Dennis Lynn Rader
(born March 9, 1945) is an American
serial killer known as BTK or the BTK Strangler. Rader gave himself the
name "BTK" (for "bind, torture, kill").
Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in the Wichita, Kansas, metro area.
Rader sent taunting letters to police and newspapers
describing the details of his crimes. After a decade-long hiatus, Rader resumed
sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent guilty plea.
He is serving ten consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.
Life and background
Dennis Rader was
born on March 9, 1945, to Dorothea Mae
Rader (née Cook) and William Elvin
Rader. He is one of four sons; his brothers are named Paul, Bill, and Jeff. Though
born in Pittsburg, Kansas, he grew
up in Wichita. His parents both
worked long hours and paid little attention to their children at home; he would
later describe feeling ignored by his mother in particular, and resenting her
for it.
From a young age, Rader harbored sadistic sexual fantasies
about torturing “trapped and helpless”
women. He also exhibited zoosadism by
torturing, killing and hanging small animals.
He acted out sexual fetishes for voyeurism, autoerotic asphyxiation, and
cross-dressing. He would often spy on female neighbors while dressed in women's
clothing, including women's underwear that he had stolen, and masturbate with
ropes or other bindings around his arms and neck. Years later, during his “cooling off” periods between murders, he would take pictures of
himself wearing women's clothes and a female mask while bound. He would later
admit that he was pretending to be his victims as part of a sexual fantasy. He kept his sexual proclivities well-hidden,
however, and was widely regarded in his community as friendly and polite.
Rader attended Kansas
Wesleyan University after high school, but received mediocre grades and
dropped out after one year. He spent 1966–1970 in the United States Air Force. Upon discharge, he moved to Park City, where he worked in the meat
department of a Leekers IGA
supermarket where his mother was a bookkeeper. He married Paula Dietz on May 22, 1971, and they had two children, Kerri and Brian. He attended Butler County Community College in El Dorado, earning an associate degree
in electronics in 1973. He then enrolled
at Wichita State University and
graduated in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in administration of justice.
Rader worked as an assembler for the Coleman Company, an outdoor supply company. He worked at the Wichita-based office of ADT Security Services from 1974 to
1988, where he installed security alarms as part of his job, in many cases for
homeowners concerned about the BTK
killings. Rader was a census field
operations supervisor for the Wichita
area in 1989, before the 1990 federal census.
In May 1991, he became a dogcatcher and compliance officer
in Park City. In this position, neighbors recalled him as
being sometimes overzealous and extremely strict, as well as taking special
pleasure in bullying and harassing single women. One neighbor complained he killed her dog for
no reason.
Rader was a member of Christ
Lutheran Church and had been elected president of the church council. He was also a Cub Scout leader. On July
26, 2005, after Rader's arrest, his wife was granted an "emergency divorce" (waiving the normal waiting period).
Case history
Murders
On January 15, 1974, four members of the Otero family were murdered in Wichita, Kansas. The victims were Joseph Otero, aged 38, Julie
Otero, age 33, and two children: Joseph
Otero Jr. age 9, and Josephine Otero
age 11. Their bodies were discovered by the family's eldest child, Charlie Otero, who was in 10th grade at
the time, as he returned home from school. After his 2005 arrest, Rader confessed to
killing the Otero family. Rader wrote a letter that had been stashed
inside an engineering book in the Wichita
Public Library in October 1974, which described in detail the killing of
the Otero family in January of that
year.
In early 1978, he sent another letter to television station KAKE in Wichita, claiming responsibility for the murders of the Oteros, Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, and Nancy Fox. He suggested many possible names for himself,
including the one that stuck: BTK. He
demanded media attention in this second letter, and it was finally announced
that Wichita did indeed have a
serial killer at large. A poem was enclosed titled "Oh! Death to Nancy," a parody of the lyrics to the American folk song "O Death". In the
letter, he claimed to be driven to kill by “factor
X”, which he characterized as a supernatural element that also motivated
the Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, and Hillside Strangler murders.
