Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered 10 people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita, Kansas), between 1974 and 1991. He was known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler ), which stands for "bind, torture and kill" and describes his modus operandi . He sent boastful letters describing the details of the killings to police and to local news outlets during the period of time in which the murders took place. After a long hiatus in the 1990s, he resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction.
Early life
Rader is the eldest of four sons born to William Elvin Rader and Dorothea Mae Cook. Though born in Pittsburg, Kansas, he grew up in Wichita, attended Riverview School, and later graduated from Wichita Heights High School. In 1957, he was confirmed into the Zion Lutheran Church. According to several reports, including his own confessions, as a child he tortured animals, one of the warning signs in the MacDonald triad. He also harbored a sexual fetish for women's underwear; he would later steal panties from his victims and wear them himself. Rader attended Kansas Wesleyan University from 1965 to 1966. He subsequently spent four years (1966-1970) in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in Texas, Alabama, Okinawa, South Korea, Greece and Turkey.
When he returned to the United States, he moved to Park City, a suburb located seven miles north of Wichita. He worked for a time in the meat department of Leekers IGA supermarket in Park City alongside his mother, a bookkeeper for the store.
Personal life
Rader attended Butler County Community College in El Dorado, earning an associate's degree in Electronics in 1973. He enrolled at Wichita State University that same fall. He graduated from there in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in Administration of Justice. He married Paula Dietz, on May 22, 1971, and they had one son and one daughter.
From 1972 to 1973, Rader worked as an assembler for the Coleman Company, a camping gear firm, as had two of his early victims. He then worked for a short time for Cessna, in 1973. From November 1974 until being fired in July 1988, Rader worked at a Wichita-based office of ADT Security Services, a company that sold and installed alarm systems for commercial businesses during Rader's years there. He held several positions, including installation manager. It was believed that he learned how to defeat home security systems while there.
Rader was a census field operations supervisor for the Wichita area in 1989, prior to the 1990 federal census.
In 1991 Rader was hired to be supervisor of the Compliance Department at Park City, a two-employee, multi-functional department in charge of "animal control, housing problems, zoning, general permit enforcement and a variety of nuisance cases." In this position, neighbors recalled him as sometimes overzealous and extremely strict; one neighbor complained that he euthanized her dog for no reason. On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader's employment for failure to report to work or to call in; he had been arrested for the murders five days earlier.
Rader served on both the Sedgwick County's Board of Zoning Appeals and the Animal Control Advisory Board (appointed in 1996 and resigned in 1998). He was also a member of Christ Lutheran Church, a Lutheran congregation of about 200 people, near his former high school. He had been a member for about 30 years and had been elected president of the Congregation Council. He was also a Cub Scout leader. His son became an Eagle Scout. On July 27, 2005, after Rader's arrest, Sedgwick County District Judge Eric Yost waived the usual 60-day waiting period and granted an immediate divorce for his wife, agreeing that her mental health was in danger. Rader did not contest the divorce, and the 33-year marriage was ended. Paula Rader said in her divorce petition that her mental and physical condition has been adversely affected by the marriage.
Victims
- January 15, 1974: Four members of the Otero family
- Joseph Otero
- Julie Otero, Joseph's wife
- Joseph Otero II, son
- Josephine Otero, daughter
- April 4, 1974: Kathryn Bright (he also shot Bright's brother, Kevin, twice, but he survived)
- March 17, 1977: Shirley Vian
- December 8, 1977: Nancy Fox
- April 27, 1985: Marine Hedge
- September 16, 1986: Vicki Wegerle
- January 19, 1991: Dolores Davis
He collected items from the scenes of the murders he committed and, reportedly, he had no items that were related to any other killings. He did have other intended victims, notably Anna Williams, 63, who in 1979 escaped death by returning home much later than he expected. Rader explained during his confession that he had become obsessed with Williams and was "absolutely livid" when she evaded him. Rader spent hours waiting in her home but became impatient and left when she did not return home from visiting friends.
Rader had stalked two women in the 1980s and one in the mid-1990s. They filed restraining orders against him and one moved away.
Rader also admitted in his interrogation that he was planning to kill again. He had even set a date, October 2004, and was stalking his intended victim.
Arrest and conviction
By 2004, the investigation of the BTK Killer had gone cold. Then, Rader sent a letter to the police, claiming responsibility for a killing that had previously not been attributed to him. DNA collected from under the fingernails of that victim provided police with previously unknown evidence. They then began DNA testing hundreds of men in an effort to find the serial killer. Altogether, some 1100 DNA samples would be taken.
The police corresponded with the BTK Killer (Rader) in an effort to gain his confidence. Then, in one of his communications with police, Rader asked them if it was possible to trace information from floppy disks. The police department replied that there was no way of knowing what computer such a disk had been used on, when in fact such ways existed. Rader then sent his message and floppy to the police department, which quickly checked the metadata of the Microsoft Word document. In the metadata, they found that the document had been made by a man who called himself Dennis. They also found a link to the Lutheran Church. When the police searched on the Internet for 'Lutheran Church Wichita Dennis', they found his family name, and were able to identify a suspect: Dennis Rader, a Lutheran Deacon. The police also knew BTK owned a black Jeep Cherokee. When investigators drove by Rader's house they noticed a black Jeep Cherokee parked outside.
The police now had strong circumstantial evidence against Rader, but they needed more direct evidence in order to detain him. They controversially obtained a warrant to test the DNA of a Pap smear Rader's daughter had taken at the University of Kansas medical clinic while she was a student there. The DNA of the Pap smear was a near match to the DNA of the sample taken from the victim's fingernails indicating that the killer was closely related to Rader's daughter. This was the evidence the police needed to make an arrest.
On February 25, 2005, Rader was detained near his home in Park City and accused of the BTK killings. At a press conference the next morning, Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams announced, "the bottom line... BTK is arrested." Rader pleaded guilty to the murders on June 27, 2005, giving a graphic account of his crimes in court. On August 18, 2005, he was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences, one life sentence per murder victim. This included nine life sentences that each had the possibility of parole after 15 years, and one life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years. It meant that, in total, Rader would be eligible for parole after 175 years of imprisonment. This result guaranteed that Rader would spend the rest of his life in prison, without any possibility of parole.
Rader was ineligible for the death penalty, because Kansas did not have a death penalty during the period of time in which he committed his crimes. Kansas reinstated death penalty laws in 1994.
Letters
Rader was particularly known for sending taunting letters to police and newspapers. There were several communications from BTK from 1974 to 1979. The first was a letter that had been stashed in an engineering book in the Wichita Public Library in October 1974 that described in detail the killing of the Otero family in January of that year. In early 1978, he sent another letter to television station KAKE in Wichita, claiming responsibility for the murders of the Oteros, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox and another unidentified victim assumed to be Kathryn Bright (not identified because her brother survived and could have identified him). He suggested a number of possible names for himself, including the one that stuck: BTK. He demanded media attention in this second letter, and it was finally announced that Wichita did indeed have a serial killer at large. A poem was enclosed entitled "Oh! Death to Nancy," a botched version of the lyrics of the American folk song "Oh Death." In 1979 he sent two identical packages, one to an intended victim who was not at home when he broke into her house and the other to KAKE. These featured another poem, "Oh Anna Why Didn't You Appear", a drawing of what he had intended to do to his victim, as well as some small items he had pilfered from Williams' home. Apparently, Rader had waited for several hours inside
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