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Ten Murders, Thirty Years: Why BTK Couldn't Stay Silent
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Dennis Rader committed ten murders across Wichita, then spent thirty years hiding in plain sight as a compliance officer, church president, and Scout leader — until his own need for recognition destroyed him. This chapter traces the letters, the poems, the thirteen years of silence, and the fatal floppy disk that ended it all.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
He got away with it for thirty years. Ten murders.
The first murder was January fifteen, nineteen seventy-four. The Otero family.
Over the following years, the letters continued. Poems too.
While investigators kept the case file open and Wichita carried its unresolved fear, Rader lived what looked, from the outside, like a completely ordinary life. He worked as a compliance officer for the city.
By two thousand and four, the BTK case was thirty years old. A Wichita journalist published a book that revived public interest.
In February of two thousand and five, Rader sent police a message asking a question. He wanted to know whether a floppy disk, if he were to use one to communicate, could be traced back to him.
FBI agents arrested Dennis Rader on February twenty-fifth, two thousand and five, near his home in Park City, a suburb of Wichita. He was sixty years old.
Kerri Rawson was living in Michigan when FBI agents knocked on her door in two thousand and five. She was in her twenties.
The story of Dennis Rader's capture is ultimately a story about what he couldn't control in himself. He controlled his environment for thirty years.
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