What's this -- another book review? As it happens there are a few of them lying about, and this one is about a pretty strange fellow: Dennis Rader, AKA the BTK killer. On the outside, he appeared profoundly normal. Yet that hid a monster lurking within. Being a professional cynic, i'm reminded how our political candidates strive mightily to seem like ordinary folks, though who knows what lurks beneath their highly manipulative personas. Nothing good, you can be assured. Here it is: ***** BTK Killer Looked Like Mr. Normal, Loved Bondage, Torture, Drag By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) -- A new book about Dennis Rader, aka the BTK killer, teaches a chilling lesson: That really ordinary guy living next door could be a serial killer. Rader, according to John Douglas's ``Inside the Mind of BTK,'' ``could out-normal even the most normal person,'' which helps explain how he evaded capture for more than 30 years. His social resume was right out of Norman Rockwell: two kids, Boy Scout leader, church congregation president, Air Force veteran and married for more than 30 years to the same woman. Indeed, at the time of his arrest on Feb. 25, 2005, the balding resident of Park City, Kansas, made his living catching dogs and handing out citations for overgrown lawns -- a yard Nazi. Yet beneath that white-bread exterior lurked a monster. Rader is known to have killed 10 people between 1974 and 1991, beginning with a quadruple murder whose victims included an 11- year-old girl, with whom he left a DNA calling card. That practice would eventually help identify him. John Douglas, a former FBI criminal profiler, provides gruesome details from Rader's journals and police reports. It's an unforgettable portrait of a guy most of us are glad we never met. Rader was weird from early on. In elementary school he developed a fetish for tying himself up, an exercise that provided an intense sexual reward. A poem from his middle-school years finds a warped mind at work: ``There once was a girl who had all the right curves/and a large tummy/All the better to wrap up tight/and make a Mummy.'' Torture, Underwear He did his apprenticeship torturing animals and later began breaking into houses and rooting around for women's underwear, which he put to erotic use. Ropes and bondage were his passion, and Rader himself supplied the BTK moniker -- Bind, Torture, Kill -- in one of several post-murder letters bragging of his deeds. Assisted by writer Johnny Dodd, Douglas often sounds like a true-crime scribe. He notes that the evening sky ``reminded me of a bruise I'd once seen covering the battered body of a woman stretched out atop an autopsy table.'' He offers the occasional rogue's profile, including a suspect with ``a lengthy history of deviant behavior that included an arrest for having sex with a duck.'' He also provides a look inside the minds of various serial killers he's interviewed, including Richard Speck and David ``Son of Sam'' Berkowitz. In a particularly chilling note, he writes that some killers tape-record their victim's pleas and screams, later listening to them ``much like a normal person would listen to a piano concerto by Mozart on their stereos.'' Bound in Drag Douglas was long puzzled by Rader's ability to go years between murders. One reason, he concludes, may have been an ultimatum from his wife after she discovered her beloved bound and in drag inside the family residence. The fear of her walking out may have cooled his murderous jets. Yet his ego would eventually trip him up. After learning that a local lawyer was planning to write a book on his crimes, in March 2004 he got in touch with a local television station. A police contact assured him that he was perfectly safe sending future messages via floppy disc, and he mailed off a missive that was traced to a church computer. He was soon in custody. Douglas has no soft spot for BTK, arguing that Rader should be put to death -- a position, he notes, that Rader shares. Because all his crimes were committed during a time when Kansas had no death penalty, Rader will live out his years in prison, though his new neighbors are probably not buying the ``normal'' act. ``Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the 30-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer'' is published by Jossey-Bass (344 pages, $26.95).
