For most of three decades Dennis Rader was a married father of two in Park City, Kansas, a church council president and Cub Scout leader who worked for the town as its compliance supervisor. His daughter, Kerri, learned who he was in 2005. For years afterward his family would not speak to the press. In 2019 she did, in a memoir and in interviews, and in 2023 she went further than almost any relative of a convicted serial killer has gone: she visited him in the prison at El Dorado, Kansas, and then helped investigators in two states.
Hers is the clearest voice, but it is not the only one. Two other daughters appear in the cases below, one who spoke years after her father’s pleas and one whose telephone call to a Wisconsin detective restarted a murder inquiry that had been cold for 29 years. A fifteen-year-old nephew gave the testimony on which a jury convicted his uncle in 1929. A father and a husband told a reporter what they knew of a woman who would later be sentenced to life, a Greek mother and a former wife said what they could not believe or had always seen, and a brother in San Diego described a man now charged with four murders. None of them is the subject of a case. All of them chose, or were made, to say something in public, and what they said was often smaller, stranger and more contradictory than the headlines it sat beneath.
Rader was 60 when he was arrested on February 25, 2005. Associated Press reports from the week of his arrest describe a man the neighbors thought they knew: a member of Christ Lutheran Church for 30 years, an usher and the elected president of the congregation council, a Cub Scout leader, a husband of 34 years. He and his wife had two grown children, a son and a daughter, Kerri. He had occupied the same house in Park City for almost 30 years. Some neighbors said afterward that he helped older residents with their yard work. Others described a municipal official who looked for reasons to write citations.
He was charged on March 1, 2005, with 10 counts of first-degree murder for killings in and around Wichita between January 1974 and January 1991. The Associated Press reported that the case turned on a computer disk he mailed to a television station in February 2005, which was traced to his church, and on DNA. The DNA came from his daughter. Police needed a sample to compare with evidence from three of the cases, and the Tonganoxie Mirror reported in December 2005 that it was a court-ordered sample, tested at a laboratory of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. A familial match followed. At his sentencing Rader told the court that the only sore spot in the investigation, for him, was the use of his daughter’s DNA.
He pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005, and was sentenced on August 18, 2005, to 10 consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility. Kansas had no death penalty in force for crimes committed between 1972 and 1994. The next day he was taken to El Dorado Correctional Facility.
### The silence, and the book
Then came a long quiet. Rader’s family refused for years to give interviews. His daughter broke that silence, and in 2019 she published A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming, which she wrote over about three and a half years at the urging of her trauma therapist. In a February 2019 interview with Kansas public radio, she spoke about the faith that carried her through it. She has described years of depression, and trauma therapy that she began about two years after her father’s arrest.
She was candid about the correspondence between them. By 2019, she said, she had written to him and he had written back, but she had never visited him. In a letter he sent in September 2005, he said he had asked God to stand between him and his victims and that he was sorry. "I legit don’t know if it was for real," she said. "He imploded my family; my family has never been the same."
What she offers is a letter, her doubt about whether it was sincere, and a plain statement of what his arrest did to her family. At his sentencing in 2005, relatives of the people he killed spoke in the same Wichita courtroom.
### El Dorado, 2023
In August 2023 the sheriff’s office in Osage County, Oklahoma, announced that it had named Rader the prime suspect in a 1976 case involving a 16-year-old, Cynthia Dawn Kinney, and in at least one other unsolved case. The Associated Press reported on August 23, 2023, that investigators had also looked at his former property in Park City, and a local television station spoke to his daughter that day. In September 2023 the Osage County district attorney said the evidence was insufficient to charge him. The sheriff and the district attorney were then publicly at odds, and the ABA Journal reported in October 2023 that their dispute had gone to court.
Rawson agreed to help the investigators in Oklahoma and Missouri. In June and July 2023 she visited her father twice at El Dorado, their first meetings in 18 years. In an interview with the sheriff at El Dorado, Rader denied any killings beyond the 10. On November 3, 2023, Rawson announced that she was resigning from the task force the sheriff had created, while continuing to serve as a protected witness for active law enforcement, KTUL reported on November 16.
In March 2024 the McDonald County sheriff in Missouri closed the 1990 case that had been linked to Rader in 2023, named another man, since dead, and said Rader was not connected to it. The Osage County sheriff lost his reelection bid in June 2024. As of August 18, 2025, the twentieth anniversary of the sentencing, Rader remained at El Dorado. His daughter’s account of him, in print and in 2023 to investigators, was by then part of the public record of the case.
