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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker, DTK
Speaker 3: every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 3: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 3: your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 4: In nineteen seventy four, Dennis Lynn Raider stocked and murdered
Speaker 4: a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he
Speaker 4: had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon
Speaker 4: after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and
Speaker 4: then an until he had ten victims. He named himself BTK,
Speaker 4: Bind Torture, Kill, and wrote notes that terrorized the city.
Speaker 4: He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one knew.
Speaker 4: No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He
Speaker 4: nearly got away with his crimes, but in two thousand
Speaker 4: and four he began to play risky games with the police.
Speaker 4: He made a mistake. When he was arrested. Raider's family, friends,
Speaker 4: and coworkers were shocked to discover that BTK had been
Speaker 4: among them, going to work, raising his children and acting normal.
Speaker 4: This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of
Speaker 4: victims and for the ordinary public face that Raider, a
Speaker 4: church council president, had shown to the outside world through
Speaker 4: jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondents. Katherine Ramsland worked
Speaker 4: with Raider himself to analyze the layers of his psyche,
Speaker 4: using his drawings, letters, interviews. In Raider's unique codes, she
Speaker 4: presents in meticulous detail tale the childhood roots and development
Speaker 4: of one man's motivation, the stock, torture, and kill. She
Speaker 4: reveals aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous
Speaker 4: of living serial killers that have never before been revealed.
Speaker 4: The documentary BTK Confession of a Serial Killer premiers January
Speaker 4: eighth and ninth on A and E. The two night
Speaker 4: event sheds new light on Raider's double life as both
Speaker 4: an upstanding citizen and a heartless killer. Doctor Katherine Ramslin,
Speaker 4: the renowned professor of forensic psychology and author, leads the
Speaker 4: examination of readers raiders transformation from an American boy to
Speaker 4: an American monster who wreaked havoc in Wichita Candae and
Speaker 4: went uncaptured for thirty years. With exclusive conversations with Raider himself,
Speaker 4: eye opening new archival, comprehensive interviews and access to raiders
Speaker 4: drawings and coded diaries, all paired with doctor Ramslin's expertise,
Speaker 4: Viewers get to know the man behind them on the
Speaker 4: truth behind the headline and a glimpse at the secrets
Speaker 4: Raider is still holding on to. The documentary we are
Speaker 4: discussing tonight is bt K Confession of a Serial Killer
Speaker 4: with my special guest, journalist and author and professor, doctor
Speaker 4: Katherine Ramsling. Welcome back to the program, and thank you
Speaker 4: so much for this interview, Doctor Katherine Ramsling.
Speaker 5: Always enjoy being here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: It's always a fantastic pleasure and a great thrill. Thank
Speaker 4: you so much for this. Let's talk about the origins
Speaker 4: of this documentary project, how it came about. Tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Well, started with the publication of the book, and then
Speaker 5: we began to look for people who might be interested
Speaker 5: in making it, you know, visual, and we had several takers.
Speaker 5: We saw the option a couple of times, and then
Speaker 5: the pandemic, So right the pandemic was a pretty big
Speaker 5: interruption because we did have somebody was going to do it,
Speaker 5: and then A and E decided that they wanted to
Speaker 5: do it as a four part documentary, which that's pretty daunting,
Speaker 5: and there was a lot of work involved, but in
Speaker 5: the end, the director's vision and the vision of all
Speaker 5: the production people really came through in terms of the
Speaker 5: goal I had had for the book, and I thought
Speaker 5: that was really quite an achievement because my goal is
Speaker 5: kind of academic. I really wanted this to use what
Speaker 5: a serial killer has to say about himself to benefit
Speaker 5: law enforcement, criminal justice, and forensic psychology. So it wasn't
Speaker 5: just a serial killer lathering on. It was formed for
Speaker 5: a specific purpose and the documentary achieves that, which I'm
Speaker 5: very pleased about it.
Speaker 4: We're talking about the book that toenty and sixteen, and
Speaker 4: that book is The Confession of a Serial Killer, The
Speaker 4: Untold Story of Dennis Raider, the BTK Killer again released
Speaker 4: in twenty sixteen, and the audiobook edition is going to
Speaker 4: be from Blackstone Publishing. It will be released January eleventh.
Speaker 4: So let's get to this very very important book and
Speaker 4: very important project that you undertook with Dennis Raider. Tell
Speaker 4: us a little bit about some of the people that
Speaker 4: were including Jim Thompson, some of the people that were
Speaker 4: involved in the very beginning of the book that you
Speaker 4: say that wouldn't happened otherwise.
Speaker 5: Well, right from the start, it wasn't even my book.
