Dennis Rader- BTK Killer

Dennis Lynn Rader was the eldest of four children born in Pittsburgh, Kansas on March 9, 1945. He grew up in a relatively modest family in Wichita, the place he would eventually terrorize.

Even as a teenager, Rader was evil. He would often hang and torture stray animals.

He cut out photographs of seductive women from magazines and drew ropes and gags on them. He envisaged the means by which he could restrain and control them.

Rader maintained a normal life and attended college for a period before dropping out and joining the United States Air Force.

When he returned from military service, he began working as an electrician in Wichita. He afterwards met his wife, Paula Dietz, in church. She worked as a bookkeeper for Snacks, and he proposed after only a few dates. They were married in 1971.

Killing His First Victim

Rader was fired from his position as an electrician in 1973, and on January 15, 1974, he murdered his first victim.

While his wife Paula slept, Dennis Rader broke into the residence of the Otero family and murdered everyone inside. The children, Josie, age 11, and Joseph, age 9, were forced to watch while their parents were strangled to death.

Josie cried out, “Mommy, I love you!” while she watched Rader strangle her mother to death. Then the little girl was dragged down into the basement where Rader pulled off her underwear and hung her from a sewer pipe.

Her last words were to ask what would become of her. Her killer, stoic and calm, told her: “Well, honey, you’re going to be in heaven tonight with the rest of your family.”

He observed the girl choke to death while masturbating. As a memory of his first atrocity, he snapped pictures of the dead victims and gathered some of the little girl's underpants.

Then, Dennis Rader returned to his wife at home. He had to prepare for church, as he was, after all, the president of the church council.

Then The Next Victims

Rader trailed and waited at the residence of Kathryn Bright, a young college student, before stabbing and strangling her. Her brother Kevin was then shot twice, but he survived. Later, Kevin described Rader's eyes as "psychotic."

Paula was three months pregnant with Rader's first child when, unbeknownst to her, Rader began secretively advertising his criminal activities.

After detailing how he murdered the Oteros in a letter he hid in an engineering book at the Wichita Public Library, Rader contacted the Wichita Eagle to inform them where they could find his confession.

Adding that he meant to kill again, he designated himself as BTK, an acronym for his favorite method: Bind, Torture, and Kill.

He took some time off after he discovered his wife was pregnant.

However, this only lasted a few years, when the BTK Killer struck again in 1977. He raped and strangled his seventh victim to death, Shirley Vian, as her six-year-old son watched through a keyhole in a door.

Even Dennis Rader's children did not suspect him. At his worst, their father was a strictly moral Christian. Kerri Rawson would recount a time when her father grabbed her brother by the neck in a fit of rage, and she and her mother had to pull him off to save the boy's life.

Her father waved to the 53-year-old Marine Hedge every morning on his way to church. When she became the eighth victim of the BTK Killer, tied up and choked to death, it was Dennis Rader who consoled and reassured his family. "Don't fret," he assured them. "We're safe."

In 1986, he murdered Vicki Wegerle, age 28, while her two-year-old child watched from a playpen. Her murder remained unsolved until the BTK Killer unwittingly turned himself in to authorities.

Dennis Rader slipped into domestic life and began working as a compliance monitor for the Wichita suburb Park City in 1991. He was notorious for being a demanding cop who was frequently unforgiving with clients.

In the same year, he committed his tenth and last crime. Rader used a cinderblock to smash through the sliding glass door of Dolores Davis, a 62-year-old grandmother who resided within a few miles of his family. Her body was discarded along a bridge.

The BTK killer Gives Himself Away

In his final year of freedom, Dennis Rader came across a local newspaper article commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Otero killings. In 2004, he sent almost a dozen taunting letters and packages to the media and authorities in an effort to re-establish the BTK Killer's fame.

Some were full of mementos from his massacres, some of dolls bound up and gagged like his victims, and one even contained a pitch for an autobiographical novel he wanted to write called The BTK Story.

The one that would certainly destroy him was a letter on a floppy disk. The cops discovered the metadata of a deleted Microsoft Word document within the device. It was a document for Christ Lutheran Church written by Dennis Rader, president of the church council.

One of his victim's fingernails was sampled for DNA, and his daughter's pap smears were examined to confirm a match. On February 25, 2005, Rader was taken from his home in front of his family when a positive match was made. The father attempted to maintain a reassuring expression. He gave his daughter one more embrace and assured her that everything would be resolved shortly.

He confessed to all ten killings, appearing to take a perverse pleasure in explaining in court the gruesome details of how the ladies had died. The BTK Killer was given a sentence of 175 years in prison without parole.

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There was no explanation as to his rampage besides Dennis Rader’s supposition that: “I actually think I may be possessed with demons.”

The only explanation for his action was Dennis Rader's statement, “I actually think I may be possessed with demons.”