True Crime Vault: My Father BTK

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Speaker 1 This is the 2020 True Crime Vault.

Speaker 3 He calls himself the BTK Strangler.

Speaker 5 BTK was a monster. He would see a woman walking and he would say, she's next.

Speaker 6 We were all scared to death to see if he was going to kill again.

Speaker 8 Nobody would have imagined this good husband as somebody that could even contemplate the murders that he committed.

Speaker 9 One minute, you had a loving father.

Speaker 1 The next minute, he's a serial killer. I mean, come on, the child of a serial killer actually talking about it?

Speaker 1 That's something you almost never hear.

Speaker 11 Evil come if you call my name. The wicked day shall rise.

Speaker 12 I'm walking on the street I grew up on, Independence Street.

Speaker 12 I just remember riding my bike up and down the street and running around in my friends' yards and sleepovers

Speaker 12 and playing hopscotch and playing in the rain puddles on the streets.

Speaker 12 So you were safe. My parents would let me ride my bike all over.

Speaker 12 This road really just reminds me of childhood.

Speaker 12 On February 25th, 2005,

Speaker 12 when I found out my father was arrested, This place became not my home and no one ever slept in my house again.

Speaker 15 Just needs something to bridge the gap from everybody.

Speaker 2 Okay? Yeah.

Speaker 12 Again, just to help you with your makeup.

Speaker 9 Are we good? Everybody's rolling?

Speaker 16 We're speaking.

Speaker 1 It's been more than a decade since your life, as you knew it, changed forever. What do you remember about that day?

Speaker 12 It was a normal day. I had slept in.
I was substitute teaching and I would just took the day off. And then there's a knock on my door.

Speaker 12 So I'm already thinking, like, who's this person, you know, in my apartment building? And then he said he was the FBI.

Speaker 1 Is there any reason you should even expect the FBI to be wrong?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 What does he say exactly?

Speaker 12 He asked, Do you know who BTK is? I was like, you mean the person that's wanted for murders back in Kansas?

Speaker 12 And then he says, your dad has been arrested as BTK.

Speaker 12 And I was like, I think I'm going to pass out.

Speaker 3 He calls himself the BTK Strangler and promises to kill again.

Speaker 16 BTK's brutal crimes shocked Wichita.

Speaker 19 The most infamous, unsolved serial killing spree in Wichita history.

Speaker 5 BTK stood for bind, torture, kill. And that was his M.O.

Speaker 21 Three letters which can touch off memories for anyone who lived in Wichita during the 1970s.

Speaker 22 BTK emerged in 1974.

Speaker 5 When BTK came forward, everybody's life changed.

Speaker 22 It was really part of Wichita's history.

Speaker 19 The BTK killings changed the way people lived in Wichita.

Speaker 8 It changed Wichita from a sleepy, little friendly town into a place in a city where you now lock your door and you check your phone to make sure you have the dial tone.

Speaker 26 They're asking that anyone with information on this case please call our Crime Stoppers line.

Speaker 28 The body was discovered here.

Speaker 23 I think we'll solve the crime.

Speaker 5 The question is, when will we solve the crime?

Speaker 5 BTK BTK was a monster who killed a total of 10 people, two of those children, in cold blood.

Speaker 31 This was a serial killer who got away with it for 30 years. That's very rare.

Speaker 32 There was somebody out there targeting women and children. BTK was the boogeyman made real.

Speaker 5 He would be driving down the street and he would see a woman walking or a woman on the front porch and he would look at her and he would say, she's next.

Speaker 5 So the killings were random.

Speaker 16 He would break into someone's home, hide in a closet, wait hours until they were fast asleep and then attack.

Speaker 16 To this day, I still check inside the closets, under the bed, behind the shower curtain when I'm in unfamiliar territory.

Speaker 33 You never knew when he was going to show up and you never knew where he was going to be next. People were really frightened.

Speaker 26 This is one of the most challenging cases I've ever been involved with.

Speaker 8 None of the women were actually physically sexually assaulted. What he wanted was the image of a bound woman.

Speaker 29 He killed in the 70s proficiently and then stopped, it seemed.

Speaker 22 It became almost mythology. This figure came, he killed a bunch of people, and then he left.

Speaker 22 It was kind of slipping into history when in 2004, a mailing came and there was no question who it was from.

Speaker 9 Police in Wichita, Kansas are investigating the possible return of a serial killer

Speaker 37 who calls himself BTK resurfaces after 25 years.

Speaker 36 This is cake news.

Speaker 18 And good evening. We have exclusive details.
A new communication that could be from the serial killer.

Speaker 6 We were all scared to death to see if he was going to kill again. And was I going to be the next victim?

Speaker 12 It scares me to be out by myself anymore.

Speaker 39 For the second time in just more than a week, another possible communication from BTK arrives here at our studios.

Speaker 29 He thrived on the publicity and I think he thrived on scaring the heck out of everybody in the city.

Speaker 36 We begin tonight with breaking news in the case.

Speaker 40 BTK is arrested.

Speaker 16 His hunger for publicity seems to have gone him in.

Speaker 18 We have learned that Raider has been charged with 10 counts now of first-degree murder.

Speaker 24 He was living a double life here in Wichita.

Speaker 41 Residents are still trying to digest the fact that a possible serial killer lived among them.

Speaker 8 Nobody would have imagined this church leader, this father, this good husband, as somebody that could even contemplate the murders that he committed.

Speaker 36 BTK was literally the guy next door with a wife and two kids.

Speaker 5 Everybody wanted to talk to the family members.

Speaker 42 Everybody did.

Speaker 1 How do you process this earth-shattering news?

Speaker 10 You don't.

Speaker 12 I said, can I call my husband? He needs to come home.

Speaker 25 All this stuff is running through my head where I'm like, did somebody get hurt? Or like, but why would it be the FBI?

Speaker 25 And so when I get home, I remember him saying, have you heard about the BTK,

Speaker 30 like the serial killer?

Speaker 8 We're pretty sure like he's the guy.

Speaker 32 Like we got the guy.

Speaker 12 I was trying to almost alibi my father. I was like, my father's a good guy.
He's Boy Scout leader, president of the church.

Speaker 12 I'm like, you've got the wrong man because you don't believe it's true and you don't want it to be true and you know your father's not capable. The father, you know, is not capable of any of this.

Speaker 1 Were you worried at that point that your mom was somehow involved in this as well?

Speaker 12 No, I never imagined that my mom was involved in anything bad. I was very worried about her and wanted to call her and let her know I was okay.
And I wanted to know how my brother was doing.

Speaker 12 He was stationed in Connecticut with the Navy. And so, like, I wasn't able to talk to my mom or my brother until like six or seven hours after the arrest.

Speaker 1 When you first heard her voice on the phone.

Speaker 12 Just heartbreaking. Like, you could just hear her break, like, just utter grief and

Speaker 43 loss.

Speaker 8 When Paula Rada found out, she was shocked in complete disbelief.

Speaker 45 How is Mrs. Rader doing?

Speaker 29 She's having a very difficult time with all of this, in a shock,

Speaker 29 just unbelievable. Totally in disbelief.

Speaker 37 Police are being very tight-lipped about the evidence against him, but there are reports the suspect is confessing to many of the murders.

Speaker 26 When did you type this?

Speaker 46 Well, it probably would help to have a calendar.

Speaker 1 So you're trying to deny this, and your father is confessing to being a serial killer.

Speaker 12 Right. I was like, what is he confessing to? You know, you're just so like...

Speaker 12 Not with it. You're like, what is he confessing to? And he's like, oh, he's confessing to the crimes.

Speaker 1 After your dad's arrest, you actually started Googling, trying to see what you can find out about this killer.

Speaker 12 I made a really huge mistake to go Google BTK.

Speaker 5 Wichita was a wonderful city back in the 1970s. Just a nice Midwestern city where people could raise their family without any fear.

Speaker 47 Very safe, very good schools, very wholesome, family-oriented town.

Speaker 22 If you want to freeze Americana and go back, then a Wichita is very much like that.

Speaker 32 No matter where you go in town, you will run into somebody you know. Everybody knows everybody.

Speaker 33 It's a nice town. It's a good place to live and a good place to be the district attorney.

Speaker 12 Another windy Kansas Day.

Speaker 49 Hello, everybody.

Speaker 47 Never in a million years did Wichitans think that a serial killer would come from here.

Speaker 40 Kansas police now say Dennis Rader may be linked to 10 murders going back to 1974.

Speaker 44 Wichita, in many ways, simply grew up.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, the life you thought you had

Speaker 1 has just sort of vaporized.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, like every moment of your whole life was a lie, even back to before you were born.

Speaker 31 Dennis Rader was born on March 9th, 1945.

