 3: sit around and fantasize. So he but then he got
Speaker 3: a job where it was a little more challenging, and
Speaker 3: the fantasy is receded until he was fired or laid off.
Speaker 3: It's what he would say. He was laid off because
Speaker 3: of the industry going down. He then he was very unhappy.
Speaker 3: He's very angry. He now had a wife. He didn't
Speaker 3: quite know what to do, so he tried to kidnap
Speaker 3: somebody that failed, broke into a house that made him
Speaker 3: feel powerful again, and that is when he began to
Speaker 3: think about actually making his fantasies into reality.
Speaker 5: Now you detail. You mentioned the significance of numbers to him,
Speaker 5: and symbols to him, and images and imagery to him.
Speaker 5: So you talk about calling these things these projects. And
Speaker 5: you said early on in the book too, if everything
Speaker 5: that he had planned, all the people that he had
Speaker 5: stalked and looked at and studied, if he would have
Speaker 5: killed them, his numbers would have been fifty or sixty,
Speaker 5: ten times or six times or more what he actually did.
Speaker 5: So tell us about some of the the organizations he does,
Speaker 5: and some of the reasons why he stocks certain people
Speaker 5: and not others, and some of that stalking what that entails.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, as he once he actually murdered, decides to
Speaker 3: murder someone, it ends up being a whole family family four,
Speaker 3: so weirdly mirroring the Clutter family murder and without intention
Speaker 3: intending that that's what it kind of became. And so
Speaker 3: now he's done it, he's gotten away with it. He
Speaker 3: wasn't really sure he was going to get away with it.
Speaker 3: He's just a document that it makes him feel powerful
Speaker 3: at a time when he's you know, laid off. He's
Speaker 3: going to school, but he's not a very good student.
Speaker 3: So the part of his life where he feels in
Speaker 3: control and powerful is a part of his life where
Speaker 3: he's you know, a murderer, and so that sets it
Speaker 3: up to be repeated again. He starts to look for people.
Speaker 3: He gets a job in a security company, so now
Speaker 3: he can see the layouts of houses. He starts looking
Speaker 3: for people women who live alone, don't have dogs, who
Speaker 3: look particularly vulnerable, who looks small, because you know, he
Speaker 3: wants to be sure he can overpower them who live
Speaker 3: in houses that won't be really obvious. And in particular,
Speaker 3: they should have three in the address or some permutation
Speaker 3: like six or nine, something like that, because that's sort
Speaker 3: of a signal to him that you know, this is perfect.
Speaker 3: He likes corner houses or houses that are set off
Speaker 3: a little bit, so he does a lot of backyard
Speaker 3: stocking where he's walking up and down looking for particular
Speaker 3: types of houses that you think would be easy to enter.
Speaker 3: Of course, he's already knows how to set up many
Speaker 3: of the alarm systems. He starts practicing on how do
Speaker 3: you cut window glass? So he has an old window
Speaker 3: in his yard. You know, he gets equipment to try
Speaker 3: to learn how to do that and be what he
Speaker 3: calls a cat burglar. So he begins to look for,
Speaker 3: you know, perfect victims. It makes a lot of mistakes. Actually,
Speaker 3: the next victim he picks is about three months after
Speaker 3: the Otero family murder, and he thinks she lives alone.
Speaker 3: He's right that she lives alone. But his m O,
Speaker 3: which is pretty risky, is to get into you to
Speaker 3: watch their habits, to know when they come in and out,
Speaker 3: to know when to expect them not to be home,
Speaker 3: and then get into the house and wait for them.
Speaker 3: So that's pretty risky because you can't be sure they're
Speaker 3: going to come back in alone. And that's exactly what
Speaker 3: happened in the second one. Kathy Bright came in with
Speaker 3: her brother Kevin, and so now he's got to deal
Speaker 3: with two of them, including one being you know, a
Speaker 3: young man who who could overpower him, and almost did
Speaker 3: because they did have a struggle. Raider had a couple
Speaker 3: of weapons with him, but Kevin Bright went grabbed for
Speaker 3: one of the guns, and Rader really believed he was
Speaker 3: going to die right there in the house. So there's
Speaker 3: a struggle. He does shoot Kevin twice, but Kevin doesn't die.
Speaker 3: He manages to get up and run out. So that
Speaker 3: completely messes up the fantasy of what Rader wants to do.
Speaker 3: And so he stabs Kathy a number of times. He
Speaker 3: doesn't and she doesn't die until after she you know,
Speaker 3: the police come and they take her to the hospital.
Speaker 3: That's where she dies. But she could have easily given
Speaker 3: a description. Kevin gave a description, but they they didn't
Speaker 3: link it to Raider. He did think about killing Kevin.