Speaker 5: What had happened is Raider was arrested in two thousand
Speaker 5: and five, and a woman whose code name we ended
Speaker 5: up using, we called her True Grit, had decided to
Speaker 5: write this book and contacted him and he agreed to
Speaker 5: do it with her, and they had several years of correspondence,
Speaker 5: and apparently she had decided she wasn't going to do
Speaker 5: this book. It had been a lot more difficult for
Speaker 5: her than she imagined it to be. She had been
Speaker 5: under attack a lot from you know all because she
Speaker 5: was kind of the gatekeeper for Raider. And I saw
Speaker 5: her on Facebook and asked her whatever happened to her book,
Speaker 5: because I had heard about her through news reports, And
Speaker 5: she asked me if I would take it over, which
Speaker 5: was not as simple as it sounds, because it was
Speaker 5: an easy yes for me because I had already written
Speaker 5: a book about how mental health experts over the past
Speaker 5: century had spent a lot of time with extreme offenders
Speaker 5: to learn about their development and their crimes and their attitudes,
Speaker 5: et cetera. So I already had a template and it
Speaker 5: was a great opportunity. But I needed to be approved
Speaker 5: by this consortium of the victims family members. They're surviving
Speaker 5: family members, because they wanted to have some control over
Speaker 5: the kind of thing that would be put out there.
Speaker 5: They didn't want anything out there, but certainly something was
Speaker 5: going to be and they wanted some control over it
Speaker 5: and as well as benefiting from it, which was fine
Speaker 5: with me. So I wrote a proposal. I sent it
Speaker 5: to the attorney Jim Thompson for the families and told
Speaker 5: them what I wanted to do, and they did like
Speaker 5: what I wanted to do. They liked my credentials, you know,
Speaker 5: in the academic world in terms of teaching forensic psychology
Speaker 5: and being very prominent in the research arena for serial
Speaker 5: killers and mass murderers, so they liked all that. But
Speaker 5: still it was a long drawn out process, and during
Speaker 5: this time I also got to Narraider, who wasn't so
Speaker 5: keen about transferring all this from the original person who
Speaker 5: he really liked to someone he didn't know. So we
Speaker 5: ended up playing chess, and he also wanted me to
Speaker 5: solve a series of codes, in part because he liked
Speaker 5: to communicate with codes because he thought of himself as
Speaker 5: kind of a spy, and it was also a way
Speaker 5: to keep prison guards from knowing what he was saying doing,
Speaker 5: but also it was a test for me to see
Speaker 5: what I play. But I play the code game, and
Speaker 5: of course I will, because my interest in him was
Speaker 5: the whole picture. Who is this guy, what motivates him?
Speaker 5: How does he create these codes and respond to them?
Speaker 5: And so fine. I mean, it was actually pretty intriguing
Speaker 5: to be sent these weird codes to see if I
Speaker 5: could figure them out. And I needed the other person,
Speaker 5: true grit to help me, because he had sent part
Speaker 5: to me in part to her, and you know, kind
Speaker 5: of a zoniac thing. He'd get together and figure this out.
Speaker 5: But for me, that was all behavior. I was interested
Speaker 5: in everything that he would do, whether it was manipulating, lying,
Speaker 5: telling the truth, whatever, it didn't matter. I wanted to
Speaker 5: see all the layers.
Speaker 4: In that as well. That you talk about these layers
Speaker 4: that you wanted to see. What are some of the
Speaker 4: things that he told you about, influence from other serial
Speaker 4: killers and some of the fantasies that it seemed that
Speaker 4: he shared with some of these role models.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a lot of that came along the way we
Speaker 5: worked for five years in this book. Initially, he of
Speaker 5: course talked about what everybody knows that who's read anything
Speaker 5: about him, that he had role models HH Holmes for
Speaker 5: his torture castles, and Raider would put his torture fantasies
Speaker 5: into a barn because he's from Kansas. And also Harvey Glatman,
Speaker 5: who would bind his victims with ropes, because for Rader,
Speaker 5: rope was a was a pretty significant fetish object in
Speaker 5: his own fantasies. So those are the two that many
Speaker 5: people are aware he uses role models. But along the way,
Speaker 5: as we were talking and reading and looking at comparisons
Speaker 5: to others, you know, he honed some of that, and
Speaker 5: he got interested in some that he didn't know about before,
Speaker 5: and talked more about some of the readings he had done,
Speaker 5: and it was pretty clear that most of what he
Speaker 5: did wasn't really original to him. He had gotten it
Speaker 5: either out of true crime magazines or fiction. You've read
Speaker 5: about what some serial killers had done in novels, and
Speaker 5: so some of the things he was doing was trying
Speaker 5: to replicate all of that. So he wasn't really that imaginative.
Speaker 5: And you know, unfortunately in fiction and film we get
Speaker 5: this notion of this master mind mentality, you know, the
Speaker 5: great puppeteer manipulator, and most of that just isn't what
Speaker 5: these serial killers are like, they're just out to achieve
Speaker 5: their goals and get it the way they need to
Speaker 5: get it. So he would find ideas in these various
Speaker 5: sources and try them out.
Speaker 4: He's used a lot of Again, he didn't make this
Speaker 4: easy for you, and you had to collaborate with the
Speaker 4: initial contact to be able to do any of this
Speaker 4: and figure out a bunch of things. Because you mentioned
Speaker 4: is trying to be clever, but you talk about him
Speaker 4: talking about the victims and talking about the murders and
Speaker 4: using expressions like going into the cookie jar and meals.
