BTK: CONFESSION OF A SERIAL KILLER-Dr. Katherine Ramsland

No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He nearly got away with his crimes, but in two thousand and four he began to play risky games with the police. He made a mistake. When he was arrested. Raider's family, friends, and coworkers were shocked to discover that BTK had been among them, going to work, raising his children and acting normal.

This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of victims and for the ordinary public face that Raider, a church council president, had shown to the outside world through jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondents. Katherine Ramsland worked with Raider himself to analyze the layers of his psyche, using his drawings, letters, interviews. In Raider's unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail tale the childhood roots and development

of one man's motivation, the stock, torture, and kill. She reveals aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous of living serial killers that have never before been revealed. The documentary BTK Confession of a Serial Killer premiers January eighth and ninth on A and E. The two night event sheds new light on Raider's double life as both

an upstanding citizen and a heartless killer. Doctor Katherine Ramslin, the renowned professor of forensic psychology and author, leads the examination of readers raiders transformation from an American boy to an American monster who wreaked havoc in Wichita Candae and

went uncaptured for thirty years. With exclusive conversations with Raider himself, eye opening new archival, comprehensive interviews and access to raiders drawings and coded diaries, all paired with doctor Ramslin's expertise, Viewers get to know the man behind them on the truth behind the headline and a glimpse at the secrets

Raider is still holding on to. The documentary we are discussing tonight is bt K Confession of a Serial Killer with my special guest, journalist and author and professor, doctor Katherine Ramsling. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview, Doctor Katherine Ramsling.

We saw the option a couple of times, and then the pandemic, So right the pandemic was a pretty big interruption because we did have somebody was going to do it, and then A and E decided that they wanted to do it as a four part documentary, which that's pretty daunting, and there was a lot of work involved, but in the end, the director's vision and the vision of all the production people really came through in terms of the goal I had had for the book, and I thought

that was really quite an achievement because my goal is kind of academic. I really wanted this to use what a serial killer has to say about himself to benefit law enforcement, criminal justice, and forensic psychology. So it wasn't just a serial killer lathering on. It was formed for a specific purpose and the documentary achieves that, which I'm very pleased about it.

very important project that you undertook with Dennis Raider. Tell us a little bit about some of the people that were including Jim Thompson, some of the people that were involved in the very beginning of the book that you say that wouldn't happened otherwise.

her than she imagined it to be. She had been under attack a lot from you know all because she

was kind of the gatekeeper for Raider. And I saw her on Facebook and asked her whatever happened to her book, because I had heard about her through news reports, And she asked me if I would take it over, which was not as simple as it sounds, because it was an easy yes for me because I had already written a book about how mental health experts over the past century had spent a lot of time with extreme offenders to learn about their development and their crimes and their attitudes,

et cetera. So I already had a template and it was a great opportunity. But I needed to be approved by this consortium of the victims family members. They're surviving family members, because they wanted to have some control over the kind of thing that would be put out there. They didn't want anything out there, but certainly something was going to be and they wanted some control over it and as well as benefiting from it, which was fine

with me. So I wrote a proposal. I sent it to the attorney Jim Thompson for the families and told them what I wanted to do, and they did like what I wanted to do. They liked my credentials, you know, in the academic world in terms of teaching forensic psychology and being very prominent in the research arena for serial

killers and mass murderers, so they liked all that. But still it was a long drawn out process, and during this time I also got to Narraider, who wasn't so keen about transferring all this from the original person who

he really liked to someone he didn't know. So we ended up playing chess, and he also wanted me to solve a series of codes, in part because he liked to communicate with codes because he thought of himself as kind of a spy, and it was also a way to keep prison guards from knowing what he was saying doing, but also it was a test for me to see what I play. But I play the code game, and of course I will, because my interest in him was the whole picture. Who is this guy, what motivates him?

How does he create these codes and respond to them? And so fine. I mean, it was actually pretty intriguing to be sent these weird codes to see if I could figure them out. And I needed the other person, true grit to help me, because he had sent part to me in part to her, and you know, kind of a zoniac thing. He'd get together and figure this out. But for me, that was all behavior. I was interested in everything that he would do, whether it was manipulating, lying,

telling the truth, whatever, it didn't matter. I wanted to see all the layers.

people are aware he uses role models. But along the way, as we were talking and reading and looking at comparisons to others, you know, he honed some of that, and he got interested in some that he didn't know about before, and talked more about some of the readings he had done, and it was pretty clear that most of what he did wasn't really original to him. He had gotten it

either out of true crime magazines or fiction. You've read about what some serial killers had done in novels, and so some of the things he was doing was trying to replicate all of that. So he wasn't really that imaginative. And you know, unfortunately in fiction and film we get this notion of this master mind mentality, you know, the great puppeteer manipulator, and most of that just isn't what these serial killers are like, they're just out to achieve their goals and get it the way they need to

get it. So he would find ideas in these various sources and try them out.

sometimes a twenty page letter. In his handwriting is pretty terrible, and in he'dn bed in the letter along the way the clues to what he had circled, So I had to make my way through the letter and then look back at the clippings and like For example, one of the most puzzling to me was when he talked about that my interest in recipes of the three layer kind and I thought, well, I don't cook worthy talking about.

