BTK's Final Chapter

Memories are funny things. Faded or forgotten, they can be refreshed and reorganized by seemingly unconnected new events. On a crowded sidewalk near Times Square, the smell of a vending cart's hot dog can put you right back in the baseball stadium bleachers, wiping mustard from your cheek with the oversized sleeve of your father's borrowed sweatshirt. These days, my triggered thoughts are a little darker. The sensationalized arrest of Dennis Rader has me remembering the years my family spent in Wichita, Kansas.

My family moved to Wichita in 1978, just as the local police department there was playing -- and replaying -- the tape-recorded voice of a serial killer who called himself BTK. My parents had relocated us from southern Florida with expectations of a quiet, simple midwestern town. In many ways, we had that in Wichita, but always under the shadow of a real-life boogeyman.

I remember playing hooky with my best friend in the fifth grade, only to regret it when someone knocked on the door, surely for some innocuous purpose. After hiding behind the couch for thirty minutes, still certain it was BTK coming to get us, we turned ourselves in to kind, old Mrs. Farrell next door in exchange for her guardianship until our parents returned. I remember the night my siblings called 911 because of the slow movement of a french door. Police stormed the house to find a window left open in the study. I remember Teddy Logan, an unfortunate kid whose parents must have missed the news bulletins. The BTK label on his Billy the Kid brand jeans did not go over well on the playground.

What made this man so terrifying was that we knew so little about him and yet so much -- Bind, Torture, Kill. We knew he walked in and out of homes in the middle of the day, cut the phone cords, and could calmly call 911 when it was all over. And we knew he could be anyone.

As I grew up and the killer remained quiet, he became less of an imminent threat and more of an old unsolved mystery. Slumber parties in the 1980's ultimately turned into late night discussions of "whatever happened to . . .?" In my household, at least, my parents and I would speculate together about new, unsolved homicides. "It looks like the same guy, doesn't it? It has to be, right?"

In 1987, my father published his sixth novel, his first venture into crime fiction. A few years later, in law school, I would find the ongoing Unabomber investigation far more compelling than any contractual dispute or constitutional question. I needed to know who he was and why he did it. I became a prosecutor, and now a criminal law professor and mystery writer. In my first novel, Judgment Calls, letters from a killer that taunt the police and media could have been written by BTK himself. I suspect that at least some of these choices were affected by all those hours spent in Wichita, wondering who, how, and why.

Of course, one difference between fiction and reality is that an author can promise closure. As Michael Connelly frequently explains, an author can restore order to random violence and chaos. Wichitans now hope that Dennis Rader's arrest will be the closing chapter of a horror novel that seemed to have no end. I have my doubts.

Whoever committed these crimes then bragged about them is a manipulative game-player. Sure, he seeks attention, but on his own terms. He enjoys knowing that others desperately need answers that only he has. He gets off on having a secret that no one else shares. A sociopath such as this might choose to plead guilty to all counts -- knowing that a life sentence is unavoidable and a death sentence a legal impossibility -- just to keep the upper hand. If that happens, Wichita law enforcement will have a moral obligation to tell the public what they know, even if the information raises questions about what might have been learned earlier.

Even full disclosure, however, may fall short. Those of us from Wichita may never know why BTK killed, how he chose those poor victims, or which other crimes may also be his. In real life, final chapters don't close so completely.

A former deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, Alafair Burke now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School and serves as a trial commentator for television and radio programs. The daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke, she is a graduate of Stanford Law School and currently lives in New York City, where she is working on the fourth novel in the Samantha Kincaid series.