"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott

Stalking the Strangler:
Almost a Year Cyber-Stalking BTK

          “Mrs. Otero?  Yes, we had a service call come in about your phone…”

          “It was working fine last night –“

          “You might want to check it, ma’am.  It’s out now.  May I come in?”

          “Um … sure …”

          On January 15, 1974, a reign of terror began in Wichita, Kansas.  That morning a man entered the home of Julie and Joseph Otero and murdered the couple along with their two youngest children, Joseph and Josephine.

          Over the next 30 years at least 6 more people were murdered, all women.   The shadow wanted credit for his kills, as well – he wanted fame.  He was a serial murderer with the mind of an ad-man.  In one of the many communications he sent to Wichita police and press between 1974 and 2005 he called himself the BTK Strangler, short for Bind them, Torture them, Kill them – his method of murder.

          Though we now know that a murder as recent as 1991, of Dolores “Dee” Davis, was likely a victim of BTK, the Strangler ceased his communication with the public and law enforcement between 1978 and 2004.

          In the interim it was speculated that BTK was either dead, imprisoned, or had possibly grown too ill to continue.

          Now it appears he simply went to silent running for a while.  In March of 2004, not long after news coverage of Wichita attorney Robert Beattie’s writing of a book about the hunt for BTK, a letter was sent to the Wichita Eagle.  In it was a photocopied sheet of paper with images of a woman murdered in 1986, as well as a copy of her drivers license.

          BTK was back.

          On February 25th, 2005, Wichita authorities arrested Dennis L. Rader, a Park City, Kansas code compliance enforcement officer, for the BTK series of murders.  Rader now sits in a Wichita jail awaiting the start of his trial on 10 counts of first degree murder.

          Between March 17, 2004, when that first letter arrived at the Eagle, and February 25th of this year, a 1970's-era serial killer met up with the computer age.  In a way, that confluence of then and now was his undoing.

          Almost from the moment news of BTK’s re-emergence was made public, a number of internet communities began to form to discuss this particular killer and his crimes.

          The amateur cybersleuth has been around as long as the internet has been accessible to the public, and this was not the first time a murder mystery spawned a great amount of internet-based sleuthing – but it was the first time I ever got involved.

          I’ve been fascinated by true crime as a genre since I was a kid.   My mom left her well-thumbed paperback of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter laying around one summer and I picked it up.  In spite of myself, my (according to my family), overly-sensitive nature, I was enthralled.  Not long after I read Truman Capote’s classic “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood, about the brutal murder of the Clutter family from Holcomb, Kansas – while staying with my grandparents at their farm in Spring Hill, Tennessee.   Capote’s combining of lyrical prose with stark violence kept me awake a couple of nights at Grandpa and Granny’s farm, jumping at every creak and shadow.

          I’ve always been a writer – in the mid-‘90's you could have found me at any number of coffeehouses in my hometown of Nashville, giving hammy public readings of my poetry.  I was published in an anthology of work by Nashville poets who were regulars at a seminal series of readings in a little pub called Windows on the Cumberland.   That was my identity as a writer, in my own mind.  My actual profession was broadcasting, and secondarily, classical music.  Since 2000, I have been actively writing in one weblog or another under various T.S. Eliot-related pseudonyms (think “Lovesong” or “The Hollow Men”) until finally I began a weblog under my own name in April of 2004.  More on that in a moment.

          Somehow, without exactly meaning to, I became with the return of BTK a kind of true-crime writer, and amateur profiler.

          First, let me stress the word “amateur.” I never had any law-enforcement training, or any more classes in psychology or sociology than anyone else pursuing some kind of liberal arts degree.

          No, I just became obsessed.

          On the internet, beginning in August of 2004, I began to stalk BTK.

          The first message board I found was the BTK forum located at http://p216.ezboard.com/fcrimeandjustice13552frm100.   This board was damaged shortly before the writing of this article by a huge denial-of-service attack against ezboard.com in general but, prior to that, it was one of the most comprehensive sources of information available to the general public. It was through ezboard that I became acquainted with what, to the BTK Strangler, passed for poetry.

Oh, Anna Why Didn't You Appear

T' was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite
My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season

Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement,
like new vines at night

Oh, Anna, Why Didn't You Appear
Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness
to scent to lofty fever that burns within,
In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desparation,
the game we play, fall on devil ears
Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.

