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Smyser's three young sons knew Rader, who often collected the church offering, as "the man with the money plate." He helped kids gather their crayons before worship started and chatted with them about school. Convivial, if not very gregarious, he liked to hear other members' fishing stories. In almost every way, Rader seemed to live by the book. He was persnickety, but this had its upside. As an installation manager at the ADT alarm company in the 1980s, Rader drew incredibly intricate, accurate layouts of security systems and homes--not unlike the crime-scene diagrams sketched by BTK and sent to the media. "His attention to detail was flawless," says ADT co-worker Mike Tavares. "Anyone who didn't know a thing about it could have installed the entire thing." But his strict adherence to the thick binder of company rules known as the "blue pages"--and his expectation that everyone would do the same--rankled some colleagues. Rader left ADT in 1989 after clashing with a manager who had a more flexible philosophy.
In 1991, he became a code-compliance officer in Park City, the working-class Wichita suburb where he, Paula and one of BTK's victims lived. It seemed an ideal job for a lover of rules, and he held it until last week, when the city council fired him. "He'd come by and measure your grass, and if it was too long, he'd give you a warning and tell you, 'You got 10 days to mow it or get a fine,'" says James Reno, who lived a few doors down from the Raders. No permit for your garage sale? He would follow you to city hall to make sure you got one.
Some afternoons he would wander through backyards in the neighborhood, tranquilizer gun ready, chasing stray pets. He did it as if he were the action hero in a hunt-'em-down video game, tracking the creatures with an aggression that for a 7-year-old boy might have been charming, if a bit creepy. In a grown man, it was just weird. The true 7-year-olds knew it too--kids in the area made up a game called Hide from Dennis, taking cover whenever they saw his white van approach.
But you don't 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 they fit in society well." If Rader is convicted, he would go down in the annals of crime as "an evil Walter Mitty," says Robert Beattie, author of the forthcoming BTK history Nightmare in Wichita. "His external life was a mask of sanity. His internal life was one of violent fantasies."
How 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 way."