CONFESSION OF A SERIAL KILLER-Katherine Ramsland

until he had ten victims. He named himself b t K Mind Torture Kill and wrote notes that terrorized the city. He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one who knew him guessed his dark secret.

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 jail house visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence. Katherine Ramslin worked with Raider himself to

analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Raider's unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man's motivation to 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. In this book, Katherine Ramslin presents an intelligent, original, and rare glimpse into the making of a serial killer

and the potential darkness that lives next door. The book they were featuring this evening, It's Confession of a serial Killer, The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, with my special guest journalists and author and professor Katherine Ramslin, Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing this interview. Katherine Ramslin.

Dennis Rader tell us when you began correspondence. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of this project.

And I knew about her from newspaper reports that she was doing this, But then I saw her on Facebook in twenty ten and I asked her what happened, whatever happened to her book, and she immediately asked me if I would take it over. She didn't want to, She couldn't do it for a variety of reasons, and she would. Reader had signed over his METEA rites to the victim's family.

It was like a trust fund for the victim's families who participated in it, and so she had given all of her documents to the victim's family trust, which would be accessible to me if I were to be approved by the attorney for this trust and by the victims' family members. So I decided I would take it on.

I wrote a proposal that I thought would use his story to benefit criminology, psychology, and law enforcement, and that just be a tale of some serial killer wanted to talk about himself, but would be really something that would be a valuable would be a value to my colleagues and offers to investigators. So I wrote a proposal with that in mind, and they appreciated that they didn't really want a book of this nature out there, but they knew it was inevitable. And if we're going to be written.

They preferred that it be something that would be valuable to scholars, to practitioners, to investigators. So they approved me and it went forward from there. So I worked with him for five years, but I really had ten years worth of material.

put this into code. The first reason being that he didn't want this to end up on the internet somewhere like one of the prison guards might see it and sell it or something like that, so he wanted to keep it under under wraps. So that was one reason. A second reason is that he liked to talk through codes because he thought of himself like a spy and that was kind of a thing he liked, he liked to do. And the third was a challenge to me to see if I would play along, so to speak,

and also figure out the codes. So the first thing is that he was going to give half of the code to Donnette and half to me, and he sent me a series of newspaper articles and magazine pictures and whatnot that things were circled and they with ABCD etc. On it, and that would correspond with a list of things that he talked about in his letters. So here and there I would find ABC in the letters, which wasn't easy. And then once I populated my half, I

was to see what Dawnette's half did. And once you put it all together, then we would tell him what we got and then I would pass the test.

of whom wrote extensively. And then so he would go in each week and look at what they wrote and encourage them and sometimes even publish them in one of his journals. And he sort of started this thing called criminal autobiographies. And not many people have taken that up

since him. You know, over one hundred years ago, but a few have, and so I thought it would be interesting to look back across the century to see what other psychologists or psychiatrists, you know, mental health experts of some kind, had really taken the time to go beyond the typical standardized assessments and clinical interviews, to spend time with an extreme offender, meaning a mass murderer or a serial killer, to see, you know, to have them tell

their stories, to be trusted, to really try to document the trajectory of their path toward violence in their lives, knowing that sometimes they're going to lie or exaggerate, or have memory issues or whatever. But and it's a very time consuming thing. But I found a dozen cases of mental health experts who are willing to really spend a lot of time with an offender to learn their life story. And so I wrote a book that might have been two.

Each chapter represents one of these efforts, you know, without ever imagining I was going to do this too, but this book got published, and then almost immediately I ended up with this opportunity to do exactly what I had just done, you know, documented to do this with Raider. So I had these role models, both both in terms of the mistakes they made and in terms of the innovations they they created to try to figure out how

did I want to approach Rader? So it was really quite an interesting schooling just it was just something that I wanted to do and it turned out to be, you know, pretty beneficial for me.

and even his phrasing sometimes he has processing difficulties. So it was better for me to try to take his words and make them a little bit more accessible to readers. So that was that was one thing. But the other thing was that if he were just left to his own devices, he would, you know, his insights, whatever they would be, would be limited. And so what I was trying to do was put triggers in, give him him primers,

things to think about. Like I would send him articles about psychopathy, for example, because he had actually watched the Charlie Rose special on the Brain, so he had some ideas, and I sent him some more material. We read a book,

