(4 of 4)
Experts suggest the murderer had a couple of reasons to resurface over the past year. Thirty years after the Otero killings, he may have wanted to remind everyone of his handiwork. Also, the local media were reporting on Beattie's forthcoming Nightmare in Wichita. "He couldn't stand somebody else writing his story," says psychologist Samuel Harrell, who consulted on the BTK case in the 1970s. "He's all ego." But he was not trying to get caught--he didn't think he could be caught. All the poems and puzzles he created over the years to taunt the police were peppered with clues to his identity, like a word search he sent to a TV station last May packed with terms like "lost pet" and "6220"--his house number on Independence Street in Park City. But he was just showing off, a peacock fanning out its feathers. "If he wanted to get caught, he would have hung out at the crime scene," says profiler McCrary. "He just thought he was smarter than everybody else."
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.
The 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