Speaker 4: So explain that language that you deciphered.
Speaker 5: That was probably one of the very first things that
Speaker 5: he did was send me clippings from newspapers and magazines
Speaker 5: with things circled, and then he would write a letter,
Speaker 5: sometimes a twenty page letter. In his handwriting is pretty terrible,
Speaker 5: and in he'dn bed in the letter along the way
Speaker 5: the clues to what he had circled, So I had
Speaker 5: to make my way through the letter and then look
Speaker 5: back at the clippings and like For example, one of
Speaker 5: the most puzzling to me was when he talked about
Speaker 5: that my interest in recipes of the three layer kind
Speaker 5: and I thought, well, I don't cook worthy talking about.
Speaker 5: But then I realized as I saw what he circled
Speaker 5: would have a B, a T, or a K. And
Speaker 5: so I realized, oh, that's the that's the three layer thing.
Speaker 5: And subsequently I learned about his magical number three. He
Speaker 5: thinks the whole world is sort of organized around threes,
Speaker 5: and that threes had somehow texted him, and so he
Speaker 5: has this attunement to threes. So there was that, and
Speaker 5: then there then he had some metaphors like castles and
Speaker 5: trains and such things as that, but it became unwieldy.
Speaker 5: I mean we would talk, we would be talking along about,
Speaker 5: you know, using trains and canyons and passengers and whatnot,
Speaker 5: as we were talking about whether this book was even
Speaker 5: going to sell or not, because I did have a
Speaker 5: lot of issues with that, and then we had to
Speaker 5: I finally, when the book did sell, I decided I
Speaker 5: would make the metaphor the codes that we would use.
Speaker 5: So it's kind of an irony because he did not
Speaker 5: want any woman kind of dominating him in any way.
Speaker 5: That was that was one of his key issues, is
Speaker 5: how females threw him off balance. And there I was
Speaker 5: making the code, but I used threes, and I used
Speaker 5: the cave and all the stuff that was appear to him.
Speaker 5: And also he sometimes would forget what some of his
Speaker 5: codes meant, so you know, so this way we had
Speaker 5: a record, you know, that we could both refer to.
Speaker 5: But in the end, the irony is that I framed
Speaker 5: the book through my codes using when I knew would
Speaker 5: be his preferential style.
Speaker 4: Mm hm. You had already done with your book The
Speaker 4: Mind of a Murderer, You already had extensive experience dealing
Speaker 4: with extreme offenders. How did that help you in this
Speaker 4: regard with BTK.
Speaker 5: Well, the Mind of a Murderer is really looking at
Speaker 5: what others had done, So I did. I wanted to
Speaker 5: look at accounts not by detectives or journalists, but by
Speaker 5: mental health experts to see how they had approached extreme offenders,
Speaker 5: mass and serial killers. So that wasn't really my work,
Speaker 5: although I've certainly approached other offenders, but not to this
Speaker 5: degree and not to the degree that those professionals had done.
Speaker 5: So they really gave me role models in terms of
Speaker 5: the persistence, the kinds of things you had to put
Speaker 5: up with the way to approach somebody who's very egotistical
Speaker 5: or narcissistic, you know. And I also had trained. I
Speaker 5: have one master's degree in clinical and psychology that has
Speaker 5: a specific type of training of really bracketing your preconceptions
Speaker 5: and your biases so that you can listen and let
Speaker 5: that person's world be what it is, rather than you imposing,
Speaker 5: you know, some theoretical perspective on them, but just listening
Speaker 5: to them. So I already had really been solidly trained
Speaker 5: in that approach, and that's certainly the one I used
Speaker 5: with Rader and would use with anybody else. Is what
Speaker 5: is your world? It doesn't matter if it corresponds to
Speaker 5: reality or corresponds to morality. It matters that you yield
Speaker 5: to me what your experience is, what your perspective is,
Speaker 5: and how you came to be this way. So that's
Speaker 5: I learned from looking to others as well as my
Speaker 5: own training in clinical psychology.
Speaker 4: Now, an important part of this is when you asked
Speaker 4: him the crucial important question about his torture fantasies, how
Speaker 4: did you approach that and how did you ensure that
Speaker 4: you were going to get something accurate?
Speaker 5: Oh, one of the things I did was to collect
Speaker 5: what I knew from others. I knew that I was
Speaker 5: already friends with the DA on that case, right, so
Speaker 5: she wasn't keen about me doing this, but she was
Speaker 5: won over, and she showed me her whole stash of stuff.
Speaker 5: I saw the interrogation, the whole police interrogation notes, so
Speaker 5: I had the way he presented himself to them. I
Speaker 5: had letters from the first person, I had letters from
Speaker 5: other people, so I had this multiple perspectives on him
Speaker 5: in terms of the way, you know, he'd spend doctor
Speaker 5: really everything for you know, whoever he was talking to.
Speaker 5: So this way I had, you know, if he wanted
Speaker 5: to talk about torturing animals, for example, I already knew
Speaker 5: some things that I knew he didn't want to tell me,
Speaker 5: so then I could call him out on it. But
Speaker 5: I but I didn't call him out on it in
Speaker 5: a confrontational way. I would simply say, oh, well, you
Speaker 5: know you told them this, so you're telling me something
Speaker 5: a little different. How how do you make sense of that?
