The Twisted Saga of Notorious Serial Killer Dennis Rader: "The BTK Killer"
His identity remained a mystery for more than 30 years. The BTK killer murdered families and taunted police and media for decades until his arrogance and need for attention led to his identification
Background
In 1974, four members of the Otero family–their father, Joseph, mother, Julie, and two youngest children–were found dead in their Wichita, Kansas home.
Police were immediately alarmed by the crime scene. It had all the hallmarks of a meticulous killer with a military background–and disturbing sexual undertones, including traces of semen in the basement near where the Otero’s youngest daughter had been hung from a pipe.
Over the following 17 years, the killer, who called himself BTK (an acronym for his modus operandi: Bind, Torture, Kill), went on to murder at least six more people.
By the early 2000s, the murders had stopped, and the case went cold.
However, the killer would resurface when he began communicating with local media, sending them taunting letters that included details that only the killer could have known.
It wasn’t the murders themselves but rather the coded messages BTK distributed to local media channels and police that cemented his place as one of history’s most notorious serial killers–instead of simply becoming just another unsolved mystery.
Had he remained quiet, the true identity of BTK likely never would have been discovered. Instead, he brought himself to justice by the force of his own narcissism.
But let’s start from the beginning–who was this disturbed killer?
Dennis Rader’s Early Life
Dennis Rader had a seemingly ordinary life.
His mother was a bookkeeper, and his father was a Marine Corps veteran and Kansas Gas Service employee. One of four sons, Rader (born March 9, 1945), went to church with his family, joined the Boy Scouts, and, for all intents and purposes seemed to be yet another perfectly average teenage boy.
But all was not as it seemed on the surface.
From an early age, Rader had developed an obsession with bondage, domination, and torture. As a child, he killed neighborhood cats by hanging and strangulation. As he grew older, he began to fantasize about tying women up and having sex with them, an obsession that quickly developed into spying on female neighbors as they were changing, stealing women’s underwear, and masturbating in bondage.
But for many years, Rader managed to put on a respectable, if withdrawn, face for the community.
After dropping out of college, he served a term in the U.S. Air Force before marrying Paula Dietz, a girl from his hometown, in 1971. In early 1973, he received an associate’s degree in Electronics Engineering Technology and took a job with aircraft manufacturer Cessna.
Less than a year later, though, he was laid off by Cessna.
Finding himself unemployed, unhappy, and with far too much time on his hands, Rader’s dark fantasies took control of him.
First Victims
The Otero family were Rader’s first victims.
He chose them as his targets more or less at random. After months spent stalking women, hiding in parking garages and alleyways, he took a particular interest in Julie Otero and her youngest daughter.
The murders went off without a hitch for Rader. He cut the Otero’s phone lines, broke into their home, and convinced them that he just wanted their money so they would let him tie them up without resistance.
It was then that he suffocated them one by one: first Joseph, then their son, then Julie.
Finally, Rader escorted their daughter, alone and terrified, down to the basement, where he hung her from a pipe mounted in the ceiling.
The bodies were discovered and reported by the Otero’s oldest three children mere hours later, upon their return home from school.
While the grisly case caught the immediate attention of the press, Rader discovered a new, insatiable lust for violence. Over the following years, he routinely stalked, bound, and killed six other local women, often in their own homes.
Between murders, Rader would engage in what he called “cooling-off periods,” wherein he would divert his attention to taking photographs of himself in women’s clothing, masks, and bondage.
Meanwhile, his image within the community remained upstanding. His family trusted and adored him. He had taken a job with a home security company and was precedence of the church council at Christ Lutheran Church, where he later disposed of the body of one of the women he killed.
And, when the Wichita serial killings finally stopped in 1991, it seemed that Rader had made a clean escape from justice.
Codes and Taunts
From the very beginning, Rader had been much more communicative with police and other local authority figures than most serial killers tend to be. He sent police and media 19 messages in total since he started his murder spree in the 1970s; 10 of these messages were sent in the final 11 months prior to his arrest.
