In 1992, when I was seventeen years old, I came across the prison address of John Wayne Gacy, serial killer of thirty-three young men. Convicted and sentenced to die (he was executed in 1994 by lethal injection), I decided to send a letter to Gacy on death row, just to see if he would respond. I told two of my friends about the plan and together we drafted a letter and sent it off. I was too chickenshit to list my own address for reply, so we listed the address of my friend James and waited to see if he would write back to us.

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Daveb’s been following the news on the recent arrest of the guy they call the BTK Killer a.k.a. Dennis Rader. For those totally in the dark or unwilling to read the news stories, Rader, arrested recently has confessed to a series of murder that occurred in Wichita, Kansas between 1974 and 1991. Standing for “Bond, Torture, Kill”, he pissed off a lot of people in Kansas and managed to get away with it for a damn long time.

Still, Rader was/is a poser. He’s just a dried-up pissy little control freak who wants to be big, powerful and mysterious, instead of a jerk-off town dogcatcher. So he became a copycat, mimicking his heroes as best as his dull little brain would allow. Echoing the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam and Jack the Ripper, Rader sent police and a local TV news station several missives and clues over the years including this word puzzle, filled with hidden clues.

Word puzzles are fun stuff, especially when serial killers make them. Rader, may be a total poser wannabe without any originality, but at least he gave us a something to do on a lazy Sunday morning, after the crossword puzzle’s been strangled and buried under the flowerbed.