Post by cofw on Sept 17, 2016 3:47:37 GMT
To confess, I have held zero interest in serial killers until I read about EAR in May, and even that would've been short lived if....well, you know the rest of the story. In reading this NYTimes article I see in Rader a connection to EAR, for eg:
"But Ramsland thinks we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can tell the Raders from the civilians just by looking. Rader’s outward life was one of normalcy: He served in the Air Force, attended community college, married and had children. He held a variety of jobs — in a supermarket, a factory, for ADT Security Services and the city. He attended Christ Lutheran Church, where he became president of the church council. He was a Cub Scout leader."
Then this:
When I mentioned my thoughts to Ramsland, though, she disagreed that people who knew Rader could have connected the dots. Why would they? To the contrary, one reason Ramsland believes that Rader was able to keep his cover was that “he grew up in a Germanic Midwestern family where there was not a lot of emotion. Like my family.”
Here it is from the beginning:
www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/magazine/the-serial-killers-co-author.html
By the time Katherine Ramsland and I stopped at the Copper Oven Cafe and Bakery in the Indian Hills Shopping Center in Wichita, Kan., it was well past lunchtime. It was June 2015, and Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology and prolific author, was in this sedate city to wind up the last bit of research on “Confession of a Serial Killer,” her book about Dennis Rader, which was published this month by University Press of New England. She wore jean capris and a T-shirt and carried a favorite handbag, made of a soft black cloth and decorated with skulls.
That morning, we had begun a tour of the seven places where Rader murdered his 10 victims, the so-called kill sites. Ramsland had already had one final look at the stash of thousands of pieces of Rader’s correspondence that Jim Thompson, the lawyer representing the victims’ families, kept in his office. She was still hoping to get clearance to visit Rader, now 70, in El Dorado Maximum Security Prison, where he has been serving 10 consecutive life sentences since his arrest in 2005.
At the Copper Oven Cafe, the petite 62-year-old grew tired of my questions about why she studied these horrifying crimes. She reached across the table, grabbed my notebook and quickly sketched the two hands in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” She spun the notebook around and pointed to the space between them. She was “interested in everything that is unseen,” she said.
What Ramsland, the director of the master’s program in criminal justice at DeSales University, means by “unseen” is the near undefinable process by which an apparently ordinary young person, in this case Rader (a.k.a. the “Bind, Torture, Kill” murderer, or “B.T.K.”), becomes a serial killer. Although Ramsland regularly talked to Rader on the phone and had corresponded with him for years, she hoped that a visit might provide additional insight into his ghoulish imagination. Later, in an email, she mentioned to me that there was a special “creep factor” to the choice of Copper Oven Cafe as our meeting site: It was right across the street from the house of Vicki Wegerle, whom Rader murdered in 1986. In fact, she informed me, Rader “prepared for the assault in the parking lot,” putting on a hard hat to pretend he was a phone repairman.
Rader is famous for how long he evaded capture, living a normal life for three decades before his arrest in 2005. Many books have already been written about the grisly string of crimes he committed in Kansas from 1974 to 1991. But “Confession” stands out as the first that takes the form of a collaboration with the serial killer. Unlike many crime books, it does not merely speculate about a predator’s deranged thoughts and schemes but rather plunges the reader into them, revealing in remarkable detail how a well-known serial killer at the end of his life sees himself. Ramsland’s rationale in undertaking this unusual project was to overturn what she sees as clichés about serial killers, thereby deglamorizing them and better protecting the public from their depredations. And yet the project raises a host of intellectual and ethical questions — including whether it’s possible to uncover the whole truth about these horrifying crimes, and what might be the cost of letting killers tell their own stories.
“He liked these old country roads,” Ramsland said cheerfully as her Kia lurched onto a slim dirt strip. She was following a map from The Wichita Eagle showing the locations of the kill sites whose coordinates she had plugged into her GPS device. Blond and fair-skinned, Ramsland dresses in preppy, no-nonsense clothes and talks slowly and sincerely. It was the middle of a hot Kansas afternoon, and a large barn with a silo loomed in a field now framed by bulbous clouds. Such barns, Ramsland said, were a model for his torture lairs. She was also interested in the country bridges, searching for one that looked as it would have in 1991 — country style with wooden beams — to help her understand why Rader was drawn to them. (He dumped the body of a victim under one, and he liked to dress up in bondage gear and suspend himself from them.) But the bridges we saw had been modernized, their beams replaced by cement girders. No good.