Speaker 31 He grew up an all-American boy playing cowboys and Indians. He was the first of four brothers in very ordinary life.

Speaker 22 His childhood was very normal. He was raised in the rural area with good parents.

Speaker 1 Had he come from a happy home?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I would say he came from a really solid home. I was very close to his parents, my grandparents Bill and Dorothea.

Speaker 1 Did you ever get any sense that he had experienced anything abusive or physically?

Speaker 12 No. There was nothing ever to hint at that something could be amiss with my father.

Speaker 31 Paula was a member of Dennis Rader's parents' church.

Speaker 12 My dad and my mom met in the fall of 1970.

Speaker 31 Rader's mother knew her and knew that Dennis was coming home from the military and she wanted Paula to meet him.

Speaker 12 He had just got back from the Air Force and they started dating. They got married nine months later in May of 71.

Speaker 31 I think he fell in love and they were two good Christian kids who wanted to get married in the right way. So there was nothing unusual about it.

Speaker 14 When Dennis marries Paula,

Speaker 14 she obviously has no idea that Dennis has already been having fantasies and maybe even obsessions about harming other people, killing other people, tying them up, etc.

Speaker 31 He's already looking inside people's houses. He's stalking people.
He's already breaking into people's homes. He's already living a double life.

Speaker 12 He knew before he met my mom what he was probably capable of.

Speaker 48 You think he knew then?

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I mean, why did he get married?

Speaker 12 Was it because he didn't want to be that other person or did he just want both lives?

Speaker 12 People who knew my parents before February 25th, 2005, would have told you this. Dennis Cherish Paula.
My dad would tell you the same still to this day.

Speaker 12 But he should have known it wasn't going to be forever.

Speaker 1 Your book is called A Serial Killer's Daughter. Is that how you see yourself?

Speaker 12 It's taken me a long time to even be able to say that out loud, but that's the truth.

Speaker 22 This whole Odyssey starts on January 15th of 1974

Speaker 22 in a little house out North Edgemore. It was the home of Joseph Otero and his wife and his five children.
He saw it was a corner house, just kind of everything about it attracted him.

Speaker 12 He says now that he spotted Mrs. Otero and one of her daughters when he was driving my mom to work and then stopped their family.

Speaker 8 The Oteros were a relatively new family to Wichita. They're a family of seven, five kids.

Speaker 8 And the older kids had gone off to school that day, leaving the two younger ones at home with their parents.

Speaker 27 My name is Charlie Otero and I am the son of Joseph and Julie Otero.

Speaker 27 My father was a really outgoing, jovial kind of guy and my mom was a very caring, loving, Catholic woman. She was a mother first.

Speaker 8 Dennis Rader went to the house, he cut the phone line, and then he entered the house.

Speaker 29 Dennis Rader believed that the mother and the daughter would be the only ones home. He was not expecting Mr.
Otero to be there.

Speaker 31 He was really taken by surprise that four people were there that he now had to deal with.

Speaker 8 He pulled a gun on them, he tied up Mrs. Otero,

Speaker 8 and then he started to strangle Mr.

Speaker 15 Otero.

Speaker 31 He wanted that very close personal engagement where their life was literally in his hands. So he wanted to strangle them.

Speaker 8 When the older children came back from school that day, they couldn't get into their house, so they forced entry into it. They discovered their parents.

Speaker 27 I ran down the hall, went in their bedroom, and saw my my mother on the bed, my father on the floor. My heart just got ripped out of my chest.
My life changed instantly.

Speaker 8 Charlie Otero ran to a neighbor's house, called the police.

Speaker 8 It was the police who discovered his little brother in another room and then found their sister.

Speaker 22 They went down into the basement and found Josephine.

Speaker 8 An 11-year-old Josephine Otero will be bound with rope and she's hanging just off the floor.

Speaker 14 He hangs her, probably has a fantasy about that, leaves his DNA at the scene and leaves.

Speaker 27 I thank God every day that I didn't find Joey and Josie because I don't know how I could have handled it.

Speaker 22 There's a lot of evidence collection. that you don't know what you're going to do with.
You want to collect everything because you get one shot at a crime scene.

Speaker 34 Law enforcement will collect DNA on the floor.

Speaker 8 They didn't collect it for an analysis. They just did not have the technology.

Speaker 32 In 1974, who would think that DNA testing was going to be this criminal investigative tool?

Speaker 5 Myself and another reporter were on the scene of the OTERO murder. And that murder was a little different because the police weren't saying anything.

Speaker 5 So we knew that something really terrible had happened in that house.

Speaker 29 The Otero murders rocked this city. It was unheard of in Wichita, Kansas to have a family of four murdered.

Speaker 22 Why would someone want to kill this wonderful family? Unknown to Wichita, they had just been visited by someone who was killing for sport.

Speaker 16 What he does next will make it perfectly clear that Dennis Rader is after much more than just murder. He really wants the spotlight.

Speaker 6 He wanted to be the most famous serial killer in the country.

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Speaker 12 Mom Talk started as a sisterhood, and that's gone to flames. New secrets, Eliza coming out.

Speaker 13 This is going to be catastrophic.

Speaker 52 We're fighting for our marriages, and the girls are just putting us through hell.

Speaker 53 They make everything about themselves. I can't.

Speaker 12 Hopefully, this doesn't end in a bloodbath.

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Speaker 15 Terms apply.

Speaker 15 Two rings surrounded by a steel cage.

Speaker 15 You wanna play games?

Speaker 15 We're gonna play games.

Speaker 15 Oh my god, are you kidding me? This is gonna be a war.

Speaker 27 Stream Survivor Series War Games, November 29th at 7 Eastern on the ESPNA.

Speaker 23 The bodies of Joseph Otero, his wife Julie, their daughter Josephine, and their son Joseph II were discovered in their East Wichita home. The victims had been bound, gagged, and strangled with a cord.

Speaker 8 Well, you have a quadruple homicide in a...

Speaker 8 in a family neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas, in the middle of America. That just doesn't happen.

Speaker 5 People in Wichita didn't know who it was. We didn't know what kind of person would do that.
We just wanted them behind bars.

Speaker 12 I don't understand how somebody that could be so protective of his own children could murder other children.

Speaker 22 He had just an incredible ability to compartmentalize.

Speaker 31 Rader called it cubing. The way the cubing works is you have multiple sides to a cube.
When he's on the face of it, those sides are all part of him, but he's not aware of them. He doesn't see them.

Speaker 31 He only is able to look out from one face. But he can switch it very fluidly to the next side of the cube if he needs to, whatever the situation calls for.

Speaker 14 He could leave a crime scene, come home, clean up, go to bed, get up, and start another day.

Speaker 22 Even when he wasn't killing, he was still looking for the possibility.

Speaker 14 Killers like Dennis Rader, they're called power control killers. And they love the power, they love the control, and they want the attention.

Speaker 14 What's a natural way to get attention without identifying yourself is to interact, call the media.

Speaker 32 On October 22nd, 1974, Don Granger, who was a columnist for the Wichita Eagle, received a phone call from somebody who's claiming to be BTK.

Speaker 22 This guy tells him to look in the city library, tells him a very specific place, goes to the engineering section, in fact tells him the shelf and the book to look for.

Speaker 8 The police go find the book and there is a letter that describes the OTERO murders in detail.

Speaker 31 The police did pick up somebody, three guys, for the OTERO murders. This was in the newspaper and Rada was upset.
He didn't want someone else to get credit for his murders.

Speaker 14 He's somebody who really seeks attention. And so when he's not getting it, it upsets him because his identity in life is committing these crimes.

Speaker 31 He wanted to show that he knew who killed the OTARs. He had done it alone.
He knew all the details. He proved that by writing the details out.

Speaker 22 He goes point for point where each one of the Oteros were found in the house, what they were wearing.

Speaker 14 They knew it had to be him because nobody had that level of detail.

Speaker 24 So it's kind of like, I'm your guy, but you're not going to figure out who I am.

Speaker 8 In the letter, he he suggests the moniker BTK, which would stand for bind, torture, kill.

Speaker 33 It was his nom de plume, and that's what he wanted to be called, because that's what he did. He said, I like to bind them, I like to torture them, and I like to kill them.

Speaker 31 In July of 1975, Rader became a father for the first time.

Speaker 12 My brother's three years older than me.

Speaker 31 And suddenly, he's now a real family. He and his wife are overjoyed to have a child.

Speaker 8 He was working for ADT, the security company.

Speaker 12 He got to be in people's homes. To my dad, like the person that committed breaking in enterings and stalked people, I would imagine that sort of gave him that side of him, like a thrill.

Speaker 31 But then he starts getting a little bit restless.

Speaker 14 From 1974 to 1977, He will kill three more women, a college student named Catherine Bright, a mother of three three named Shirley Vian,

Speaker 14 and a 25-year-old named Nancy Fox.

