He’s pleading guilty

Frequent readers will know how obsessed I have been over the years about BTK. Imagine my shock — but not necessarily surprise — to read that he’s plead guilty to ten counts of murder this morning:

In an extraordinary hearing, Rader said he killed because he wanted to fulfill sexual fantasies. He described the killings in detail in a voice devoid of emotion.

He started by telling how he killed four members of the Otero family. After cutting the phone lines at the house, he nearly lost his nerve and left, he said, but "the door opened, and I was in."

Thirty minutes into the hearing, he was still describing how he murdered the Oteros — two adults and two children.

And on it goes. A full transcript’s supposed to be available soon, but the sheer matter-of-fact way that Rader evidently described his crimes is nothing short of chilling.

Sentencing is scheduled for August 17, and it’s pretty likely he’ll elude the death penalty and spend the rest of his life in jail.

UPDATE: I just watched CNN’s partial video transcript (thanks, Jeff.) And what else is there to say but…holy shit. Chilling doesn’t even describe this. It’s almost as if Rader had a running, detailed movie in his head, and the times when he paused to remember a name or describe how he stabbed Kathryn Bright or tied up the Oteros, he was reliving the incidents in his mind for what had to be at least the thousandth time. If not more.

Never mind that it’s readily apparent that Rader was putting on a show. The cameras were there, the knowledge the potentially millions of people were watching him describe his greatest fantasies come true — what more could a serial killer ask for, really?

And all I kept thinking was that Hannah Arendt was right, yet again.