Speaker 3: He thought about looking up where he lived and killing
Speaker 3: him to make sure to eliminate witnesses. So here's making
Speaker 3: mistakes even though he's got you know, he's trying to
Speaker 3: be very careful. He has the sort of code of
Speaker 3: leave nothing to chance, and yet makes a number of
Speaker 3: mistakes when he When he cases the O'to house looking
Speaker 3: for the mother and daughter, Julie O'taro and Josephine O'taro,
Speaker 3: he doesn't know they have a dog, he doesn't know
Speaker 3: there are three other kids in the house. He doesn't
Speaker 3: realize the father is actually home that day because he
Speaker 3: was in a car accident. So there's any number of
Speaker 3: mistakes that writer makes, even though he thinks he's trying
Speaker 3: to be very, very careful. But he does look for
Speaker 3: houses and certain types of victims. Many of these were
Speaker 3: on the road. If he had a job on the road,
Speaker 3: he would then go into other towns and he'd case
Speaker 3: houses there. So that's how he ended up with a
Speaker 3: list of fifty to sixty. You know, many people think
Speaker 3: that he stopped. He would just say he didn't succeed
Speaker 3: on all of these, but he's certainly had detailed notes
Speaker 3: on these various potential victims. He did.
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Speaker 3: Plus enter a number of houses to wait for people
Speaker 3: who didn't come home when he thought they would, and
Speaker 3: he could have had many more victims than he did.
Speaker 5: Have you outline so many of the famous serial killers
Speaker 5: in this book because they occurred during the Rain of
Speaker 5: Terror that Dennis Raider and flicks on Kansas, but also
Speaker 5: that he is really admire certain serial killers like Ted
Speaker 5: Bundy and h Holmes and others like Harvey Glatman like
Speaker 5: you mentioned. But also, as you mentioned, he learns from
Speaker 5: these people's things such as the ruse. So what I
Speaker 5: want to talk about was what he did where he
Speaker 5: got some of the things he from. It seemed like
Speaker 5: he got a little bit from everyone, but the rules
Speaker 5: that he used where he has a mask, but he
Speaker 5: doesn't use a mask. Tell us why he wouldn't do that.
Speaker 5: What seems odd until you hear the explanation.
Speaker 3: Well, it depends on which case you talk about. But
Speaker 3: in some cases it just made him hot. I mean
Speaker 3: he sweated profusely, and so he didn't want to wear
Speaker 3: the mask and he knew he's going to kill them anyway.
Speaker 3: I said, didn't matter if he had the mask on
Speaker 3: or not. But I think, you know, he says he
Speaker 3: had no interest in the Zodiac Killer, which happened in
Speaker 3: late sixties in California. He was actually in the military,
Speaker 3: was overseas at that time, but a lot of his
Speaker 3: mo is pretty similar. So I think he definitely read
Speaker 3: some books about it. Because his idea of I'm a
Speaker 3: wanted fugitive, I just need your car. He wanted people
Speaker 3: to be put at ease because he thought if they
Speaker 3: feel like they're safe, you can control them more easily.
Speaker 3: So that was the first thing he wanted. He wanted
Speaker 3: to pretend to be something, so having the mask on
Speaker 3: would did not work that way. He wanted them to
Speaker 3: believe he's just a fugitive on his way somewhere, and
Speaker 3: he needed their car. He needed money, he needed, you know,
Speaker 3: items from the house, so if they just went along,
Speaker 3: they'd be all right. And that's very much like the Zodiac,
Speaker 3: much more so than some of the other serial killers.
Speaker 3: But he said he wasn't interested in the Zodiac because
Speaker 3: Zodiac was not someone who bound his victims and strangled them.
Speaker 3: He was more interested in Bundy, the bots and strangler,
Speaker 3: people who did the things that aroused him. So those
Speaker 3: were the serial killers he paid the most attention to.
Speaker 3: And Bundy, of course, was pretty famous for having a
Speaker 3: variety of ruses where he would pretend to be a
Speaker 3: police officer, for example, or somebody who in need of help.
Speaker 3: So later learned from these people. And the mask thing,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure what you're referring to, but there were
Speaker 3: times when it just was too it just made him
Speaker 3: swept too much, and so he didn't want to use it.
Speaker 5: No, that's what I was trying to get from you,
Speaker 5: is that why wouldn't he have worn the mask at
Speaker 5: the Otero's And it was that because that would have
Speaker 5: been he said, it was more difficult with a mask,
Speaker 5: So why not just not go with a mask? Like
Speaker 5: you said, he's gonna kill him anyway.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and then and and actually he wasn't all
Speaker 3: that shured that he was he was gonna do that
Speaker 3: until finally the young boy Joseph Jr. Opened the back
Speaker 3: door and then then he had to go through with it.
Speaker 3: But he also tried out gloves, a lot of different gloves,
Speaker 3: like the first one, the the Otero's. He had those
Speaker 3: those stupid kitchen rubber gloves that he can't do anything.
Speaker 3: He can't even do dishes with those things, and so
Speaker 3: he tried that and it was very clumsy. He would
Speaker 3: then try try like the kind of gloves you get
Speaker 3: in the drug store, and those didn't work very well.
Speaker 3: So then he stole some golf gloves, leather golf gloves,
Speaker 3: and those were better, but still took away some of
Speaker 3: the sensation of really touching a person's skin. And so
Speaker 3: you know, he goes through some of the discussions about
Speaker 3: the pros and cons of wearing gloves and not wearing gloves,
Speaker 3: and also in the masks, I mean, he talks about
Speaker 3: that they were just difficult. He brought them with but
Speaker 3: he often didn't like using them.
