BTK /// Bind, Torture, Kill /// Part 4

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The following communication was sent to KAKE TV and was titled The BTK Story.

Believed to be the autobiography of the killer the police were searching for.

Complete with an outline, giving the titles to 13 chapters of the BTK story.

They were

1.

A Serial Killer is Born.

2.

Dawn.

3.

Fetish.

4.

Fantasy World.

5.

The Search Begins.

6.

BTK's Haunts.

7.

PJs.

8.

MO ID ruse

nine

hits

ten

treasured memories

eleven

the final curtain call

twelve dusk

thirteen will there be more

In the spring of 1989, Dennis Rader got a new job as a census field operations supervisor in Wichita, Kansas.

Now, he liked this job for many reasons, mainly because the job required him to be out driving around in a truck.

One of his favorite things was to eat his lunch in his truck and scout for possible new victims.

He also had, among other strange hobbies, a hobby where he would scour magazines and newspapers for ads featuring women that caught his eye.

He would cut out the images of the women he liked and he would glue them to three by five index cards.

Each day, he would place one in his pocket, and the card would ride along in the truck with him while he was out doing his job each day.

He would write in his journals at home and talk like the women were real.

So he would write things like, drove around today,

drove around town today with a sexy redhead.

Notes itself, if I ever start doing this, jump off a bridge immediately.

In 1991, he was hired by the compliance department in Park City as a compliance officer.

This job required him to work with code violators, issuing tickets and catching dogs.

There were varying stories regarding Rader at this job.

Some would later say that Rader used the position to bully people.

Some say he was just doing his job.

And others even reported that Rader was nice and helpful.

In all likelihood, he probably did not treat everyone the same way.

And he definitely harassed some women during the time when he was working in this position.

And there's one story in particular of a woman that had moved into town, into Park City.

And she stated that when she moved to Park City, she was single.

And Raider must have taken a liking to her because he was very helpful, like, seemed to be checking on her from time to time, very pleasant, very nice to her.

And he would see her often.

I think that's called stalking.

Well,

when she got a boyfriend,

he changed his song and dance.

He really started harassing the woman and started harassing the boyfriend.

He would issue them tickets for very minor infractions, almost seeming like he was making things up from time to time.

And she said that he often would park his truck and sit

and eat his lunch where he could see the house, where he could keep a visual monitoring of the house and maybe of her as well.

Again, that's cut stocking.

Regardless, he seemed to like this job for many reasons, but mostly because it gave him some type of authority, giving him a badge and some power.

Dolores D.

Davis, age 62, was born in 1928 in Stella, Nebraska.

She was raised on a farm.

Now, she was an excellent cook who made everything from scratch.

In 1961, after 12 years of marriage, a son and a daughter, Dee and her husband, divorced.

Now, she was a fun, protective, and devoted mother and grandmother, adored by her family, her son, and

you know, her son always spoke to his mother on the phone on the weekends, sometimes for hours.

When her children and grandchildren gathered for Christmas at her home in 1990, they spent much time together, but one memory that was created during that trip was they all sat together and watched the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven.

If anybody's seen this movie, you'll know it's an emotional movie.

It did bring the family to tears.

Now, Dee had just retired from her job of over 25 years as a secretary for a fuel company.

She was passionate about animal rights issues, and she enjoyed being a Mary Kay Cosmetics sales consultant.

Dennis Rader had spent a couple of months driving by her home and seeing her when he decided that she would be a good target.

Well, this is because BTK found her attractive and she lived alone.

In January of 1991, Dennis Rader was going to put together a plan to do a hit on her.

Now, on the night of the 19th, Rader went to Dolores' home.

Dolores was home inside reading.

Dennis waited outside for her to turn off the lights before he would break in.

While he's out there, Rader is waiting outside.

He's wondering, he cannot figure out how he's going to break into the house.

He had already checked the doors and they were locked and they were far too sturdy for him to pry them open.

After she turned out the lights, Rader cut the phone line to the house.

He then found a cinder block in someone's backyard.