Adrian Rayne's The Anatomy of Violence. It took him two years, but he made his way through the whole thing and talked about this is how he thought it applied to him, so it's a guided autobiography, and that these were not things that wouldn't necessarily have occurred to him to be thinking about in terms of himself. But because I was there, and because I brought to it clinical and forensic expertise, I was able to structure it in a way that

helped him along. But still it's him, you know, I didn't feed him any thoughts about here's how you interpret this, but but it's still him trying to figure out who he is and why he became a serial killer. So you get him. It's really about eighty percent in his words,

but I still guided it. And also there are things like if he mentioned HH Holmes or Harvey Glatman or Ted Bundy or some of these cases, or he talked about a movie or a book that inspired him or frightened him, well, then I would read the book, and I would watch the movie, and I would would provide the frame so that readers wouldn't you know, I wouldn't You wouldn't just assume that readers know exactly who Ted Bundy is or H. H. Holmes or you know, the

wax Museum or any of those things. So the other part of what I did in this was to provide the frame for some of the things he talked about.

There's some codes involved, and you have to figure those codes out to be able to understand what he's trying to say in that, but you also have to explain and you say, it's important to understand his torture fantasy in relation to what he had learned about HH Silms and what he had respected and was influenced by from HH Holms. So tell us about Herman Mudget and his influence and what Dennis Rader got from it.

a sexual person. He just enjoyed that. So when he as a teenager, he found these two detective magazines under the seat of his father's car, and one of them was Harvey Glatman, who was a serial killer who posted as a photographer inviting women into, you know, into his apartment and then tying them up, pretending he's going to photograph them for the cover of a magazine and then telling them they're going to die so he'd get the

photographs of their terror. That was the first one that really impressed itself on Raider because he loved the binding, the ropes and then their look of terror and the knowledge that it was total control over them. So that

was the first one. And then along came a front cover about you know, the White City and HH Holmes in his Murder Castle, which was a hotel he had built in the eighteen nineties as the World's Fair was coming into Chicago, and the idea, you know, he was going to allow these young women to register for a room and then he would put them into a special special rooms that he had that were torture devices or something where he could spy on them dying, being gassed,

things like that, and then he would strip the flesh from their bodies and sellthers skeletons to medical schools and whatnot. So he was quite the con artist kind of put himself to a medical school that way. And it was the idea of him having this hotel, this three story hotel with torture devices that got to Raider and so he would think about barns in Kansas that they drew

his attention. He would look at the barns and the silos with their layers and think about what torture devices could he put into these barns if it were him. Among them being a railroad track. He wanted to have a train inside a barn because he had a particular fantasy about tying girls to railroad tracks and having the trains run over them, and so he needed to have a big barn that would somehow have a train track

fantasy is what it is. That's all I have to say, because obviously that wouldn't be very practical, but in his fantasy, that's exactly what he had. So modeling it off of HH Holmes with some touch of the Harvey Glatman influence with the bindings really and then Dudley do Right with the nell tied to the railroad track, that kind of mixed all together to influence his teenage fantasies.

And so that again becomes the barn is the place you do these secretive things with bindings and whatnot. And with the chickens that wasn't actually on the farm, that was his father raised chickens in the backyard. When they moved to Wichita, one of his duties was to assist with killing the chickens for dinner. So watching their heads get cut off and watching their bodies run around and you know, horror stories like that.

He set a couple of fires, but he certainly wasn't doing repetitive fire setting, and not bed wedding according to him. And he did not have what many serial codes have in their background, is abuse, child abuse, verbal or physical or sexual or anything like that. But there is a possibility he had a head injury. His mother dropped him on his head when he was a child a baby. He turned blue, They didn't get him any help and

get him too a hospital. She also had fallen off a horse when she was pregnant with him, and then later when he's a teenager, he was in a car

accident where he hit his head. Now we don't know that that these head injuries have anything to do with it, but we do know that the brains of violent individuals certainly have some issues with areas of the brain that process moral information, that make decisions and do behavioral inhibition, and we do find that sometimes when people have these head injuries, it replicates what we also find in the

violent brain. We're not at the point where we can say that this is causal, and I don't have an MRI of raider's brain to point out any of these issues, but we can't say that this isn't an influence either, because we've certainly seen it in the brains of violent individuals.

