[ male announcer ] sustainable solutions. fedex. solutions that matter. confessions of btk continues on msnbc reports. here again is stone phillips. he spent years stalking and killing innocent people. then dennis rader, known only as btk, seemed to stop. he gradually disappeared from the headlines he craved. and that is something he now says he could not tolerate. here again, edie magnus.
comfortable by actually loosening some of the binds around their hands and feet. tried to comfort them as much as i could. to keep them quiet or because you were worried? both. i m not a bad guy. i care for people. have concerns for people. and i hadn t really crossed that path yet where i was going to kill the people yet. i was in concern mode. what you re seeing here is a very early form of a future serial killer. who s still trying to decide what it is he s going to get out of these crimes. we asked james allen fox, one of the nation s leading criminologists and a professor at northeastern university, to give his analysis of this interview. he has studied serial killers for 25 years and has written numerous books. his most recent book, on serial killers including btk. he wants to fulfill his fantasy. but it s not necessary for them to feel excessive suffering.
while they didn t know anything about dennis rader, they knew a lot about btk. after he went dormant and stopped killing the theory was, and everyone was saying, well, he s in prison or maybe he has an illness or something happened. i never i never bought that. i was convinced that he was one of us. we had him pegged, in terms of the type of individual we were looking for. we had everything but a name. in the jailhouse interview with the psychologist, which we showed former chief lamunyon, dennis rader was openly scornful of local law enforcement. the police are the keystone cops. and disdainful of all their years of efforts. they traced a lot of things down. traced the copier down, the copier i used at wsu, but they couldn t make the connection from there. they had 30-some years to break it and they couldn t do it. the taxpayers were paying the money. they really need to have a sharper bunch. although they tried and tried and tried and tried. were you offended when you h
to use a technical term, it s poppycock. it s just an excuse. it was dennis rader making the decisions, not factor x. he speculates at one point that he was dropped on his head. yeah. that might have done something. everybody could believe that, too. it s someone else s fault. there are lots of kids that fall off tricycles and fall out of cribs and they bang their heads and they don t have factor x or go on killing sprees. it s a way to deflect blame. dennis rader is someone who is selfish, narcissistic, committed to his own pleasures. committed to fulfilling his sexual fantasies, no matter who he hurts in the process. in 1978, of course, nobody new what rader s excuses were. all they knew was that btk was out there, a seven-time murderer who was promising in his factor x manifesto that he was about to take another innocent life.
calm he made up a story about why he was there. mr. otero actually stepped up and told them i was coming for some food, i was wanted in california, i needed some food and water and some money and transportation. that was my ruse to kind of calm them down. he kind of laughed a little bit. is this a joke? who sent you? my brother-in-law? rader says the family bought his lie about being on the run from the law and not wanting to hurt them. and so at gunpoint, they acquiesced to his tying up all four of them, mother and father, and younger son and daughter, without a struggle. they were cooperating with me 100%. that probably was their demise. if they struggled, it probably would have been a different story. they felt fairly comfortable that is what i was going to do. as rader tells the story, like he does so often, he paints his own conduct in the best possible light. he says he took pains to make his victims feel even more