He carried it over near Dolores' home.

He lifted it up until it was shoulder high.

He centered himself on a large sliding glass door in the back of the house.

Rader launched the heavy block into the air and through the window, instantly shattering the glass.

Dolores ran out of her bedroom screaming.

She saw Rader standing inside her home.

He told her It was cold outside and that he needed some warmth, some food, and some money.

He ordered her to return to the bedroom.

He followed behind.

Once inside the bedroom, Dennis Rader pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and put them on her wrist.

To try to calm the woman down, he kept telling her he just needed her car keys and that he would be gone in no time.

Once she calmed down, Rader took the cuffs off of Dolores and tied her hands together with rope.

He took a pair of pantyhose from one of the dresser drawers.

He wrapped them around her neck, strangling her until she was dead.

Blood had started to come out of her ears, mouth, and nose.

It took him about three minutes to strangle her.

Rader then wrapped her body up in the blanket that was on the bed and carried her body out to the trunk of her car.

Then he went back into the home and collected some jewelry and clothing of Dolores's.

He then hopped into her car and drove off.

He dumped her body in a culvert by a highway.

Then he drove to another location and hid the trophies he had collected from her house in a safe spot so that he could retrieve them later.

Then, and I find this to be awfully strange,

he drove her car back to her house and put it in the garage.

And then he

walked like two miles to his own vehicle.

I do find this incredibly strange, but here one thing I do do know about BTK is this.

At one of his crimes, he actually left the gun that he used during the crime at the crime scene.

I don't know which crime scene that was.

And he said that he had to go back and retrieve that gun.

My guess is it might be this one that he's talking about.

Or his driving around and saw a bunch of cops and thought, well, he should just go back to the house and drop off the car at the house.

Well, and a little behind the scenes thought here for everybody.

That's kind of why I picked the beer this this week to be Dimwit.

We have this individual, Dennis Rader, that likes to portray himself of a certain intellect and to be very smart and cunning and outsmarting the police and outsmarting his victims when in reality, he's just kind of a buffoon.

He's a Dimwit.

Yeah, he's a Dimwit.

Very good.

So I think maybe it might be this crime where he realized that he had left the gun because he dumps her body in this culvert just to kind of conceal her.

And then he decides to go hide these trophies that he intends to retrieve later, driving her vehicle back to her home, walking two miles to his own vehicle.

And then once he gets his vehicle, he drives back to her body.

picks it up and takes it to another location much further away.

And he decides that he's going to dump her here at this new location.

This is under a bridge out in the middle of nowhere.

Now the next day, he's still all charged up and hopped up on these fantasies and thinking about the night before.

The next day, he returned to the body.

He placed a plastic mask over the face and put lipstick and makeup on the mask.

And then he took several photos of the body.

Two weeks later, the body was discovered.

The murder was featured in the newspaper.

The connection to BTK was not made.

According to Dennis's journals, with each kill, he was extremely paranoid after his murders, each time expecting the police to show up at his door at any time.

But each time that feeling would go away after about a month or so.

And after the paranoia left, each time,

then he would be back out trolling for victims again.

This murder took place in 1991, but we're not going to hear from the BTK because it goes dark until 2004.

Yeah, the whole time, I guess, living his life doing normal things, more normal things.

However, it would be

what brought this on, I believe, is in January of 2004, the Wichita Eagle ran a story on the 30-year anniversary of the BTK case.

Right.

Two months later, in March of 2004, a letter arrived at the newspaper.

According to the information on the envelope, the letter was from Bill Thomas Killman.

The return address was 1684 South Old Manor.

The address was fake.

There was no such place in Wichita.

Now,

people had always wondered: if you think about the initials of Bill Thomas Killman, so that's BTK, right?

And then the other thought was:

was he playing some kind of game?

You know, BTK would be an old man by now, and the address used was 1684 South Old Manor.

Right.

Anyway, inside the envelope, they found photocopied snapshots of a woman who appeared to be either unconscious or dead.

She's lying on a floor.

