My Boss was the BTK Killer... I was the Next Victim [Paperback]

Mary Capps (Author), Jim Dobkins (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Mary Capps worked 6-1/2 years under the supervision of Dennis Rader in the Compliance Department for the City of Park City, Kansas. Rader was her boss until his arrest in February 2005 as the BTK (Bind Torture Kill) serial killer, confessing ten brutal murders, over 17 years, 1974 to 1991. The realization that he had targeted her as his eleventh murder victim sent her into Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. She reveals things about Dennis Rader not previously made public, including the time her aunt and another Park City employee saved his life; how he terrorized her on the job; how he might have been poisoning her; and documents why she believes she was Project Broadwater -- Dennis Rader's intended eleventh murder victim. Capps reveals why Park City Management unfailingly sided with her serial killer supervisor instead of her when she filed grievances about her boss' erratic, intimidating behavior towards her. She interweaves the despicable acts of BTK with events happening simultaneously in her life; from little girl daydreams to tormenting nightmares. Capps gives a unique insight into the man and monster before his exposure as BTK. Mary Capps began having horrible nightmares and premonitions of impending danger during the final months she worked under Rader's supervision. Those nightmares intensified when she realized he had been planning to murder her. It was her own Nightmare on Elm Street -- she desperately needed to sleep but was afraid to sleep because she knew what awaited her. And what about the physical symptoms she experienced many times djuring the afternoons -- after feeling fine when she went to work? The leg cramps. The sudden trouble breathing. The unexpected loss of memory -- all symptoms like those caused by a certain illegal date rape drug. Was her boss poisoning her? Mary gives two plausible ways he could have done so. Was it a miracle when all of the symptoms cleared up immediately after her last day of working with him? Mary does not think so.

From the Publisher

Sometimes evil is so out in the open that it goes unnoticed. Thirty-one years had elapsed from the time Dennis Rader bound, tortured and killed four members of the Otero family on January 15, 1974 until his arrest February 25, 2005. He confessed to ten murders committed over 17 years.

When I asked former Park City policeman Dan Lickey how Rader was able to pull this off, he shook his head. "Plain dumb luck."

Probably no man was hated more by Rader than Lickey, who along with others at City Hall had dismissed Rader as being a weirdo who was not good at socializing with people. Looking back, Lickey's biggest regret is that on one particular occasion he did not recognize Rader's actions for what they really were--the demeanor of a man who was hiding something. This occasion will be revealed later in this book.

I interviewed Lickey and others during a one-week visit to Kansas in November 2006 in which I finally got to meet Mary Capps in person. Her zest for life and the twinkle in her eyes gave no hint of her months-long bout with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which she'd been diagnosed as having in the wake of her boss' arrest as the BTK serial killer. She appeared as fully recovered as is possible. Mary's dad, George, former Police Chief of Park City, called Rader a "strange ranger...a lazy ass...a coward." George Capps said his biggest regret was "not doing more to get City Hall to take action with regard to Mary's complaints about Dennis. I did not want people to think I was favoring Mary because she was my daughter." His face reddened and his neck veins strained moments after beginning to discuss City Hall's refusal to erase Mary's negative job reviews posted by Rader. "How would you feel if a serial killer gave you a bad job review...and his supervisor would not even consider expunging it from your employment records AFTER the guy was arrested as a serial killer? It's just not right. She will be a victim of Dennis Rader as long as those job performance reviews remain on file for any prospective employer to check out." While I was in Park City and vicinity, Mary gave me a tour of Dennis' neighborhood. A lasting impression I have is of facing five particular houses. Picture this in your mind--the house to the far right is the house where Rader lived with his wife Paula and their children. Four houses to the far left on the corner is the house, 6254 Independence, in which Rader murdered Marine Hedge in 1985--and in the house right in the middle is where Paula lived with her mother. "My God," I thought. "How could any woman live two doors down from the house she'd lived in so many years in the presence of the BTK killer and two doors from the house in which he committed one of the murders? In my mind this did not, and still does not compute. (The house Dennis Rader lived in was demolished on March 7, 2007 as the first step by Park City to create a new entryway to Jardine Memorial Park.)