But then I realized as I saw what he circled would have a B, a T, or a K. And so I realized, oh, that's the that's the three layer thing. And subsequently I learned about his magical number three. He thinks the whole world is sort of organized around threes, and that threes had somehow texted him, and so he has this attunement to threes. So there was that, and then there then he had some metaphors like castles and trains and such things as that, but it became unwieldy.

I mean we would talk, we would be talking along about, you know, using trains and canyons and passengers and whatnot, as we were talking about whether this book was even going to sell or not, because I did have a lot of issues with that, and then we had to I finally, when the book did sell, I decided I would make the metaphor the codes that we would use. So it's kind of an irony because he did not want any woman kind of dominating him in any way. That was that was one of his key issues, is

how females threw him off balance. And there I was making the code, but I used threes, and I used the cave and all the stuff that was appear to him. And also he sometimes would forget what some of his codes meant, so you know, so this way we had a record, you know, that we could both refer to. But in the end, the irony is that I framed the book through my codes using when I knew would be his preferential style.

So they really gave me role models in terms of the persistence, the kinds of things you had to put up with the way to approach somebody who's very egotistical

or narcissistic, you know. And I also had trained. I have one master's degree in clinical and psychology that has a specific type of training of really bracketing your preconceptions and your biases so that you can listen and let that person's world be what it is, rather than you imposing, you know, some theoretical perspective on them, but just listening to them. So I already had really been solidly trained in that approach, and that's certainly the one I used

with Rader and would use with anybody else. Is what is your world? It doesn't matter if it corresponds to reality or corresponds to morality. It matters that you yield to me what your experience is, what your perspective is, and how you came to be this way. So that's I learned from looking to others as well as my own training in clinical psychology.

I had the way he presented himself to them. I had letters from the first person, I had letters from other people, so I had this multiple perspectives on him in terms of the way, you know, he'd spend doctor really everything for you know, whoever he was talking to. So this way I had, you know, if he wanted to talk about torturing animals, for example, I already knew some things that I knew he didn't want to tell me, so then I could call him out on it. But I but I didn't call him out on it in

a confrontational way. I would simply say, oh, well, you know you told them this, so you're telling me something a little different. How how do you make sense of that? And then and he'd sometimes get upset if we're on the phone, But then he'd write a long letter justifying everything it's said. And again, for me, that's behavior. It's not necessarily that I'm after the truth because really, you can look at any of us. We all form our

narratives to serve our purposes out of the system. So I'm looking at how how does he approach being confronted? How does he approach being told, well, I know that you also tortured rabbits?

kind of work. I think it's very valuable and beneficial. It helps us to prevents us from seeing the serial killers that is all collected under a profile. It's a cookie cutter approach, and I think that's a mistake that I'm hoping this book can rectify.

and so he did a lot of work. He interviewed a number of people knew Bundy and really again gave us a very nice profile, or I mean not a profile, but an approach to how do you look at someone like this. You can't just go with what they say because they're going to put themselves in the very best light.

And Bundy was a master at that. So Carlisle had not just done this assessment of Bundy, but he also had interviewed a few other serial killers while there, and so he came up with this idea of how are they able to pass as if they are like us and yet have this very very dark, awful side to

them and then not have any remorse, et cetera. So, because he had come up with this very interesting description of a compartmentalized person, I asked him if I could show this to Raider, as I want to see raiders response to it, because one of the things I was trying to do get raided to not just say what he knew, but to look at one of the people had said and reflect on that in terms of how it applied to him, and he worked hard at it.

I have to give him a lot of credit. When he saw Carlisle's analysis of Bundy as being like an actor taken on a lot of different roles, he said, yeah, that's very very accurate. That really captures it. But then he responded with what I thought was even more interesting than what Al gave me, which was this idea of

cubing instead of compartmentalizing. Because when you think about like compartments on a shelving unit, for example, as if they're all distinctly different and almost unrelated to one another, it's a bunch of different personalities, and similar to an actor, they take on different roles, but those roles aren't related to one another. There When later came up with his metaphor, which is cubing, he it's the idea that all the faces are there, but you only show one face at

a time in any given circumstance. So if you need to be the good father or good husband or churchgoer, you show that face and that. But but if you see someone you want to stalk, you immediately can switch out. Because all the faces are part of you, they are all connected and associated to you. And because people like Greater are not emotionally rooted in the notion of integrity or truth or morality, they can make that switch very easily.