So what was right from the very beginning, what did you learn from that very first must have been informative letter from package from demonstrator.

of daily logs, and he would write long letters. And many of the letters he wrote to Donnette also were not really very valuable for the kinds of things I wanted to try to find out. But I think it took a while for him to settle in and understand

we're really trying to plumb the depths here. It was actually me who ended up writing the code we were going to use for the book, and I put that in the introduction where in the end I wrote a code that I thought would be complex enough to really cover everything and also would appeal to him because he liked the number three particularly, so I did a lot of things like three different tools and three different layers

of soil and such things as that. But the ability to use a code that actually had a lot of complexity to it began to open things up a little bit more. But I'd say it took a couple of years before I thought, we really are We really do have a book here, and he really can reach in and start thinking about things. The initial letter, you know,

was very interesting, but what followed after that wasn't. And it did take a while, but finally, when I think when he really started to think about what it was like to plan to stalk, to kill someone, to keep journals about it, to keep trophies, to form Heidi holes, that all became very you know, I hate to say it, but it was quite rich for a book of this nature to have him really get the raw material down.

But one of the best things that happened, which was completely unexpected, was we began to watch some television shows, and some of the television shows actually gave us some really rich material in a metaphorical way. He told me to start watching Bates Motel, which is not one I thought I would ever watch, but I ended up being very addicted to it because it really was good writing.

It was really tremendously interesting about the development of somebody who already had a latent kind of mental or vulnerability into a killer because of the way his mother and her condition trespasses on him. That wasn't really like Rater.

But the one that really was interesting was The Americans, which is a show about a couple of Soviet spies who are planted in the United States during the Reagan years, and they raise kids and they act like they're your neighbor, and they're like everybody else, but they have all these missions they have to go on, so they leave this double life that's very edgy and very risky. Their kids

don't know anything about it. But weirdly, the way one of the kids begins to realize something's up, it was very similar to some of the sentiments that Raider's own daughter actually stated when she did give her one interview to the newspaper, and the sort of betrayal she felt in the sense that I don't even know it's real anymore. I don't have any idea. So this daughter is talking a lot about that, and it was interesting to me

that Rader failed to see the parallels. I mean, he could see exactly what his daughter said, he could hear what this character page was saying. He could not see

that they were the same thing. And so that began to show me the buffers he had up in his life against actually realizing the impact he was having on people that he claimed that he loved, and it was very similar to the show The Americans, very similar, just the way the parents didn't seem to really have a clue that their devotion to their missions and Water had his devotion to his mission would have terrible reverberations in the lives of people they knew if anything was ever revealed,

And they built up these compartments psychological compartments, very similar to the way that he did. And so that show was amazing. So as we talked about each episode, there were things revealed about him, almost similar actually to the way Ted Bundy when he was telling the detectives about trying to help them with the Green River serial killer case. The more he talked, the more they realized this about you.

So it was actually very similar to that because later when he would talk and especially when he didn't see the blind spots. Now I'm really I'm getting to know him in a way that I don't think he realizes. I'm seeing how he is engaged, not just what he's saying, but how he's engaged with his own thinking processes and his words. And that was very interesting to me.

times in his life. He seems to suppress these desires, but tell us before he does anything murderous, how he tries to control himself. How does he try to control this monster that he certainly much before he commits murder, he at least identifies within.

kill her so that's you know, early thinking. He's already had you know, arousal at the idea of what Glatman had done to his victims, binding them and having them complete under control. So some of these early thoughts are clear.

He also begins to understand that he is aspiring to be a serial killer, although no one's using that phrase at the time, because he's seeing the fame they get, they get to be on the cover of you know, front page Detective and things like that, and so these two things are really working on him, as well as the idea that he can control females in this way.