It also contained a photocopy of a driver's license of a 28-year-old Vicki Wegerly, whose 1986 murder had never been solved or linked to the BTK strangler.

On the letters, BTK was written at the bottom of the page.

There was also some type of code made up of letters and numbers.

Police sent the code to code breakers, but they came up with nothing.

They couldn't crack it.

Well, when you're stupid and you come up with a code, normally it's hard for anybody to

crack it.

Right.

Because it didn't make any sense.

In 2000, in the year 2000, this was four years.

In the year 2000.

Four years before BTK ended his silence, the Wagerly Cold case became hot.

The Wichita police detectives, this is Kelly Otis and Dana Gouge, they were assigned to work on the unsolved 1986 killing of 28-year-old Vicki Wagerly, a wife and a mother found bound and strangled in her home on West 13th Street.

Now, the police had found a man's DNA.

This was under the victim's fingernails.

And in 2003, the lead homicide detective, Ken Landware, remember we talked about him, he was one of the members of the Ghostbuster squad.

By this point in his career, he's now the lead homicide detective for the Wichita, Kansas Police Department.

He had the two detectives on the case test the DNA that was found.

Landware had always suspected that the Vicki Wagerly murder could be the work of BTK.

Now, as you know, when it comes to lab work, current cases take priority over the old ones.

So it was not until after the first communication from BTK in 2004 that they would get the the results back.

Well, and it could have been as simple as: hey, he's made contact again, so they bumped up the priority.

Yeah, yeah.

They may have moved it to the front of the line.

But shortly after he broke his silence, they received the results from those tests, and the profile was entered into a newly developed national database of criminals.

Now, there was no match for this.

However, the DNA test showed that the same killer had been in the homes where BTK strangled four members of the Otoro family in 1974 and Nancy Fox in 1977.

But once police saw the photocopy of the pictures, then the driver's license and the letters BTK, the hunt was on.

So police announced the startling new development, and the news media pounced on this story.

Police received over 1,000 tips over the course of the first weekend of this investigation that they just launched.

Now, to handle the response from the public, police set up a command center at a law enforcement training academy.

They needed elbow room for phone banks and for computers, and they just needed space to work on this thing.

The Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office assisted with data entry and research support.

Callers gave police an overwhelming number of possible suspect names.

Detective Landware and crew decided suspects would be eliminated systematically and scientifically.

Now, the eliminators would be as follows.

One would be race.

So the DNA profile showed the killer was a white male.

So if you weren't a white male, you're eliminated.

Right.

Age, the calculation was based on the idea that the killer probably would have been at youngest 18 to maybe 20 years of age when he killed his first known victims, victims,

the Otoros, in January of 74.

So the killer would be at this time 48 years or older.

Now, incarceration was also very much an eliminating factor because someone who was in jail or prison during any one of the murders was eliminated.

Also, prisoners in recent years would have DNA on record, and police knew that BTK's DNA didn't match anything in the database.

The most important of all of the eliminating factors was, of course, DNA.

In a somewhat controversial move, investigators took 1,600 DNA mouth swabs from men mainly in and around Wichita, but a few came from people living out of the state.

Almost all of these 1,600 people volunteered and complied to submit their DNA.

Well, and the other crazy thing is, is now

they're realizing with the research that BTK wasn't dormant.

Yeah, and actually, a lot of people at this time had probably forgotten about BTK.

Wichita was no longer afraid of this person.

Most people had assumed that he had died or moved on.

But yeah, like you said, you know, it wasn't that he wasn't dormant during this two and a half decades.

He had just simply kept a lower profile than in his earlier killings.

And now police had to wonder, as did the community, how many killings was he responsible for over the course of that time?

On June 9th of 2004, what police would later call communication number three, this was found at the corner of First and Kansas, taped to a stop sign.

One of the documents in the package graphically described the Oturo family murders.

Also, there was a drawing of a nude female bound, gagged, and hanging from a rope.

With the drawing were the words, the sexual thrill is my bill.

This guy's such a douche.

