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Compliance Officer, Scout Leader, Killer: How BTK Finally Fell
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For thirty years, BTK killer Dennis Rader hid behind a life of civic authority — enforcing city codes, leading church councils, mentoring children — while ten people were dead and their trophies sat hidden in his home. One floppy disk and an unanswered question brought it all down.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What does it mean when the man who enforces your neighborhood's rules, leads your church, and earns the trust of your children's scout troop is also the man responsible for ten murders? That question isn't abstract.
The morning of January fifteen, nineteen seventy-four was when it began. Dennis Rader broke into a home in a quiet Wichita neighborhood and killed four members of the Otero family.
While Wichita tried to figure out who BTK was, Rader was living the kind of life that would have seemed completely unremarkable to anyone watching. He was a compliance officer.
After the murder of Marine Hedge in nineteen eighty-five and Vicki Wegerle in nineteen eighty-six, Rader killed one more time. Dolores Davis, in January of nineteen ninety-one.
What followed was one of the most consequential acts of self-destruction in the history of American criminal cases. Rader sent packages to police and media.
Rader was sixty years old when they took him in. He'd been hiding in plain sight for three decades.
On the morning of February twenty-fifth, two thousand and five, two FBI agents knocked on the door of Kerri Rawson's apartment in Michigan. She was thirty years old.
Rader kept physical reminders of what he'd done. Bloody clothing.
The compliance officer. The church president.
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