Speaker 5: This guy's a very complex serial killer. You talk about
Speaker 5: how unique he is and his experiences and his behavior
Speaker 5: is unique. So you also talk about some of the
Speaker 5: things he did, he like I say, he did a
Speaker 5: little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Speaker 5: Whatever he was really influenced by, whether it's walked, drawing
Speaker 5: on a chalkboard or writing on a chalkboard, or contacting
Speaker 5: the media. So at what point does he decide he
Speaker 5: needs that gratification, that ego gratification, and what does that
Speaker 5: correspondence tell the police.
Speaker 3: Well, the very first letter he wrote wasn't about ego.
Speaker 3: That occurred about eight months, nine months after the Otara murder,
Speaker 3: which is January, in January of nineteen seventy. For what
Speaker 3: happened is they had identified three men who they thought
Speaker 3: were suspects, and so the newspaper had written a story
Speaker 3: that they were questioning these men in the Oteo case,
Speaker 3: which kind of made Raider mad because because he was
Speaker 3: they were wasting taxpayer money. So he wanted to make
Speaker 3: sure they didn't spend too much time doing that because
Speaker 3: that was a waste of his taxes. So he wanted
Speaker 3: to set them straight that they had the wrong the
Speaker 3: wrong dudes as he called them. But at the same
Speaker 3: time he started to play a little game with that
Speaker 3: as he put this letter into a you know, a
Speaker 3: book in the particular library and directed the newspaper people
Speaker 3: to go find it. That kind of thing. So he's
Speaker 3: already playing what he called his cat and mouse games,
Speaker 3: and he didn't do much with that until after after
Speaker 3: he had killed I believe maybe the seventh victim he
Speaker 3: or maybe the sixth one he alludes to. He had
Speaker 3: to be careful because he didn't want them to link
Speaker 3: Kathy Bright's murder because he knew Kevin was a survivor.
Speaker 3: But he wanted them to know that there was a
Speaker 3: serial killer in town because he wanted that gratification of
Speaker 3: terrorizing the Wichita community. So he wrote to the newspaper
Speaker 3: basically saying the o'to's and another one and I think
Speaker 3: it was could have been Shirley Bayan or Nancy Fox,
Speaker 3: linking those together and then but leaving the Kathy Bright
Speaker 3: one unnamed, and they pretty much figured out which one
Speaker 3: he must have meant. But he did at that point
Speaker 3: want the ego gratification. And then he starts to write
Speaker 3: things like, you know, how many has to die before
Speaker 3: I get the kind of notoriety that people like Jack
Speaker 3: the Ripper and Ted of the West Coast meaning Ted Bundy,
Speaker 3: and you know some of the others. He names a
Speaker 3: number of serial killers that he wants to be thought of.
Speaker 3: He wants to be among the elite, and that's where
Speaker 3: he starts talking about we each have a factor X.
Speaker 3: No one knows when this monster my brain is going
Speaker 3: to act. I can't control it, you know, the next victim.
Speaker 3: I'm already looking at the next victim. So that during
Speaker 3: those days, those early days, he's really wanting to spread terror.
Speaker 3: And at one point he did go into a woman's
Speaker 3: house and thought she was going to come home. He
Speaker 3: mistook her daughter for her. He thought it was her
Speaker 3: daughter who actually lived in this house, so again making
Speaker 3: a mistake, but he goes in. She doesn't come home
Speaker 3: when he expects her to, and so he sends a
Speaker 3: package of items he's taken out of her house to
Speaker 3: basically tell her, you know, BTK was here and you
Speaker 3: could have been the next victim, which of course completely
Speaker 3: terrorized her as well as everybody else because he got
Speaker 3: into her house. So he's beginning to do that kind
Speaker 3: of thing. But then he stops, and they are not.
Speaker 3: They don't link him with the final three victims. Although
Speaker 3: they have their suspicions, they don't link him with the
Speaker 3: final three definitively because he doesn't write any notes afterwards.
Speaker 3: In the Shirley v in case he writes a poem
Speaker 3: about her, he writes a poem about the woman who
Speaker 3: he didn't kill, oh Anna, And mostly he's plagiarizing poems.
Speaker 3: He finds you in the library, in the college library,
Speaker 3: but he is trying to create this atmosphere of I'm
Speaker 3: out there, I'm among you. You never know who I'm
Speaker 3: looking at, you never know when I'm going to strike.
Speaker 3: So people began to know they come home, they check
Speaker 3: their phone lines first, because he knew he always cut
Speaker 3: the phone line. People started getting dogs and guns and alarms,
Speaker 3: and of course, you know, that plays right in for
Speaker 3: him because he's he is installing alarms, so he knows
Speaker 3: who's got what kind of alarm and how to you know,
Speaker 3: cut the wires or you know what codes they might
Speaker 3: be using. So you know, the ultimate boogeyman, the guy
Speaker 3: who sets up your security system and then uses it
Speaker 3: to get into your house and wait for you. Is
Speaker 3: is really quite a terrifying prospect for people.
Speaker 5: What is it you said talk about? The more fascinating
Speaker 5: part of this book, too, is that while he's got
Speaker 5: this and he calls it cubing to be able to
Speaker 5: compartmentalize himself and be able to and then lead a
Speaker 5: seemingly normal life. Let's talk about that seemingly normal life.
Speaker 5: He meets Paula, falls in love. Does she see anything
Speaker 5: and when? If anything, when does she see it? And
Speaker 5: in general, what does Paula think of their marriage? And
Speaker 5: how is he as a father? What's their life like?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, he meets paul They at church, their their churchgoers.