In July, workers at the public library discovered a clear plastic bag at the bottom of a book return bin.

Written on the bag were the letters BTK.

Inside were five sheets of paper.

Two of the pages detailed BTK's involvement in the death of a troubled 19-year-old man named Jake Allen.

Allen's death was ruled a suicide.

Now, Allen was a star athlete in high school who dreamed of being an optometrist.

Allen was picked up and arrested by police.

He and some buddies were out drinking and driving, and they had alcohol in the car.

After his arrest, he was convinced that he would never get into college.

And it is believed because of this that he decided to take his own life by lying down on the train tracks.

He was crushed almost beyond recognition.

Now, BTK, however, wrote in this communication that he had been responsible for the death of, as he put it, old Jakey after meeting him in a computer chat room and convincing the young man that he was in fact a private eye hunting for BTK.

The letter claimed that the young man Jakey had sexual perversions involving masturbation, bondage, and homosexuality, and claimed Jakey agreed to help the fake private eye in his investigation to find BTK.

These, of course, are all lies.

However, the police at the time did not know this.

And

this was actually, you know, where I call Dennis Rader a dimwit.

This may have been a smart move on his part just simply because the investigation at that time was white hot, right?

And this...

This is Dennis Rader throwing a wrench into that well-oiled machine because then the police spent weeks focusing in on Jake Allen, conducting interviews, sifting through his computer, investigating if he was the latest BTK victim.

But it was all for naught.

It was just a farce put on by Raider after he read about the boy's suicide in the newspaper.

Now, what might not be a phony story is that also in this communication, BTK stated that he had some future female and maybe a child victim in mind, that he had spotted them and had already began to troll them.

And he just had to, quote, work out the details.

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All right.

Cheers, mates.

We're drinking the Dimwit.

Let's get back to the Dimwit.

Cheers, Captain.

It was in October that BTK reached out again.

What we're seeing here is a frequency.

He can't control himself at this point.

Right.

He's enjoying this communication back and forth too much at this point.

This communication was found in a UPS drop box by one of their drivers.

Again, it was a plastic bag with the initials BTK on it.

Inside were three note cards, and on them were what BTK called his Uno Dos Trace Theory, stating that the world of the BTK is based around the number three

and triangles.

I could go into this.

I know this stuff, but it makes little to no sense at all.

Like, you know, like he would draw like a triangle and it would at one point put BTK,

police,

detectives, you know, or I'm sorry, BTK, victims, police, you know, and then the other,

sun, heat, warmth.

Like, it was just stuff that made no sense at all.

Right.

This communication also contained what is thought to be pieces of the killer's autobiography.

And as usual, this was full of errors and misspellings.

It was.

Now, and we kind of talked about this.

We don't know if he was just an idiot and he

had misspellings or had errors or if he did this on purpose to throw off the scent.

Yeah, so

do you want me to kind of fast forward a little bit since we're on that subject?

Yeah.

So, yes, you're exactly right.

The FBI warned the local police department to not fall for what could be what is commonly used when these guys make communications is a lot of them will purposely misspell things or they'll have grammatical errors.

In this case with BTK, that was the thought.

That was the thought during the time of the investigation.

After he was caught and after he was

wrote out his own confessions, they saw those same, the guy couldn't spell and he couldn't write.

Well, he might have had some form of dyslexia.

Probably.

You know, which would probably make him feel self-conscious, which would probably lead him to want to feel powerful.

Yeah.

You know, I laughed there, but I only laughed there because I actually think maybe he's just more impulsive and less in control of himself than he thinks that he is.

Right.

And that and that this bad spelling thing is something that has always been a part of him.

Right.

Now, speaking of communications, the next communication was as the others others were strange.

This was a strange one, and they seemed to be getting more and more strange as they were getting more frequent.

This time it was a cereal box that was found inside.

I'm sorry, inside the cereal box, they found jewelry from one of his victims and a little doll, like a Barbie doll.

And the Barbie doll had bindings on it, and it was tied by the neck to a little piece of pipe.

