Wichita ? Confessed BTK serial killer Dennis Rader graphically described his crimes but glossed over the sexual fantasies that motivated them, prompting at least one criminologist to say Rader might have been sexually repressed.

“He glossed that over, suggesting that perhaps he had some sexual inhibitions – a streak of Puritanism, a dose of sexual repression in his past,” Michael Rustigan, a California criminologist who has closely watched the BTK case, said Tuesday. “How can one be so lacking in remorse describing the killings, yet glossing over and not being specific about his sexuality? I found that missing in his report. There seems to be some masking of his sexual perversions.”

In a chilling courtroom confession, Rader, 60, talked about how his sexual fantasies drove him to kill 10 people in the Wichita area between 1974 and 1991. BTK – a self-styled moniker for “Bind, Torture, Kill” – taunted media and police with cryptic messages that became increasingly frequent in the months before Rader’s arrest.

He described in detail, for example, the 1974 killing of 11-year-old Josephine Otero. He strangled her parents and her 9-year-old brother before hanging the girl from a sewer pipe in the basement.

“I had sexual advances, but that was after she was hung,” Rader calmly told the judge Monday.

Dist. Atty. Nola Foulston called the killings “sexually sadistic murders” and said Rader was not charged with other crimes, such as burglary and sexual assault, because the statute of limitations had run out for all but the murders. Foulston said she planned to present evidence at Rader’s sentencing hearing in August to give the court a basis for the harshest sentence possible.

“The majority of serial killers, and certainly the ones most fascinating to Americans, are sexual sadists.” said Jack Levin, a professor with the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence at Boston’s Northeastern University.

Among them is Angelo Buono Jr., whose gruesome killing of Los Angeles women in the 1970s earned him the nickname Hillside Strangler. Another is John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of luring 33 young men and boys to his Chicago area home for sex and then strangling them between 1972 and 1978.

Depths of depravity

Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist at New York University Medical Center, is working on a project to measure human depravity. His research is intended to provide courts across the nation with a standardized scale with which to decide whether a crime was depraved. Some 39 states now use terms such as depravity, heinous, atrocious or cruel when weighing the severity of sentences.

“This crime is unusual in that BTK intended to terrorize this community. He caused his victims grotesque suffering. He intended to mentally traumatize his victims. He was indifferent to their suffering after the fact and he experienced a thrill from the crime itself,” Welner said. “It is very seldom you will find cases that have all those elements present.”

Steven Egger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said what Rader calls sexual fantasy is his way to excuse his behavior, at least to some extent.

“The sexual component in serial killers is more of an instrument in which they fantasize the method they will have control over the victim,” Egger said. “Basically, serial killing is all about control and power – the ultimate power being whether to let a person live or die and when you are going to kill the person.”

Egger said he did not believe serial killers were capable of remorse. He noted that Rader referred to his victims as “projects,” indicating he no longer saw them as individuals but as objects to satisfy his desires.

Rader’s attorneys have said that any statements of remorse by Rader would be more appropriate at his sentencing.

Rader remorseless

Rustigan, the California criminologist, said he was riveted to Rader’s televised confession. He said what struck him the most was the cold, businesslike manner in which Rader chronicled his killings.

“Even Jeffrey Dahmer expressed periodic remorse as he was recounting his methods of murder, and Dahmer even indicated he deserved to be executed in his interviews – so we picked up some glimmers of emotion,” Rustigan said.

Ted Bundy choked up once while recalling the murders in Florida of a teenage girl, putting his head down and displaying some shame, he said.

“But Rader seemed to be relishing the intelligent reporting of his murders. He seemed to be almost acting like a trained attorney,” Rustigan said. “He was enjoying his day in court without the glimmerings of remorse that we saw in Bundy or Dahmer.”