Speaker 3: They you know, pray together and get involved in church activities.
Speaker 3: She gets a job as an accountant. They rent a
Speaker 3: house and then eventually buy a house and just have
Speaker 3: a basic, you know, middle class kind of life. Eventually
Speaker 3: she gets pregnant with their first child. He's very exited,
Speaker 3: you know, sh for all intensive purposes, this looks like
Speaker 3: a basic middle Midwest, middle class church going family. There's
Speaker 3: no reason to suspect otherwise. And then they have a
Speaker 3: second child, so they have a son and a daughter.
Speaker 3: He goes back to college and gets a couple of degrees.
Speaker 3: He gets you know, he's a breadwinner. He brings home
Speaker 3: the money to support them. He's a good father. According
Speaker 3: to things that his daughter has said no one ever
Speaker 3: suspects anything. There are a few incidents where he claims
Speaker 3: Paula called him at certain things that she has said
Speaker 3: she doesn't remember any of that. She doesn't think they happened.
Speaker 3: People have asked me about that, to which I say, well,
Speaker 3: people usually take their own memories away from any given incident.
Speaker 3: So if she did see him writing a poem that
Speaker 3: he said was a class project in criminal justice, you know,
Speaker 3: they want us to write something like the BTK Killer,
Speaker 3: that wouldn't have stuck with her at all. And I
Speaker 3: can understand her saying I don't have any memory of
Speaker 3: actually seeing him or catching him having that, Whereas it
Speaker 3: would stay with him because it would you know, that's
Speaker 3: a sweat inducing moment. Oh my god, she's catching me
Speaker 3: doing my BTK thing. So it would stay very clear
Speaker 3: in his memory. But it wouldn't stay in her memory
Speaker 3: at all, because to her, that's just one more assignment
Speaker 3: that he does papers, all of them, you know, all
Speaker 3: the time. What's the big deal. So for her to
Speaker 3: say that never happened, I just think it could easily
Speaker 3: have happened. She doesn't remember it, who knows. But for
Speaker 3: the most part, they were a basic church going family
Speaker 3: and very involved. He was a volunteer with cub Scouts
Speaker 3: with his son. In fact, he used that as a
Speaker 3: cover several times to go out and commit murder and
Speaker 3: nobody suspected anything, even when he decided to kill one
Speaker 3: of their neighbors, a woman who lived a couple of
Speaker 3: houses away, and did kill her, and then his daughter
Speaker 3: was terrified and he reassured her, you are safe, you
Speaker 3: have nothing to worry about. Of course, he knows she
Speaker 3: has nothing to worry that he's not going to do
Speaker 3: anything to her. So imagine imagine how she would feel
Speaker 3: knowing her father had said that to her after he's
Speaker 3: killed their neighbor. Horrible.
Speaker 5: The thing is with Paula, though he claims that his
Speaker 5: you know self bondage that he and cross dressing that
Speaker 5: he enjoys, and he enjoys at the crime scenes if
Speaker 5: if we haven't mentioned that, that he is caught by
Speaker 5: her a couple times and it's almost grounds for splitting up,
Speaker 5: at least according to him as well. Of course she
Speaker 5: gives them a second chance, and then of course the
Speaker 5: third chance.
Speaker 3: Well, that's another thing she says never happened. And for me,
Speaker 3: I'd say it never happened too. It's a pretty embarrassing thing.
Speaker 3: I my sense from all of that is that something
Speaker 3: happened of that nature. He remembers it, probably more clearly
Speaker 3: and in more detail, and perhaps even exaggerated the detail
Speaker 3: than she does. It's more significant for him because he
Speaker 3: would imagine this is a reason for divorce. She might
Speaker 3: not have felt the same way. So it's very hard
Speaker 3: to put those stories together. But I will say for
Speaker 3: him to make something like that up would be extremely cruel,
Speaker 3: because it's humiliating for her, for people who know her
Speaker 3: to say, Wow, did this really happen? And there's really
Speaker 3: not much that he does to humiliate her. He's pretty
Speaker 3: clear that he never wanted to hurt her, never lost
Speaker 3: his feelings for her, did not want her to be
Speaker 3: hurt by this book in any way. And so I
Speaker 3: guess I tend to think it probably happened. He didn't
Speaker 3: tell it just to hurt her or be cruel, But
Speaker 3: maybe she just doesn't have the same kind of sense
Speaker 3: of it that he does. You raised the cubing. You
Speaker 3: raised the cubing thing, And I'd like to say something
Speaker 3: about that, because that's interesting. In psychology, we call it compartmentalizing,
Speaker 3: which is a very long and clumsy word to get
Speaker 3: at the idea that that people, some of these people
Speaker 3: create whole alter personalities without really being like a multiple personality,
Speaker 3: but they create alter egos. They can have entire centers
Speaker 3: of morality that are contradictory within their own psyche. And
Speaker 3: Raiders that way. For example, on the On the Americans,
Speaker 3: there was a scene where a guy was being questioned
Speaker 3: by a Soviet agent. The agent puts a burning tire
Speaker 3: over him and his screams and screens and Raider was outraged,
Speaker 3: outraged that they would show such a horrible scene. You know,
Speaker 3: TV's like, what, how can you get the outrage? You're
Speaker 3: a serial killer? But that's what I mean that, that's
Speaker 3: that cubing. He calls it cubing, which I think actually
Speaker 3: is a better word, because he says, you live on
Speaker 3: one side of the cube, but you have all these
Speaker 3: other facets, other angles. You don't see them, but they're
Speaker 3: still part of you, and for various different purposes, you
Speaker 3: can move off the face of the cube onto the
Speaker 3: side of the cube or underneath the cube for whatever
Speaker 3: you need and be that person. So he can be
Speaker 3: a very religious person for example, to one correspondent who
Speaker 3: wants to do Bible studies with him, and he has
Speaker 3: all the right words and everything to sound quite real
Speaker 3: and sincere, and then maybe and then with me, he'll
Speaker 3: tell me all the worst things he ever did, and
Speaker 3: he's perfectly sincere about that. And then when the cops
Speaker 3: come in, he puts on another face for them. I
Speaker 3: certainly saw him putting on a face for the prison
Speaker 3: guards that was very different from the face he put
Speaker 3: on for me. So he's an impression manager, and part
Speaker 3: of the success of that is that he can be
Speaker 3: on these different faces of the cube. So I think
Speaker 3: his concept is really interesting. And he actually asked me
Speaker 3: at one point, did I come up with that? Or
Speaker 3: did you? You did?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: It's actually quite quite good. And I use it now
Speaker 3: when I talk about compartmentalizing, I use that metaphor.