The box also contained a note card asking a question.

Had the officers received number seven from the Home Depot parking lot?

The answer to that question is they had not.

So

here's what he's doing.

He's kind of numbering his communications, right?

Just like he named himself, now he's numbering his communications.

He's not technically numbering them, but this would be the seventh communication that they received in 2004

and he's saying wait a second did you receive number seven from the home depot parking lot so but seven in the same year

yes seven in the same year i just want to be clear about that right so what what i'm getting at is

This would be the seventh communication that they had received.

It's the eighth one that he has sent to them.

He's asking them, did you get number seven?

Because he knows that sometimes they receive these things and they don't tell anybody.

His whole thing that his whole

ritualistic attitude here is

he has to have that broadcasted.

He has to get the notoriety for these communications.

He has to see his name in the paper.

And because he didn't, he wants to know, well, did you receive that and you're just keeping it quiet?

Or did you not find it?

Right.

Well, they had not received this.

And the way that this worked out was they go to this Home Depot and they're looking around.

They search the store inside and out.

They can't find anything from BTK.

They can't find any form of communication.

Note, it should be pretty obvious once they find what they're looking for because he almost always puts the initials BTK on the communications.

So what they do is they get a bunch of the surveillance tape from the parking lot, from the Home Depot.

And on one piece of footage, this was from days before that they spotted where an SUV had pulled into the almost empty parking lot.

This would have been when the store was not open.

Parking lot's almost empty.

This SUV pulls in.

Somebody gets out of the vehicle, walks across a short way across the parking lot and has some kind of object in their hand and they toss it into the back of a pickup truck, into the bed.

of a pickup truck.

The crazy thing here, though, Captain, is the detectives.

We have Landware, who's been working this case for almost 20 years.

We have all these other detectives that have been hunting this madman.

Could you imagine?

They're seeing what they believe to be BTK's vehicle.

Could you imagine what's going through their brains?

Well, they're looking at

a shadow figure of the guy that they know and believe to be BTK, the guy that they've been hunting all these years.

They're seeing him, but not his face.

Well, what they end up doing is they have to get the they have no idea what was thrown into the back of that truck or how they're going to find this thing, right?

Well, maybe if they get the license plate number, they could track down the vehicle, they couldn't because it's too blurry, too blurry.

Plus, if they could do that, then you would think they could get BTK's license plate number, true.

But think of the risk that he's

okay, we've covered so many retail cases lately.

Please upgrade your cameras, people.

Please, it's ridiculous.

Well, what they did, Captain, was they were able to decide that they could determine the approximate size and wheel base of the vehicle that the suspect was driving.

This was interesting because they actually really narrowed it down to a very few models, a very few vehicles and models.

And what they were able to determine was that if, in fact, this vehicle was not stolen, that he was driving his own vehicle, let's say, He would be one of about 200,

he would be one of about 2,500 local residents that owned a vehicle matching this description.

Let's go knocking on doors, my friend.

Well, that would be an option, but they actually came up with the communication before they would have to take that route.

So, what happened was the manager of the Home Depot put up flyers inside the store asking all of the employees, Did you receive anything strange in your vehicle?

Did you find anything weird and you don't know what it is?

Let us know.

Well, a roommate of a guy that worked there that owned a the um the guy that worked there owned a pickup truck.

Right.

His roommate had found a cereal box in the back of the dude's pickup truck.

Cinnamon toast crunch.

It was uh special K cereal.

Oh, that's so

cereal.

That's a garbage.

He was, he assumed that it was trash and he had thrown it away.

He assumed right because that cereal is garbage.

I like Special K.

Wow.

Now,

the trash had not been collected from the home yet.

So they were able to retrieve this Special K cereal box.

This was recovered, and inside

there was a two-page document, and on it was a long list of BTK's projects or what he called his PJs.

There was also a question, and this was asking Landware.

This was asking Landware directly.

If BTK wanted to send a computer disc to them, could they trace it?

And he asked them to give him the answer in the newspaper in the want ads under the miscellaneous section.

