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My Congregation, My Victims: The Double Life Dennis Rader Built
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Dennis Rader murdered ten people across seventeen years while serving as a church president, compliance officer, and Scout leader in Wichita — and nobody suspected a thing. This chapter traces how BTK designed his crimes, taunted investigators through letters and poems, and was finally undone by a floppy disk and his own hunger for recognition.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you understand Dennis Rader, you picture one kind of man. After you understand him, you see a completely different one, and the frightening part is that the facts don't change at all.
The murders began without warning on January fifteenth, nineteen seventy-four. Dennis Rader entered the home of the Otero family in Wichita and killed four of them.
Wichita didn't know it had a serial killer until Rader told them. In October of nineteen seventy-four, nine months after the Otero murders, a letter appeared inside an engineering textbook at a Wichita library.
Between nineteen seventy-nine and nineteen eighty-five, the killings stopped. For six years, Wichita waited.
Detective Ken Landwehr became the face of the BTK investigation during its final and most critical chapter. He'd been connected to the case through his career in the Wichita Police Department, and by the time Rader resurfaced in two thousand four, Landwehr was the lead homicide detective on a case that was three decades old.
The floppy disk is where the story turns completely. In early two thousand five, Rader sent investigators a floppy disk containing a document.
On February twenty-fifth, two thousand five, FBI agents arrested Dennis Rader near his home in Park City. He was sixty years old.
Dennis Rader had a daughter named Kerri. She was thirty years old in February of two thousand five when FBI agents knocked on the door of her apartment in Michigan.
Step back from the timeline and a pattern becomes clear. Dennis Rader operated successfully for so long not because he was uniquely brilliant, but because the gap between his public identity and his private behavior was so extreme that no one was looking in the right place.
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