Speaker 5: And then and he'd sometimes get upset if we're on
Speaker 5: the phone, But then he'd write a long letter justifying
Speaker 5: everything it's said. And again, for me, that's behavior. It's
Speaker 5: not necessarily that I'm after the truth because really, you
Speaker 5: can look at any of us. We all form our
Speaker 5: narratives to serve our purposes out of the system. So
Speaker 5: I'm looking at how how does he approach being confronted?
Speaker 5: How does he approach being told, well, I know that
Speaker 5: you also tortured rabbits?
Speaker 2: What was he going to do with that?
Speaker 5: Since he didn't tell it to me, but I knew
Speaker 5: about it, you know, so it really was. And again
Speaker 5: you're looking at a very extended investment of time, which
Speaker 5: very few people can do. And you know, psychologists they
Speaker 5: charge and they don't. Nobody's paying them for this kind
Speaker 5: of time. So you have to see this as an
Speaker 5: opportunity the way I did, and be willing to take
Speaker 5: the hit in terms of the investment of time and money.
Speaker 5: And I was because as I really believe in this
Speaker 5: kind of work. I think it's very valuable and beneficial.
Speaker 5: It helps us to prevents us from seeing the serial
Speaker 5: killers that is all collected under a profile. It's a
Speaker 5: cookie cutter approach, and I think that's a mistake that
Speaker 5: I'm hoping this book can rectify.
Speaker 4: What did the late doctor al Carlyle contribute to this?
Speaker 4: How did he help in what area?
Speaker 5: Oh, Al Carlisle was so terrific, He's such a loss.
Speaker 5: He had interviewed He was a Utah prison psychologist who
Speaker 5: had interviewed Ted Bundy when Bundy was first picked up
Speaker 5: on suspicion of burglary and then attempted abduction, and Carlisle
Speaker 5: had gone to have been at the prison and he'd
Speaker 5: given him a number of assessments. He wasn't the only one.
Speaker 5: There was another psychologist or psychiatrist who put him through
Speaker 5: a bunch of things. But Carlile's task was to decide
Speaker 5: if Bundy might be a day if he were released,
Speaker 5: and so he did a lot of work. He interviewed
Speaker 5: a number of people knew Bundy and really again gave
Speaker 5: us a very nice profile, or I mean not a profile,
Speaker 5: but an approach to how do you look at someone
Speaker 5: like this. You can't just go with what they say
Speaker 5: because they're going to put themselves in the very best light.
Speaker 5: And Bundy was a master at that. So Carlisle had
Speaker 5: not just done this assessment of Bundy, but he also
Speaker 5: had interviewed a few other serial killers while there, and
Speaker 5: so he came up with this idea of how are
Speaker 5: they able to pass as if they are like us
Speaker 5: and yet have this very very dark, awful side to
Speaker 5: them and then not have any remorse, et cetera. So,
Speaker 5: because he had come up with this very interesting description
Speaker 5: of a compartmentalized person, I asked him if I could
Speaker 5: show this to Raider, as I want to see raiders
Speaker 5: response to it, because one of the things I was
Speaker 5: trying to do get raided to not just say what
Speaker 5: he knew, but to look at one of the people
Speaker 5: had said and reflect on that in terms of how
Speaker 5: it applied to him, and he worked hard at it.
Speaker 5: I have to give him a lot of credit. When
Speaker 5: he saw Carlisle's analysis of Bundy as being like an
Speaker 5: actor taken on a lot of different roles, he said, yeah,
Speaker 5: that's very very accurate. That really captures it. But then
Speaker 5: he responded with what I thought was even more interesting
Speaker 5: than what Al gave me, which was this idea of
Speaker 5: cubing instead of compartmentalizing. Because when you think about like
Speaker 5: compartments on a shelving unit, for example, as if they're
Speaker 5: all distinctly different and almost unrelated to one another, it's
Speaker 5: a bunch of different personalities, and similar to an actor,
Speaker 5: they take on different roles, but those roles aren't related
Speaker 5: to one another. There When later came up with his metaphor,
Speaker 5: which is cubing, he it's the idea that all the
Speaker 5: faces are there, but you only show one face at
Speaker 5: a time in any given circumstance. So if you need
Speaker 5: to be the good father or good husband or churchgoer,
Speaker 5: you show that face and that. But but if you
Speaker 5: see someone you want to stalk, you immediately can switch out.
Speaker 5: Because all the faces are part of you, they are
Speaker 5: all connected and associated to you. And because people like
Speaker 5: Greater are not emotionally rooted in the notion of integrity
Speaker 5: or truth or morality, they can make that switch very easily.
Speaker 5: It's they're really mentally dexterous in terms of being able
Speaker 5: to adopt a different persona for a different circumstance. So
Speaker 5: to me, not only is you know, cubing easier to
Speaker 5: spell than compartmentalizing, I think it gets at it better
Speaker 5: And I kind of wish I could have talked with
Speaker 5: Carlisle about that, but he of course has passed on,
Speaker 5: and I think he would have really appreciated that metaphor
Speaker 5: because I think it works very well.