And if they can't trace it, to put in the message, Rex, it will be okay.

Also, they should run the ad for several days so that BTK would not miss the ad if he were out of town or didn't pick up the paper that day.

Please run the ad multiple times for me.

This was weird because now we have Raider wanting to start communicating by sending them floppy disk from computers.

And for the first time, BTK is asking the police a question.

This is a dumb question.

Rather than just kind of

directing the conversation and telling them whatever he wants.

When your teacher tells you, when they stand up at the front of the classroom and they say, students, there are no dumb questions.

You say, yes, there is.

When you're a serial killer, you do not ask the cops if they can trace something or not.

The police, they went ahead and ran the ad in the newspaper.

And their ad read, Rex, go ahead and send a floppy.

Well, on January of 2005, Dennis Rader became the elected president of council at the Christ Lutheran Church.

Right.

On February 16th of that same year, a padded envelope arrived at KAKE TV.

Inside were more index cards and a purple computer disc.

The disc was turned over to the police analysts.

The disc contained one message, and the message said, this is a test.

See note card for further instruction.

The note card said that any communication going going forward from the killer would have a number on it.

That way, if one was lost, they would know.

Yeah, or if somebody else was writing to them, pretending to be the BTK, that they want to get mixed up.

It only took the analyst a few more minutes to pull the information that they were searching for.

This revealed that the author of the test message was someone named Dennis, and the owner of the computer was the Christ Lutheran Church.

Now, this is going to sound completely crazy for somebody that you've looked for for 20 years.

I mean, and when you factor all involved, you're talking about this was over a 30-year manhunt for this guy.

So, what did they do?

They did a quick Google search.

And this quick Google search told the officers that Christ Lutheran Church was located in Park City

and that a one Dennis Raider was listed as the church's president.

They put surveillance on their subject, but they didn't jump on him and arrest him right away.

They wanted to make sure that they had good, solid evidence on this guy to connect him to BTK before the arrest.

Lanware wanted DNA from Rader to tie him to the DNA that was found at multiple crime scenes where BTK had killed.

Right.

But how were they going to get Dennis Rader's DNA without tipping him off?

Well,

this is wild.

So they start doing some digging on Dennis Rader, his background, and his family.

One thing that they discovered is that his daughter, Carrie, had attended the University of Kansas State.

While she was there, she had been treated or received some kind of checkup or treatment at the health clinic there.

Yeah.

They took her DNA.

Yeah, so

she was no longer a student there.

She had graduated before,

but they still had things that they believed that they could pull DNA from.

So they get a court order and they go to the Kansas State University.

They find these items.

They get a court order to test them for DNA.

And what they discover is that it tested positive that the DNA that they tested was the daughter.

of the killer that they knew to be BTK.

Oh, good, because I just hate this guy.

You know?

Yeah, I mean, you and the rest of the world, right?

He's just, I hate him.

So the task force that we have, they were worried that somehow the media might learn of Dennis Rader before they could arrest him.

This was a concern.

Because this had actually happened before.

This was when

they had a guy that they liked as BTK.

His name was Roger Valdez.

They wanted to get DNA swab from him.

He was one of the few people that didn't really want to comply and give them the DNA swab.

And it was because through the media, he had heard that he was considered a prime suspect at the time.

So they had a leak somewhere amongst this task force.

They were worried, would Dennis Rader, would this be leaked to the media and Dennis Rader catch wind of this?

So they're going to have to move a little faster than they wanted to.

However, for Rader, What the police wanted to do was map out precisely and coordinate a plan to simultaneously arrest him, search his home, other key places, and contact and interview his relatives all at the same time.

So, what they did was they organized 215 officers and agents were assembled to take this on.

Oh, that's a lot of money.

A lot of this was mostly for the searches that were going to be done.

So, now they were going to use Dennis Rader's schedule against him.

Raider was predictable, and the detectives knew this from following him over the course of that surveillance.

They knew what time he went to work.

They knew what time he came home for lunch every day, and so on and so forth.

