Unholy Messenger: The Life and Crimes of the Btk Serial Killer by Stephen Singular
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is an amazing detailed and revealing study of the psychopath next door - or maybe hiding in the closet - drawn from extensive interviews with Rader's pastor, congregation, detectives, and psychologists who worked the case, and from his detailed thirty-two-hour confession. The true bogeyman of homicidal home invasion while also working at ADT and (later) a canine officer and even Lutheran congregation chief officer is all too much and very American, somehow. This is the kind of monster that is truly fearsome: fitting in and hiding in plain sight.
For the closing material, I think some where-are-they-now stories would have been good, since the crimes are so recent. However, a lot was given over to discuss the possible physiological basis for criminal motivation without being able to connect it to BTW, like it was successfully to Arthur J. Shawcross in [b:The Misbegotten Son|230864|The Misbegotten Son|Jack Olsen|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388771585s/230864.jpg|1520133]. This is a needed line of inquiry and makes me think of Kurt Vonnegut ('Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow ...), but possibly more relevant and related here is the popular Christian mysticism that allowed him to self-justify within a matrix of demonic possession and acceptable levels of repentance.
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