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The Otero Murders: How BTK's First Kill Revealed Everything
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On January 15, 1974, Dennis Rader broke into the Otero family home and killed four people — his first known murders, and a blueprint for everything that followed. This episode traces BTK's debut crime, the taunting letters that followed, and the double life that kept him hidden for thirty years.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
January fifteenth, nineteen seventy-four. A Tuesday morning in Wichita, Kansas.
The Otero family had roots in Puerto Rico. Joseph had served in the Air Force and recently moved the family to Wichita.
Dennis Lynn Rader was twenty-eight years old when he killed the Otero family. He had served in the Air Force himself.
For several months after the Otero murders, Wichita police had no viable leads. Then, in October nineteen seventy-four, someone called the Wichita Eagle newspaper and directed them to a letter hidden inside an engineering textbook at the Wichita Public Library.
Rader killed again in April nineteen seventy-four. Kathryn Bright and her brother Kevin, who survived the attack with gunshot wounds.
Through all of it, Dennis Rader held jobs that put him in direct contact with the community he was terrorizing. He worked as a supervisor for ADT Security.
After nineteen ninety-one, Rader went quiet for thirteen years. Then, in two thousand four, he started writing again.
At his arraignment and later at his sentencing hearing, Rader talked about his crimes in a tone that disturbed everyone in the courtroom. He was clinical.
When FBI agents knocked on Kerri Rawson's apartment door in Michigan in February two thousand five, she was twenty-six years old. She knew her father was under arrest.
The Otero family murders did something specific in the record of this case. They established the template.
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