Now, the police knew that Rader always left his office at 12:15 p.m.

and arrived home for lunch to have lunch with his wife at 12.18 p.m.

each day.

Three minutes.

As Rader drove onto Frontage Road, this is off of 61st Street in Park City, an unmarked police car stopped him.

There were plenty of guns drawn on him.

An officer dragged him out of his truck.

Now, at that point,

the officers would later say, at that point, we're dealing with an individual we believe committed eight homicides.

So we were taking no risk.

We knew that he had used guns before and in previous crimes.

So they drew guns on this guy.

They took no risk.

Now, Raider was handcuffed and he was searched.

moments later raider in landware the guy who had been hunting him for 20 years wait did he have one of those little creepy cards his little flash cards he made i wonder if he had one of those on his person at that time i i don't know driving around with a redhead that's interesting if he still had that hobby at the time um weirdo but now we have these two individuals we have the the monster and the guy that's been hunting the monster for 20 years they're finally face to face with each other other.

And

they're saying hello to one another.

They're calling each other Mr.

at this point in the back of the police car.

I'm not calling nobody Mr.

Police audiotaped the arrest from the car

and

used in the transport of Raider and took aerial photographs from a helicopter as well.

They stated that he was, Dennis Raider was breathing hard during this time, as were the officers.

And later, Landware would go on record saying, I cannot tell you how much fun it was to finally take this guy down.

It was a great day for everyone in law enforcement.

Now, Bob Morton, who was a FBI behavioral analyst and Detective Landware, they were the ones that would conduct the initial interview with Dennis Rader.

The idea here, Captain, was that Rader would respond to Landware.

Because he knew who he was.

He knew him by name.

He knew he was active on the BTK case for so long.

And Bob Morton, being from the FBI, well, this would boost Dennis Rader's ego during the course of the interview.

Then the teams of detectives interviewed Rader about the cases that they had been assigned to.

So we have all these murders, all these homicides.

We have other detectives working some of these.

Now,

we had some detectives during the interviews.

The only thing they spoke to Rader about was his communications with KAKETV, with law enforcement, and so on.

And the sheriff's personnel, they approached him about the Maureen Hedge and Dolores Davis homicides.

Now, you have to keep in mind, the sheriff's department had to work these two homicides because they took place outside of Wichita City.

And not only that, they were abducted from another location and then dumped elsewhere.

So how long did they interview this creepo?

For 32 hours, they interviewed Dennis Rader.

And during that time, they actually encouraged him to sleep, but he wouldn't.

He did nap a couple of times, you know, very briefly, but they wanted him to get a good night's sleep, and he did not want to.

He wanted to talk.

It was about three hours and 15 minutes into the initial interview when Rader looked at Bob Morton, the FBI agent, and Morton said to him, Say who you are.

And Dennis Rader answered, I'm BTK.

Now, Rader's own DNA came back as a match about 12 hours after the start of the interviews.

He had learned that investigators by this time had already had his daughter's DNA and had linked that to him and to BTK.

And so, according to Detective Landware, at this point, Rader has figured out that he has been put in a corner.

And he kind of,

once that comes out with the DNA, and once once he realizes this is what's going on,

after about 12 or 13 hours into the interview, he's going to start telling them

everything.

I mean, everything.

To the point that he was even trying to describe to them the that code.

Remember that code that they couldn't figure out?

Yeah, the shitty code.

Yeah, he was trying to tell them that the letter that he mailed to the Eagle in 2004, what he had used was German fractional code that he claimed that he knew from his military background.

And remember, they sent it and nobody could crack it because the code actually made no sense.

He got it wrong when he tried to remember it.

He had damn dyslexia getting in the way again.

Well, in the interview process, he tried to prove them wrong, trying to recall the code himself, which he couldn't.

Damn way.

Another interesting thing, though, here, Captain, was that during the course of the interview, Rader repeatedly tapped on the disc, on the computer disc.

They put it on the interview table and they just kind of set it there right in front of him.

Okay.

And he tapped on it.