He does make a hit kit. He goes in. He starts to break into houses and do some petty crimes and things to see what he can get away with, and he in fact does it away with pretty much everything that he does, but it begins to feed into his sense of power over others. He becomes kind of a loner. He goes in and starts engaging in audo erotic activities where he binds himself, buries himself. He goes off on camping trips or supposed fishing trips so he can be alone to to string himself up in a

tree or something like that. He creates hit kits that that are inspired by things he's reading about other serial killers.

He carries that around. He starts thinking of himself as James Bond, and then he begins to cut out pictures of women in in magazines he calls his slick ads, where he'll he'll take like a seerious catalog of you know, women posing in underwear, and he'll cut out the pictures and he'll he'll draw gags and bindings on them, and you know, various other items, and then he names them.

He takes them with him places that that sort of becomes something that that keeps him from really acting out because his fantasy life is getting more and more witch but it's still under control. He then he then also goes off in the in the Air Force. He's away for four years and then comes back and gets married. So when he's doing what he calls his social obligations or you know, things that distract him, the fantasy life

isn't isn't as prominent. But he got a job early on working on a kind of an assembly line, and he had, you know, a great deal of time to sit around and fantasize. So he but then he got a job where it was a little more challenging, and the fantasy is receded until he was fired or laid off. It's what he would say. He was laid off because of the industry going down. He then he was very unhappy.

He's very angry. He now had a wife. He didn't quite know what to do, so he tried to kidnap somebody that failed, broke into a house that made him feel powerful again, and that is when he began to think about actually making his fantasies into reality.

So tell us about some of the the organizations he does, and some of the reasons why he stocks certain people and not others, and some of that stalking what that entails.

So the part of his life where he feels in control and powerful is a part of his life where he's you know, a murderer, and so that sets it up to be repeated again. He starts to look for people. He gets a job in a security company, so now he can see the layouts of houses. He starts looking for people women who live alone, don't have dogs, who look particularly vulnerable, who looks small, because you know, he wants to be sure he can overpower them who live

in houses that won't be really obvious. And in particular, they should have three in the address or some permutation like six or nine, something like that, because that's sort of a signal to him that you know, this is perfect. He likes corner houses or houses that are set off a little bit, so he does a lot of backyard stocking where he's walking up and down looking for particular types of houses that you think would be easy to enter. Of course, he's already knows how to set up many

of the alarm systems. He starts practicing on how do you cut window glass? So he has an old window in his yard. You know, he gets equipment to try to learn how to do that and be what he calls a cat burglar. So he begins to look for, you know, perfect victims. It makes a lot of mistakes. Actually, the next victim he picks is about three months after the Otero family murder, and he thinks she lives alone.

He's right that she lives alone. But his m O, which is pretty risky, is to get into you to watch their habits, to know when they come in and out, to know when to expect them not to be home, and then get into the house and wait for them. So that's pretty risky because you can't be sure they're going to come back in alone. And that's exactly what

happened in the second one. Kathy Bright came in with her brother Kevin, and so now he's got to deal with two of them, including one being you know, a young man who who could overpower him, and almost did because they did have a struggle. Raider had a couple of weapons with him, but Kevin Bright went grabbed for one of the guns, and Rader really believed he was going to die right there in the house. So there's a struggle. He does shoot Kevin twice, but Kevin doesn't die.

He manages to get up and run out. So that completely messes up the fantasy of what Rader wants to do. And so he stabs Kathy a number of times. He doesn't and she doesn't die until after she you know, the police come and they take her to the hospital. That's where she dies. But she could have easily given a description. Kevin gave a description, but they they didn't link it to Raider. He did think about killing Kevin. He thought about looking up where he lived and killing

him to make sure to eliminate witnesses. So here's making mistakes even though he's got you know, he's trying to be very careful. He has the sort of code of leave nothing to chance, and yet makes a number of mistakes when he When he cases the O'to house looking for the mother and daughter, Julie O'taro and Josephine O'taro, he doesn't know they have a dog, he doesn't know there are three other kids in the house. He doesn't realize the father is actually home that day because he

was in a car accident. So there's any number of mistakes that writer makes, even though he thinks he's trying to be very, very careful. But he does look for houses and certain types of victims. Many of these were on the road. If he had a job on the road, he would then go into other towns and he'd case houses there. So that's how he ended up with a list of fifty to sixty. You know, many people think

that he stopped. He would just say he didn't succeed on all of these, but he's certainly had detailed notes on these various potential victims. He did.

