In today’s NYT, we’ve got a deeper story about Witchita’s BTK Killer, who was finally caught last week. Couple lessons:
1. It’s the sticklers, the true believers, and the inflexibly “correct” that we have to worry about:
“He looked for absolutely everything, and he must have enforced every rule there ever was – just because he could, I guess,” said Barbara Walters, 69, a retired auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, who challenged a $25 ticket that Mr. Rader issued in 1998, saying her dog, Shadow, was running loose.
and
Rhonda Reno said she watched one day as Mr. Rader wandered on the lawn of a neighbor who was ill and unable to mow the grass. Walking the grass with a yardstick, she said, he measured for infractions. “I never trusted him,” said Jim Reno, her husband. “There were two people I keep an eye on in this block and one was him.”
2. Labor laws often make us go through goofy steps in order to terminate municipal employees who should probably be fired:
Park City, meanwhile, quietly fired Mr. Rader last week, saying only that he had failed to show up for work or to call.