Speaker 4: When you talk to BTK Dennis Raider. He mentions this
Speaker 4: mythical figure, this minutor, and he calls it the minutor.
Speaker 4: Sense tell us more about this mythological symbol that he
Speaker 4: uses to describe.
Speaker 5: I think it's minotaur.
Speaker 4: Okay, thank you.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure, but you could be right.
Speaker 4: You're probably right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the minotaur was a code name for serial killers.
Speaker 5: So he'll talk about the Kansas Minotaur, or he'll read
Speaker 5: about somebody like there was a guy in South Carolina
Speaker 5: a couple of years ago who got called, and he'll
Speaker 5: call him the South Carolina Minotaur. So that's just a
Speaker 5: way to be able to write about this in letters
Speaker 5: without guards confiscating it, you know, because I I've had
Speaker 5: a few letters sent back to me by the prison.
Speaker 5: You may not do this, you may not do that.
Speaker 5: They have to always be careful about the whole contraband angle.
Speaker 5: And so I think he adopted that. But also he
Speaker 5: had read about it in a novel and he liked
Speaker 5: the image of that, of this of this beast that's
Speaker 5: inside this maze, that's that's fed these innocent virgins, and
Speaker 5: you know, he just he liked that to use to
Speaker 5: describe what a serial killer was like. And then for him,
Speaker 5: that would be a cave like a cave monster. And
Speaker 5: he thinks that the that these cave monsters are part
Speaker 5: of him, not like he's demon possessed. That was a
Speaker 5: that was a narrative he initially had used after his
Speaker 5: minister had visited him and said to him, the only
Speaker 5: way I can make sense of this is if your
Speaker 5: demon possessed Rato grabbed on to that. He does that.
Speaker 5: He immediately absorbs things that make sense, and then for
Speaker 5: a little while he'll use he'll use the narrative, but
Speaker 5: he doesn't any longer think of it that way. But
Speaker 5: he does think about that there is this monstrous part
Speaker 5: of him that he himself doesn't understand. Well. It's really
Speaker 5: compulsion that comes from his fantasy life, from a very
Speaker 5: vivid fantasy life in which he's highly invested for his identity,
Speaker 5: so he has more control than he often will say.
Speaker 5: But the minotaur image or metaphor appealed to him in
Speaker 5: that way.
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Speaker 4: slash murder. Now we're talking about some of the things
Speaker 4: that Dennis Raider used and utilized to describe some of
Speaker 4: the things this fantasies to evade censorship through the prison
Speaker 4: guards that would read this material. So there was an
Speaker 4: underlying reason, but also he was being clever and getting
Speaker 4: you to work a little bit what about which was
Speaker 4: really the crux of what you're doing, to try to
Speaker 4: find out what his psycho sexual development was when he
Speaker 4: was young how and sexuality got all mixed up and
Speaker 4: hence all of these fantasies and this murderous rampage. So
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about what you discovered.
Speaker 5: Well, one of the difficulties of working with him was
Speaker 5: he was really a minutia collector, and so many of
Speaker 5: his early letters were long, long, long descriptions of his
Speaker 5: family history and you know, things that really had no
Speaker 5: bearing on what I was trying to do. But I
Speaker 5: had to be patient and should certainly show interest and
Speaker 5: finally he suddenly realized this book was the book for
Speaker 5: him to get his story out, that it was going
Speaker 5: to be the definitive one, and he might never have
Speaker 5: this opportunity again. And all of a sudden, the letters
Speaker 5: just turned many shades darker in terms of the things
Speaker 5: he wanted to explore. And part of that was he
Speaker 5: had dug through a lot of his the papers he
Speaker 5: keeps in his cell, and he had found original police reports.
Speaker 5: They were summaries of police reports, and he sent them
Speaker 5: to me, all marked up with what they got wrong
Speaker 5: and what this meant and what that meant. So here's
Speaker 5: the whole description of when they went into the Oteo's
Speaker 5: what they saw, and he then elaborate on what did
Speaker 5: that mean, And that's basically how I presented in the book.
Speaker 5: Here's the report, and here are the things that he
Speaker 5: had to say about various aspects of this report, or
Speaker 5: about his experience of stalking a particular victim, or what
Speaker 5: did he do afterward and how did he feel afterward.
Speaker 5: So it was like all of a sudden he felt
Speaker 5: the pressure of a deadline of Oh my god, I
Speaker 5: have to to get busy because I want this to
Speaker 5: be my dark journey and all of the other stuff
Speaker 5: that was about his family dropped away. But he then
Speaker 5: began to start thinking about where does this originate. He
Speaker 5: talked a lot about his boyhood, and then it was
Speaker 5: up to me really to look at the themes of
Speaker 5: that and see how they related to the potential development
Speaker 5: of the kind of dark fantasies he had. That then
Speaker 5: really led the dance for him. So it was really
Speaker 5: kind of him figuring out he needed to do some
Speaker 5: work and me finding through this. I mean lots and
Speaker 5: lots of lots of detail the things that would be
Speaker 5: useful for my goals. So the hard thing about doing
Speaker 5: a book of this length is all the data you
Speaker 5: amass and keeping your goal was always in front, so
Speaker 5: you know what you're focusing on, but keeping but not
Speaker 5: to the point where you're working with tunnel vision or
Speaker 5: or you know, a cognitive bias that limits the world.