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got some of the things he from. It seemed like he got a little bit from everyone, but the rules that he used where he has a mask, but he doesn't use a mask. Tell us why he wouldn't do that. What seems odd until you hear the explanation.

some books about it. Because his idea of I'm a wanted fugitive, I just need your car. He wanted people to be put at ease because he thought if they feel like they're safe, you can control them more easily. So that was the first thing he wanted. He wanted to pretend to be something, so having the mask on would did not work that way. He wanted them to believe he's just a fugitive on his way somewhere, and

he needed their car. He needed money, he needed, you know, items from the house, so if they just went along, they'd be all right. And that's very much like the Zodiac, much more so than some of the other serial killers. But he said he wasn't interested in the Zodiac because Zodiac was not someone who bound his victims and strangled them. He was more interested in Bundy, the bots and strangler,

people who did the things that aroused him. So those were the serial killers he paid the most attention to. And Bundy, of course, was pretty famous for having a variety of ruses where he would pretend to be a police officer, for example, or somebody who in need of help. So later learned from these people. And the mask thing, I'm not sure what you're referring to, but there were times when it just was too it just made him swept too much, and so he didn't want to use it.

he tried that and it was very clumsy. He would then try try like the kind of gloves you get in the drug store, and those didn't work very well. So then he stole some golf gloves, leather golf gloves, and those were better, but still took away some of the sensation of really touching a person's skin. And so you know, he goes through some of the discussions about the pros and cons of wearing gloves and not wearing gloves, and also in the masks, I mean, he talks about

that they were just difficult. He brought them with but he often didn't like using them.

the media. So at what point does he decide he needs that gratification, that ego gratification, and what does that correspondence tell the police.

they were wasting taxpayer money. So he wanted to make sure they didn't spend too much time doing that because that was a waste of his taxes. So he wanted to set them straight that they had the wrong the wrong dudes as he called them. But at the same time he started to play a little game with that as he put this letter into a you know, a book in the particular library and directed the newspaper people

to go find it. That kind of thing. So he's already playing what he called his cat and mouse games, and he didn't do much with that until after after he had killed I believe maybe the seventh victim he or maybe the sixth one he alludes to. He had to be careful because he didn't want them to link Kathy Bright's murder because he knew Kevin was a survivor. But he wanted them to know that there was a serial killer in town because he wanted that gratification of

terrorizing the Wichita community. So he wrote to the newspaper basically saying the o'to's and another one and I think it was could have been Shirley Bayan or Nancy Fox, linking those together and then but leaving the Kathy Bright one unnamed, and they pretty much figured out which one he must have meant. But he did at that point

want the ego gratification. And then he starts to write things like, you know, how many has to die before I get the kind of notoriety that people like Jack the Ripper and Ted of the West Coast meaning Ted Bundy, and you know some of the others. He names a number of serial killers that he wants to be thought of. He wants to be among the elite, and that's where he starts talking about we each have a factor X. No one knows when this monster my brain is going

to act. I can't control it, you know, the next victim. I'm already looking at the next victim. So that during those days, those early days, he's really wanting to spread terror. And at one point he did go into a woman's house and thought she was going to come home. He mistook her daughter for her. He thought it was her daughter who actually lived in this house, so again making

a mistake, but he goes in. She doesn't come home when he expects her to, and so he sends a package of items he's taken out of her house to basically tell her, you know, BTK was here and you could have been the next victim, which of course completely terrorized her as well as everybody else because he got into her house. So he's beginning to do that kind of thing. But then he stops, and they are not.

