Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (37 page)

Once Harty and Moon pulled Rader over, Gouge, Relph, Otis, Snyder, Lundin, and John Sullivan and Chuck Pritchett from the FBI would pull up and draw their weapons. Lundin was assigned to drag Rader out of his truck, with Otis backing up Lundin with a shotgun. A helicopter would provide cover overhead. A few yards behind the arrest team, Landwehr and Relph would watch from inside a car, then drive Rader downtown.

Backing the arrest team were more than two hundred people, many of them assigned to simultaneous searches. They would go to Rader’s house, his church, his mother’s house, his office at city hall, the library. They would confiscate Rader’s city truck. The bomb unit would stand by.

There was a computer seizure team, relief teams, interview teams. Those to be interviewed included Rader and his wife, son, mother, and two brothers who lived in the area.

O’Connor asked, half jokingly, whether he could take part in the arrest. He offered to hide in a car trunk and stay out of the way. The cops smiled and said no.

They all crossed their fingers about keeping the story quiet. Otis had enjoyed a conversation earlier in the week in which he got to mislead the
Eagle
reporter who had staked out the cops at the Valadez arrest.

Tim Potter had had to cancel several vacations and long weekends with his wife as the BTK story had progressed. He called Otis at midweek, unaware that Otis was helping plan the arrest. Potter was exhausted from a string of twelve-hour days. On the phone with Otis, he said he was taking his wife to Kansas City for a long weekend. He cracked a joke, “Could you do me a favor and not arrest BTK while I’m gone?”

“Aw, man,” Otis said, in a reassuring tone. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

46

February 25, 2005

“Hello, Mr. Landwehr”

Landwehr and Johnson were scared to death that reporters would blow their cover. So Johnson was upset at 9:00
AM
the next morning when she got a call from a Kansas City television reporter. He had heard there was going to be a BTK arrest. Was this true?

Johnson lied, telling him it was rumor. She lied again when a reporter from Wichita’s KWCH-TV called. By that time, three hours before the scheduled arrest, several law enforcement agencies had spent hours staging cops into their assigned positions.

Johnson felt frantic: word was leaking out.

When she went to the daily 10:00
AM
briefing for local reporters, she felt herself slipping into paranoia. The briefing went smoothly; a recitation of the crimes police had investigated the night before. She looked at her watch: two hours to go.

On a side street in Park City, two blocks from Rader’s house, Officers Harty and Moon sat in Chief Williams’s Chevy Impala, still amazed that they had drawn this assignment. The arrest team had come quietly into Park City, without notifying local authorities, and they were listening to their police radios. Behind them, detectives sat in other cars. Sometimes people driving past would stare.

Would Rader run, or shoot himself, or shoot at them? Whatever he did, Harty and Moon decided, they’d be ready. Moon was thirty-five and had served on the gang unit and SWAT team. Harty was twenty-eight; when he joined the force at age twenty-one he looked so youthful that Speer had called him “Altar Boy.” But he was no naïf. Harty and Moon arrested gangbangers every day.

Gouge and Snyder sat behind them in one car, Lundin and Otis in another; Sullivan and Pritchett, the two FBI guys, in a third; Landwehr, Relph, and Larry Thomas in a fourth car.

Gouge pulled his car up beside Lundin and Otis. The minutes until 12:15 ticked by. Everyone wore body armor.

Otis had dozed in a recliner at home overnight but had not slept deeply. He held a 12-gauge shotgun, itching to get going. There had been times in the past eleven months when he had almost had to carry his partner to the car after Gouge suffered back spasms from the stress of work. There had been the day when Otis burst through the door of a house where the phone line had been cut, thinking he would face down BTK�but it had turned out to be some loser’s scheme to keep his girlfriend from moving out. There had been weeks when Otis had looked at obituaries, hoping to find a hint that BTK might be dead. In funeral homes, Otis swabbed the nostrils of half a dozen dead men, hoping for a DNA match. He was ready for this to be over.

Something occurred to Snyder as he sat with Gouge: “Hey, who’s going to cuff Rader?”