Speaker 5: So I had to watch my own expectations and what
Speaker 5: I was expecting hoping to see, but also I needed
Speaker 5: to guide him away from all the minutia. Like one
Speaker 5: of the earliest letters he sent me had a journal
Speaker 5: of his his day and it was like minute by
Speaker 5: minute of oh, getting up at this time, and this
Speaker 5: is what they gave me for breakfast. And then I
Speaker 5: did this, and then I did that, and he think,
Speaker 5: and he kept one for every single day, thinking someone
Speaker 5: was going to really find this to be very important. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's just sitting in a single prison cell. He's not
Speaker 5: in general population. He doesn't interact with anybody. You know,
Speaker 5: he'll read he was at the time. He's listening to
Speaker 5: the stock report because he had imaginary stocks, and listen
Speaker 5: to the farmer's reports and whatnot. But wow, it was
Speaker 5: up to me to make my way through all this
Speaker 5: data and see the things that were really going to
Speaker 5: make this into a book. And I will admit there
Speaker 5: were times I didn't think I had a book, really yeah,
Speaker 5: because I just I didn't think he was up to it.
Speaker 5: And then all of a sudden will come letters filled
Speaker 5: with very rich ideas and memories and reflections. Okay, now
Speaker 5: I can move forward. But I'd say for the first
Speaker 5: two years I wasn't sure.
Speaker 4: You're trying to get him to be insightful about his
Speaker 4: own life, and you say this is a guided autobiography,
Speaker 4: so you had to help him be able to learn
Speaker 4: and decipher some of the things that have happened when
Speaker 4: he got to his development. When he talks about his
Speaker 4: childhood and some of the things that again seemed to
Speaker 4: turn are directly related to his sexual fantasies. What did
Speaker 4: he tell you about his early childhood and bullying and
Speaker 4: the barn tell us a little bit about some of
Speaker 4: the things that he finally divulgd to you about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, he would always kind of go to
Speaker 5: what had excited him whether and even very young. It
Speaker 5: wasn't necessarily sexual, but it was certainly physical, and so
Speaker 5: he would talk about that. But I will say, like,
Speaker 5: at one point he told me about a movie he
Speaker 5: had a thing with his mother. She was a brunette
Speaker 5: and she had kind of movie star looks, as many
Speaker 5: people described her, and he would go to the movies
Speaker 5: with her. And he told me he had the movies
Speaker 5: he had watched. So I watched them to get a
Speaker 5: sense of that little boy's perspective sitting with his beautiful mother.
Speaker 5: And there was one the House of Wax. Oh my god,
Speaker 5: it's a naked woman bound in this thing. She's brunette, naked,
Speaker 5: struggling in all the most titillating ways. Oh lord, it's
Speaker 5: a good thing I watched this rather than just heard
Speaker 5: him say, we watched the House of Wax and that
Speaker 5: had an effect on me. Well, I can imagine it did,
Speaker 5: because he already was thinking about binding girls who made
Speaker 5: him feel uncomfortable or took away his self esteem. He
Speaker 5: was thinking of binding them in railroad tracks or building
Speaker 5: girl traps for them. And so here he is with
Speaker 5: his mother, who's who's already humiliated him once and he's
Speaker 5: seen her stuck helpless, and he's seen the look on
Speaker 5: her face that made him feel powerful. And now he's
Speaker 5: watching this movie with a clearly I mean that showing
Speaker 5: obviously a full frontal nudity back in those days, but oh,
Speaker 5: the suggestion of it was very strong in that movie, right,
Speaker 5: And I thought, whoa right there, that's the kind of thing.
Speaker 5: And the weir wolf who can shape shift, and that's
Speaker 5: the kind of thing. What's a little boy thinking about
Speaker 5: after he's seen not just seeing these movies, but they
Speaker 5: haunt him. He has nightmares, he has dreams about them,
Speaker 5: he thinks about them, And how is that affecting the
Speaker 5: kinds of fantasy fantasy life he is going to develop
Speaker 5: as he enters into puberty? And it does become all
Speaker 5: about sexual arousal. So he had the sexual arousal as
Speaker 5: a boy getting tied up playing the cowboy games and
Speaker 5: he got trapped once in a silo and it was scared,
Speaker 5: but also it was really exciting. So he had some
Speaker 5: of those experiences early to the point where he would
Speaker 5: tie ropes around his waist because it felt good. And
Speaker 5: as he's developing into his sexual being, it feels very
Speaker 5: good and it's the kind of thing he's not going
Speaker 5: to give up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you also talk about innocuous things were seemingly like
Speaker 4: the Dudley do Right cartoon that we all watched.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean for Raider, immediately it was tying
Speaker 5: the redheaded girl on the train track, and it wasn't
Speaker 5: about her getting rescued. It was about get that train
Speaker 5: to hit her and run her over so that she
Speaker 5: was bound and helpless though, was the thing. And then
Speaker 5: as a fourteen year old, he found a True Detective
Speaker 5: magazine that had the Harvey Glatman pictures on the cover
Speaker 5: and saw this image of this utterly helpless, bound woman
Speaker 5: who was about to be murdered, and he masturbated to that.