They don't link him with the final three victims. Although they have their suspicions, they don't link him with the final three definitively because he doesn't write any notes afterwards. In the Shirley v in case he writes a poem about her, he writes a poem about the woman who he didn't kill, oh Anna, And mostly he's plagiarizing poems. He finds you in the library, in the college library, but he is trying to create this atmosphere of I'm

out there, I'm among you. You never know who I'm looking at, you never know when I'm going to strike. So people began to know they come home, they check their phone lines first, because he knew he always cut the phone line. People started getting dogs and guns and alarms, and of course, you know, that plays right in for him because he's he is installing alarms, so he knows who's got what kind of alarm and how to you know, cut the wires or you know what codes they might

be using. So you know, the ultimate boogeyman, the guy who sets up your security system and then uses it to get into your house and wait for you. Is is really quite a terrifying prospect for people.

no reason to suspect otherwise. And then they have a second child, so they have a son and a daughter. He goes back to college and gets a couple of degrees. He gets you know, he's a breadwinner. He brings home the money to support them. He's a good father. According to things that his daughter has said no one ever suspects anything. There are a few incidents where he claims Paula called him at certain things that she has said she doesn't remember any of that. She doesn't think they happened.

People have asked me about that, to which I say, well, people usually take their own memories away from any given incident. So if she did see him writing a poem that he said was a class project in criminal justice, you know, they want us to write something like the BTK Killer, that wouldn't have stuck with her at all. And I can understand her saying I don't have any memory of actually seeing him or catching him having that, Whereas it would stay with him because it would you know, that's

a sweat inducing moment. Oh my god, she's catching me doing my BTK thing. So it would stay very clear in his memory. But it wouldn't stay in her memory at all, because to her, that's just one more assignment that he does papers, all of them, you know, all the time. What's the big deal. So for her to say that never happened, I just think it could easily have happened. She doesn't remember it, who knows. But for the most part, they were a basic church going family

and very involved. He was a volunteer with cub Scouts with his son. In fact, he used that as a cover several times to go out and commit murder and nobody suspected anything, even when he decided to kill one of their neighbors, a woman who lived a couple of houses away, and did kill her, and then his daughter was terrified and he reassured her, you are safe, you have nothing to worry about. Of course, he knows she has nothing to worry that he's not going to do

anything to her. So imagine imagine how she would feel knowing her father had said that to her after he's killed their neighbor. Horrible.

to put those stories together. But I will say for him to make something like that up would be extremely cruel, because it's humiliating for her, for people who know her to say, Wow, did this really happen? And there's really not much that he does to humiliate her. He's pretty clear that he never wanted to hurt her, never lost his feelings for her, did not want her to be hurt by this book in any way. And so I

guess I tend to think it probably happened. He didn't tell it just to hurt her or be cruel, But maybe she just doesn't have the same kind of sense of it that he does. You raised the cubing. You raised the cubing thing, And I'd like to say something

about that, because that's interesting. In psychology, we call it compartmentalizing, which is a very long and clumsy word to get at the idea that that people, some of these people create whole alter personalities without really being like a multiple personality, but they create alter egos. They can have entire centers of morality that are contradictory within their own psyche. And Raiders that way. For example, on the On the Americans, there was a scene where a guy was being questioned

by a Soviet agent. The agent puts a burning tire over him and his screams and screens and Raider was outraged, outraged that they would show such a horrible scene. You know, TV's like, what, how can you get the outrage? You're a serial killer? But that's what I mean that, that's that cubing. He calls it cubing, which I think actually is a better word, because he says, you live on one side of the cube, but you have all these

other facets, other angles. You don't see them, but they're still part of you, and for various different purposes, you can move off the face of the cube onto the side of the cube or underneath the cube for whatever

you need and be that person. So he can be a very religious person for example, to one correspondent who wants to do Bible studies with him, and he has all the right words and everything to sound quite real and sincere, and then maybe and then with me, he'll tell me all the worst things he ever did, and he's perfectly sincere about that. And then when the cops

come in, he puts on another face for them. I certainly saw him putting on a face for the prison guards that was very different from the face he put on for me. So he's an impression manager, and part of the success of that is that he can be on these different faces of the cube. So I think his concept is really interesting. And he actually asked me at one point, did I come up with that? Or did you? You did?

and you use his car for these things. But he's doing silly things like going in and buying cereal boxes that have a B or a T or a K in the title, like special K, putting these fashion dolls inside, leaving him out in public places where he could be seen or caught in a security camera. So no, he's

not getting better. He's lucky in many ways. And then in the end he makes a pretty stupid mistake where he's tired of he's wanting to write his life story out for the police, even though you don't know what's true and what isn't true. So he has these chapters that he's putting inside these cereal boxes and packages, and he's copying them and then copying the copies and then copying the copies, which is very time consuming. He wants to stop doing that, so he asks he knows how

to use a computer. He asks Ken Landweer, who was the task force leader. It's sort of through newspapers and through communications. Can you trace it if I use a computer disc and let me know of ad in the newspaper and land Where says no, we can't, which of course they can. He lied and later believed him and send a disk and was caught. So he wasn't getting better. I think he just ran out of luck.