Speaker 5: When we talk about when you talk about Dennis Rader,
Speaker 5: you talk about all organize This guy is today and always.
Speaker 5: Did he get better like unlike some serial killers that
Speaker 5: seem to get sloppier in which leads to an inevitable arrest.
Speaker 5: Was he getting better at what he was doing? He said,
Speaker 5: he made a bunch of mistakes in the beginning, and
Speaker 5: then he had a lot of projects that just didn't
Speaker 5: work out. Was he getting better?
Speaker 3: He wasn't getting better. He had only one that he
Speaker 3: would say was the perfect one that was Nancy Fox.
Speaker 3: The rest all had mistakes where he came close to
Speaker 3: getting caught or he left something behind. And also then
Speaker 3: when he started up his second cat and mouse thing
Speaker 3: with the police and newspapers, he was quite sloppy. He
Speaker 3: ended up on a security video he drove his son's SUV,
Speaker 3: which my opinion is, what in the world is your
Speaker 3: son going to think when he finds out you'd bek
Speaker 3: and you use his car for these things. But he's
Speaker 3: doing silly things like going in and buying cereal boxes
Speaker 3: that have a B or a T or a K
Speaker 3: in the title, like special K, putting these fashion dolls inside,
Speaker 3: leaving him out in public places where he could be
Speaker 3: seen or caught in a security camera. So no, he's
Speaker 3: not getting better. He's lucky in many ways. And then
Speaker 3: in the end he makes a pretty stupid mistake where
Speaker 3: he's tired of he's wanting to write his life story
Speaker 3: out for the police, even though you don't know what's
Speaker 3: true and what isn't true. So he has these chapters
Speaker 3: that he's putting inside these cereal boxes and packages, and
Speaker 3: he's copying them and then copying the copies and then
Speaker 3: copying the copies, which is very time consuming. He wants
Speaker 3: to stop doing that, so he asks he knows how
Speaker 3: to use a computer. He asks Ken Landweer, who was
Speaker 3: the task force leader. It's sort of through newspapers and
Speaker 3: through communications. Can you trace it if I use a
Speaker 3: computer disc and let me know of ad in the
Speaker 3: newspaper and land Where says no, we can't, which of
Speaker 3: course they can. He lied and later believed him and
Speaker 3: send a disk and was caught. So he wasn't getting better.
Speaker 3: I think he just ran out of luck.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was incredible, incredible trusting the police and explicitly
Speaker 5: or implicitly, and that led to his downfall. And also
Speaker 5: I guess his narcissism obviously led to that mistake. So
Speaker 5: when you talk about what's interesting about him is unlike
Speaker 5: some killers, is what the actual sexual act meant to
Speaker 5: him as opposed to these other people. And you talk
Speaker 5: about paraphilia, and you also talk about that really paraphilia
Speaker 5: itself or the study of paraphilia has been limited. So
Speaker 5: tell us about what you describe as paraphilia and how
Speaker 5: this relates to Dennis Rader.
Speaker 3: Well, paraphilias have not been well studied, but really the
Speaker 3: number in the thousands. And a paraphilia is an item
Speaker 3: or an experience that arouses a person and is considered
Speaker 3: somewhat perverse or debiant in that culture. So it is
Speaker 3: culture to culture. It's things like a shoe fet ish,
Speaker 3: sato masochism, both of those are considered paraphilias. Arousal at statues,
Speaker 3: which is statuephilia. You know, I could go on and
Speaker 3: on how many different peraphilies there are. But with Raider,
Speaker 3: he had the thing with ropes. That was one of
Speaker 3: his paraphilias to be bound, and so he would actually
Speaker 3: go hang himself, trust himself up with ropes. He had
Speaker 3: all kinds of contraptions that he would bind himself in
Speaker 3: to get aroused. He'd sometimes put himself into a like
Speaker 3: a dry cleaner bag with a barbie doll, things like that,
Speaker 3: which so many people would find that to be perverse
Speaker 3: or debiant and different. How however, your development goes when
Speaker 3: you're exposed to something. That thing might be arousing. So
Speaker 3: if that thing is an abnormal thing for our culture,
Speaker 3: and yet it becomes the thing that you find most arousing,
Speaker 3: even sometimes to the point of being unable to be
Speaker 3: aroused without it, and you have developed a paraphilia. Most
Speaker 3: of these are not criminal, but when they become coercive,
Speaker 3: that is, you need to trespass on the rights of
Speaker 3: another person, bring harm to them, or kill them, like necophilia.
