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"Hey/The winds of change may blow around you/But that will always be so/When love is pain it can devour you/When you are never alone...
WARNING: THIS PROPOSAL CONTAINS POTENTIALLY DISTURBING DETAILS
What’s the work?[]
Mindhunter is a Netflix original series which ran for two seasons before being screwed over cancelled in 2023. It follows the development of criminal profiling in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Special Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench (fictionalized versions of real-life FBI legends John Douglas and Robert Ressler) interview serial killers around the United States in order to gain insight into the mind of a killer and, with any luck, find a way to apply that insight to catching more killers.
Unfortunately, there’s a flaw in their methodology. No matter how much they try to cover all bases, at the end of the day their findings are based entirely on talking to the killers who got caught. What happens if a new kind of killer comes along, one who doesn’t share the same common, easy-to-spot characteristics as the usual dysfunctional psychopaths? Such a killer, if they did encounter one, would be nigh-impossible to catch using their normal methods; profiling’s no use if the killer you’re looking for doesn’t have any of the traits you’ve profiled. But what are the chances of that happening?
Who is he? What has he done?[]
Dennis Rader (his name is never given, but it’s pretty clear that’s who he’s supposed to be) is by all accounts a perfectly normal man who works as an ADT installer in Park City, Kansas. We see him in several vignettes throughout the series, which show him going about his day and doing seemingly harmless things like posting letters, practicing his knot-tying skills, and checking the security on client’s houses. No harm in that, right?
Or maybe there is. You see, at the same time as we’re seeing this, a serial killer who calls himself “B.T.K.” (short for Bind, Torture, Kill) is terrorizing the people of Park City and nearby Wichita. His first (confirmed) attack is against a woman named Julie Otero and her 11-year-old daughter Josephine, who he stalks for several weeks before breaking into their home, only to find that Julie’s husband Joseph and son Joseph Jr. are also home. So he ties all four of them up, then fixes plastic bags over the adult’s heads and forces the children to watch as their parents suffocate. He then does the same to 9-year-old Joseph Jr., pulling up a chair to watch as he suffocates to death for six minutes, before taking Josephine down into the basement, hanging her from a rafter and masturbating over her as she suffocates.
Over the next few years, B.T.K. continues his spree. His next attack is against a young woman named Kathy Bright, whose home he breaks into before attacking her and her brother Kevin. After tying them both up, he takes Kathy into the next room and starts strangling her, getting an erection from it, before coming back in, trying to strangle Kevin and shooting him repeatedly in the head when he fights back. Then he goes back to strangling Kathy, but Kevin is still alive and manages to escape. B.T.K. realizes the cops will be there soon, so he stabs Kathy to death and makes his escape. Kevin survives his injuries but is left with permanent nerve damage.
B.T.K. goes on to kill two more women, Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox, by breaking into their homes, tying them to their beds and slowly strangling them to death (these murders are focused on less than the last two, which is why there’s less description here). He also breaks into the home of a woman named Anna Williams, but leaves after a few hours when she doesn’t come home, later sending her her driver’s licence in the mail to show her how close she came to being killed.
By the time of the show, B.T.K.’s started writing letters to the media bragging about his crimes, complete with detailed sketches of his tied-up victims, which leads the local police to call the F.B.I. This is where Holden and Bill come in, as they are asked to create a profile of B.T.K. in the hope of narrowing down the suspect pool. During the investigation, Bill remembers a case from the next-door state of Iowa they investigated earlier in the series: a single mother named Ada Jeffries and her preteen son were attacked by an unknown assailant, who tied Ada up, forced her son to watch as he anally raped her with a broomstick, forced her to watch as he did the same to her son, stabbed both of them to death, and masturbated onto their bodies. Bill notices that the victims were bound in the same way as the Kansas victims and seemingly concludes that B.T.K. was responsible for these murders as well.
Holden and Bill try and build a profile of their killer, which is hampered by the flaw I mentioned in the opening: although all the evidence points to B.T.K. being an ordinary suburban man who can hold down a job and form relationships with other people, Holden insists he must be a dysfunctional psychopath who can barely function in the real world based on the history of the other killers he’s spoken to. As such, they never do get close to finding B.T.K. and are soon taken away from the case by another high-profile killer who they have more success with (in real life B.T.K. would go on to kill three more people after this point before he got caught over a decade later, but since the show was cancelled we don’t get to see this, though the plotline likely would have continued if the series had).
With all this additional information, it’s time to take another look at the vignettes, which appear at the beginning or end of almost every episode. They show Dennis Rader, an ordinary suburban man with a steady job and a wife and kid, posting letters from locations where B.T.K.’s letters were posted from, practicing how to tie knots (with the knots appearing to resemble the ones used by B.T.K.), surveilling random houses in his van (B.T.K. is believed to stalk his victims before his attacks), checking the security on women’s houses under the guise of his job for ADT, and assembling a kit which includes rubber gloves, a gun, and a roll of tape. One shows him seemingly waiting in someone’s house in the middle of the night before eventually leaving, which is all but stated to be him lying in wait at Anna Williams’ house. The season one finale gives us our first real look at his true nature when, implicitly after reading a newspaper report about Holden’s success profiling killers, he burns violent sketches of tied-up women in his front yard, in a scene which corresponds with the start of B.T.K.’s hiatus after killing Nancy Fox. The following season shows him strangling himself for sexual gratification before being caught by his wife, drawing more sketches of tied-up women which resemble the ones from the B.T.K. letters, burying what’s heavily implied to be the murder kit I mentioned earlier in his garden, and stalking a woman in his van before leaving in frustration when her husband shows up. One of his final scenes finally confirms what was only hinted at until now: Rader is shown having trouble printing a letter, but is reluctant to accept help because he doesn’t want the other guy to see what he’s written. When it does print out he jerks it out of the other guy’s view and we see that the “B.T.K.” signature is written on the back. Rader’s final scene, and the final scene of the series, shows him checking into a motel room and choking himself while looking at newspaper reports about B.T.K.