He also intended to kill others, such as Anna Williams, who in 1979, aged 63,
escaped death by returning home much later than expected. Rader explained
during his confession that he became obsessed with Williams and was "absolutely livid" when she
evaded him. He spent hours waiting at her home, but became impatient and left
when she did not return home from visiting friends.
Marine Hedge,
aged 53, was found on May 5, 1985, at East
53rd Street North between North Webb
Road and North Greenwich Road in
Wichita. Rader had killed her on
April 27, 1985, and he took her dead body to his church, the Christ Lutheran Church, where he was
the president of the church council. There, he photographed her body in various
bondage positions. Rader had previously-stored black plastic sheets and other
materials at the church in preparation for the murder and then later dumped the
body in a remote ditch. He had called his plan "Project Cookie".
In 1988, after the murders of three members of the Fager family in Wichita, a letter was received from someone claiming to be the BTK killer, in which the author of the
letter denied being the perpetrator of the Fager
murders. The author credited the killer with having done "admirable work." It was not proven until 2005 that this
letter was, in fact, written by Rader. He is not considered by police to have
committed this crime. Additionally, two of the women Rader had
stalked in the 1980s and one he had stalked in the mid-1990s filed restraining
orders against him; one of them also moved away.
His final victim, Dolores
E. Davis was found on February 1, 1991, at West 117th Street North and North
Meridian Street in Park City.
Rader killed her on January 19, 1991.
Cold case
By 2004, the investigation of the BTK Killer was considered a cold case. Then, Rader began a series
of 11 communications to the local media that led directly to his arrest in
February 2005. In March 2004, The Wichita
Eagle received a letter from someone using the return address Bill Thomas Killman. The author of the
letter claimed that he had murdered Vicki
Wegerle on September 16, 1986, and enclosed photographs of the crime scene
and a photocopy of her driver's license, which had been stolen at the time of
the crime.
Before this, it had not been definitively established that
Wegerle was killed by BTK. DNA collected from under Wegerle's fingernails
provided police with previously unknown evidence. They then began DNA testing
hundreds of men in an effort to find the serial killer. Altogether, over 1,300 DNA samples were taken
and later destroyed by court order.
In May 2004, television station KAKE in Wichita received
a letter with chapter headings for the "BTK
Story," fake IDs, and a word puzzle. On June 9, 2004, a package was found taped to
a stop sign at the corner of First and
Kansas in Wichita. It had
graphic descriptions of the Otero
murders and a sketch labeled "The
Sexual Thrill Is My Bill." Also enclosed was a chapter list for a
proposed book titled The BTK Story,
which mimicked a story written in 1999 by Court
TV crime writer David Lohr. Chapter
One was titled "A Serial Killer
Is Born." In July, a package was dropped into the return slot at the
downtown public library containing more bizarre material, including the claim
that he was responsible for the death of 19-year-old Jake Allen in Argonia,
Kansas, earlier that month. This claim was false, and the death was ruled a
suicide.
After his capture, Rader admitted in his interrogation that
he had been planning to kill again and he had set a date, October 2004, and was
stalking his intended victim. In October
2004, a manila envelope was dropped into a UPS box in Wichita. It had many cards with images of terror and bondage of
children pasted on them, a poem threatening the life of lead investigator Lt. Ken Landwehr, and a false autobiography with
many details about Rader's life. These details were later released to the
public.
In December 2004, Wichita
police received another package from the BTK
killer. This time, the package was found
in Wichita's Murdock Park. It had
the driver's license of Nancy Fox,
which was noted as stolen from the crime scene, as well as a doll that was
symbolically bound at the hands and feet, and had a plastic bag tied over its
head.
In January 2005, Rader attempted to leave a cereal box in
the bed of a pickup truck at a Home
Depot in Wichita, but the box
was discarded by the truck's owner. It was later retrieved from the trash after
Rader asked what had become of it in a later message. Surveillance tape of the
parking lot from that date revealed a distant figure driving a black Jeep Cherokee leaving the box in the
pickup. In February, more postcards were sent to KAKE, and another cereal box left at a rural location was found to
contain another bound doll, apparently meant to symbolize the murder of
11-year-old Josephine Otero.