Speaker 12 I was born in 78

Speaker 12 and my dad murdered a young woman when my mom was three months pregnant with me.

Speaker 45 That kind of stuff happens to somebody else but not to someone in your family. My name's Beverly Fox and Nancy and I were sisters.

Speaker 8 Nancy Fox was a hardworking young lady, worked two jobs. She lived by herself in a duplex.

Speaker 45 What she wanted was to get married, to have kids, you know, to have a family. She loved kids.
How did he find her? How did he pick her out? Why Nancy?

Speaker 8 Dennis Rader will describe that he saw and noticed Nancy Fox when she was getting mail one day.

Speaker 22 This was what he called his perfect crime. This case, Nancy's case went exactly how he planned it.

Speaker 31 Nobody else was in the house. She wasn't expecting anybody else.
He was not going to get interrupted. This one worked out the way his fantasies happened in his head.

Speaker 31 The next day, Raider did something unusual. He found a phone booth and he called in

Speaker 31 the murder of Nancy Fox.

Speaker 31 43 South Persian in Nancy Fox.

Speaker 29 The caller said, reporting a homicide. Police went to that address and found Nancy Fox dead, bound and strangled on her bed.

Speaker 29 You will find a homicide in 243 stops in person in Nancy Fox.

Speaker 1 So when you heard this, did it sound like your father?

Speaker 12 You can hear like that clip way my father could talk.

Speaker 12 I like, I, that was another, like these things just start clicking. Oh my God, it really is my father.

Speaker 31 Rader has now struck a number of times in a way that can be connected, and yet he's not getting the press that he's seeing other serial killers getting. Ted Bundy has been in the news.

Speaker 52 Ted Bundy is charged with the murder of two Florida State University co-eds and is suspected in 19 other murders in western states.

Speaker 31 He wants to know why they're not recognizing that he is among the elite serial killers.

Speaker 29 He sent a letter to Cake TV, which was an ABC affiliate here in Wichita.

Speaker 55 This morning, Cake TV was contacted by the person who police say they believe murdered four members of the Joseph Otero family.

Speaker 5 The letter in 78 to Cake TV came in through the mail, just as a normal letter from a viewer, it appeared. And once it was opened, we knew we had something unusual.

Speaker 3 BTK began today's letter with a question. How many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention?

Speaker 22 The letter indicated, on no uncertain terms, when was he going to get some national attention, that there were seven in the ground, there were many more to go.

Speaker 3 He says he is compelled to kill by what he calls factor X.

Speaker 8 In this letter, he describes a factor X and he describes what drives him. He lets them know that he can't stop, that the Factor X makes him want to kill and he's going to keep killing.

Speaker 31 The early communications were more about exerting control and terrorizing Wichita.

Speaker 3 With us right now is Chief of Police Richard Lamunyon.

Speaker 33 Chief Lamunyon

Speaker 33 had to give an announcement to the public to give them a warning. that there was a serial killer in our community.

Speaker 3 What kind of leads do you have?

Speaker 3 Well very honestly, we have no solid leads at all.

Speaker 5 We didn't know that all of the murders were related. When he announced that, now you definitely know that there's a serial killer on the prowl.

Speaker 33 It was overwhelming horror at

Speaker 33 who is this person.

Speaker 1 After the Fox murder, he

Speaker 1 didn't kill anyone again for eight years.

Speaker 23 Right. The chief does want people to be aware that BTK is probably still around, so people should be careful.

Speaker 23 I have no reason to doubt that the individual will strike again, assuming that he's still free and walking around.

Speaker 12 I was born in 1978. He has said himself that he just got busy, like raising kids and having a family.

Speaker 1 How would you describe your childhood with your father?

Speaker 12 I pretty much had the American dream. You know, like the three-bedroom ranch with the big backyard and the Springer Spaniel dog.

Speaker 12 And then when I was four, he built a massive tree house for my brother and I.

Speaker 43 Gentle, loving, stern.

Speaker 12 Kind of a mix. Most of the time he was even killed and kind and warm.
At times he could be very firm or have flashes of anger or outbursts that you weren't expecting.

Speaker 1 Was he physically abusive ever?

Speaker 12 We only saw physical abuse twice. It was a Friday night.
My mom had worked all day.

Speaker 12 She had gone to a lot of work to make manicotti for us, which was like a special meal. I don't know who started an argument, but our family got into an argument.

Speaker 12 Somebody pounded on it, our old rickety kitchen table, and all of a sudden my dad just sprung up out of the chair and lunged for my brother, like facing him front, like his hands around his neck like this.

Speaker 12 Like choking him? Yeah, like trying to strangle my brother. My brother was the color of a white sheet.
He was just petrified.

Speaker 1 Has you ever seen that side of your dad before?

Speaker 12 I never. So it was extremely odd of the characteristic of my father to be physically abusive.

Speaker 33 April 27th, it's 1985.

Speaker 33 And Maureen Hedge, who just happened to be his neighbor about six doors down, becomes victim number eight.

Speaker 8 He'll describe to us that it took a lot of guts to kill Maureen Hedge because it was bringing the police close to home, literally a few houses away.

Speaker 12 I was six years old. The night she went missing, there was a thunderstorm.
I still can recall that night because I crawled into bed with my mom.

Speaker 12 So I knew my dad was gone that night because I wouldn't have ever crawled into bed with my mom if my dad had been there.

Speaker 1 Why was he gone?

Speaker 12 He was on a Cup Scout camp out with my brother who was nine.

Speaker 22 The crime was planned with the alibi in mind.

Speaker 31 He had to find ways to get opportunities. One of those ways was these overnights.

Speaker 31 He was a volunteer for the Boy Scouts when his son was involved and had a good space of time where he could go murder Maureen.

Speaker 8 He will leave that Boy Scout event. He will drive to Wichita.
He cuts through even the backyard of his own residence and goes to Maureen Hedge's house, cuts the phone line, breaks into her house.

Speaker 33 He kills her at her home and then transports her body over to the church.

Speaker 8 What he has done is he has prepared his church, the church that he was a member of.

Speaker 29 He was the congregational president and he wanted to take pictures of her

Speaker 5 posed.

Speaker 31 Dressed her in underwear he had stolen from other houses, took Polaroid photos of her, and then dumped her body in ditch.

Speaker 8 He drives right back to the Boy Scout event and picks up right where he left off. Back to being Dennis Rader, the husband, the father.

Speaker 12 Somehow I knew at six that her body had been found and that she had been murdered and she had been strangled.

Speaker 28 The body was nude and police say badly decomposed. A pair of knotted pantyhose were found lying in the ditch beside it.

Speaker 1 How did that affect you?

Speaker 12 It scared me. Like, I started having night terrors around that time.
I would wake up screaming, sitting up in bed. My mom is always the one that would come comfort.

Speaker 12 I would say, there's a bad man in my house. And she's like, no, there's no bad man in your house.

Speaker 14 So over the next five years, he kills two more women, Vicki Wagerly, in September 1986 and Dolores Davis.

Speaker 17 My mother was a loving person and for that reason had lots of friends and really no enemies.

Speaker 22 Dolores' house has obvious signs of an intruder making entry into the back of the house. They'd use a cinder block and through a sliding glass door.

Speaker 17 She's of course going to be immediately up, running out there. That's when she sees him, the monster, standing there.

Speaker 8 He'll kill her in the residence and he'll remove her body.

Speaker 31 He ends up dumping Dolores Davis out in sort of a culvert by a bridge.

Speaker 17 My mother had been a beautiful person inside and out, and she's disregarded like a bag of garbage.

Speaker 22 Several days later, she's found by a boy walking the dog. The dog breaks loose, runs under the bridge, and finds Dolores.

Speaker 14 His last three victims are not initially connected by the police to BTK. And that's because they're different.
The bodies are in a different location.

Speaker 14 And he's not really attracted to one particular type of person. They're in the right place, the right location for him.
Then he acts.

Speaker 14 Whether they're young, whether they're old, it's more important to commit the crime than it is what the person may look like or what their age might be.

Speaker 8 Dennis Rader, after he murdered Dolores Davis, went silent. He went silent for a very long time.

Speaker 29 Most people believe that he was either incarcerated for another crime or killing himself or whatever. Because serial killers don't quit killing killing until they're caught.

Speaker 5 It became generational. People did forget about BTK.
And there was a lot of speculation. Where is he? BTK was actually living among us.
He was going to the movies with us.

Speaker 5 He was going to the grocery store with us.

Speaker 22 It was inevitable that he was going to reach out. This is the greatest accomplishment of his life.

Speaker 8 He felt it necessary to say, No, I'm still here, and I'll be the one that will write this story.

Speaker 22 BTK, it was thought he had disappeared.