itself or the study of paraphilia has been limited. So tell us about what you describe as paraphilia and how this relates to Dennis Rader.

he had the thing with ropes. That was one of his paraphilias to be bound, and so he would actually go hang himself, trust himself up with ropes. He had all kinds of contraptions that he would bind himself in to get aroused. He'd sometimes put himself into a like a dry cleaner bag with a barbie doll, things like that, which so many people would find that to be perverse or debiant and different. How however, your development goes when

you're exposed to something. That thing might be arousing. So if that thing is an abnormal thing for our culture, and yet it becomes the thing that you find most arousing, even sometimes to the point of being unable to be aroused without it, and you have developed a paraphilia. Most of these are not criminal, but when they become coercive, that is, you need to trespass on the rights of another person, bring harm to them, or kill them, like necophilia.

Now you have a criminal paraphilia, and raiders, which could have remained non criminal if he just found himself for autoerotic practices, became a coercive paraphilia when he decided he needed to bind other people to get aroused.

the third and fourth and fifth year. What exactly you describe, And he describes in minute detail everything that he went through in terms of the planning, everything he went through, in terms of the fantasizing, everything that he went through, in terms of the other things that helped him get through till he actually did go through with the murders. Because at some points, as you talk, he has a tight schedule. He plans a couple of things for lunch hour.

So the descriptions as you describe in the book tell us how he was able to be able to talk about these things, and yet he again he talks about remorse, described the incredible again contrast or conflict in how he talks about all of these things. But yet now that he's in prison again, it's incredible the complexity of this mind. But you have got this kind of dialogue and with

these interviews you've captured that. So just tell us a little bit more about that correspondence him describing the oteros or any of the murders and the process that he went through and everything that he derived from that in terms of satisfaction.

of that. And when people ask me if he's out remorse, I always say, depends on what part of the QB's on, because if he wants to give a certain face, that's what he'll talk. He'll have all the remorse talk. And I don't know how deeply he feels that anymore than I know how deeply anyone feels that who uses the word remorse. You know how much do any of us

know what another person feels. So I'm not going to say, no, he doesn't feel remorse, but I am going to say many of his actions contradict what we think of when we think of remorse. So if someone says, I don't really want to draw a torture silo for you, but then he spends days and days doing it in great detail, I'm sorry you enjoyed that. So you can say, oh, you want to me about not wanting to and feeling bad, but I see what really goes into that, and that

you're into it. This is this is hot for you, So please spare me the rhetoric. I don't I don't believe you but I don't say that to him. I just know that to be true because I've also been a therapist. I've seen all kinds of stuff in therapy where people come in with a cover story, but that's not really what the issue is. So you're always watching behavior.

You're always watching for patterns in the things that they're doing, and that's why it does take This is a very time consuming type of project because you have to be able to see patterns in a variety of things like drawings and poetry and whatnot, but you have to see them across time. And for example, at the end of the book, I talk about a dream that he has. Well, that dream would have been meaningless without my having seen so much that came before it, so that I now

have a context for why. I think all of the items in the dream are quite revelatory. So I'm always looking at the how and the what. How is he engaged in the things and what does he say about them? And it's pretty clear. Like one of the things that was really striking to me was when he said how much he loved his kids, and yet he used his son's car to go drop off things. Well, in his mind, his son is in the Navy, and he's exercising the car, like putting the car to use, so that he's doing

a loving thing. I said, but but can't you think about his point of view when if you to get caught and revealed as BTK using his car, don't you think that would hurt him? And he said, I wasn't going to get caught. It never it never occurred to me that I would get caught, like, but that's not a very loving thing thing to do, to not even think about, but what if? And then he became angry at me that I would that I would make him think about the possibility that his love for his son