Well, he would tap on it throughout the course of the interview.

And at some point, he looked at the officers, Landware in particular, and he asked him, why did you lie to me?

And Landware said,

because I'm trying to catch you.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't I lie to you?

I'm trying to catch you.

Yeah, you killed people, you son of a bitch.

Yeah, we're going to lie to you.

Well, I think, see, that's what's weird, though, is that,

okay, so something psychological had taken over with Dennis Rader.

And this was actually something that the FBI had recommended that the police do a long time ago in their investigation.

What they had recommended is that they create the persona of some kind of super cop.

All right.

So that Dennis Rader would identify the investigation into him and to his killings through one person and one person only.

He could take this detective and he could put him on a pedestal in his mind.

He's now this super cop that is a worthy adversary of his, hunting him, somebody that is his equal.

And

throughout the course of many years of looking at that one person and having this person that he considered to be an equal, he let his guard down to the point where he then believed that he could trust him, that his equal would be honest with him, and that the game of cat and mouse would continue forever.

Well, that wasn't going to be the case, obviously.

And the FBI did say that they believed with somebody, and they always believe this, usually when a killer is willing to communicate multiple times with the media or law enforcement, is that usually

they will lead law enforcement to themselves.

They will get themselves caught because of their ego and because of their need to make these communications.

Now, Rader did voice concern about how his arrest would affect his family, his church, and the city of Park City.

When teams of investigators told Rader's wife and his grown son and daughter about his arrest, they were in disbelief.

They had no idea that their husband or father was this monster.

They did exactly like they said they were planning to do.

Remember, we said that they brought in 215 officers because they wanted to search his,

all at the same time.

They wanted to arrest him, search his home, interview his relatives, and they did that.

And some of them didn't even live in Wichita, Kansas.

So what they did was they distributed officers out to those locations.

They sat there and waited.

And at that specific time, between 12-15 and 12-18 on that day, those officers were to go and bust into the home, knock on the door, do what you got to do.

You need to be in these locations all at this same time.

On March 1st, 2005, Raider's bail was set at $10 million, and a public defender was appointed to represent him.

On May 3rd, the judge

entered a not guilty plea on Raider's behalf as Rader did not speak at his arraignment.

However, on June 27th, which was the scheduled trial date, Dennis Rader changed his plea to guilty.

The thought here was that he would save his family some anguish and shame of going through the details of the crime.

That was not to be because he was forced to describe the murders in detail during,

he was ordered to give a full confession, basically.

right now could there be some murders out there that he didn't confess to for some reason possible it's possible i doubt it like you said earlier it seems to be that he wants the credit let's say that's a terrible word but that's what he wants he wants the credit for his actions and for what he thinks to be some kind of career or some kind of great work that he believes that he did now

during the

and i'm sure some people have seen this by now you can actually find the full confession online.

I believe it's like 48 minutes long.

That's awful.

It's very tough to listen to because he doesn't seem like he gives a shit.

He seems like he's kind of giving the weather report to somebody when he talks about these crimes.

One thing that I know that really sickened the family, his direct family, especially his daughter, was that, one, they didn't believe he was guilty until they, you know, the next day when they found out, well, he confessed to police.

Right.

They're like, the DNA matches.

Right.

Well, they're like, crap, you know,

he did really do this.

And then once he's in court, when he's going over the description of these murders,

a lot of people thought that he

may have purposely

droned on about the murders of the two children.

You know, most of his victims were adults.

And a lot of people seem to think that he hovered around that a little longer than necessary.

Maybe he took some kind of pleasure in talking about those specific murders out of the murders.

So he offered no apologies during the course of this confession.

And at Dennis Rader's August 18th sentencing, victims' families made their statements, after which Rader did apologize in a rambling 30-minute monologue.

Dennis Rader was sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences with a minimum of 175 years to be served.

Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the murders that he committed.

So he is in solitary confinement with one hour of exercise per day and gets to shower three times per week.

And guess what that makes him?

What?

One stinky piece of shit.

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