WICHITA, KAN. – The man accused of being the BTK serial killer pleaded guilty yesterday to 10 murders that spread fear across Wichita beginning in the 1970s, recounting with a chilling, almost professorial air how he “trolled” for victims and then shot, stabbed, or strangled them.

Dennis Rader, a 60-year-old former code inspector and church president with a wife and children, said he killed to satisfy his sexual fantasies.

In an account utterly devoid of emotion, Rader described how he used a “hit kit” consisting of guns, rope, handcuffs, and tape in a briefcase or a bowling bag. He described his killings as “projects” and his victims as “targets.” He talked of his first four victims almost as animals, saying he decided to “put them down.” And he said he offered one victim a glass of water to calm her down before putting a bag over her head and strangling her.

Unfailingly courteous, Rader helpfully corrected the judge on some matters, clarified others, and at one point launched into an almost scholarly discourse on the mind and habits of a serial killer. “If you’ve read much about serial killers, they go through what they call different phases. In the trolling stage, basically, you’re looking for a victim at that time,” he told the judge. “You can be trolling for months or years, but once you lock in on a certain person, you become a stalker.”

The man who called himself BTK – for his preferred method, “Bind, Torture, Kill”- cannot get the death penalty because the killings occurred before Kansas adopted capital punishment, but he almost certainly will go to prison for the rest of his life. Each count carries up to life in prison. The guilty pleas came on the day that his trial was supposed to start. Sentencing is August 17.

Those who watched or listened to him in court yesterday were struck by how utterly ordinary he looked – a balding figure in a tie and jacket, with a neatly trimmed goatee and gold wire rimmed glasses – and by the air of detachment with which he recounted his grisly crimes.

“He was so cold about it,” 19-year-old Jared Noble of Wichita, said, who listened on the radio. “The way he described the details – heartless – with no emotion at all.”

For the families of Rader’s victims, the grisly confession answered questions that had haunted them for decades.

The BTK killer taunted the press and police with cryptic messages during a cat-and-mouse game that began after the first murder, in 1974. BTK resurfaced in 2004 after years of silence with a letter to the Wichita Eagle that included photos of a 1986 victim and a photocopy of her missing driver’s license.

That letter was followed by several other cryptic messages and packages. The break in the case came earlier this year after a computer disk the killer sent was traced to Rader’s Lutheran church, where he once served as president.