Speaker 3: Now you have a criminal paraphilia, and raiders, which could
Speaker 3: have remained non criminal if he just found himself for
Speaker 3: autoerotic practices, became a coercive paraphilia when he decided he
Speaker 3: needed to bind other people to get aroused.
Speaker 5: Now, once these are rested, and obviously you corresponded with
Speaker 5: for five years, and you say it was again not
Speaker 5: so productive until after the second year. I'm continuing into
Speaker 5: the third and fourth and fifth year. What exactly you describe,
Speaker 5: And he describes in minute detail everything that he went
Speaker 5: through in terms of the planning, everything he went through,
Speaker 5: in terms of the fantasizing, everything that he went through,
Speaker 5: in terms of the other things that helped him get
Speaker 5: through till he actually did go through with the murders.
Speaker 5: Because at some points, as you talk, he has a
Speaker 5: tight schedule. He plans a couple of things for lunch hour.
Speaker 5: So the descriptions as you describe in the book tell
Speaker 5: us how he was able to be able to talk
Speaker 5: about these things, and yet he again he talks about remorse,
Speaker 5: described the incredible again contrast or conflict in how he
Speaker 5: talks about all of these things. But yet now that
Speaker 5: he's in prison again, it's incredible the complexity of this mind.
Speaker 5: But you have got this kind of dialogue and with
Speaker 5: these interviews you've captured that. So just tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit more about that correspondence him describing the oteros
Speaker 5: or any of the murders and the process that he
Speaker 5: went through and everything that he derived from that in
Speaker 5: terms of satisfaction.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the first things he wanted to make
Speaker 3: sure I understood is that he didn't really want to
Speaker 3: do this, but he did want to somehow give back
Speaker 3: to the victims' families for what he had, the harm
Speaker 3: and pain that he had caused them. And why would
Speaker 3: he say that to me, Because he's an impression manager.
Speaker 3: He wants me to think well of him. But so
Speaker 3: that's what I mean when I say how he's engaged
Speaker 3: with his words versus what he says. There are two
Speaker 3: different things, and I'm always careful to watch both layers
Speaker 3: of that. And when people ask me if he's out remorse,
Speaker 3: I always say, depends on what part of the QB's on,
Speaker 3: because if he wants to give a certain face, that's
Speaker 3: what he'll talk. He'll have all the remorse talk. And
Speaker 3: I don't know how deeply he feels that anymore than
Speaker 3: I know how deeply anyone feels that who uses the
Speaker 3: word remorse. You know how much do any of us
Speaker 3: know what another person feels. So I'm not going to say, no,
Speaker 3: he doesn't feel remorse, but I am going to say
Speaker 3: many of his actions contradict what we think of when
Speaker 3: we think of remorse. So if someone says, I don't
Speaker 3: really want to draw a torture silo for you, but
Speaker 3: then he spends days and days doing it in great detail,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry you enjoyed that. So you can say, oh,
Speaker 3: you want to me about not wanting to and feeling bad,
Speaker 3: but I see what really goes into that, and that
Speaker 3: you're into it. This is this is hot for you,
Speaker 3: So please spare me the rhetoric. I don't I don't
Speaker 3: believe you but I don't say that to him. I
Speaker 3: just know that to be true because I've also been
Speaker 3: a therapist. I've seen all kinds of stuff in therapy
Speaker 3: where people come in with a cover story, but that's
Speaker 3: not really what the issue is. So you're always watching behavior.
Speaker 3: You're always watching for patterns in the things that they're doing,
Speaker 3: and that's why it does take This is a very
Speaker 3: time consuming type of project because you have to be
Speaker 3: able to see patterns in a variety of things like
Speaker 3: drawings and poetry and whatnot, but you have to see
Speaker 3: them across time. And for example, at the end of
Speaker 3: the book, I talk about a dream that he has. Well,
Speaker 3: that dream would have been meaningless without my having seen
Speaker 3: so much that came before it, so that I now
Speaker 3: have a context for why. I think all of the
Speaker 3: items in the dream are quite revelatory. So I'm always
Speaker 3: looking at the how and the what. How is he
Speaker 3: engaged in the things and what does he say about them?