Speaker 5: That was highly exciting to him, and we do know
Speaker 5: that when certain stimuli are paired with masturbation as a
Speaker 5: as a young boy is becoming a young man, that
Speaker 5: becomes part of the sexual fetish. It might be something
Speaker 5: that lasts the rest of his life because it gets
Speaker 5: paired and it gets fused together with the process of
Speaker 5: sexual development. And for him, was that was the image
Speaker 5: he wanted to replicate in his own victims.
Speaker 4: So he graduated to stalking. Initially, that was his first
Speaker 4: foray into criminality. Was the stalking.
Speaker 5: Well, it's hard to say. You know, he went into
Speaker 5: the military and he was in the countries, and I
Speaker 5: think he did a lot of voyeuristic activity at that point,
Speaker 5: and then that became stalking. So the voyeurism was looking
Speaker 5: into people's windows, imagining power over them, and then as
Speaker 5: he would see someone, he might follow that person. So
Speaker 5: I think the voyeurism came before the stocking. But then
Speaker 5: the stocking arrived with the idea that he would kidnap somebody,
Speaker 5: and he did make an attempt to kidnap a bank
Speaker 5: clerk and it failed utterly, and he got scared that
Speaker 5: he was going to get identified. So he began to
Speaker 5: break into houses and when he did that, it made
Speaker 5: him feel very powerful. Were the people who lived there.
Speaker 5: I mean often they weren't home, but just he would
Speaker 5: take something like a hammer or you know whatever, just
Speaker 5: because he had invaded their space, he owned the place,
Speaker 5: he had a position over them, and so that then
Speaker 5: became not He's not going to try to capture some
Speaker 5: want and kidnap her. He's going to go into a
Speaker 5: house and subdue the person he wants. And then that leads,
Speaker 5: of course to the Otero murders.
Speaker 4: You utilized for this documentary, but also for this book.
Speaker 4: Letters and drawings that he had sent you explain what
Speaker 4: might be on this document will be on this documentary
Speaker 4: regarding those letters and those drawings.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I have thousands of pages of his handwriting,
Speaker 5: and God bless the documentary makers for going through all
Speaker 5: that to pick out passages. But there will be passages highlighted.
Speaker 5: We also interviewed him and recorded it, so you'll hear
Speaker 5: him responding to some of my questions. Highlighted passages of
Speaker 5: things he said that are either ironic in terms of
Speaker 5: how could he see how this makes no sense in
Speaker 5: the polarization morally in the same person. You'll see drawings
Speaker 5: that he's done for example, he drew from me what
Speaker 5: he had hoped one day to build was the silo
Speaker 5: filled with torture instruments, similar to AJH. Holmes and his castle.
Speaker 5: And so it's very meticulous, full color. And you know,
Speaker 5: he said to me it wasn't He really had not
Speaker 5: wanted to do this because it took him back into
Speaker 5: a world he knew he had to avoid. And yet
Speaker 5: you look at all the detail, you see how much
Speaker 5: Funny had doing it. He did want to do it.
Speaker 5: He wanted to do it very much. And so that's
Speaker 5: the interesting dynamic I had with him is he had
Speaker 5: a verbal narrative and he's kind of like had Bundy
Speaker 5: in that thinking when he says something that controls reality, right,
Speaker 5: language controls reality, and Bundy was very much like that too.
Speaker 5: But then you see that he's presenting one thing and
Speaker 5: he's showing in his behavior something altogether different. For me,
Speaker 5: that's the most interesting and intriguing aspect of him is
Speaker 5: how does he not see? How does he develop these
Speaker 5: blind spots, these walls between what he says about himself
Speaker 5: and what he's showing about himself. Well, we all do it.
Speaker 5: It's a human tendency. But in a serial killer is
Speaker 5: particularly interesting.
Speaker 4: It's much more profound and seems much more out of
Speaker 4: touch from reality. Despite being a fairly intelligent person, it
Speaker 4: would seem that there's this out of touch with reality
Speaker 4: completely even at this time, even after this many years, right,
Speaker 4: there's not a recognition or realization by him.
Speaker 5: And that is the role of a very rich and
Speaker 5: real feeling fantasy life. That's that's where he comes alive.
Speaker 5: That's where he his whole identity is wrapped up in
Speaker 5: the fantasy person. And so it's very easy for him
Speaker 5: to develop these blind spots and these walls between what's
Speaker 5: real and what's what he thinks is real because he's
Speaker 5: so immersed in who you know, this image of himself
Speaker 5: again a human tendency. And at the end of the
Speaker 5: book I talk about this, it's it's not that he's
Speaker 5: such a different creature, as you use the word profound.