Heinous Standard[]
FINAL WARNING: THIS SECTION IN PARTICULAR CONTAINS POTENTIALLY DISTURBING DETAILS
This is the biggest obstacle to B.T.K.’s status. Mindhunter, being a show about catching serial killers, naturally has quite a high heinous standard, with many similarly revolting villains making an appearance.
- Edmund Kemper murdered six college-age girls and raped their severed heads. He also did the same to his mother, although in fairness she had abused him for years, and killed three other people including his grandparents (though again, this was after they abused him).
- Dwight Taylor beats and molests two elderly women, killing one and leaving the other in a coma for a week, and disembowels their pet dogs.
- Montie Rissell raped and murdered five women and already had a history of rapes before that.
- Benji Barnwright and Frank Janderman savagely mutilated and murdered Benji’s fiancée, raping her purely to hurt and degrade her, stabbing her in the vagina, cutting off her breasts, and scalping her.
- Jerry Brudos murdered four women, raped three both before and after killing them, humiliated them beforehand by forcing them to pose for nude photos, and kept their severed body parts to masturbate to.
- Richard Speck massacred eight women in one night and raped one of them just because he could.
- Darrell Gene Devier raped a 12-year-old girl and crushed her skull with a rock.
- David Berkowitz (who, incidentally, is cited as an inspiration in Rader’s letters) shot fifteen people for sexual gratification, killing six and wounding nine.
- William Pierce raped and murdered four women (five in real life) and killed four more people in robberies.
- William Henry Hance raped and murdered three women.
- Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley (plus another accomplice who we never see) raped, tortured and murdered 28 teenage boys. Corll is also implied to have sexually abused his two accomplices, who were both young boys, and tried to rape, torture and kill Henley for disobeying him before ordering him to rape and kill a 15-year-old girl while he did the same to his intended 29th victim.
- Charles Manson and Tex Watson slaughtered seven people, including a pregnant woman, and may or may not have been trying to start a race war.
- Paul Bateson probably dismembered six men and threw them in the river (and even if it wasn’t him, somebody did it) and stabbed his boyfriend to death pretty much on a whim.
- Wayne Williams is the prime suspect in the murders of 29-30 people, most of them children (including a 12-year-old girl who was molested and had a pair of panties stuffed down her throat, although he probably didn’t do that one), and although it’s never made clear how many he actually killed (as it’s heavily implied some of them were killed by a paedophile ring) it’s clear he killed quite a few of them and the police ultimately link him to 24 of the murders.
But despite ample competition, I still think Rader stands out. Because although he may not have the highest kill count (that dubious distinction goes to either Corll with 28 or Williams who likely has somewhere in the twenties, but could have anywhere from 2 – 30) the sheer torture his victims go through isn’t matched by anyone in the show apart from Corll (who doesn’t count due to lack of personality btw). Most of the other killers shoot or stab their victims, or maybe they’ll beat them to death. At worst you’ll get Wayne Williams, who chokes the life out of his victims with his bare hands. Rader, meanwhile, torturously suffocates his victims while prolonging their end for as long as he can manage (Joseph Otero Jr. took six minutes to die, and he was the weakest victim), in the case of the Otero family making the victim’s children watch while he does so before doing the same to them and masturbating over them as they die. Most of the other killers rape their victims, before or sometimes after killing them; but Rader is the only one who violates a preteen boy with a broomstick while making his mother watch, having previously made him watch as he did the same to her, and then ejaculates on them while he’s killing them. Wayne Williams is similar, as he also strangles minors to death and is implied to get off on it, but his crimes don’t contain a sexual element to the same extent as Rader’s (although Holden theorizes that he gets sexually aroused from it, only one of the dozens of victims was violated in any way, and that was one of the ones he probably didn’t kill) and he certainly doesn’t make the kid’s mothers watch as he abuses them, or vice versa. Even Corll never did anything like that.
Ultimately, in terms of sheer nauseating sexual deviancy, the only killer whose crimes are depicted in a comparatively sickening light is Ed Kemper, who gives us a lovely monologue about the difficulties of raping his victim’s severed heads, which he did to six co-ed girls and his mother (he didn’t bother with his other three victims). However, while I’m certainly not defending necrophilia, Kemper’s most nauseating acts were done to people who were already dead and unable to suffer. Rader does his deviant acts while his victims are still alive, which gives him the edge on Kemper “humiliating” (as he puts it) the bodies of those he’s already killed.
Mitigating Factors[]
Rader has no mitigating factors. He has a wife and daughter, but he never shows any affection for them (in real life he molested his daughter, though this doesn’t come up in the show) and it’s explicitly stated that he’s only using them as a “normal” cover for his depraved fantasy life. It’s a recurring point in the show that many killers become that way due to abuse as children, but this is never hinted at with Rader (who as far as we know was not abused in real life). We don’t technically see him killing anyone, but we do see the aftermath when the murders are investigated by Holden and Bill, and we see him making preparations for his crimes, staking out his victims, lying in wait at Anna Williams’ house, disposing of evidence, drawing sketches of his crimes, writing and sending letters where he confesses to the murders, and following news reports to re-live his crimes. And although we don’t get to know him very well, we get a detailed psychological profile of B.T.K. which establishes him as a control freak and sexual sadist who has a pathological need to re-live his crimes, and much of this is supported by what we see him doing during the vignettes, so he has enough personality.