One question I asked of nearly everyone I talked to in Park City and neighboring communities was, "Do you think Paula knew or suspected her husband was the BTK killer?" The response I most often got was, "I don't see how she could not have suspected him, especially with all those things he kept in their bedroom closet." Violet Capps, Mary's mother, had a more direct assessment. "She's either on the moon or in denial about her husband. How could she not know? She had to be curious about what was in that closet." I asked her, "What would you do if you found out your husband was a serial killer?" "I'd turn him in in a heartbeat." George said, "We shouldn't jump to conclusions about Paula. We have no way of knowing what she knew or was thinking." Violet got up from a chair at the dinette table and walked the several feet onto the back patio of their home to puff a cigarette. That was when George's neck veins began to strain. I said, "I don`t want you to have a heart attack." Violet heard my comment through the open arcadia door, and laughed. "He always does that when he gets worked up about something." Mary's parents wear well their many years of marriage. He's inches over 6-feet tall and in good physical shape; she's a short wisp of a woman. Kind of a Mutt and Jeff duo. Good people. This book, although it does intertwine the evil deeds of Dennis Rader with various time periods of Mary's life, it is not so much about the BTK killer as it is about a woman whose innocent childhood hopes and dreams morphed into terrible nightmares under his work supervision. The nightmares didn't stop with Rader's arrest on February 25, 2005. They intensified. Literally crippled by stress and fear, months of psychological counseling enabled her to start reclaiming her life, and a gradual return toward being the person she was before her hire to work for Rader. Having heard her story, I concur that she indeed was the next victim. Being supervisor in the two-person Compliance Dept for the City of Park City was the perfect cover. It afforded the opportunity for Rader to keep his nastiness against Mary secretive and tormenting. There is strong reason to believe that Rader was gradually poisoning her to affect her enough physically and mentally that she would quit her job. And then he would kill her, as he suspected she was getting too close to figuring out that he was the BTK killer.

Jim Dobkins May 18, 2007

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: UCS Press; 1st edition (June 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943247098
• ISBN-13: 978-0943247090
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #718,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Working With the Enemy, September 14, 2007

By	Scott Coblio "kookoo guy" (West Hollywood, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: My Boss was the BTK Killer... I was the Next Victim (Paperback)

Having never heard of the BTK killer, I opened this book without any knowledge or pre-existing interest in the case. In fact, I didn't even know until partway through what the initials BTK stand for ("bind, torture, kill"). But "My Boss Was the BTK Killer" draws you in from the beginning and holds you til the end, in a quite unexpected way.

Interspersed with Ms Capp's diary-like account of working with Dennis Rader, are transcripts of his confessions detailing the various murders. It's always repellent to hear a killer sound indifferent, or--more offensively--gloating about their atrocities with no apparent display of remorse, empathy or objectivity about what they've done. Of course, this is also what makes them fascinating. Like distillations of the predatorial instinct run amok, they are society's cancer gene--they get a signal from their brain instructing them to murder someone, and once they've completed the task, they think to themselves "I've done a good job today. Finally, I can sleep." In short, they are pure killing machines.

Mary Capp's first hand account of working with the murderer for six and a half years is told in such an informal, talky way that at first I thought it would fail to create a suitably spooky atmosphere. Accounts of pleasure-killing, when detailed in books, are usually mounted in a language that elevates the sordid details into the prose of gothic fiction. This makes them go down easier--we feel less depraved for enjoying it. Ms Capp's narrative voice, however, is chatty and real--like a journal entry, or a transcript of a telephone conversation between friends. At times, her habit of lapsing into extrannea can be disconcerting--her constant references to Diet Pepsi, musing about the plastic wrappers on her cigarette packs, naming the guys she went to every high school dance with etc., all seem tangential and off the point. Isn't there a killer lurking?

But as I read on, I realized that when evil people really ARE in your life, this is the way it is. All the banal things continue to happen around them, and their presence doesn't "enchant" the atmosphere. But then in private, when no one's watching, they morph from those everyday guises--a surly supervisor, in this case--into monsters that surpass our wildest nightmares. Only to return to their former, seemingly innocuous personas again the next day.

Hence the most daunting aspect of this book; How evil hides inside the banality of everyday life, interwoven with the fabric of it so that you might miss it at first glance. You might even miss it if you're working for it, living with it or married to it, drinking your Diet Pepsis and fiddling with the cellophane wrap on your cigarettes. You might even miss it until it kills you.

