Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Killer (for “bind, torture, kill”), was one of the 20th century’s most heinous serial killers. He was also one of its greatest criminal copycats, inspired to become a notorious psychopath by True Detective magazine and predecessors such as Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith (the ex-cons whose murder of the Clutter family was the basis for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and Harvey Glatman (aka the Lonely Hearts Killer). A self-described “monster” with a sadistic fixation on bondage, strangulation, domination, and hanging, he idolized America’s most infamous, studying their habits and techniques so he might employ them for his own devious (and compulsion-driven) ends. Moreover, he wanted to be acknowledged as their equal, and by the end of his reign of terror in 2005, he had achieved that sick dream.
A&E’s BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer (Jan. 8) revisits Rader’s crimes, which spanned 30 years and were marked by 10 homicides (eight adults, two children) in Wichita, Kansas, and its neighboring Park City suburb. Throughout the docuseries, Rader discusses his misdeeds at length in phone calls with professor of forensic psychology and author Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who—along with penning dozens of books and articles about serial killers—has corresponded with the convicted killer for a decade. Hearing Rader relay intimate details of his murders, as well as the thoughts and impulses that drove him to commit them in the first place, is the hook of this two-night, four-part event. Yet what ultimately makes it stand out isn’t Rader’s candid commentary as much as Ramsland’s profile of her subject, whom she analyzes with the type of clarity and insightfulness that’s often missing in such true-crime efforts.
Ramsland contends that she communicates with Rader because she believes that, by understanding serial killers in a manner that transcends easy stereotypes, we might have a better chance of not only catching them but identifying children who are at risk of becoming adult offenders. While that initially sounds like a superficial justification for chatting with a scary fiend, Ramsland proceeds to dissect Rader’s upbringing, conduct and psyche with bracing perceptiveness. In doing so, she turns BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer into the rare docuseries that doesn’t exploit access to a killer for cheap thrills; on the contrary, it exhibits a serious interest in figuring out what made Rader tick, including the various ways in which he deviated from traditional serial-killer norms.
Those, it turns out, were numerous. Unlike his idols (and the many who followed in his wake), Rader was raised in a loving and stable home by a mother and father he dubs “good parents.” Moreover, though his urges developed from an early age, Rader was capable of controlling himself to a greater extent than most, as evidenced by the fact that he paused his homicidal spree for six years between 1979 and 1985. He was also a family man with a wife and children of his own, a respected member of his local church, and a local compliance officer. Especially during the 1970s, when Rader began killing innocent members of his Wichita community, he successfully presented himself as an ordinary citizen—and thus not the type of individual sought by police.
Though Ramsland is open about the fact that Rader routinely tries to manipulate her during their calls, she and BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer accept his argument that the “formative” experience during his youth was finding his stricken mother trapped in a couch, her ring caught on a spring. The look of helpless unhappiness and shock on her face would stir in him a mysterious desire (which he referred to as “Factor X”) that would later manifest itself as a hunger to bind women and luxuriate—sexually, and egotistically—in their powerlessness. According to Ramsland, Rader’s yearning to lord over incapacitated women went hand-in-hand with a stunted-adolescent need for attention, the latter demonstrated by his subsequent decision to begin writing letters and making phone calls to the media and the police. He was a cold-blooded narcissist who craved the spotlight and cared little about those whose lives he took, or the young children who were often the collateral damage of his crimes—and who, in multiple instances, speak on-camera through anguished tears in BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer.
Rader’s hiatus was caused by his burgeoning familial responsibilities and facilitated by his hobby of taking tripod photographs of himself in masks, wigs and his victims’ clothing, bound up like they were when he tortured them. Ramsland persuasively remarks, however, that while this role-playing pastime may have temporarily mollified his need to kill, it eventually amplified his lethal sexual fantasies, resulting in him resuming his evil behavior in more elaborate and risk-taking fashion than before. That he referred to his intended crimes as “projects” indicates, to Ramsland, that he was a sociopath capable of easily dehumanizing his victims, and that the “love” he felt for his wife was of a shallow kind. Certainly, in audio clips of Ramsland’s conversations with him, Rader comes across as an amiable man with absolutely no remorse for his atrocities.
Rader’s sadomasochistic fixation on bondage and hanging may have marked him as a killer driven by idiosyncratic perversions, but his childhood practice of killing cats, and his taunting of law enforcement, were also standard-issue facets of a serial killer—making him something like a wannabe who was immensely cut out for his chosen field. The portrait painted by BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer is of a self-made second-generation madman who realized his ambitions through research, study and duplication, all while also adding his own twists to an established formula. A&E’s docuseries doesn’t break any new ground when it comes to formal storytelling; its mixture of archival footage, talking-head interviews, dramatic reenactments, and slow-motion shots of Ramsland traversing Rader’s old hunting grounds are of a stock variety. What it lacks in aesthetic inventiveness, however, it makes up for in astuteness, with Ramsland providing such a three-dimensional impression of Rader that she elevates this attempt at comprehending the mind of a seemingly incomprehensible maniac.