Oh, Anna Why Didn't You Appear
Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments
across most private thought
Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with
control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears
in eyes so deep and clear.

Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why for
number eight was not.
Oh, Anna Why Didn't You Appear

          There was a great deal of ridiculous speculation about this poem: that BTK was writing first in a foreign language and translating, that he was as brilliant as James Joyce – but the first thing that struck me was that it looked like a bad imitation of Shakespeare, or Matthew Arnold.  The assertion that Joyce had anything to do with the confused and disjointed rambling of a serial killer was ludicrous to me.  “Oh Anna” was written by a man with no ear for poetry, or understanding of what makes a poem.

          Perhaps this is where my obsession truly began – with the fact that a serial killer thought he was a poet.  In the letter he wrote in the ‘70's where he came up with the “BTK” moniker, he also suggested this name – “The Poetic Strangler.”

          It occurred to me at some point that maybe it made sense for a poet to profile the serial killer who thought himself a bard as well.

          It was only after a good deal of discussion on the various message boards that it occurred to me one day to write a “profile” – at the time I didn’t think I was doing anything special; a good part of what I wrote was based on a fact sheet Wichita authorities developed about the killer released at the end of November last year – information that proved after the arrest of Dennis Rader to be, in large part, erroneous or false.

          I figured – what harm can it do? I’m just a blogger. At the time my only weblog was www.planethuff.com/steve – it was intended for classic journaling; that is, anything I was thinking about that day.  Only occasionally, when a crime or mystery got my attention would I write an entry and then archive it under “true crime.”

          So on December 4th of 2004 I gathered up my instincts and knowledge of the BTK case up to that point in time and started typing.

          Here is some of what I wrote that night, with some emphasis and notes added:

• BTK is younger than the age given in the most recently-released info about him. Possibly by a decade or so …  [Dennis Rader was 59 at the time of arrest.]

• Resembles the 'dark-haired' suspect drawing of him … but is not hispanic or italian – he may be balding at this point, but if the mustache was accurate in the drawing, he will still be wearing one.  If he's balding he probably wore a comb-over until it got too thin, but I suspect his hair will still seem a bit longer than is fashionable for a man his age – no ponytail or anything, but definitely not clippered close to the scalp.  I know that might disappoint those of you who like the image of some skinhead-looking serial out there with beady eyes in the dark ...  [Rader was of German descent, and wore a mustache and “comb-over” on his balding pate.]

• May have been a Mama's boy. He has a cleanliness fetish, maybe to the point of ocd - it is tied somehow to his upbringing …  [Even friends of Dennis Rader made a point of saying something about his “neatness” – his job actually required someone with a decidedly fastidious nature.]

• Co-workers and family alike will have viewed him as helpful, cooperative, the kind of guy who always pitches in.  [This is apparently a perfect description of Rader’s behavior as a churchgoer. He was president of his congregation when he was arrested in February.]   They do not know that his motivation is not altruistic, but aimed at ingratiating himself. Publicly, he wears a mask, and I think he views himself this way too.   He viewed BTK's crimes as his "taking off the mask," but not in a negative sense, in his mind.  More like his unveiling of some great secret.  It's the closest he gets to being mystic ...

• Couple of odd thoughts to end this with.  I think he still attends church.  I think he helps out at church, probably just went to an advent service or a hanging of the greens in the last week or two.  I have a very strong feeling he spotted, or even became acquainted with at least one of his victims through some mutual church affiliation.  The last thought is about his clothing.  The same profile that postulated BTK seeming melancholy, if I recall correctly, also posed the idea that he tends to wear dark clothing by choice.  I agree with that, and I also say he keeps his clothes very neat, may be a compulsive ironer – irons his socks and t-shirts too.  I say too that he will wear large dark framed glasses, and if they are metal framed they will still be large, and possibly tinted. [Evidence about Dennis Rader since his arrest indicates all the preceding in bold was true.]

          There were certainly things I had wrong; I figured he was single – Rader was married to Paula Dietz for 30 years; I believed information released at the end of November about BTK having a model train hobby; this proved to be true of one of Rader’s brothers, not the accused himself.  I thought that if BTK were married, he would have no children – Rader is the father of two adult children, Brian and Kerri.