“I don’t know,” Gouge said. He turned to Otis in the car beside them: “Who’s gonna cuff Rader?”

“It’s not going to be me,” Otis said. “I’m carrying this shotgun.”

Snyder remembered that there were a lot of WPD cops long retired�Drowatzky and Cornwell and Thimmesch and Stewart and many others�who thought their failure to catch BTK had stained their careers. And now here the WPD sat amid agents from the FBI and the KBI.

“I think whoever cuffs him ought to be WPD,” Snyder said.

“So do I,” Gouge said.

Snyder thought for a moment.

“I think it should be you, then,” Snyder said to Gouge. “You’ll be the closest to Rader, and Otis will have his hands full with the shotgun.”

Gouge shrugged.

Snyder smiled. “Okay,” he told Gouge. “But you have to use my cuffs.”

“Okay,” Gouge said. Snyder handed over his cuffs.

It was 12:15. “He is on the move,” a radio voice said.

In the next few moments, the undercover cop tailing Rader radioed every turn Rader made, every street he passed.

Harty looked in his rearview mirror and saw Rader, in his white city truck, driving toward them. Harty felt his heart race. He let Rader pass him; Harty did not dare look in his direction. “It’s okay,” Moon said. “He didn’t even look at us.”

Harty gunned the engine and drove up behind Rader. Moon flipped on the flashing lights embedded in the grill. Rader pulled over immediately.

What happened next took only seconds: Harty scrambled out of the car as Lundin drove up alongside and skidded to a halt at a diagonal only a couple of feet from Harty’s car. Harty was suddenly trapped between cars.

Moon got out on the other side, drew his Glock, and aimed at Rader, who was getting out of his truck with an irritated look. Rader’s face froze when he saw Moon wearing the distinct tan uniform of the Wichita Police Department.
He looks like his mind just went into vapor lock,
Moon thought.

Lundin drew his 9-mm pistol and moved toward Rader; but Otis, who was getting out of the passenger side, found himself trapped with Harty between the cars; he had no room to get out or aim his shotgun.

“Ray!” Otis yelled at Lundin. “You’ve boxed me in!”

He threw his right hip, shoulder, and 230 pounds against the door�and crunched a dent into the side of the chief’s car.

The moment of capture�Dennis Rader is caught by the Wichita police.

“Don’t move!” Moon called to Rader. “Hold your hands where I can see them!” Rader stood as though frozen; Lundin, who had hesitated, now ran toward Rader.

“Get down on the ground!” Lundin ordered. He was six feet tall and weighed 225 pounds; he’d been a power weight lifter. He grabbed Rader by the back of the neck and forced him to the pavement.

Everyone else ran up now, guns drawn. Snyder’s heart skipped a beat when he saw one of the two uniformed officers pull out a pair of cuffs, but Gouge moved in quickly with Snyder’s cuffs, and then Snyder got there too. Snyder held his Glock in one hand and patted Rader down with the other. Harty twisted Rader’s left arm behind his back; someone else pulled Rader’s right arm into place; Gouge snapped Snyder’s handcuffs onto Rader’s wrists. Snyder looked up and suppressed a grin; Sullivan, the FBI agent, glowered down at Rader while holding a submachine gun. Sullivan would forever be known in task force lore as “Machine Gun Sully.”

Snyder noticed there was none of the usual “What did I do? What’s this all about?” stuff that people usually say during arrests. Rader looked resigned.

He was wearing his tan compliance officer uniform, complete with a webbed belt that held a can of pepper spray and a stick baton. One of the cops asked another, “Do you want us to take this off?”

“You can if you want,” Rader said petulantly, thinking they were addressing him. They ignored him and removed the belt.

Lundin pulled Rader to his feet. Rader looked into Lundin’s eyes from inches away and spoke: “Hey, would you please call my wife? She was expecting me for lunch. I assume you know where I live.”

What a guilty man,
Snyder thought.
He knows why we’re here.

As they propelled Rader to the back of the line of cars, Rader peered into the car that he would ride in. In the backseat he saw a man with a tanned and familiar face. The cops eased Rader into the seat.