Consider "My Boss was the BTK Killer" your ticket to terror from the front lines. Eerie, chilling, unforgivable, unforgettable. But above all, consider it a warning. Evil hides in plain sight.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I quit halfway through, November 14, 2007

By	Laurie Miller - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: My Boss was the BTK Killer... I was the Next Victim (Paperback)

This book was one of the most poorly written and edited books I have ever read. It told me very little about Dennis Rader and a whole lot about Mary Capps. What I read of the book (about half)told me all about Mary's life, her kids and her growing up, with an occasional diatribe about Dennis Rader and how he ruined her life with a sentence that followed similar to "but more about that later." She supposedly attempts to tell her life story along a time line which runs with what BTK was reported to be doing at that particular time in her life, but goes off on too many rabbit trails. It certainly is not worth $14.00; in fact, in my opinion it isn't worth 50 cents.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Eleventh BTK Victim, January 12, 2009

By	Brendan Collins (Tulsa, OK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: My Boss was the BTK Killer... I was the Next Victim (Paperback)

Only Mary Capps could have written this book.

Part memoir, part thriller, this book combines the most unlikely of the two genres. Mary "Mary Nova" Capps worked under Dennis "BTK Killer" Rader, the notorious Kansas serial killer, as a compliance officer. Throughout her six and a half year tenure, she felt as if Rader had singled her out for death. One year, for Christmas, Rader gave her an ornament of a snowman wearing a hat and scarf. "I look back on certai...more Only Mary Capps could have written this book.

Part memoir, part thriller, this book combines the most unlikely of the two genres. Mary "Mary Nova" Capps worked under Dennis "BTK Killer" Rader, the notorious Kansas serial killer, as a compliance officer. Throughout her six and a half year tenure, she felt as if Rader had singled her out for death. One year, for Christmas, Rader gave her an ornament of a snowman wearing a hat and scarf. "I look back on certain incidents," Mary Capps writes, "and wonder how close Dennis [Rader] was to choking the crap out of me."

(Fortunately for her, the killer was arrested before he ever got the chance to choke the crap out of her.)

Mary Capps has bad dreams, and recounts several of them for posterity to demonstrate how her subconscious was warning her of the impending doom. Mary Capps has circumstantial evidence to show that Rader was poisoning her Diet Pepsi with "tranq" (the substance used by compliance officers to tranquilize aggressive dogs). Mary Capps would also come home to find her front porch light regularly unscrewed. And once, Rader stood in front of her office door in a menacing manner. All of this leads to her case that Mary Capps was hand-chosen by Rader as his eleventh victim. Indeed, she has her mother's assent on this point.

"No, I wasn't murdered," Mary Capps admits, "but I sure in hell am a surviving victim." In fact, he even gave her a negative work performance review prior to his arrest - a review the municipality of Park City allegedly refuses to expurge from its files.

But this book isn't entirely about Dennis Rader and his crimes against Mary Capps. Mary Capps also shares some of her own biography with readers: she grew up with "Happy Days" on television, and listened to Bruce Springsteen in 1978 (after growing weary of Paul McCartney's Wings). She went through several serious relationships, and other personal crises. And as a treat for the reader, she delves into some intimate personal moments between her and her three children: "Our joke between my boys and myself is that I tell them, 'Don't make me get a ladder so that I can slap you.' And then we bust up laughing. One, because of the joke; and two, because I probably only ever struck my three children once or twice in their lifetime, but I can yell! That's another joke between the boys. I won't hit them, but I can sure scare the hell out of them when I raise my voice, that's when they know I mean business."

And with this book, Mary Capps truly does "mean business."

Although tormented on a daily basis by her psychotic boss, Mary Capps also takes the time to share a little seen side of Dennis Rader: his perceived sense of humour. In one instance, when Mary Capps was ordered to condemn a home which was soiled with "three inches of cat poop on the stove, and on the floor in every room," Rader acknowledged her efforts with a bumper sticker that read: SO MANY CATS, SO FEW RECIPES.

One criticism I have read of this book is that Mary Capps delves into her own history as well as into the specifics of the case. While it is true that there is a lot of focus on the author, perhaps an answer can be found between the lines: "In short," Mary Capps writes, "Dennis Rader is all about Dennis Rader."

Why, then, should Mary Capps be all about Dennis Rader, and not herself to some extent? Too many people have called her crazy in her lifetime - and finally Mary Capps has the means to show them who the crazy one really is.