BTK and the Possibility of Redemption
The BTK story can’t help but explore the (im)possibility of redemption.
I had followed the case for a number of years, since the oddest thing was simply that BTK had stopped communications with the police and seemingly vanished, despite being someone who behaviorally would be extremely unlikely to stop killing on his own.
Then came the resurfacing of BTK, after so many years, and his own audacity and hubris resulting in his capture. (It seems odd that a man so intelligent would be so ignorant of basic computer technology, or at least not be cautious enough to avoid anything that could potentially earmark him for the police. BTK had spent his entire “career,” supposedly, being cautious and meticulous.)
Whatever the case, after his capture, his wife and children are put through the wringer. What does it mean to discover that the man who supposedly cared for you, protected you, the man to whose authority you submitted, blithely murdered not just women but children in order to satisfy his own internal cravings? It’s like stepping into toxic quicksand, all foundation suddenly melting away under your feet. Your past – or at least, a large part of it – was nothing but a fabrication.
That story does not have a happy ending, as his wife quickly moved to divorce him and pick up her life elsewhere. Can she ever “forgive” him, and if so, what exactly does that mean? What would it look like? Trust was not just shattered but trampled, torn, spit on, and crumpled like old newspaper with headlines that no longer apply.
Dennis Rader’s pastor was placed in a consternating situation. A man he trusted and depended on, a man he thought loved God, was instead harboring the antithesis of the faith he supposedly embodied. If the core of Christianity is self-sacrificing love, in Rader he now had someone who sacrificed others to feed his own self-love. It would be as if Jesus came down to consume and sublimate, rather than freely serve and offer himself as a ransom for many.
How does a pastor properly react to this wolf in the fold? How do you love a self-confessed murderer who, at core, does not seem repentant? The pastor continued his visits and refused to abandon Rader, but I do not know what they discussed while they were alone, or the tension that crackled between them during each meeting.
There was some speculation that Rader wanted to get caught. That he should not have been caught because he was smarter than that. That he could have laid low and died in anonymity, no one (except God of course) the wiser. That his resumed games with the police showed that something in him wanted to expose his duplicity and somehow find healing. That perhaps he was in the process of being redeemed and was moved by God to give himself up.
It’s a nice dream, but after watching some of the psychologist’s interview with Rader, I’m not so sure. Rader apologized for his crimes in open court, he expressed remorse verbally for what he had done, but the coldly clinical demeanor that unsettled many in the courtroom was only more obvious in the privacy of his cell.
Perhaps we cannot assume how someone should behave or speak in a stressful situation, and certainly people have been unfairly judged by an unrealistic standard, but I think that it’s fair to say that a repentant man is a broken man – one consumed by sorrow and grief for what he has done. He does not beg for mercy because he knows he deserves none, and in fact offers to pay to the fullest extent of the law.
Those interviews did not show a broken man, nor even a shaken man. His demeanor was as one sitting with a friend in a bar, chatting about life over his beer stein, his descriptions and observations of his own crimes as impersonal and detailed as a geek bragging about his home computer system. It wasn’t a show or a mask, he was as cool as the proverbial cucumber, and he seemed to revel in providing countless details about his personal experience as the BTK killed -- his thoughts, his feelings, his careful plans, his intelligent execution of them. He was a man who could not stop talking about himself, a man who might as well been showcased on Jerry Springer if he would not have been incarcerated.
And we know Rader still has the capacity for tears, because he did break down once or twice – when discussing how his terrible mistakes would now result in him spending the rest of his life behind bars. How he had now lost everything (family, freedom, respect, authority) he once had.
He wept solely about his own loss.
There is redemption available to every man – I believe that, I have to believe that – but in Dennis Rader I see nothing but an empty shell of a human being. A self-absorbed vacuum that consumes others in order to fill itself, yet never succeeds in banishing its own emptiness. If the Spirit was ever at work there, it currently is speechless.
I had followed the case for a number of years, since the oddest thing was simply that BTK had stopped communications with the police and seemingly vanished, despite being someone who behaviorally would be extremely unlikely to stop killing on his own.
Then came the resurfacing of BTK, after so many years, and his own audacity and hubris resulting in his capture. (It seems odd that a man so intelligent would be so ignorant of basic computer technology, or at least not be cautious enough to avoid anything that could potentially earmark him for the police. BTK had spent his entire “career,” supposedly, being cautious and meticulous.)
Whatever the case, after his capture, his wife and children are put through the wringer. What does it mean to discover that the man who supposedly cared for you, protected you, the man to whose authority you submitted, blithely murdered not just women but children in order to satisfy his own internal cravings? It’s like stepping into toxic quicksand, all foundation suddenly melting away under your feet. Your past – or at least, a large part of it – was nothing but a fabrication.
That story does not have a happy ending, as his wife quickly moved to divorce him and pick up her life elsewhere. Can she ever “forgive” him, and if so, what exactly does that mean? What would it look like? Trust was not just shattered but trampled, torn, spit on, and crumpled like old newspaper with headlines that no longer apply.
Dennis Rader’s pastor was placed in a consternating situation. A man he trusted and depended on, a man he thought loved God, was instead harboring the antithesis of the faith he supposedly embodied. If the core of Christianity is self-sacrificing love, in Rader he now had someone who sacrificed others to feed his own self-love. It would be as if Jesus came down to consume and sublimate, rather than freely serve and offer himself as a ransom for many.
How does a pastor properly react to this wolf in the fold? How do you love a self-confessed murderer who, at core, does not seem repentant? The pastor continued his visits and refused to abandon Rader, but I do not know what they discussed while they were alone, or the tension that crackled between them during each meeting.
There was some speculation that Rader wanted to get caught. That he should not have been caught because he was smarter than that. That he could have laid low and died in anonymity, no one (except God of course) the wiser. That his resumed games with the police showed that something in him wanted to expose his duplicity and somehow find healing. That perhaps he was in the process of being redeemed and was moved by God to give himself up.
It’s a nice dream, but after watching some of the psychologist’s interview with Rader, I’m not so sure. Rader apologized for his crimes in open court, he expressed remorse verbally for what he had done, but the coldly clinical demeanor that unsettled many in the courtroom was only more obvious in the privacy of his cell.
Perhaps we cannot assume how someone should behave or speak in a stressful situation, and certainly people have been unfairly judged by an unrealistic standard, but I think that it’s fair to say that a repentant man is a broken man – one consumed by sorrow and grief for what he has done. He does not beg for mercy because he knows he deserves none, and in fact offers to pay to the fullest extent of the law.
Those interviews did not show a broken man, nor even a shaken man. His demeanor was as one sitting with a friend in a bar, chatting about life over his beer stein, his descriptions and observations of his own crimes as impersonal and detailed as a geek bragging about his home computer system. It wasn’t a show or a mask, he was as cool as the proverbial cucumber, and he seemed to revel in providing countless details about his personal experience as the BTK killed -- his thoughts, his feelings, his careful plans, his intelligent execution of them. He was a man who could not stop talking about himself, a man who might as well been showcased on Jerry Springer if he would not have been incarcerated.
And we know Rader still has the capacity for tears, because he did break down once or twice – when discussing how his terrible mistakes would now result in him spending the rest of his life behind bars. How he had now lost everything (family, freedom, respect, authority) he once had.
He wept solely about his own loss.
There is redemption available to every man – I believe that, I have to believe that – but in Dennis Rader I see nothing but an empty shell of a human being. A self-absorbed vacuum that consumes others in order to fill itself, yet never succeeds in banishing its own emptiness. If the Spirit was ever at work there, it currently is speechless.
posted by Fortunato at 11:52 AM
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