Word: rader
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CONFESSED. DENNIS RADER, 60, serial killer whose self-coined nickname was BTK, for "bind, torture, kill"; to the first-degree murders of 10 people between 1974 and '91; in a courtroom in Wichita, Kans. In a chillingly matter-of-fact narrative, the former Boy Scout leader and church-council president recounted how he had comforted one of his victims by getting her a glass of water and provided a pillow for another, then killed them. Because Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the killings, Rader will probably be sentenced to life in prison...
...suspect someone of murder because he is nitpicky or hates stray pets--you probably just decide he is annoying. In fact, Rader's mix of good and bad traits makes him human and relatively normal--which is what experts, though perhaps not the rest of us, expect serial killers to seem. BTK "has done such monstrous crimes, so we want the guy to be a monster, drooling and with one eye in the middle of his forehead," says former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary, author of The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us. "But we look right through them because...
...could BTK have juggled two lives for more than three decades? Perhaps the answer is that there wasn't such a dichotomy after all. Serial killers "like to have authority over others," says McCrary. Rader's life--from his city job to his community roles--"was about dominating others. He was smooth enough to do it in socially acceptable ways, when it was at church or Cub Scouts. But in his pathological life, he did it in a very abnormal...
That made Wichita police all the more exultant when they announced on Feb. 26 that "BTK is arrested." But Harrell says the declaration was part of "such an orgy of self-congratulation and excessive publicity that I wonder if Rader can get a fair trial in this county." Rader's lawyers, who will not confirm reports that their client has confessed to all 10 killings, wonder the same thing. A change of venue "is one of the things we'll be looking at," says counsel Steve Osburn...
...discovery process has just begun, and Rader is not scheduled to appear in court until March 15. In the meantime, he has to try to get used to prison food. One night at dinner, he found a pebble in his potatoes and told his lawyers that he considered it "extra protein." His only regular human contact, apart from his lawyers and the prison guards, is with the characters of the book he is reading. It is a detective novel. --Reported by Maggie Sieger/Grand Rapids and David E. Thigpen/Wichita