Speaker 3: And it's pretty clear. Like one of the things that
Speaker 3: was really striking to me was when he said how
Speaker 3: much he loved his kids, and yet he used his
Speaker 3: son's car to go drop off things. Well, in his mind,
Speaker 3: his son is in the Navy, and he's exercising the car,
Speaker 3: like putting the car to use, so that he's doing
Speaker 3: a loving thing. I said, but but can't you think
Speaker 3: about his point of view when if you to get
Speaker 3: caught and revealed as BTK using his car, don't you
Speaker 3: think that would hurt him? And he said, I wasn't
Speaker 3: going to get caught. It never it never occurred to
Speaker 3: me that I would get caught, like, but that's not
Speaker 3: a very loving thing thing to do, to not even
Speaker 3: think about, but what if? And then he became angry
Speaker 3: at me that I would that I would make him
Speaker 3: think about the possibility that his love for his son
Speaker 3: wasn't very deep or genuine. But that's my part of
Speaker 3: this is really I just don't buy that. I don't
Speaker 3: buy your story in that, you know, and I've actually
Speaker 3: been like the detectives who did the interrogation with him
Speaker 3: were sort of critical of me, and they said, well,
Speaker 3: you didn't confront him enough and get at the truth.
Speaker 3: And I said, well, first of all, I wasn't there
Speaker 3: as a detective. That wasn't my job. And secondly, you
Speaker 3: don't have any idea what my process is because this
Speaker 3: is his autobiography. A great many things went on behind
Speaker 3: the scenes. You will never see is I'm not writing
Speaker 3: a book about writing the book. I'm helping him write
Speaker 3: his autobiography, So you don't have any idea what kinds
Speaker 3: of things I said to him. But in any rate,
Speaker 3: I wasn't there as an investigative reporter, and I wasn't
Speaker 3: there as a homicide detective. I'm here as a psychologist
Speaker 3: looking at the layers, which will include him telling lies
Speaker 3: and recording the lies and everything else that I see
Speaker 3: so that other people, criminologists and psychologists can come in
Speaker 3: and see their own ideas and get their own interpretations
Speaker 3: out of it. So I think there's more in this.
Speaker 3: Certainly there's more in this than there was in their interrogations.
Speaker 3: I have the entire transcript of the interrogations and the
Speaker 3: videos of they made. There's a lot more that you
Speaker 3: can get out of a five year project then you
Speaker 3: can get in a thirty hour interrogation. And I had
Speaker 3: our time conveying that to them.
Speaker 5: But I think I'm right, well, I think I think,
Speaker 5: especially considering I think if police were to say, listen,
Speaker 5: you've given this guy an easy time, but we think
Speaker 5: he's a suspect and other murders, Well that's not the case.
Speaker 5: It's not Ted Bundy or Gacy or any of those
Speaker 5: people like that, or denial, denial, and it seemed like, again,
Speaker 5: no one can be quite certain that he wasn't responsible
Speaker 5: for any other murders. But if you put everything together,
Speaker 5: it looks logically like these are all that he was
Speaker 5: responsible for. He wanted to talk these ad journals and evidence,
Speaker 5: and so it looks like you weren't going to interfere
Speaker 5: with anything that the police could ever potentially do anyway.
Speaker 5: But to get to the again, the incredible inside. I
Speaker 5: know sounds cliche about the inside the mind of a
Speaker 5: serial killer, but when you let the serial killer tell
Speaker 5: the story, and again, like you say, are guided, and
Speaker 5: you call upon all of your expertise. You're responsible for
Speaker 5: sixty books. I don't think there's anybody more. You know
Speaker 5: more because it has done more study, So I I, yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't. The criticism of the police is not one.
Speaker 3: And I do go through because I say there are
Speaker 3: people who say there are more, and there are people
Speaker 3: who say there aren't more. So I go through the
Speaker 3: logic of that. Here here's how he's surround here's the
Speaker 3: behavior surround the Ethus murders. He recorded them, he kept
Speaker 3: items he did so if there are more wire there
Speaker 3: are no journal entries for anymore, that's one thing you
Speaker 3: have to ask. I think there could be another one,
Speaker 3: and I've gone to the police and said, if there
Speaker 3: ever is another one, I'll tell you. I'll tell you
Speaker 3: thing I know. I will cooperate with them. But with Rater,
Speaker 3: I think you have to look at the again, the
Speaker 3: consistency of behavior. He has actually talked with them about
Speaker 3: some of the open cases that they thought he might
Speaker 3: have done that remain open today. He's tried to help them.
Speaker 3: He's sat with them and said, here's where I was
Speaker 3: at that time, here's why this isn't mine. And they
Speaker 3: feel like they've pretty much covered that. If he has
Speaker 3: killed someone else, it's in another state or another country.
Speaker 5: Even before I let you go, we do have not
Speaker 5: talked about sort of a conclusion if there is anything
Speaker 5: like this. And of course I never expect anyone to
Speaker 5: come out to the why. But you've done everything except
Speaker 5: the why. Absolutely the why. There's certainly you've examined the why.
Speaker 5: But you talk about low self esteem, loneliness and human
Speaker 5: to contributing factors. How important after you looked at this
Speaker 5: and after all the research you did from previous books,
Speaker 5: how important is that in this case?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, one of the things that I noticed
Speaker 3: is not very many people have done much study on
Speaker 3: the role of humiliation in extreme climes like this. I
Speaker 3: think it plays a big role for some people. It's
Speaker 3: always about the way someone perceives their life. So if
Speaker 3: you're humiliated and that enrages you and makes you want
Speaker 3: to control women because your mother is the one who
Speaker 3: humiliated you, that's going to play a greater part in
Speaker 3: your subsequent behavior than someone who isn't as enraged by
Speaker 3: it or is made helpless by it. So that's how
Speaker 3: the person sees it, how they perceive it, and then
Speaker 3: what they want to do with that experience. That really
Speaker 3: really is key. There's no formula. I say this every
Speaker 3: single day. People tell and I just do a talk
Speaker 3: the other night. Everyone wants a formula. There's a profile
Speaker 3: of the serial killer. There's not a serial killer, isn't
Speaker 3: a criminal type. It's a description of the fact that
Speaker 3: you've killed at least two people in two different occasions.