Speaker 33 There's this long hiatus where he doesn't call the police, he doesn't talk to the newspaper, there's no more killings during that period of time.

Speaker 5 Nobody in a thousand years thought that this story was going to come back.

Speaker 30 We thought it was basically over.

Speaker 29 What we would learn later is that he was raising children.

Speaker 12 In 1991, your father got a job as a Park City compliance officer.

Speaker 12 I was 12, and he sort of settled back down again because he had a steady job and almost had an outlet again for that psychopathic behavior.

Speaker 22 He enjoys it, but mainly because it provides a certain amount of authority. Walks around with this big old dart gun and he's in uniform and is telling people to cut their grass, get a permit.

Speaker 8 The compliance office that Dennis Rader worked in was right next door to the Park City Police Department.

Speaker 16 It wasn't as if he was hiding at all. Dennis Rader granted Kansas Station KSN an interview about his job as a dog catcher.

Speaker 56 We've been trying to round him up and corral him as best as we can.

Speaker 33 In the years after the last killing back in 1991, his family was just moving along in their normal pace. His daughter went to Kansas State University.

Speaker 12 I met my husband Darian at Kansas State in 1998. So he lived in the dorm across from mine.

Speaker 1 Did your parents like him?

Speaker 12 You kind of get that pushback like all fathers do against like their girls, boyfriends. He's like, well, I don't really like his leather jacket.

Speaker 25 And he just seemed like another regular Wichita dad to me.

Speaker 12 And then in 2003, my dad walked me down the aisle at our wedding.

Speaker 32 For those who are here, he was in the back of their mind, but people, their lives went on.

Speaker 29 There was an article in the paper in 2004 about the 30-year anniversary of the BTK killings.

Speaker 32 And we included there that nobody remembered him, which invoked his ire.

Speaker 31 He saw this in the newspaper and decided he didn't want someone else to tell his story. He wanted to control it.

Speaker 14 That again goes back to, I want attention. These are my murders.
I identify with them. And I want you to know that I did them.

Speaker 8 After the article is published, he sends a letter to the Wichita Eagle. The address on it is Bill Thomas Kilman which is BTK.

Speaker 29 I'll never forget that day. We open it up and it was pictures of Vicki Wiggerly.

Speaker 14 In the Vicki Wiggerly case, he had taken pictures of her and he gave the police basically photocopies of those pictures that clearly only the killer would have.

Speaker 14 And so they knew now he's back in the game.

Speaker 22 He wanted to enter the the arena and clash swords with law enforcement again. He enjoyed that and then thought that he was up to the task again.

Speaker 41 This morning we have more information on the letter sent to the Wichita Eagle by the BTK killer.

Speaker 8 After the reports that BTK is back, there was an explosion of interest.

Speaker 38 In the nation's heartland, a serial killer resurfaces.

Speaker 16 Why BTK remains silent for 25 years remains a mystery. This was a local story for many years, but once BTK re-emerged, it became a huge national story.
Reporters just descended on Wichita.

Speaker 28 Police say they want help finding a man who calls himself BTK.

Speaker 44 The killer is linked to eight unsolved murders.

Speaker 16 Police revealed that they've received more letters from BTK.

Speaker 22 We were on the front page of the paper for 69 days in a row. It is the only thing that people talked about because, you know, the monster's back.

Speaker 48 Fear fell over every woman in Wichita.

Speaker 10 This guy's back and am I going to be next?

Speaker 16 We went into stores where things like pepper spray were selling off the shelves. Self-defense classes were full.

Speaker 12 I have pepper spray and a sun gun. And as soon as they get those little laser guns, I'm going to get one of those.

Speaker 16 We went to a playground, and there were moms there with their kids, and these moms were scared. One of them, when we talked to her, she pulled a hunting knife out of her front pocket.

Speaker 12 I'm going to start carrying it in my pocket just in case anybody wants to mess with me.

Speaker 12 I came across an article on ABC News, and it said that there had been an active serial killer in Wichita in the 70s and that he had become active again and I was shocked like that there was a serial killer in Wichita.

Speaker 1 What are you thinking a serial killer in Wichita would be like?

Speaker 12 I figured he was a loner, somebody that probably had been in trouble with the law before and kept to himself.

Speaker 16 Morning.

Speaker 47 Ken Landware was the lead homicide detective when BTK reappeared.

Speaker 26 We are again asking for help from the public.

Speaker 8 There was a strategy from the very beginning to have Kenny Landweer be the face of the investigation.

Speaker 26 We truly feel that he is trying to communicate with us.

Speaker 8 And the experts believed that would help to keep Dennis Rader talking.

Speaker 22 You have to provide him an adversary, an adversary that he can identify with. And so it was decided very early on that any communications to the public were going to come from Kenny Landwuer.

Speaker 26 The tip that was received by the Wichita television station indicated indicated that another possible BTK communication was dropped on January 8th.

Speaker 5 Between 2004 and 2005, there were a series of communications, both to the Wichita Eagle and to Cake TV. And the communications came in many ways.

Speaker 5 Sometimes they were a postcard, sometimes they were a letter. In one instance, he left a cereal box on a county road.

Speaker 31 Cereal boxes, because serial killer cereal boxes, he thought this was a great joke. He got these dolls, dressed them to look like his victims, put them into the boxes with some of the victims' items.

Speaker 31 He started really having fun. This is what he called his cat musk game.

Speaker 33 It was kind of like a treasure hunt for him, for people.

Speaker 36 We know he is watching and we know he is listening. And to him, we say the message has been received and passed on.

Speaker 6 Every communication we got and that we relayed out, we knew as a media, if we kept him communicating, he was going to slip up.

Speaker 1 That's what was going to get him caught.

Speaker 59 It started with a phone call in the early hours of the morning.

Speaker 21 911, what is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 59 A terrified woman tells the operator she's been kidnapped, assaulted, and that she's trapped in a room with her attacker.

Speaker 7 He's fallen asleep, so she quietly and ever so carefully finds his phone and calls for help.

Speaker 60 Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know without waking him. I'm scared.

Speaker 7 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland into a crime scene.

Speaker 30 We've got something big going on here.

Speaker 32 The first thing you hit my mind is a monster.

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Maybe inappropriate for children under 13.

Speaker 46 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Your father is confessing to being a serial killer.

Speaker 12 That's not the man I knew and loved.

Speaker 2 I don't know that man.

Speaker 5 BTK stood for Bind, Torture, Kill.

Speaker 33 That's what he wanted to be called? Because that's what he did.

Speaker 3 How many do I have to kill before I get some national attention?

Speaker 16 It became a huge national story. It made its way into pop culture, Made for TV, movies.

Speaker 28 It's been 30 years since the first BTK killings.

Speaker 5 We expected a Charles Manson-looking guy. It wasn't.

Speaker 6 He was the guy in the line next to us at the grocery store.

Speaker 31 He got these dolls, dressed them to look like his victims.

Speaker 1 Is your dad mentally ill or is he evil?

Speaker 1 We think no.

Speaker 46 Bottom of the river.

Speaker 32 BTK started sending packages with mementos from his crimes. One that was part of what Ledge was undoing was dropping a package in the back of a truck at a local Home Depot.

Speaker 8 The police were able to recover that package.

Speaker 8 In this box is a piece of paper entitled Communication, and he actually spells communication wrong and asks about whether or not he can send a floppy disk without being traced.

Speaker 8 And he tells law enforcement to be honest.

Speaker 29 He says, let me know in the one ads, in the classified ads of the Wichita Eagle, that it's okay. And if I see it, give me a couple weeks to send you something.

Speaker 22 We put a little ad in the paper. Rex, it'll be okay.

Speaker 31 And Rader fell for it. He believed Landware enjoyed the game as much as he did, so he would be honest.

Speaker 22 So eventually the disc arrives and it is taken directly to a forensic software detective.

Speaker 8 Anybody who had any connection to the investigation in this case was in that room.

Speaker 29 We got into the metadata and it showed that it had been typed on by a computer at a church in Park City. The name of the computer was registered to the name of Dennis.

Speaker 8 There's another detective who Googles the Christ Lutheran Church, and on their webpage is the president of the church, Dennis.

Speaker 33 And that's when it sunk in. This was his greatest mistake.

Speaker 16 Police still had that DNA that they collected back in 1974 at the Otero murders, and they knew that Dennis Rader had a daughter.

Speaker 12 They got a warrant for my medical records at the College Health Center. And you had no idea.
I had no idea. They found out I had had like annual PAP smears.
They got a sample of my DNA.

Speaker 1 In some ways, your DNA sealed your dad's fate. It did.

Speaker 12 But nobody told me this.

Speaker 12 It would have been nice if someone had asked me. for my DNA.
I would have willingly given it. It felt like an invasion of my privacy.