Ramsland’s career has been an unusual one. In her day job at DeSales, she oversees the master’s degree in the criminal-justice program that offers classes in criminology, ethics, forensics, criminal justice and criminal law. But she also has an astonishingly prolific sideline as a popular author, writing some 59 books on a variety of macabre subjects, including ghosts and ghost hunters. In the early 1990s, she broke out with two biographies of genre writers who specialized in depicting fictional monsters: “Prism of the Night,” an authorized biography of Anne Rice, and later “Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography,” about the best-selling horror writer. Since then, she has often written multiple nonfiction books per year, a number of them in the true-crime genre, with titles like “Into the Devil’s Den” (about an F.B.I. informant who went undercover among white supremacists), “Darkest Waters” (about serial killers in the Great Lakes states) and “The Murder Game” (about murder in Michigan, specifically). She has collaborated with other forensic psychologists and F.B.I. profilers, dug up cold cases, exploited new angles or missed clues.
Even within her oeuvre of murderabilia, “Confession of a Serial Killer” stands out. Composed of roughly 80 percent of Rader’s words and 20 percent Ramsland’s commentary, it is a murderer’s “My Struggle,” obsessed with Knausgaardian minutiae, including mistakes in the police report and biographies. One of the book’s scoops is that Rader planned to kill many more people than he actually did, and he specifically describes stalking an 11th victim. Equally unsettling, for people familiar with the case, is reading the accounts of the murders Rader committed from his perspective. It has long been believed that he put a chair in the bedroom of one victim, Joseph Otero, purely for the purposes of watching him die; Rader denies this, though he claims not to remember the actual reason, saying it might have been to prevent Otero from “rolling off the bed.” Rader also claims that he drank a glass of water in every house in which he killed someone, then cleaned it and put it back in the cupboard. He describes turning up the thermostat in each home, because he read that doing so could impede a medical examiner’s attempt to determine a victim’s time of death.
The C.S.I.-worthy level of detail makes “Confession” more chilling than the same story told — as it already has been — from the point of view of the heroic cop, the celebrity F.B.I. profiler, the local lawyer, the priest (who believed Rader was possessed), the work colleague unaware of his secret identity or the victim’s family member envisioning a conspiracy. Seeing things through Rader’s eyes is indeed a stranger vantage point than all of those. The oddness of his language — his fractured diction and superhero jargon (Ramsland includes a glossary) sets it further apart. Serial killers are “Minotaurs.” “Factor X” is Rader’s drive to kill. “Cubing” is the extreme compartmentalization that he used to perpetuate his double life. “D.T.P.G.” stands for “Death to pretty girls.”
Years before she started studying serial killers, Ramsland wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Soren Kierkegaard, the “father” of existentialism. She sees Kierkegaard as informing her most controversial idea in “Confession” — that some serial killers are more like the rest of us than common wisdom tells us. In the annals of serial killers, Rader is hardly the only one who held down a facade of normalcy while hunting his prey, but he managed it far longer than many others. There are many qualities, Ramsland writes, that ordinary people share with so-called monsters: “overestimating our willpower, idealizing ourselves, daydreaming about power, indulging in secret behaviors that keep attracting us, deceiving others and keeping secrets.” She believes that all of us should lock our doors at night.
The strange concept behind “Confession” was hatched in 2010, when Ramsland saw a post on Facebook that Kris Casarona, a self-described accountant and ghostwriter whom Rader had given the media rights to his story, was abandoning the project. Ramsland decided to step in. By that time, Thompson, the lawyer who represents the victims’ families, had rejected a number of writers looking to do some kind of project about him. He told everyone who called to write a proposal of intent, but few followed through. Those who did were not able to win over the families. Ramsland, however, got the go-ahead. The families liked her, Thompson said, though he added that they “didn’t really want a book — they would have preferred that he be left in a hole and never heard from again.”
Ramsland next had to gain Rader’s trust, which she did by writing him a letter expressing her interest and listing her credentials. She apparently impressed him. Soon Ramsland and Rader were corresponding, mostly by mail. “He’ll slip into the third person, as Ted Bundy sometimes did,” Ramsland said. Sometimes his letters would start with elaborate fake monograms, “From the desk of Dennis Rader.” Sometimes he would spend days on a single letter to her. His correspondence could sometimes run to more than 30 pages, composed in a tiny, scratchy hand. They played chess by mail, sending each other their moves. Rader once said, “Don’t cheat,” Ramsland recalled with a snort, adding in a half-mock-outraged aside: “You’re a freakin’ serial killer. I’ll cheat if I want to!”