Speaker 3: That's all it is. There's many motives, many moos. Some
Speaker 3: of them completely switch out what they do or the
Speaker 3: weapons they use, or they're victim type or whatnot. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: some of the fiction TV shows have given us this
Speaker 3: notion that there's a formula, that there's a profile of
Speaker 3: the serial killer that they all sit and it's just
Speaker 3: not true. So one of the things I wanted to
Speaker 3: do with this book was talk about these formulas and
Speaker 3: the fact that even among my colleagues there are sometimes
Speaker 3: formulas like they would say, well, if you didn't find abuse,
Speaker 3: he just didn't tell you, he just lied to you,
Speaker 3: like or our formulas are wrong. But we need to
Speaker 3: accommodate the outliers, the ones who don't fit. And that's
Speaker 3: the whole point of keeping doing this research, is to
Speaker 3: to recognize that our formers are based on what we
Speaker 3: what we know to this point, but they're not based
Speaker 3: on all possible human behavior, and human beings will constantly
Speaker 3: surprise us, and water surprises a lot of people. So
Speaker 3: one of the reasons I wanted to write this book
Speaker 3: is because he does have a lot of unique things
Speaker 3: that don't fit what we've come to accept as our
Speaker 3: formulas for serial killers. So that's that's the good thing,
Speaker 3: because then we won't get, you know, in a rut,
Speaker 3: which I think we have gotten into. So that's one thing.
Speaker 3: What I do think is it's not about necessarily what
Speaker 3: causes someone, but more how do we study these cases
Speaker 3: to see what influences in a particular individual's life braided
Speaker 3: together in such a way as to become the ground
Speaker 3: from which this person not just became violent, but became
Speaker 3: serially violent. How did the addiction to violence occur? That
Speaker 3: is what we need to study. We need to understand
Speaker 3: paraphilias better, because they are addictive and quite rigid. If
Speaker 3: we understand better the perophilias that drive this particular type
Speaker 3: of behavior and get some treatments in place, I think
Speaker 3: we have a better shot at being able to really
Speaker 3: demystify the serial killer. But we're not there yet.
Speaker 5: And I agree with you too, because the most fascinating
Speaker 5: books and the most interesting books to me are to
Speaker 5: understand somewhat again, just somewhat, because again, Dennis Raider doesn't
Speaker 5: understand his own motivations to do things. Glad luckily, thankfully
Speaker 5: that you put your mind and the minds of all
Speaker 5: your experience and all your people that you know in
Speaker 5: the in this multi disciplined area that you've been able
Speaker 5: to come up with this, But I think it is
Speaker 5: really beneficial to be able to talk to those killers
Speaker 5: that want to talk and get. As you say, not
Speaker 5: everybody fits this little bill that was there was some
Speaker 5: good work when there was again in the pioneering days.
Speaker 5: But I agree with you too that I think we've
Speaker 5: been resigned to thinking that we know much more than
Speaker 5: I think we do. And I think the people to
Speaker 5: talk to are the experts, which are unfortunately people like
Speaker 5: Dennis Rader.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, I hope this book encourages my
Speaker 3: colleagues too. It's very time consuming and that won't pay
Speaker 3: off much in terms if they're looking for any financial benefit.
Speaker 3: I think it's extremely worthwhile and one of the things
Speaker 3: one of the reasons I wanted to do it was
Speaker 3: because I thought it would draw together really my entire
Speaker 3: experience and all the knowledge I've accumulated about serial murder
Speaker 3: and extreme offenders. It's like a professional accomplishment for me,
Speaker 3: regardless of anything else. But I'm hoping I will inspire
Speaker 3: other people with similar expertise to do this with others.
Speaker 5: Yes, well, I'm sure it will be this is a
Speaker 5: fascinating book and I want to thank you very much
Speaker 5: for coming on and talking about Confession of a serial Killer,
Speaker 5: the untold really the untold story of Dennis Raider, the
Speaker 5: BTK killer. Thank you very much. For those that might
Speaker 5: want to learn more about your work. I know we
Speaker 5: can go to Amazon, but do you have a website
Speaker 5: and do do Facebook?
Speaker 3: I do Facebook. I have a website, but I barely
Speaker 3: touch it. I'm mostly on Facebook. I have three different
Speaker 3: Facebook sites, so you can you can find me my
Speaker 3: personal page, you can find my my author page, my friends.
Speaker 3: It's Katherine Ramslam page. I'm very active on Facebook.
Speaker 5: Yes, well, I want again thank you very much Catherine
Speaker 5: for coming on and talking about the BTK. It's been
Speaker 5: fascinating and congratulations on an incredible book, and thank you
Speaker 5: and hope to talk to you again your future.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed, I always enjoyed being with you.
Speaker 5: Good questions, Thanks, thanks, Thank you very much Katherine, and
Speaker 5: have a great evening you too.