Speaker 29 We matched that DNA to the OTERO DNA on the little girl. We knew we had our guy.
The night that Lambert called me and said the DNA matches to Dennis Rader,

Speaker 29 I laid on a bed and cried

Speaker 5 because it was done.

Speaker 22 You know, I went to an office myself and knelt down

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 22 thanked the Lord.

Speaker 5 On February 25th, 2005, we knew something was up because none of our sources in the police department would call us back.

Speaker 22 So overnight we called 200 policemen. We had helicopters.
We had resources from off. We had a tank.

Speaker 22 We were the arrestee. We had eyes on him.
We knew he was leaving work. And we were going to catch him right before he got to his house.

Speaker 55 Jenny Castle checkmate 160.

Speaker 29 We pull him over and before he can hardly get in and park, we're yanking him him out of the car.

Speaker 29 We put him down, and he looked at the detective that had handcuffed him and said, Would you let my wife know I won't be home for lunch? I assume you know where I live. And I got chills.

Speaker 12 She always met my dad for lunch. The police knocked on her door and said that she needed to leave the house quickly.

Speaker 8 Dennis Rader's arrested. He was taken back to a car that Kenny Landwear was in.

Speaker 8 And he leaned in and said, Hello, Mr. Landwear.

Speaker 33 Dennis Rader, in my estimation, was just totally enamored with Kenny Landware. He was kind of like, oh, we're buddies, you know, and I'm from the dark side and you're on the light.

Speaker 10 My boss calls and says, Susan, you have to get to work right away.

Speaker 50 We're almost sure BTK was caught.

Speaker 43 I got to tell you, at that moment, I literally felt

Speaker 10 this huge weight being lifted off my shoulders and I started crying. I never knew how afraid I was

Speaker 47 till the day he was caught.

Speaker 5 This is a breaking news alert from Kink on your side.

Speaker 63 Quarter century search for Wichita's worst serial killer is over. Police confirming today they have made an arrest of BTK.

Speaker 27 I got the phone call from my sister. She said they got him.
I said, yeah, right. She goes, no, they really got him.
They swear it's him.

Speaker 17 Then the news blitz came on and it was all over, everywhere.

Speaker 19 BTK is arrested.

Speaker 38 Police say this man, 59-year-old Dennis Radar, is the BTK strangler.

Speaker 9 And you were still at that point convinced that they had the wrong man?

Speaker 12 I think reality was starting to creep in

Speaker 12 because I knew that BTK had strangled women. Like, that's what I had known.
I knew from the news. And it hit me that our neighbor down the street,

Speaker 12 Maureen Hedge, had been strangled. And I felt my stomach just twist, realizing it could be true.

Speaker 5 I think the surprise for all of us is we expected a Charles Manson-looking guy. It wasn't.

Speaker 16 Dennis Rader is literally the least likely suspect. He is a pillar of the community.
He's the president of his Lutheran Church congregation. He is a compliance officer.

Speaker 43 He wore a badge.

Speaker 6 People at Meekers would see him there all the time.

Speaker 15 Hey, hey, how are you doing?

Speaker 6 He was the guy in the line next to us at the grocery store.

Speaker 33 Everything was set to go so they could start the interrogation.

Speaker 22 We had moved him to a room that we had prepared and he started talking and kind of danced around for a while.

Speaker 31 He didn't think that they had kept the biological specimens from the crimes that he had committed all these years.

Speaker 31 And then they brought up the DNA and they could nail him.

Speaker 20 Anyway, you can get out the DNA, right?

Speaker 26 You can't get out of your DNA unless you've had a total blood transfer and lost every organ. It's there.

Speaker 22 And it was at almost the exact three-hour mark of them being in the room. And he said, you got me.

Speaker 15 I'm BTK.

Speaker 64 Yes, you guys know.

Speaker 64 Just say exactly who you are.

Speaker 28 Tinkin, your BTK.

Speaker 29 They're talking to Rader, and Lieutenant Lanware pulls up a Ziploc evidence baggie with the purple floppy disk in it. He slides it in front of Rader and says, you know what this is?

Speaker 29 Dennis Rader starts poking his finger forcefully on this floppy disk.

Speaker 29 And he says, I got a question.

Speaker 7 But I'm going to ask you this question.

Speaker 64 I need to ask you this question. I need to ask you.

Speaker 20 Sure, you alive.

Speaker 20 I'll give you all right.

Speaker 64 Because I was trying to catch you.

Speaker 29 And Lieutenant Lamb says, well, I was trying to catch you.

Speaker 16 It took a while for Dennis Rader to start talking, but once he did, he told police more than they bargained for.

Speaker 54 The list of BTK's victims is growing. Two unsolved murders from the 80s and 90s now tie to the serial killer, the murders of Maureen Hedge and Dolores Davis.

Speaker 8 He spills everything in detail.

Speaker 64 A lot of times when I catch you scouting, people get camped out at night. It's a good cover for a guy like me.
You go out and camp out and then slip away.

Speaker 8 He becomes so comfortable that during a break, when he's asked to put his name on a cup of the drink that he has, he writes BTK on the cup as his name.

Speaker 22 While I don't admire him, his memory was admirable. I mean, that guy remembered those scenes.

Speaker 64 The belt that I used was the the belt I was wearing and I had her come back and I whispered to her a little bit and

Speaker 64 remember told her okay that's a bad guy and that she really is smart.

Speaker 64 He spoke for over 30 hours and Joseph and she says what's going to happen for me I said well I said now you're looking at the life that returns your family.

Speaker 44 And he showed no remorse, no regret.

Speaker 8 The only regret he showed during this was that there weren't more victims, that if he wouldn't have had a family that held him back, he would have been able to do and kill more people.

Speaker 1 Did you ever think there was anything scary about your father all this time growing up?

Speaker 12 Not scary, no. I mean, unsettling at times, like you might get spanked or you get yelled at or barked at for something small.
Like as a parent now, I realize that happens in a lot of families.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 56 There's no foreshadowing.

Speaker 25 I spent a lot of time at her house.

Speaker 25 It still doesn't even really creep me out knowing, you know, like I was like sleeping on the couch and, you know, he was there, like, because there's nothing about him that really put me off.

Speaker 9 One minute, you had a man in your life who you thought was a loving father.

Speaker 1 The next minute, he's a serial killer. Right.

Speaker 12 I had to learn how to grieve the loss of somebody I loved very much that no one else loved anymore.

Speaker 8 He told us that we would discover what he termed his mother love.

Speaker 50 What did you make of all that?

Speaker 31 I'm Dr. Catherine Ramsland.
My area of expertise is primarily serial killers.

Speaker 31 When Dennis Rader was arrested in 2005, I saw this as a very unique opportunity for me to use what I knew about serial killers to structure a book by a serial killer. I wrote letters to him.

Speaker 31 He wrote multiple letters, long letters back to me. We talked on the phone every single week and I visited him in the prison.

Speaker 44 Dennis Rader was arrested on Friday in Wichita and he has confessed.

Speaker 22 He knew he was caught. There was no question.
We had, you know, not only DNA, we had all the evidence we were getting in his house.

Speaker 8 He told us that we would discover what he termed his mother load. Information that covered from the OTERO murders all the way through Dolores Davis.

Speaker 2 There were journals and drawings.

Speaker 16 He had materials that he collected from each of his victims, clothing,

Speaker 16 car keys.

Speaker 31 He had compartments everywhere. He had false bottoms in a closet.
He had stuff in a crawl space. He had stuff in a tree house he had made for his kids.

Speaker 31 And also there were Polaroids of himself in his autoerotic activities that the police initially thought were male victims that they didn't know about.

Speaker 8 What we would discover is photographs of himself. where he would be dressed up as a female.
Sometimes he would have a mask on and a wig, and he would be tied up.

Speaker 33 He was dressing himself up in bras and underwear, torturing himself, hanging from trees, taking photographs of himself half buried with a Polaroid camera that he'd hook up to his foot and pull the trigger.

Speaker 22 They took thousands of pictures with that Polaroid.

Speaker 31 He took the photos of himself to relive the experiences. That was part of what he needed to be aroused.

Speaker 50 What did you make of all that?

Speaker 12 Horrified. To have somebody that seemed so prim and proper to find out that was his other side.
Like, that's just weird. Like, remove all the crimes.
Just that. It's like shocking.

Speaker 29 Serial killers have a pattern. Usually they're abused as children.
He flatly denied any physical abuse, sexual abuse.

Speaker 29 All of the hallmarks of a person that turns into a serial killer, he claimed he didn't have.

Speaker 22 He always had a very, very healthy fantasy life. Raider had, at a very young age, connected sexual excitement with violence.