wasn't very deep or genuine. But that's my part of this is really I just don't buy that. I don't buy your story in that, you know, and I've actually been like the detectives who did the interrogation with him were sort of critical of me, and they said, well, you didn't confront him enough and get at the truth. And I said, well, first of all, I wasn't there as a detective. That wasn't my job. And secondly, you don't have any idea what my process is because this

is his autobiography. A great many things went on behind the scenes. You will never see is I'm not writing a book about writing the book. I'm helping him write his autobiography, So you don't have any idea what kinds of things I said to him. But in any rate, I wasn't there as an investigative reporter, and I wasn't

there as a homicide detective. I'm here as a psychologist looking at the layers, which will include him telling lies and recording the lies and everything else that I see so that other people, criminologists and psychologists can come in and see their own ideas and get their own interpretations out of it. So I think there's more in this. Certainly there's more in this than there was in their interrogations. I have the entire transcript of the interrogations and the

videos of they made. There's a lot more that you can get out of a five year project then you can get in a thirty hour interrogation. And I had our time conveying that to them.

responsible for. He wanted to talk these ad journals and evidence, and so it looks like you weren't going to interfere with anything that the police could ever potentially do anyway. But to get to the again, the incredible inside. I know sounds cliche about the inside the mind of a serial killer, but when you let the serial killer tell the story, and again, like you say, are guided, and you call upon all of your expertise. You're responsible for

sixty books. I don't think there's anybody more. You know more because it has done more study, So I I, yeah, I don't. The criticism of the police is not one.

ever is another one, I'll tell you. I'll tell you thing I know. I will cooperate with them. But with Rater, I think you have to look at the again, the consistency of behavior. He has actually talked with them about some of the open cases that they thought he might have done that remain open today. He's tried to help them. He's sat with them and said, here's where I was at that time, here's why this isn't mine. And they

feel like they've pretty much covered that. If he has killed someone else, it's in another state or another country.

it or is made helpless by it. So that's how the person sees it, how they perceive it, and then what they want to do with that experience. That really really is key. There's no formula. I say this every single day. People tell and I just do a talk the other night. Everyone wants a formula. There's a profile of the serial killer. There's not a serial killer, isn't a criminal type. It's a description of the fact that you've killed at least two people in two different occasions.

That's all it is. There's many motives, many moos. Some of them completely switch out what they do or the weapons they use, or they're victim type or whatnot. Unfortunately, some of the fiction TV shows have given us this notion that there's a formula, that there's a profile of the serial killer that they all sit and it's just

not true. So one of the things I wanted to do with this book was talk about these formulas and the fact that even among my colleagues there are sometimes formulas like they would say, well, if you didn't find abuse, he just didn't tell you, he just lied to you, like or our formulas are wrong. But we need to

accommodate the outliers, the ones who don't fit. And that's the whole point of keeping doing this research, is to to recognize that our formers are based on what we what we know to this point, but they're not based on all possible human behavior, and human beings will constantly surprise us, and water surprises a lot of people. So one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because he does have a lot of unique things that don't fit what we've come to accept as our

formulas for serial killers. So that's that's the good thing, because then we won't get, you know, in a rut, which I think we have gotten into. So that's one thing. What I do think is it's not about necessarily what causes someone, but more how do we study these cases to see what influences in a particular individual's life braided together in such a way as to become the ground from which this person not just became violent, but became

serially violent. How did the addiction to violence occur? That is what we need to study. We need to understand paraphilias better, because they are addictive and quite rigid. If we understand better the perophilias that drive this particular type of behavior and get some treatments in place, I think we have a better shot at being able to really demystify the serial killer. But we're not there yet.

understand his own motivations to do things. Glad luckily, thankfully that you put your mind and the minds of all your experience and all your people that you know in the in this multi disciplined area that you've been able to come up with this, But I think it is really beneficial to be able to talk to those killers that want to talk and get. As you say, not everybody fits this little bill that was there was some good work when there was again in the pioneering days.

But I agree with you too that I think we've been resigned to thinking that we know much more than I think we do. And I think the people to talk to are the experts, which are unfortunately people like Dennis Rader.

regardless of anything else. But I'm hoping I will inspire other people with similar expertise to do this with others.