The Real BTK Killer’s Confession is Scarier Than Anything in ‘Mindhunter’

The BTK Killer looms over Mindhunter Season 2. While protagonists Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), and Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) investigate the BTK murders and other challenging mysteries, the killer himself remains unfazed. We get only peeks at his life, from fights with his wife in the early ’70s to struggles over Xerox printers in a nearby library. He is a specter haunting the story, and that makes sense since the real BTK Strangler wasn’t apprehended until 2005. That’s when he made an alarming confession of guilt — one that makes for the eeriest watch on YouTube today.

The BTK or BTK Strangler, so named for his propensity to “Bind, Torture, and Kill” his victims, murdered ten people in the Wichita, Kansas area between 1974 and 1991. BTK’s real name was Dennis Rader, and for decades he sent the police taunting letters. In 2005, he slipped up and sent police a floppy disc with metadata revealing his first name and connecting him to his church. Going off of this, police were able to use circumstantial evidence to reveal his identity. A court-ordered DNA test on his daughter’s pap smear confirmed forensic evidence linking Rader to the scenes of the BTK killer’s crimes. Once arrested, Rader fessed up to the crimes pretty quickly. Today, you can watch his full confession in court and it’s a harrowing 46 minutes.

It’s not just that he’s describing in vivid detail how he killed all ten victims, but it’s how Rader does this. What’s chilling is how casual he is about each confession. Rader doesn’t look guilty; he looks bored. Not only that, but the level of detail he’s able to recollect is astonishing. (I can’t always remember what I had for lunch yesterday, and he can specifically remember details from decades before.) As he details his first kills, the Otero family (Joseph, Julie, Junior and Josesphine), he mentions rebinding his victims several times in order to make them feel more comfortable. He even offers patriarch Joseph Otero a pillow to sooth pain from a cracked rib injury. Rader also sheepishly admits that he didn’t know how much pressure he had to put on Julie’s neck to strangle her. It was his first time strangling a person to death, he says. One thing he struggles to remember, though? The names of his victims. At least once, he glances at notes to confirm the name of Junior Otero, a nine-year-old boy he murdered during his first crime.

Personally, I find it a struggle to watch this. The cool detachment Rader exudes as he talks about human beings as “projects” or “targets” sickens me. The way he constantly rolls his eyes as he’s confessing infuriates me. Rader murdered ten people, and by all accounts, wanted to kill more. He was only captured because he didn’t understand how metadata worked on floppy discs. He’s a horrific person who has brought evil into this world, and within the narrative of Mindhunter, he is a phantom on the fringes of the story, haunting the audience and taunting the police.

This nearly 47 minute-long confession has been watched by well over 2.5 million people. I couldn’t finish the whole thing. Watching the truth about Mindhunter‘s most infamous murderers is quite different than merely binge-watching Mindhunter.

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