Speaker 31 In November 1959, about 200 miles west of Wichita, in a town called Holcomb, Kansas, a family of four was murdered, tied with ropes first.

Speaker 31 Dennis Rader, at the age of 14,

Speaker 31 was in a car with a girl he had a crush on. He heard this on the radio.

Speaker 20 The murders of four members of the Herbert Clutter family near Holcomb, Kansas.

Speaker 31 This alarming story of the Clutter family being murdered in their homes. And he immediately wanted to kill the girl that was in the car.

Speaker 14 The in cold blood case in Kansas is so shocking, they make a movie out of it.

Speaker 57 Make one move,

Speaker 15 how it wants,

Speaker 57 and we'll cut their throats.

Speaker 14 To Dennis, it really taps into his fantasy and obsessions.

Speaker 31 His reaction was not horror, as most people's were. It was arousal, attraction.
He wanted to do that too.

Speaker 1 Were there things things in Catherine Ramson's book that angered you?

Speaker 12 Yeah. The book was very personally difficult to read.

Speaker 31 Raders said that his wife one time came home unexpectedly and witnessed him in her slip hanging himself or at least preparing to do so.

Speaker 31 He tried to explain it and he says she went to a counselor and was reassured this is sort of a man thing and it wasn't necessarily dangerous or terrible.

Speaker 31 But she wanted him to keep it out of the house, just don't do it in front of me.

Speaker 12 So I called my mom. I said, look, he's claiming this thing and this book that's about to come out.
And I'm like, did that happen? She's like, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 12 She said, like, no, like five or six times.

Speaker 53 So then it becomes this issue.

Speaker 12 Who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe the sane normal woman, which is my mother? Are you going to believe the narcissistic psychopath that you know lies all the time?

Speaker 31 Raider does have a lot of psychopathic behaviors, and we know from brain research that they have very shallow emotional roots so that he doesn't have a conscience about lying or deceiving or manipulating or pretending to be somebody he's not.

Speaker 1 When you try to sort this out, is your dad mentally ill or is he evil?

Speaker 12 He's definitely mentally ill, but he's not insane. He very much knows what he's doing and what he did.

Speaker 8 He's just a sick, sadistic murderer is what it comes down to, not some fascinating criminal.

Speaker 31 I think to dismiss Dennis Rader or any other serial killer or mass murderer as a one-dimensional being is to make yourself unsafe because you will not spot the real monsters if you think they're so easy to see.

Speaker 12 Early on when my father wrote me in 2005, he said like he's so sorry things got away from him. Like cat and mouse caught up with him.
You will always be my baby girl I raised right proud, independent.

Speaker 12 Hopefully someday your heart will mend and you can forgive me.

Speaker 12 Life before the arrest was a good time and the dark side took me away.

Speaker 1 How could you even correspond with him? I mean people would wonder like why wouldn't you just cut him off?

Speaker 12 I wasn't corresponding with BTK. I'm never corresponding with BTK.
I'm talking to my father. I'm talking to the man that I lived with and loved for 26 years.
I still love my dad today.

Speaker 1 You still love him today.

Speaker 13 Because I love the man that I knew.

Speaker 12 So, you know, clinically, there's

Speaker 12 criminologists or psychologists that would say, your father's a psychopath and he's incapable of feeling. But I don't know.
I don't know a psychopath.

Speaker 12 That's not the man I knew and loved.

Speaker 53 So,

Speaker 53 like, I have a a tendency to want to compare my lives and disassociate and say, over here for 26 years, this man that I adored and loved that could sometimes be gruff and a couple times was abusive, and that's not okay.

Speaker 2 And then over here is this insane, torturous, violent, horrific man.

Speaker 2 I don't know that man.

Speaker 53 So, if I'm going to get up every morning and live my life, I better come to learn how to get back here.

Speaker 44 This is Cake News, Station of the Year.

Speaker 37 Larry Hatterberg joins us with more on that.

Speaker 5 I was with Cake Television, the studio that we're in now for 51 years from 1963.

Speaker 55 What the escapees have done between the time they left here and when they were caught?

Speaker 5 To 2014. Oh, I'm sure somebody will be discovered in that.
I was just looking at the video.

Speaker 16 We were trying to discover someone.

Speaker 65 Dennis Rader grew up watching cake.

Speaker 6 He watched cake every single night.

Speaker 18 We were his favorite station.

Speaker 36 And good evening, everyone. We begin tonight with breaking news in the case.

Speaker 18 We have learned that Rader has been charged with 10 counts now of first-degree murder.

Speaker 6 The day he was caught, the weekend weather guy walks into the newsroom. Name is Jeff.
He goes, Susan, I have to apologize.

Speaker 65 I said, apologize for what?

Speaker 6 He goes, I'm a member of Christ Lutheran. Dennis Rader asked me,

Speaker 6 hey, can we take a tour of the cake studios?

Speaker 6 And Jeff, our weekend weather guy, saying, I brought him into the cake studios as a tour group.

Speaker 1 And I'm looking, that was him.

Speaker 6 That was him taking the pictures. Dennis Rader was right there, five feet from us, watching the newscast.
two months before he was caught.

Speaker 65 And the weird part about it was,

Speaker 6 you know, during the two newscasts, we were BTK, BTK, BTK, because we were that whole year.

Speaker 65 Can you imagine how that thrilled him?

Speaker 13 It was nearly a year ago when Wichita got a chilling reminder.

Speaker 28 Okay, we know he's charged with 10 murders.

Speaker 5 Everybody wanted to talk to Dennis, from the national media and international media on down to those of us in the local media. And of course I wanted to talk to Dennis Rader.

Speaker 5 I wrote him a number of letters and I had included my phone number.

Speaker 5 Then on one Saturday morning, I get a call. The operator says, will you accept a collect call from the Cedric County Detention Facility?

Speaker 5 I had BTK on the phone.

Speaker 44 I have a recorder going, if that's all right with you.

Speaker 5 I said, there are questions that I want to ask you. And he said, go ahead.

Speaker 55 When did you first know that you had a problem?

Speaker 5 I was always curious when he knew that he was going to become something very bad in life.

Speaker 5 This was a building thing. This started many, many, many years ago.

Speaker 44 Can you pinpoint when you knew that there was a problem coming?

Speaker 44 Well,

Speaker 44 I would say probably came when I was in coming great school. I sort of had some problems.
And what kind of problems were those?

Speaker 44 Oh,

Speaker 44 sexual fantasies. My personal problem was

Speaker 44 weirder than other people.

Speaker 5 He said, by the time I was in junior high, I knew who I was and I knew what I was.

Speaker 31 The first thing that set BTK apart, was even before he started to kill, was his desire to be a serial killer at a time when that phrase wasn't even in use.

Speaker 31 There's very little media coverage of these people, but he was reading true detective magazines that showed him a couple of serial killers that then became role models for him.

Speaker 31 So he incorporated serial murder into his fantasy life.

Speaker 23 He talked about the hunt.

Speaker 5 He told me he got a high from it. Finding the woman and then killing her, that was what turned him on.

Speaker 46 Do you have any remorse over the killing?

Speaker 5 Dennis Rader told me that he felt sorry for the victims.

Speaker 42 Well, no one believes that.

Speaker 5 The families certainly don't believe that. The police department doesn't believe it.
The FBI doesn't believe it. It was just him trying to be human.

Speaker 12 It was more like he was sorry that he got captured. Or it's more like he's really sorry that he's in prison, that he's cold and he doesn't have my mom's cooking.

Speaker 12 Honestly, I don't ever really have saw it where he said he's sorry for murdering 10 people.

Speaker 31 When you add in for Rader, the narcissism, it's always going to be about him.

Speaker 31 Narcissists have a strong buffer around themselves that is only about them and they'll always act first in their own interests, always.

Speaker 32 Virtually everything involving Dennis Rader in the media can be traced back to his arrogance. He wanted attention.
Attention drove him.

Speaker 16 His hunger for publicity seems to have drawn him in. Would he have been caught had he not re-emerged in 2004? Had he not sent out those envelopes to the paper and to the TV station?

Speaker 16 If he faded into the night, would he still be out there in Wichita living as a married man and a father and a dog catcher? I think bottom line is I want the people of Senator County

Speaker 16 and the United States and the world to know that

Speaker 16 I want to pay for it.

Speaker 5 Life sentence. After I hung up the phone, I remember thinking I've just talked to a man who has has no soul.

Speaker 5 Please ride.

Speaker 16 Now, Dennis Rader was headed to court.

Speaker 54 All right, Mr.

Speaker 36 Rader, I need to find out more information.

Speaker 50 We've never heard a serial killer like this.

Speaker 20 The kids were really banging on the door and hollering and screaming.

Speaker 24 It was shocking.

Speaker 11 This gets complicated.