These communiques were generally pleas for public attention and notoriety. Rader developed codes and symbols to show off his intelligence, and in one letter pleaded, “How many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national recognition?”
In January of 2004, on the 30th anniversary of the Otero killings, local newspaper The Wichita Eagle published an article about the yet-unsolved BTK case.
The article wasn’t deemed worthy of the first page–which Rader found an intolerable offense.
A few months later, a Wichita TV station received a postcard from Rader describing two packages: one which he left by the side of the road, and another, in a local Home Depot.
The first was a cereal box containing records and memorabilia from Rader’s serial killings: some jewelry, a doll with a rope around its neck, and a document, formatted as a parody of the Wichita Eagle article, containing gruesomely detailed descriptions of the Otero murders.
It was the second package that broke the case.
Inside of it was, among several other documents, a note in which Rader asked police whether it was possible to communicate via floppy disk without being traced. If so, he requested, they should place an ad in the newspaper that read “Rex, it will be OK.”
Breaking the Case
Of course, the police ran the ad.
They also scanned security footage from the Home Depot, in which they were able to identify the car of the person who had planted the package, a Black Jeep Cherokee.
Two weeks later, a different TV station received another package: a gold chain, a photocopied cover from a novel about a serial killer who bound his victims, and a floppy disk with instructions for the police to communicate with BTK.
While Rader had taken some precautions to erase personally identifying information from the floppy disk, police still found the name Dennis in the floppy disk’s metadata. They also discovered that the disk had been used at Christ Lutheran Church and the Park City library.
All evidence–including the truck, which was identical to the one owned by Rader’s now adult son Brian–pointed to Dennis Rader.
Now all that was needed was final, undeniable proof–which was secured when prosecutors subpoenaed a student clinic near Kansas State University in Manhattan for a sample of a pap smear done on Rader’s daughter, Kerri.
The DNA collected from the pap smear and from semen left in the vicinity of Rader’s victims proved, beyond a doubt, that the killer was Kerri’s father.
Arrest and Sentencing
The morning of February 25, 2005, was just like any other for Dennis Rader.
He went to work as a compliance officer for Park City and schemed about new ways to grab the attention of the public before returning home for lunch.
It was there that, after 31 long years, BTK was finally arrested.
More than anything, Rader seems to have been embarrassed by the way the arrest panned out–not as a heroic last hurrah, but a mundane and humiliating experience:
“At first it was kind of—kind of a cat and mouse game. That they had a suspect. But it, but it, but it did kind of hurt, you know… I had the power, you know, I was a law enforcement officer technically and here I am—these law enforcement officers were trying to do my duties. That kind of hurt a little bit.”
Before long, though, Rader was enthusiastically and vividly confessing to the authorities. He seemed overjoyed to have finally got some of the recognition and attention he so desperately craved.
His testimony earned him a divorce from his wife of 34 years, and a 175-year prison sentence–the most extreme penalty available in Kansas at the time.
Sources:
Aly Vander Hayden. “The Creepy Bondage Selfies the BTK Killer Took in between His Murders.” Oxygen Official Site, 31 Aug. 2018, www.oxygen.com/snapped/crime-time/creepy-bondage-selfies-btk-killer-dennis-rader.
Bonn, Scott. “Evolution of a Serial Killer: Dennis Rader, BTK | Psychology Today.” www.psychologytoday.com, 7 Feb. 2022, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/202202/evolution-serial-killer-dennis-rader-btk.
Hansen, Mark. “How the Cops Caught BTK: Playing to a Serial Killer’s Ego Helped Crack the Case.” ABA Journal, 1 May 2006, www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/how_the_cops_caught_btk.
Magnus, Edie. “31 Years of the BTK Killer.” NBC News, 12 Aug. 2005, www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8916264.
Winter, Hannah Murphy. “BTK Serial Killer: What We Learned from Confessional New Book.” Rolling Stone, 12 Sept. 2016, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/btk-serial-killer-what-we-learned-from-confessional-new-book-111057/.