When I first met Ramsland, she said her focus on serial killers began somewhat accidentally, in 1998, when she started writing for CrimeLibrary — a crime website later sold to Court TV — just before she entered John Jay College. But over time, details about her own family’s past began to slip out. Her maternal grandfather, she told me, had plotted to poison his wife and children but was caught buying arsenic. Then there was her father’s mother, who was murdered by a 20-year old man she was involved with. Ramsland grew up in Saline, Mich., and in 1967, when she was 13, the “Michigan Killer,” John Norman Collins, started picking up female hitchhikers in nearby Ann Arbor and stabbing and strangling them; her brother’s friends found the remains of one of them in a field. The brother of one of Ramsland’s favorite philosophy professors in college, Alfred Dewey Jensen, was murdered by the killer Charles Raymond Starkweather; years later, Jensen killed himself. Violence seemed wound into Ramsland’s life as much as — if not more than — Rader’s. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m a psychopath,” Ramsland said.
One question people often ask about this unusual collaboration is whether Rader profits from it. He doesn’t, Ramsland explained. In the past 40 years, so-called Son of Sam laws — named after David Berkowitz, who considered selling his story to great outrage in 1977 — have prevented a number of murderers from making money from their stories. In 2005, Thompson worried that Son of Sam laws did not go far enough: They varied from state to state, and a 1991 court ruling had found them to be too broad and possibly unconstitutional. So Thompson and his then co-counsel, Mark Hutton, drew up a contract that gave the families of the victims 75 percent of the profits of all media rights. The current contract, though slightly different, is similarly generous. (Sony has already optioned a TV series.)
Another question “Confession” has raised is about Rader’s veracity in his comments and how much it matters whether what he recounts is true. Through her daughter, Rader’s ex-wife, Paula Rader, contested two claims Rader makes in the book, particularly his accusation that she knew he was killing people while they were married. And several people who worked on the case have criticized Ramsland for giving Rader a platform, allowing him to portray himself as an evil genius.
Ramsland has responded to these objections by saying that she is seeking to show readers how a serial killer really thinks: lies, exaggerations and all. But she is also acutely aware that Rader — who, from early on, played to the media and tried to exploit it — is looking to make an impression with their book. Although books are not allowed in El Dorado, he has nonetheless been making bookplates to send to pen pals who buy the book. He somehow got a hold of a photo of the cover, which is red, with the title superimposed on a photo of a coil of rope, to suggest strangling, his method of choice. He liked the design.
The day after we visited the kill sites was gloomy and wet. We set out early to see Holcomb, Kan., another site of great interest to true-crime aficionados: It’s where Richard Hickock and Perry Smith killed the Clutter family in 1959, forming the basis for Truman Capote’s legendary study “In Cold Blood.” A teenage Rader became fixated on Hicock and Smith and obsessively read about a host of other historic killers — Albert DeSalvo and Richard Speck, each of whom strangled their victims; Jack the Ripper, who eluded capture; Charles Manson; and the Zodiac Killer.
But Ramsland thinks we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can tell the Raders from the civilians just by looking. Rader’s outward life was one of normalcy: He served in the Air Force, attended community college, married and had children. He held a variety of jobs — in a supermarket, a factory, for ADT Security Services and the city. He attended Christ Lutheran Church, where he became president of the church council. He was a Cub Scout leader.
I had watched Rader’s confession on YouTube, and I liked to think that I would have known he was a psychopath if I met him. He talked about himself in the third person, answering the judge’s questions with phrases like “If you know anything about serial killers. …” As he used the phrase “put him down” to describe killing Joseph Otero, he appeared to be shrugging and twitching; I wondered if he spoke that way ordinarily, and if so, what his wife and children made of it.
When I mentioned my thoughts to Ramsland, though, she disagreed that people who knew Rader could have connected the dots. Why would they? To the contrary, one reason Ramsland believes that Rader was able to keep his cover was that “he grew up in a Germanic Midwestern family where there was not a lot of emotion. Like my family.”
We reached Holcomb around noon. We drove by the Valley View Cemetery, stopping briefly to find the Clutter family headstones. Then we headed through town to Oak Street, where the notorious Clutter farmhouse still stood. We parked at the end of the muddy driveway and got out of the car. We could see the two-story building set back on a long, flat parcel of land, the top floor in gray-white siding, the bottom a dull yellow brick. The house seemed so ordinary that it was hard to believe that something so horrible happened there. I looked to see what Ramsland’s next move would be, but a do-not-trespass sign discouraged her from going any further. The branches of the Chinese elms bowed as the sky darkened.