Speaker 11 Let me think now.

Speaker 65 Our laws dropped.

Speaker 65 Give it up for Chicago.

Speaker 67 Sebastian Maniscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, is now streaming on Hulu.

Speaker 62 30 years ago, Jeff Bezos, complete nerd. Bezos now ripped to shreds on his super yacht, and the boxes keep

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Speaker 61 Terms apply.

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Speaker 29 Can't wait to see you guys. We love you.

Speaker 67 If they can only make it home.

Speaker 40 What's going on? Our tour plane burned? No.

Speaker 32 We cannot miss Christmas.

Speaker 52 Nothing can stop us from getting home now.

Speaker 11 Hungry.

Speaker 9 You lost all three of your passports?

Speaker 40 It's Christmas. Anything can happen, right?

Speaker 67 A very Jonas Christmas movie, now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu, reading TBPG DL.

Speaker 22 It became clear early on that he was going to plead because the case was simply overwhelming. As much evidence as I'd ever seen against someone.

Speaker 22 And Nola Folsteel was going to make it very clear that he's going to be exposed for what he was.

Speaker 49 This guy is one very, very perverted individual.

Speaker 22 He's not a master criminal. He's not some piece of mythology.

Speaker 33 He's a child-killing piece of I told the court, I said, you know, that's all fine and well if they want him to plead guilty.

Speaker 33 But we want to put on evidence of all of the crimes so people know exactly what happened.

Speaker 8 Public was going to hear and see who Dennis Rader really was, not who he wanted the public to think he was.

Speaker 1 Did you attend any of his court appearances? Did you see him?

Speaker 12 No, I just, I wouldn't have been able to do it.

Speaker 12 I was torn because you want to be there supportive for your father, but the media presence was massively heavy.

Speaker 12 And we were not keen on being anywhere near the media.

Speaker 22 Those plea hearings are usually 10, 12 minutes, but this one turned into about an hour and a half.

Speaker 8 Judge Waller, rightfully so, asked Dennis Rader to describe what he did.

Speaker 5 All right, Mr.

Speaker 36 Rader, I need to find out more information.

Speaker 31 The judge took him through every victim.

Speaker 20 I did miss this Otero.

Speaker 20 I had never strangled anyone before, so I really didn't know how much pressure you had to put on a person or how long it would take.

Speaker 20 The whole family just went, they went panicked on me, so I worked pretty quick. Mrs.
Byanne, I went ahead and tied her up, and then put a bag over her head and strangled her.

Speaker 35 After she was down and not moving anymore, I

Speaker 35 rearranged her clothes a little bit and took some quick photos.

Speaker 16 Here is this man standing in court

Speaker 16 in what I imagine was his church suit, recounting the murders of his neighbors one by one by one.

Speaker 35 I had a commitment I needed to go to, so I moved her to one spot, took her out of her car.

Speaker 11 This gets complicated.

Speaker 2 Let me think now.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 In the interim,

Speaker 23 I took her car back to her house.

Speaker 2 Our mouse dropped.

Speaker 10 And the national audience, too.

Speaker 47 This guy's explaining every single murder in detail like he's explaining a trip to the grocery store.

Speaker 17 He's giving the judge a lesson in serial killer 101. That's his arrogance.

Speaker 20 If you read much about serial killers, they go through what they call the different phases.

Speaker 20 That's one of the phases they go through

Speaker 20 as a trolling stage.

Speaker 20 Basically, you're looking for a victim at that time.

Speaker 17 It was hard to stomach.

Speaker 12 He makes himself sound like he's Mr. Good Guy.
You know, like he says, I got Mr. Otero a pillow

Speaker 12 like before I strangled Mr. Otero.

Speaker 20 Tried to make Mr. Otero as comfortable as I could.
Apparently he had a cracked rib from a car accident. So I had him put a pillow down for his head.

Speaker 1 I was kind to him before I killed him.

Speaker 12 That's where like that massive disconnect comes in.

Speaker 12 And you realize, my God, my father's a psychopath.

Speaker 27 When Rader described in court how he killed my family, it was the first time I'd ever heard how they died.

Speaker 27 When he said that some of my mom's last words were, may God forgive you for that, it was like breaking my heart again.

Speaker 27 I just, I could not believe that my mom was so beautiful and gracious in such a traumatic moment.

Speaker 45 The detectives had tried to prepare us for what we might hear in the courtroom, and I couldn't keep it together.

Speaker 49 I just broke down and Lieutenant Lanware came over.

Speaker 49 He just hung me

Speaker 49 and let me cry.

Speaker 33 I'm sitting at this desk and I'm listening behind me to all the families crying when he's thumbing through all of these murders he committed and how much he liked them.

Speaker 20 I had some sexual fantasies.

Speaker 20 But that was after she was hung.

Speaker 33 It was horrible.

Speaker 5 I will accept these pleas pleas of guilty and I judge you Dennis L.

Speaker 29 Rader, guilty of murder in the first degree.

Speaker 31 The case was over except for the sentencing. Now the DA had her day in court.
She put together very elaborate PowerPoints to show his deviancy, his aberrancy, you know, how bad he was.

Speaker 66 It was part of his modus operandi to enjoy them expiring before his eyes with their knowledge that he was killing them. There was nothing normal about Mr.
Rader's existence.

Speaker 49 Nancy's death is like a deep wound that will never ever heal.

Speaker 29 The pain and suffering that he's caused our family.

Speaker 40 Their lost lives are missed yet to this day.

Speaker 22 At the end of the sentencing hearing, there is a chance for victim impacts.

Speaker 56 Charlie Byanne was my mother.

Speaker 22 If you want to watch six minutes of the best written impact statement, you watch that of Jeff Davis.

Speaker 4 For the last 5,326 days, I have wondered what it would be like to confront the walking cesspool that took my mother's precious life.

Speaker 24 I spent months working on that victim impact statement.

Speaker 17 Months. I just couldn't wait.

Speaker 4 If my focus were hatred, I would stare you down and call you a demon from hell who defiles this cord at the very sight of its cancerous presence.

Speaker 4 If I embraced bitterness, I would remind you that you are nothing but a despicable, child-murdering, cowardly, impotent eunuch and pervert masquerading as a human being.

Speaker 17 And I stared at him the whole time.

Speaker 24 He didn't have the guts to look at me.

Speaker 22 After that, he was allowed to make a statement in what they call mitigation.

Speaker 22 So he gets up and I don't know if he misunderstood the wording or what because I think he thought he was getting an award.

Speaker 20 Thanks.

Speaker 20 I can't believe the people that have helped me on this. You have to appreciate the police department.
They've done a lot of work. I hope I pronounced these people's last names right.

Speaker 20 And if I leave somebody else, I apologize for that.

Speaker 33 All the families walked out. They all got up, turned around, and walked out the door.

Speaker 20 There's many, many, many more beyond those.

Speaker 20 I would be here a long time if I helped. So I do appreciate all those people that helped.

Speaker 12 He's thanking everybody, like the police.

Speaker 28 He was thanking people?

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's really surreal. And then he basically said, like, my family were pawns in his game.
and social contacts.

Speaker 1 Called you social contact. Right.

Speaker 22 He leaves us all with a quote from the Bible.

Speaker 35 This is John 8, 12.

Speaker 5 I am the light of the world.

Speaker 35 He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have life of life.

Speaker 22 What I always tell people is in law enforcement, we can quote the Bible too. If you do evil, be afraid, for we do not bear the sword in vain.

Speaker 16 The judge sentenced Dennis Rader to 10 life sentences. He wasn't eligible for the death penalty because at the time he committed the crimes, the death penalty did not exist in Kansas.

Speaker 29 There's one person that's going to judge him. When he has to meet his maker, then he'll get his true judgment.

Speaker 29 They both have a locking mechanism in the back.

Speaker 8 Lieutenant Landwhere was a towering figure in this case.

Speaker 5 No one worked harder. No one worked longer hours than Detective Landwhere to bring BTK to justice.

Speaker 8 Unfortunately, Lieutenant Landwhere passed away a few years ago. He was stricken with cancer.

Speaker 29 I was at his home with other detectives that worked for him, and we were right there by his bedside when he took his last breath.

Speaker 5 And man, he was a

Speaker 42 hell of a man.

Speaker 8 Kenny Lanwer did die knowing that he caught BTK.

Speaker 38 That is the car that Dennis Rader is in.

Speaker 2 I know Wichita will never forget the day that he was transferred.

Speaker 10 to the El Dorado correctional facility.

Speaker 33 He'll never walk out of that prison, and that's where he needs to stay, until the day he dies.

Speaker 16 Dennis Rader freely admitted that he wasn't done yet, that there was an 11th victim.

Speaker 46 Had you picked the person at that point? Oh, yes, I know.