Speaker 5: He's profoundly different in some ways, but all of those
Speaker 5: ways are attached to who we all are to some degree.
Speaker 5: But he just doesn't have the emotional rootedness in wanting
Speaker 5: and a sense of integrity of presenting. You know, a
Speaker 5: lot of us want to present ourselves with uniformity. Whatever
Speaker 5: I do in this situation would come through in a
Speaker 5: different situation because I'm who I am. That's often how
Speaker 5: we think of ourselves. That isn't the way someone like
Speaker 5: him operates. It's whatever I need for this situation is
Speaker 5: what matters. Not presenting myself in the same way all
Speaker 5: the time.
Speaker 4: Was there any reaction from him to say that as
Speaker 4: he discovered things through this process that you asked him
Speaker 4: specifically questioned so that he could learn to be able
Speaker 4: to respond in the way you would like him to
Speaker 4: respond rather than just talking about you say that lots
Speaker 4: of his thinking was convoluted. What was his reaction to
Speaker 4: some of this if there was some of this discovery
Speaker 4: of the connection the psycho psycho sexual development, was there
Speaker 4: any recognition that he had learned something from this and
Speaker 4: what was that reaction?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean he hasn't read the book, by the way,
Speaker 5: He has no response to that because it's contraband, right.
Speaker 5: But yes, there's a chapter in which it's really his
Speaker 5: thinking about himself to some extent, guided by assessment instruments
Speaker 5: that I use. But he's thinking his way through where
Speaker 5: does this all come from? What salient in his memory?
Speaker 5: And his reflective process that he keeps coming back to
Speaker 5: him over and over, and he makes the lists, but
Speaker 5: he does do it. And also I used a few
Speaker 5: books like Adrian Rain's I Think is Anatomy of Violence
Speaker 5: that helped him frame it out. Al Carlisle's ideas helped
Speaker 5: him to articulate things that he hadn't really been able
Speaker 5: to understand. But in the end he did his own
Speaker 5: self analysis, which I thought was, you know, to some extent, insightful.
Speaker 5: I mean, he's not he's in a particularly bright guy.
Speaker 5: He didn't do well in school, but he's certainly worked
Speaker 5: at trying to understand this. And and of course I
Speaker 5: will hear from people saying, oh, he just he's just
Speaker 5: screwing with you. He's he's manipulating him. Certainly, he's manipulating
Speaker 5: me to some extent. But I think everybody wants to
Speaker 5: try to understand themselves, particularly narcissists. And I think he
Speaker 5: did want to take advantage of the fact that he
Speaker 5: had someone here with credentials, with a sense of structure
Speaker 5: who could possibly guide him through some of this. And
Speaker 5: I think I think I guided him through some. I
Speaker 5: don't know that I have the whole truth, and nothing
Speaker 5: but the truth. But I have a lot from him
Speaker 5: for which I think he needs, he deserves some credit.
Speaker 4: Well, it's an extraordinary book. It was extraordinary when I
Speaker 4: interviewed you in twenty sixteen about this book, Confession of
Speaker 4: a Serial Killer, The Untold Story of Dennis Raider, the
Speaker 4: BTK Killer, which was released in twenty sixteen, and now
Speaker 4: the audiobook edition by Blackstone Publishing will be released January eleventh.
Speaker 4: Just tell our audience before I let you go about
Speaker 4: the A and E two part documentary Confession of a
Speaker 4: Serial Killer AVTK Killer. Tell us just a little bit
Speaker 4: about when that will air, and yeah, when that will
Speaker 4: air on A and E.
Speaker 5: Okay, on A and E. It's actually four part it's
Speaker 5: two nights, but four parts, and it's an arc over
Speaker 5: the whole story. But there's a lot more in it
Speaker 5: than just what's in the book. We've found people to
Speaker 5: talk to who had more to say, and also there
Speaker 5: are like I did not interview the victims' families, so
Speaker 5: we do have some of them in the documentary. I
Speaker 5: did not interview the impact on people in Wichita because
Speaker 5: I was doing an autobiography, So there's a lot more
Speaker 5: about Wichita. The effect of a serial killer in town
Speaker 5: and anyway. So it's it's on A and E January
Speaker 5: eighth and ninth, four parts, so two hours each night.
Speaker 5: And I think, I personally think that it's very it's multifaceted.
Speaker 5: There's there's a lot there that you may never have
Speaker 5: heard or read before about Dennis Raider.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I want to thank you so much, Catherine Ramselind
Speaker 4: for coming on and talking about first your book Confession
Speaker 4: of a Serial Killer, the Untold story of Dennis Raider,
Speaker 4: the BTK Killer, and also the documentary BTK Confession of
Speaker 4: a Serial Killer, premiers January eighth and ninth on A
Speaker 4: and Thank you so much, doctor Kathleen Ramslan for this interview.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, and have a great evening.
Speaker 5: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
Speaker 4: Thank you, good night.
Speaker 5: Nice