          Initially I cross-posted the profile to several boards, but only a few people gave me any feedback; in general it was positive.

          I tried to let it go, really.  But as Christmas unfurled its wings and cold winds swept in I found myself chewing on the mystery more every day.  What kind of man does the things BTK did? What is his everyday life like?

          Without realizing it I think I was utilizing my training as a performer, and beginning to insert myself into the head of a very real “character.”

          In part there was a certain logic to some of my conclusions; I’d noted two different occasions where BTK mentioned in one of his taunting letters to authorities something about the neatness of a victim’s home or car.  It occurred to me that only a man with a fetish for neatness and control could be capable of controlling his pathological behaviors as well as BTK.

          He was unique in his going silent for more than 20 years – while we now know that he did kill at least 3 other people in that time, he did not send out any communications to police and press.  He changed his MO – that took a great deal of control for a man in the throes of what some profilers and forensic psychiatrists term an addiction – to murder.

          The mustache made sense to me, too – for some men it’s a fashion statement; for others this particular facial hair is a statement of purpose.  Two dictators who historically sometimes hold a fascination for the psychopathic mind are Stalin and Hitler, famously mustachioed men.  To some men, then, a mustache is a statement of how they want to be perceived – as men of authority, of power.  BTK would want to promote this image – this was true of Dennis Rader.  In the ‘70s he applied to become a member of the Wichita Police force, and his degree from Wichita State was in criminal justice.  He didn’t satisfy that desire to work in a perceived position of power, so he would have to settle for projecting an image of authority.

          I adopted several different identities on various message boards as I sought out signs of BTK online – the Wichita Eagle’s forum at http://forums.prospero.com/kr-kansas_news/start knew me as Larry Anderson, avuncular and incisive, prone to silliness; also as a_bracksis, prickly and a bit strange, finally as thundersaid, who was completely abstract, referring to himself and others as ‘entities.’

          It was not that I was playing games; what remained foremost in my mind the entire time was that these forums were all devoted to discussion of a (possibly) still-active and anonymous serial killer.  Who knew how much he was online?  Who knew what he read and didn’t read? Who knew what he might be able to determine by reading our messages?  In retrospect my attitude towards using the boards may seem overly cautious, even paranoid, but at the time I wasn’t taking any chances.

          The thing that fascinates me in retrospect is that under these online guises, I ended up writing my most strangely on-target speculation about the BTK Strangler.

          I don’t know if the freedom of a sort of anonymity enhanced my perception or if I am simply a good guesser, but here are some samples of messages I posted in my effort to grasp the man behind the shadow then known as BTK…

          On the Wichita Eagle's message board about BTK on December 4, 2004, I wrote the following in reply to a poster calling herself enixer, who stated that "BTK was German":

          To put a fine point on it:

• On December 4, 2004 - the same day I wrote my "profile," though I'm not sure if this post was before or after that, I surmised that "perfection, cleanliness, order," were "all extremely important to" BTK. Dennis Rader was known by one and all to be on the obsessive-compulsive side of things.

• I surmised in the same post that BTK would "still go to church regularly" and be either a southern baptist or an "evangelical" lutheran. Rader was a lutheran.

• I wondered if he would be working a job that "required cleanliness and order," and if he did, he would know "the job was beneath him" yet he still would take "great pride in these two things." Rader worked a low-level codes job while his degree was in criminal justice. He may have had anger towards WPD for not hiring him. His job required exactly the qualities I surmised, and he was notably over-zealous in most reports I've read about the way he approached his work.

• I predicted he would more closely resemble "the mustached, 'dark' drawing" of the BTK suspect that was first put out in the 70's. He did.

          What follows is the strangest of all.  I posted the following as thundersaid in a thread that was humorously asking for "psychic impressions" of BTK.  Earlier in that thread I posted a variation on my 'profile,' with some added in stuff that was pretty off just like everyone else ... then I posted the following (link is in the body of the quote):

Feb-3 (2005) 12:25 pm
From: thundersaid
To: Vigilant
5627.11 in reply to 5627.9

... I have fortunately had no dreams about BTK.  I had a malevolent daydream once where an older, balding gentleman with dark hair and a mustache, who was a bit jowly and wearing a tan members-only style jacket over a yellow and red plaid shirt, wore aviator-frame prescription glasses with a tint (not sunglasses, but regular glasses that perhaps darkened in the sunlight), was standing on the driveway outside, staring at me through the bedroom window.  This approximated a vision, I suppose, as I did not actually perceive him there – that would have been psychosis – but had the image of this man come so vividly and forcefully into my mind that the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I forced myself to get away from the computer and watch a South Park DVD ...