In his letters to police, Rader asked if his writings, if
put on a floppy disk, could be traced or not. The police answered his question
in a newspaper ad posted in the Wichita
Eagle said it would be safe to use the disk. On February 16, 2005, Rader
sent a purple 1.44-Megabyte Memorex
floppy disk to Fox TV affiliate KSAS-TV in Wichita. Also enclosed was a letter, a gold-colored
necklace with a large medallion, and a photocopy of the cover of Rules of Prey, a 1989 novel about a
serial killer.
Police found metadata embedded in a deleted Microsoft Word document that was,
unknown to Rader, still stored on the floppy disk. The metadata contained the words "Christ Lutheran Church", and
the document was marked as last modified by "Dennis."
An Internet search determined that a "Dennis Rader" was president
of the church council. From the Home Depot incident, the police also
knew BTK owned a black Jeep Cherokee. When investigators drove
by Rader's house, they noticed a black Jeep
Cherokee parked outside.
The police had strong circumstantial evidence against Rader,
but they needed more direct evidence to detain him. They obtained a warrant to test the DNA of a
pap smear Rader's daughter had taken at the Kansas State University medical clinic when she was a student
there. The DNA of the Pap smear was processed by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation at their lab in Topeka and demonstrated a familial match to the sample taken from
Wegerle's fingernails. This indicated that the killer was closely related to
Rader's daughter, and was the evidence the police needed to make an arrest.
Arrest
Rader was arrested while driving near his home in Park City shortly after noon on
February 25, 2005. An officer asked, "Mr. Rader, do you know why you're
going downtown?" Rader replied, "Oh,
I have suspicions why." Wichita Police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, and ATF agents searched Rader's home and vehicle, seizing evidence
including computer equipment, a pair of black pantyhose retrieved from a shed,
and a cylindrical container. The church he attended, his office at City Hall, and the main branch of the Park City library were also searched.
At a press conference the next morning, Wichita
Police Chief Norman Williams announced, "the
bottom line: BTK is arrested."
Legal proceedings
On February 28, 2005, Rader was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder. Soon after his
arrest, the Associated Press cited an
anonymous source alleging Rader had confessed to other murders in addition to
those with which he had been connected; the Sedgwick County district attorney denied this but refused to say
whether Rader made any confessions or if investigators were looking into
Rader's possible involvement in more unsolved killings. On March 5, news sources claimed to have
verified by multiple sources that Rader had confessed to the 10 murders he was
charged with, but no other ones.
On March 1, Rader's bail was set at US$10 million, and a
public defender was appointed to represent him. On May 3, the judge entered not
guilty pleas on Rader's behalf, as Rader did not speak at his arraignment;
however, on June 27, the scheduled trial date, Rader changed his plea to
guilty. He described the murders in detail and made no apologies.
At Rader's August 18 sentencing, victims' families made
statements, after which Rader apologized in a rambling 30-minute monologue that
the prosecutor likened to an Academy
Awards acceptance speech. His
statement has been described as an example of an often-observed phenomenon
among psychopaths: their inability to understand the emotional content of
language. He was sentenced to 10
consecutive life sentences, with a minimum of 175 years. Kansas
had no death penalty at the time of the murders. On August 19, he was moved to the El Dorado Correctional Facility.
Rader talked about innocuous topics such as the weather
during the 40-minute drive to El Dorado
but began to cry when the victims' families' statements from the court
proceedings came on the radio. He is now in solitary confinement for his
protection (with one hour of exercise per day, and showers three times per
week). This will likely continue indefinitely. Beginning in 2006, he was
allowed access to television and radio, to read magazines and other privileges
for good behavior.