It's they're really mentally dexterous in terms of being able to adopt a different persona for a different circumstance. So to me, not only is you know, cubing easier to spell than compartmentalizing, I think it gets at it better And I kind of wish I could have talked with Carlisle about that, but he of course has passed on, and I think he would have really appreciated that metaphor because I think it works very well.

They have to always be careful about the whole contraband angle. And so I think he adopted that. But also he had read about it in a novel and he liked the image of that, of this of this beast that's inside this maze, that's that's fed these innocent virgins, and you know, he just he liked that to use to describe what a serial killer was like. And then for him, that would be a cave like a cave monster. And he thinks that the that these cave monsters are part

of him, not like he's demon possessed. That was a that was a narrative he initially had used after his minister had visited him and said to him, the only way I can make sense of this is if your demon possessed Rato grabbed on to that. He does that. He immediately absorbs things that make sense, and then for a little while he'll use he'll use the narrative, but he doesn't any longer think of it that way. But he does think about that there is this monstrous part

of him that he himself doesn't understand. Well. It's really compulsion that comes from his fantasy life, from a very vivid fantasy life in which he's highly invested for his identity, so he has more control than he often will say. But the minotaur image or metaphor appealed to him in that way.

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my listeners ten percent off your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder and turn healthy habits into a ritual that's ten percent off at ritual dot com slash murder. Now we're talking about some of the things that Dennis Raider used and utilized to describe some of the things this fantasies to evade censorship through the prison

guards that would read this material. So there was an underlying reason, but also he was being clever and getting you to work a little bit what about which was really the crux of what you're doing, to try to find out what his psycho sexual development was when he was young how and sexuality got all mixed up and hence all of these fantasies and this murderous rampage. So tell us a little bit about what you discovered.

this opportunity again. And all of a sudden, the letters just turned many shades darker in terms of the things he wanted to explore. And part of that was he had dug through a lot of his the papers he keeps in his cell, and he had found original police reports. They were summaries of police reports, and he sent them to me, all marked up with what they got wrong

and what this meant and what that meant. So here's the whole description of when they went into the Oteo's what they saw, and he then elaborate on what did that mean, And that's basically how I presented in the book. Here's the report, and here are the things that he had to say about various aspects of this report, or about his experience of stalking a particular victim, or what did he do afterward and how did he feel afterward.

So it was like all of a sudden he felt the pressure of a deadline of Oh my god, I have to to get busy because I want this to be my dark journey and all of the other stuff that was about his family dropped away. But he then began to start thinking about where does this originate. He talked a lot about his boyhood, and then it was up to me really to look at the themes of that and see how they related to the potential development of the kind of dark fantasies he had. That then

really led the dance for him. So it was really kind of him figuring out he needed to do some work and me finding through this. I mean lots and lots of lots of detail the things that would be useful for my goals. So the hard thing about doing a book of this length is all the data you amass and keeping your goal was always in front, so you know what you're focusing on, but keeping but not to the point where you're working with tunnel vision or or you know, a cognitive bias that limits the world.

So I had to watch my own expectations and what I was expecting hoping to see, but also I needed to guide him away from all the minutia. Like one of the earliest letters he sent me had a journal of his his day and it was like minute by minute of oh, getting up at this time, and this is what they gave me for breakfast. And then I did this, and then I did that, and he think, and he kept one for every single day, thinking someone was going to really find this to be very important. Yeah,

he's just sitting in a single prison cell. He's not in general population. He doesn't interact with anybody. You know, he'll read he was at the time. He's listening to the stock report because he had imaginary stocks, and listen to the farmer's reports and whatnot. But wow, it was up to me to make my way through all this data and see the things that were really going to

make this into a book. And I will admit there were times I didn't think I had a book, really yeah, because I just I didn't think he was up to it. And then all of a sudden will come letters filled with very rich ideas and memories and reflections. Okay, now I can move forward. But I'd say for the first two years I wasn't sure.

turn are directly related to his sexual fantasies. What did he tell you about his early childhood and bullying and the barn tell us a little bit about some of the things that he finally divulgd to you about that.