Speaker 46 There was one already picked out.

Speaker 16 The terror of this case really makes it unforgettable, and it's kind of made its way into pop culture.

Speaker 28 It's been 30 years since the first BTK killings.

Speaker 48 All of a sudden you've got made-for-TV movies, Dennis Rader.

Speaker 13 What on earth are you up to now?

Speaker 5 I did watch the TV movie. It's odd when you see your community displayed on the national TV.
It's just an odd feeling. But I understand the interest.
It was so fascinating.

Speaker 29 Every aspect of the story was fascinating.

Speaker 5 Do you know why you're being arrested?

Speaker 29 I have suspicions, Juan.

Speaker 7 Dennis Rader.

Speaker 29 He was a prototype for the guy in my story.

Speaker 16 Stephen King even wrote a novella called A Good Marriage that was made into a film that mirrors this theme.

Speaker 47 Now it's on this show called Minehunter.

Speaker 8 And there's a reference to a killer in Wichita, Kansas.

Speaker 12 My Netflix notifies me on my phone. Minehunter is just coming out.
You're like a 97% match for Minehunter and you probably would really like it.

Speaker 60 Oh,

Speaker 45 I didn't realize you were still in the house.

Speaker 12 I got into like 30 seconds of it. They opened with a scene of the guy playing my dad.
He's close enough match that it messed me up in my head really bad.

Speaker 12 And I haven't made it through any more Mindhunter.

Speaker 8 My kids have watched it, but I have not.

Speaker 24 I know what happened.

Speaker 8 I don't have to be reminded about it.

Speaker 16 Dennis Rader freely admitted that he wasn't done yet.

Speaker 16 That there was an 11th victim. That he had chosen her.
He had an 11th project on his list.

Speaker 5 I asked him if he had another victim in mind. Were you going to kill again?

Speaker 5 Well, yes and no. There was probably much more.

Speaker 5 I was really thinking about it. Had you picked the person at that point?

Speaker 5 Oh, yes, I know.

Speaker 31 There was one already picked out. Number 11 was going to be sort of his swansong.

Speaker 29 He tells us her name. He tells us her address.

Speaker 29 He tells us he's he's been stalking her over a year. He tells us what kind of vehicle she drove.
He told us how he approached her home one night and actually got to the front porch.

Speaker 31 This was going to be the most elaborate of all. He was going to tie her up, I think, upside down.
He was going to burn the house down.

Speaker 31 There were a lot of things that he was going to do to this victim that he had not done before.

Speaker 31 But when he went to her house, and there was a construction crew outside the house on the day.

Speaker 8 Law enforcement did reach out to this person.

Speaker 8 She was shocked.

Speaker 14 They go to that victim who's never been publicly identified to tell her, look, this guy wanted to have harmed you, but now that will not occur.

Speaker 29 I would never bet my life on it because you don't know, but I truly believe that he told us everything he did to the fullest. I don't think we have any more victims out there.

Speaker 1 Just months after your dad had confessed, your mom was granted an emergency divorce.

Speaker 12 I think partly to like remove her finances from him because she was trying to sell our home. But she needed to break off from my father, not just for financial reasons.

Speaker 12 She needed to emotionally make that disconnect and move on with her life.

Speaker 1 Has she contacted him?

Speaker 12 She wrote my father early on. in the beginning months, but as far as I know, she has not contacted him since the summer of 2005.

Speaker 16 The biggest question was, didn't his family know? Didn't his wife know? Everyone suspected that the family must have had some sort of inkling.

Speaker 5 He kept his kill kit in his closet.

Speaker 5 People have always wondered, why didn't she go in the closet and see it?

Speaker 5 The police asked her about it. The FBI asked her about it, and she said, he was always a very neat man.
I saw no reason to go into his closet.

Speaker 5 I'm not sure how many wives would do that, never go into their husband's closet.

Speaker 1 Do you think your mom had any clue that your dad was doing anything criminal?

Speaker 12 No, mom and I both said, if we had had an inkling that my father had harmed anyone, let alone murdered

Speaker 12 anyone, let alone 10, we would have gone screaming out that door to the police station. We were living our normal life.
We looked like a normal American family because we were a normal family.

Speaker 12 And then everything upended on us.

Speaker 31 There's no reason she should have known anything. He was very good at what he was doing.
His duplicity was very, very skilled and polished.

Speaker 10 People ask me, do you know where his wife is?

Speaker 50 Do you know where BTK's wife is?

Speaker 50 She just disappeared, never wanted any part of anything.

Speaker 45 I can't imagine what her mom and her and her brother went through finding out who their dad was and what he really did. That must have been almost as bad as what he did to us.

Speaker 27 I believe that the Raider family has been victimized by him, and I also have compassion for the pain they must be going through. But it's not the same kind of a deal, you know what I mean?

Speaker 27 It's one thing to be hurt by someone you love. It's another thing to see someone that you love hurt.

Speaker 16 If his family had no idea what he was up to or even saw any evidence of this over 30 years,

Speaker 16 it really makes you question, how well do you know anyone?

Speaker 1 Some people would want to stay in the shadows. They would not want to step out publicly and say, I'm the daughter of a serial killer.
Why tell people?

Speaker 12 I tried for nine and a half years not to tell people. I mean, I prayed over and over to God.
I want a peaceful, quiet life. I live with depression and anxiety.
I was suffering from PTSD.

Speaker 16 The problem is,

Speaker 2 if you live

Speaker 12 Such a quiet private life,

Speaker 12 it sits inside you and eats at you you because it's like something you have to hide or you're something you have to be ashamed of.

Speaker 1 So, you're taking control of your own story.

Speaker 12 I'm starting to take control of my own story and change the dialogue and trying to say, I've gone through hell, I'm still here. You too can overcome things.
Like, don't ever give up.

Speaker 12 No matter what you're going through, you can get through it.

Speaker 1 When will you tell your children who their grandfather is and what their grandfather did?

Speaker 12 This place represents loss and grief.

Speaker 12 In 2007, two years after my father was arrested, the house was demolished.

Speaker 14 The city decided to demolish it because of what it represented and they didn't want anybody to have a memory of this guy or where he lived.

Speaker 12 My childhood home's gone. Where my family was is gone.
Where I spent all this time with my father is gone.

Speaker 12 My dad had it all landscape. There were flowers, trees, tulips, daffodils.

Speaker 12 That's actually the flood that my brother and I played with in the winter and went sledding down hills. And I guess it just was never picked up when everything else was cleaned up.

Speaker 12 I wrote my dad in the summer of 07 because I wanted to let him know I was pregnant.

Speaker 12 Anybody would want their dad to know you're having a grandkid.

Speaker 12 But not long after that, I grew really protective of my growing baby and myself. And so I actually shut off contact with my dad for five years from 2007 to 2012.

Speaker 1 In the book, you say, in the foreword to Darian for loving me without fail, to Emily and Ian, when you're old enough, I will hand you this story to tell you my story.

Speaker 1 No, you're not old enough yet, so stop asking.

Speaker 1 When will you tell your children who their grandfather is and what their grandfather did?

Speaker 12 When my daughter was around five, she started noticing that she only had one grandfather. She was kind of like, well, where's the other grandfather?

Speaker 12 So I said, you know, I have a father, but he's in jail. And she's just this little thing.
So she's like, well, what what is jail you know and i was like well it's like a really long time out

Speaker 12 we have to be flexible what we're doing now works and then when it stops working we'll adjust Now they both know grandpa's in prison and they both know that grandpa hurt people, but they don't know the word murder.

Speaker 12 They know his name's Dennis, but I don't even think they know Rader. We're very careful with BTK.

Speaker 8 Dennis Rader is 73 years old today and he's in the El Dorado Correctional Facility just about 30 minutes up the road from Wichita in El Dorado, Kansas. And that's the place where he'll die.

Speaker 31 Dennis Rader is in a single cell in maximum security. He watches TV, sleeps, watches the stock market, is interested in politics, is very interested when he hears about another serial killer.

Speaker 31 Always wants details,

Speaker 31 and he reads.

Speaker 1 You write to him now.

Speaker 12 I do because in 2012 I was able to forgive my father.

Speaker 1 How do you forgive him for what he did? He took lives, he ruined your life.

Speaker 12 How do you forgive that? It was a very long journey. There was a lot of hard work in me with faith.
I had gone back to church. I was working like on my relationship with God.
working on my own heart.

Speaker 1 And how did you feel finally letting that go?

Speaker 12 It was just a massive release. I realized I was rotting within.
Like I didn't just forgive my father

Speaker 12 for him. I had to do it for myself.
I hope to see him in heaven someday because he could be forgiven for his sins too.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes.
See you then.

Speaker 68 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 5 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they? A massive twist.

Speaker 61 At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 68 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.