Further
investigations
Following Rader's arrest, police in Wichita, Park City, and several surrounding cities looked into
unsolved cases with the cooperation of the state police and the FBI. They
particularly focused on cases after 1994, when the death penalty was reinstated
in Kansas. Police in surrounding
states such as Nebraska, Missouri,
Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas also
investigated cold cases that fit Rader's pattern to some extent. The FBI and
local jurisdictions at Rader's former duty stations checked into unsolved cases
during Rader's time in the service.
After exhaustive investigations, none of these agencies
discovered any further murders attributable to Rader, confirming early
suspicions that Rader would have taken credit for any additional murders that
he had committed. The ten known murders are now believed to be the only murders
for which Rader is actually responsible, although Wichita police are fairly certain that Rader stalked and researched
a number of other potential victims. This includes one person who was saved
when Rader called off his planned attack upon his arrival near the target's
home due to the presence of construction and road crews nearby. Rader stated in
his police interview that "there are
a lot of lucky people," meaning that he had thought about and
developed various levels of murder plans for other victims.
Evaluation by Robert
Mendoza
Massachusetts
psychologist Robert Mendoza was hired by Rader's court-appointed public
defenders to conduct a psychological evaluation of Rader, and determine if an
insanity-based defense might be viable. He conducted an interview after Rader
pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005. Mendoza diagnosed Rader with narcissistic,
antisocial and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders: He observed that
Rader has a grandiose sense of self, a belief that he is “special” and therefore entitled to special treatment; a
pathological need for attention and admiration; a preoccupation with
maintaining rigid order and structure; a complete lack of empathy for his
victims.
NBC claimed Rader
knew the interview might be televised, but this was false according to the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office. Rader
mentioned the interview during his sentencing statement. On October 25, 2005,
the Kansas attorney general filed a
petition to sue Mendoza and Tali Waters,
co-owners of Cambridge Forensic
Consultants, LLC, for breach of contract, claiming that they intended to
benefit financially from the use of information obtained through involvement in
Rader's defense. On May 10, 2007, Mendoza settled the case for US$30,000 with
no admission of wrongdoing.
In media
Forensic psychologist
Katherine Ramsland wrote Confession of
a Serial Killer about Rader, compiled from her five-year correspondence
with him. In the introduction, she describes the book as a "guided autobiography" of Rader, stating that she
interjects only to "assist with
chronology or provide substance, sense, or background."
The horror writer
Stephen King says his novella A Good
Marriage, and the film based on it, was inspired by the BTK killer.
The novelist Thomas
Harris has said that the character of Francis
Dolarhyde from his 1981 novel Red
Dragon is partially based on the then-unidentified BTK Killer.
A 2005 made-for-TV movie, The Hunt for the BTK Killer, told the story from the perspective of
the Wichita detectives who worked
the case for 31 years. Rader was
played by Gregg Henry.
Episode 15 of Season 1 (2006) of Criminal Minds is based on Rader's murders.
The story of Dennis
Rader is also told in the 2008 movie B.T.K.,
written and directed by Michael Feifer,
and starring Kane Hodder in the
title role.
Musician Steven
Wilson wrote a song entitled "Raider
II" inspired by the story of Rader on his 2011 album Grace for Drowning.
Rader is a character in the Netflix series Mindhunter.
He appears throughout season one and season two, in vignettes set in and around
Park City, Kansas. (Although the
character is credited as "ADT
serviceman", the German language
dubbing credits specifically list him as "Dennis
Rader".)
The "Cold Case
Files" podcast covered the story of the murders and eventual solving
of the cold case that led to Rader's arrest in their December 5, 2017 episode
called "Finding BTK."
The 2018 film The
Clovehitch Killer is loosely based on Rader. The 2019 special "BTK: A Killer Among Us" detailed the 30-year
investigation that led to the arrest of Dennis
Rader. It first aired on the Investigation
Discovery network on February 17, 2019.
In 2019, Rader's daughter, Kerri Rawson, released the book A
Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming, where
she wrote about growing up with her father and struggling to understand his
double life as a serial killer after his arrest.
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