“Hello, Mr. Landwehr,” Rader said cordially.

“Hello, Mr. Rader,” Landwehr replied.

Landwehr glanced at Relph, who had turned around to look as he sat at the wheel. Landwehr could see that Relph was thinking the same thing:

Rader is going to confess.

They had kept Park City police in the dark. The chief, Bill Ball, first realized that a police story was unfolding in his town when he saw a helicopter flying low just east of I-135. At city hall, Ball learned that Rader had been arrested. Ball saw Wichita police walk in carrying a warrant. They wanted to see Rader’s office.

“Get ready for a lot of media attention,” one of them said.

Landwehr and the FBI had planned a standard good-cops-bad-cops tactic: the cops who pushed Rader to the pavement were the bad cops. Landwehr and the cops taking him to the Epic Center were the good cops. They would get Rader away from the arrest scene quickly and treat him respectfully. The abrupt arrest followed by cordial courtesy was calculated to loosen his tongue. Landwehr, once an altar boy, now wanted to be Rader’s confessor. There would be no made-for-TV confrontation. Landwehr had spent eleven months building a rapport with BTK. He would build on that now.

Rader complained politely that his handcuffs were too tight. Landwehr reached behind Rader and adjusted how they fit but did not loosen them. Landwehr tried to think of something friendly to say.

“A nice sunny day,” he said, looking out the window. “Do you play golf?”

“No,” Rader said. “I like to hunt and fish, and I’m more into gardening.”

“A garden?” Landwehr said. “Well…you’ll be planting potatoes pretty soon.”

As they pulled into the Epic Center parking garage, Larry Thomas turned in the front seat and noticed that Rader was fidgety. Thomas saw why: Rader’s billed cap was about to fall off his head. Rader, his hands cuffed, was tilting his head to keep the cap on.

“Can I help you with your cap?” Thomas asked.

“Yes, please.”

As they walked inside, Landwehr worried about botching the interview.

47

February 25, 2005

The Interview

Otis and the other detectives thought that it was a mistake to assign Landwehr and Morton to interview Rader.

Interrogation is a craft requiring practice. Landwehr, their supervisor, had not interviewed a criminal in ten years. The detectives thought he was rusty and that Morton was more academic than investigator.
Rader might be dumb,
Otis thought,
or he might be clever and prepared. But it’s Landwehr’s case,
Otis concluded.
After twenty years, he deserves to be the first one in.

Landwehr himself worried that he was out of practice. But the chief had already dispensed with these objections. It would feed Rader’s ego to be interviewed by the commander of the BTK task force and an FBI profiler. BTK loved feeling important.

Morton had arrived from Quantico only minutes before Rader reached the Epic Center.

The two investigators got Rader a Sprite and chatted with him to get acquainted. The detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors watched on a closed-circuit monitor from another room.

Interrogations are almost never like those on television, Landwehr would say later. The silly stuff that actors do�screaming, threatening, grabbing the perp by the throat�would ruin most investigations. In real life, most interviews start like this one did�quiet, sympathetic, and friendly, with the cops establishing trust. Landwehr wanted Rader to think that he was his best friend, his last best lifeline in working through a problem.

There is a structure to a police interview. Like a storyteller, the skilled homicide detective picks a starting point and works in a sequence: “Okay, so do you know why we are here today?” The interviewer’s questions build a framework of logic and slowly herd the guy into a box. If the suspect is innocent, there’s a great chance that he can explain his way out of that box. But if he’s guilty, the suspect is trapped by his own lies.

After they handcuffed Rader to the table, Landwehr and Morton introduced Rader to Gouge, who carried a search warrant. Only twenty minutes had passed since Lundin had pushed Rader to the pavement. Landwehr told Rader that they wanted to swab him to collect DNA. Rader agreed, asked to see the warrant, and joked with Gouge. While defending the police after the Valadez arrest, Foulston had erroneously announced that the cops had swabbed about four thousand people since BTK had resurfaced. “I make four thousand and one?” Rader asked.