          From Steve Quayle News Alerts, posted February 28, 2005:

... In Park City, Mr. Rader was known for wandering the subdivision roads in his city truck, wearing his official tan city uniform, and stopping in whenever he saw potential violations of the city's rules.   Mr. Rader knew every lawn, every house in the community of about 6,000.  Sometimes, neighbors said, he would march right into their backyards and snap photographs to show leaky roofs or overflowing trash ...  

The Members Only brand jacket I saw so vividly in my "image" of BTK was the older type that had epaulets, military-style. Much like Dennis Rader's uniform shirts worn as part of his Park City, Kansas codes enforcement job.

          I make no claim to be qualified to profile anyone.   I trust that I have a strong sense of intuition, but I’d stop short of saying I’m psychic.  However the significant thing to me about the message board postings is the fact that the post or editing date of a post cannot be altered, as far as I know.  The date I made the post was the date stamped, and had I edited any of the posts in question, a note would have been automatically inserted at the bottom of the message with the date of the edit.  I could easily alter all this in my own weblog, but these message board ramblings were as close as I could get on the internet to proof that prior to the arrest of balding, Lutheran, bespectacled, mustachioed Dennis L. Rader in Wichita, Kansas, I was to some degree envisioning a man a bit too close to the accused for my comfort.  In fact, when I was interviewed by AP reporter Steve Brisendine after Rader’s arrest the first thing he asked me was, “Have you ever lived in Wichita?”

          I wondered if Brisendine was thinking I already knew Rader, and making an unusually educated guess.

          As much as those of us who spent hours online hunting for BTK wanted to believe that it would somehow be amateur cybersleuthing that brought the man into the light, it was not any of our efforts, exactly, that led to Dennis Rader’s arrest.  A computer did play a key role in the end, but not mine, or any of my fellow cybersleuths.  A purple diskette sent by the BTK Strangler to Wichita police contained metadata that linked directly back to Dennis Rader’s church, Christ Lutheran, and Rader himself.  It may finally have been BTK’s need for attention, his hubris, and his ignorance of one of the great pitfalls of the internet age that brought him down.  Apparently the man who sent that purple diskette of his doom to authorities had never heard the old saw that veterans of cyberspace read everywhere – in a day and age when hackers can steal millions of credit card numbers with a virus, when identities can be stolen, no one is truly anonymous.  I would have loved someone in Park City stumbling across my blog entry or message board postings and saying to themselves, “Gee, that sounds just like old Denny Rader,” but that didn’t happen.  Dennis Rader caught the BTK Strangler with a borrowed computer at church.

          Out of my stalking of BTK something new was born – my true crime weblog, or ‘blog, The Dark Side – http://www.planethuff.com/darkside.   I had noticed that the few true crime entries I wrote for my original, personal weblog seemed to be of the most interest to readers, my website traffic doubling, even trebling for an entry about murder and mayhem.

          So on December 29, 2004, I went live with the new weblog, transferring all my true crime blog entries to The Dark Side.

          Most remarkably, in the six months since I went live on the internet with The Dark Side, my web traffic has skyrocketed.  At this writing I receive an average of 4,000 readers a day, and have been interviewed or mentioned in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the article written by the AP reporter I referred to earlier.  I’ve begun to receive "tips" and even scooped the mainstream press with revelations about high-profile and sometimes not-so-high-profile crimes in the news.

          And in truth, those 200,000 or so readers in six short months wouldn’t know about me if it weren’t for BTK.

          It was a strange muse to follow, and even far from any real investigation I found the road I was traveling to sometimes be dark, bleak.  More than once since beginning the ‘blog I’ve felt that the success of having a large readership was a kind of pyrrhic victory – something good achieved through bad things happening.  Even now that I feel a need to stay current and hold the reader’s attention, maintain an “audience,” I still find I must back away sometimes, and step out into the sunlight, the fresh air.  That, perhaps, is the value in taking that road – because so much darkness can only make one appreciate the light that much more.

"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott