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The Double Life: How BTK Lived Among His Victims for Thirty Years
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Dennis Rader murdered ten people while serving as a church president, compliance officer, and Cub Scout leader — and nobody saw it coming. This episode breaks down how BTK selected victims, sustained a double life for decades, and was finally caught by a floppy disk.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you understand Dennis Rader, he seems like a man who simply got away with it for a long time. After you understand him, the more disturbing truth is that getting away with it was never the hardest part.
Last episode laid out the essential architecture of the BTK case. Ten victims.
The first time the public and investigators got a look at what that methodology meant in practice was January fifteen, nineteen seventy-four. Rader entered the home of the Otero family in Wichita.
What's difficult to hold in mind simultaneously is that Rader built the rest of his life around that same capacity for sustained, quiet focus. The thing that made him a methodical killer was the same quality that made him appear, on the surface, like a responsible member of the community.
Between nineteen seventy-nine and nineteen eighty-five, there were no confirmed BTK killings. Six years.
One thing that cuts against any idea of clean compartmentalization is the trophies. Rader kept items from his victims.
In two thousand and four, Rader started writing again. His last murder had been thirteen years earlier.
His daughter Kerri learned about her father's identity the same day as his arrest. FBI agents came to her apartment in Michigan to tell her.
At sentencing in two thousand and five, Rader received a total of one hundred and seventy-five years, the maximum available. Because Kansas had not had the death penalty at the time of his killings, execution wasn't an option.
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