he had watched. So I watched them to get a sense of that little boy's perspective sitting with his beautiful mother. And there was one the House of Wax. Oh my god, it's a naked woman bound in this thing. She's brunette, naked, struggling in all the most titillating ways. Oh lord, it's a good thing I watched this rather than just heard him say, we watched the House of Wax and that had an effect on me. Well, I can imagine it did, because he already was thinking about binding girls who made

him feel uncomfortable or took away his self esteem. He was thinking of binding them in railroad tracks or building girl traps for them. And so here he is with his mother, who's who's already humiliated him once and he's seen her stuck helpless, and he's seen the look on

her face that made him feel powerful. And now he's watching this movie with a clearly I mean that showing obviously a full frontal nudity back in those days, but oh, the suggestion of it was very strong in that movie, right, And I thought, whoa right there, that's the kind of thing. And the weir wolf who can shape shift, and that's the kind of thing. What's a little boy thinking about after he's seen not just seeing these movies, but they

haunt him. He has nightmares, he has dreams about them, he thinks about them, And how is that affecting the kinds of fantasy fantasy life he is going to develop as he enters into puberty? And it does become all about sexual arousal. So he had the sexual arousal as a boy getting tied up playing the cowboy games and he got trapped once in a silo and it was scared, but also it was really exciting. So he had some of those experiences early to the point where he would

tie ropes around his waist because it felt good. And as he's developing into his sexual being, it feels very good and it's the kind of thing he's not going to give up.

That was highly exciting to him, and we do know that when certain stimuli are paired with masturbation as a as a young boy is becoming a young man, that becomes part of the sexual fetish. It might be something that lasts the rest of his life because it gets paired and it gets fused together with the process of sexual development. And for him, was that was the image he wanted to replicate in his own victims.

I think the voyeurism came before the stocking. But then the stocking arrived with the idea that he would kidnap somebody, and he did make an attempt to kidnap a bank clerk and it failed utterly, and he got scared that he was going to get identified. So he began to break into houses and when he did that, it made him feel very powerful. Were the people who lived there.

I mean often they weren't home, but just he would take something like a hammer or you know whatever, just because he had invaded their space, he owned the place, he had a position over them, and so that then became not He's not going to try to capture some want and kidnap her. He's going to go into a house and subdue the person he wants. And then that leads, of course to the Otero murders.

the polarization morally in the same person. You'll see drawings that he's done for example, he drew from me what he had hoped one day to build was the silo filled with torture instruments, similar to AJH. Holmes and his castle. And so it's very meticulous, full color. And you know, he said to me it wasn't He really had not wanted to do this because it took him back into a world he knew he had to avoid. And yet you look at all the detail, you see how much

Funny had doing it. He did want to do it. He wanted to do it very much. And so that's the interesting dynamic I had with him is he had a verbal narrative and he's kind of like had Bundy in that thinking when he says something that controls reality, right, language controls reality, and Bundy was very much like that too. But then you see that he's presenting one thing and

he's showing in his behavior something altogether different. For me, that's the most interesting and intriguing aspect of him is how does he not see? How does he develop these blind spots, these walls between what he says about himself and what he's showing about himself. Well, we all do it. It's a human tendency. But in a serial killer is particularly interesting.

again a human tendency. And at the end of the book I talk about this, it's it's not that he's such a different creature, as you use the word profound. He's profoundly different in some ways, but all of those ways are attached to who we all are to some degree. But he just doesn't have the emotional rootedness in wanting and a sense of integrity of presenting. You know, a lot of us want to present ourselves with uniformity. Whatever I do in this situation would come through in a

different situation because I'm who I am. That's often how we think of ourselves. That isn't the way someone like him operates. It's whatever I need for this situation is what matters. Not presenting myself in the same way all the time.

of his thinking was convoluted. What was his reaction to some of this if there was some of this discovery of the connection the psycho psycho sexual development, was there any recognition that he had learned something from this and what was that reaction?

he does do it. And also I used a few books like Adrian Rain's I Think is Anatomy of Violence that helped him frame it out. Al Carlisle's ideas helped him to articulate things that he hadn't really been able to understand. But in the end he did his own self analysis, which I thought was, you know, to some extent, insightful. I mean, he's not he's in a particularly bright guy. He didn't do well in school, but he's certainly worked

at trying to understand this. And and of course I will hear from people saying, oh, he just he's just screwing with you. He's he's manipulating him. Certainly, he's manipulating me to some extent. But I think everybody wants to try to understand themselves, particularly narcissists. And I think he did want to take advantage of the fact that he had someone here with credentials, with a sense of structure who could possibly guide him through some of this. And

I think I think I guided him through some. I don't know that I have the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I have a lot from him for which I think he needs, he deserves some credit.

Serial Killer AVTK Killer. Tell us just a little bit about when that will air, and yeah, when that will air on A and E.

about Wichita. The effect of a serial killer in town and anyway. So it's it's on A and E January eighth and ninth, four parts, so two hours each night. And I think, I personally think that it's very it's multifaceted. There's there's a lot there that you may never have heard or read before about Dennis Raider.