Keith Hunter Jesperson, a long-haul truck driver, was arrested in March 1995 after he telephoned a Clark County, Washington, sheriff’s detective on March 24 and confessed to killing Julie Ann Winningham, 41, whom accounts describe as his girlfriend. By then he had written letters in 1994 to The Oregonian and to prosecutors in Portland. The Oregonian said in 2022 that in them he confessed to five murders and signed with a drawn smiling face. The newspaper’s coverage gave him his name in print, the Happy Face Killer. Prosecutors in several states charged him over the following decades, and eight women are counted among his victims.
His oldest child is Melissa Moore. Her public account, given to ABC News in a July 2015 interview for Good Morning America, is as much about what came after her father’s arrest as about him. ABC News describes a woman who grew up in Toppenish, Washington, the oldest of three children of Jesperson and his wife. They had married in 1975, when she was a teenager. After 14 years of marriage she left with the three children and moved in with her mother in Spokane. Melissa was 10. The divorce became final in 1990, the year the killings began, and for about five years afterward Jesperson kept visiting the family when his trucking routes brought him near, according to ABC News.
The forensic psychologist Robert Schug, who has spoken with Jesperson several times, told ABC that his violent outbursts may have stemmed from the divorce. The killings began the year the divorce became final.
### What the letters did
Jesperson’s first killing, of Taunja Bennett, 23, near Portland in January 1990, had already been solved, wrongly. A woman trying to escape an abusive relationship told detectives that she and her boyfriend had killed Bennett, and both were convicted. The National Registry of Exonerations, which gives the dates, records that anonymous letters reached the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office and The Oregonian in 1994, that the paper ran a five-part series on the letter writer, and that no one connected the letters to a name. The two people convicted stayed in prison until Jesperson’s own arrest and statements to prosecutors led to their release on November 27, 1995. Bennett’s sister, Michelle White, told ABC News in 2021 that Taunja was the only one in the family to graduate from high school, that she read a lot and loved music.
Jesperson has since pleaded guilty or no contest to murders in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, California and Florida. Patricia Skiple, a mother of two from Colton, Oregon, was named in April 2022 as the woman he had admitted killing in California; he had pleaded guilty to that murder in July 2007, when no one knew who she was. Cold case detectives in Santa Clara County worked with the DNA Doe Project, and the forensic genealogist Cairenn Binder said she hoped the identification would give Patricia "some of her dignity back." On August 27, 2026, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office announced that the last of his eight victims, the woman he had called Claudia, had been identified. He is held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
Edward Wayne Edwards was a public figure of a kind. He was a car thief and robber who escaped from jail twice, reached the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1961 after a bank robbery in Akron, Ohio, and was captured in Atlanta on January 20, 1962. After his parole in 1967 he wrote an autobiography, Metamorphosis of a Criminal, and spoke to young people about staying out of trouble. His book carried the line "Don’t be a crime victim. Be a crime stopper." In the late 1960s he married a student at the University of Akron, and the couple had children. The Summit County prosecutor, Sherri Bevan Walsh, said in 2010 that the family drifted across at least nine states, moving every few years. One of his daughters told a Wisconsin newspaper that the moves came abruptly, every six months to a year.
One of those daughters, who was 11 in the summer of 1980, later recalled being woken one August night in Wisconsin and told to pack. The Daily Jefferson County Union summarized the account in 2018 from a People magazine feature. Edwards had been working as a handyman at a dance hall and campground in the Town of Concord, Jefferson County, where a young couple, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, had gone to a wedding reception on August 9, 1980. Edwards was questioned about a month later and left the state in September 1980 with his family. The case stayed open for 29 years. The sheriff’s office pursued more than 100 suspects and thousands of leads, the Watertown Daily Times reported.
### The call
In March 2009 the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s cold case unit received federal money, and that month a Madison television station aired a report on the Hack and Drew case. One of Edwards’s daughters, living in Ohio, read the station’s online coverage. In early May 2009 she telephoned Jefferson County sheriff’s Detective Chad Garcia, told him of her suspicions about her father and pointed him to the 1972 autobiography. Garcia read the book and went to Ohio to interview her in person. She later described years of moving, her father’s interest in newspaper clippings about killings, and his habit of offering to help police with investigations.
At the time of Edwards’s arrest, officials would say only that new evidence had come to light. The Daily Jefferson County Union later reported that the tip came from his daughter. The state crime laboratory received a sample from him on July 8, 2009, and identified him as the likely contributor of DNA on Kelly Drew’s clothing, with about one person in four million as likely to have left that profile. Garcia arrested him on July 30, 2009, in Louisville, Kentucky, with Louisville police and the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He was 76.
### What the family said, and what they did not
Edwards pleaded guilty on June 9, 2010, in Wisconsin to the deaths of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew and on June 11, 2010, in Akron to the aggravated murders of William Lavaco and Judith Straub, killed in 1977. Both life sentences followed. A week before the Wisconsin sentencing, he gave an interview to the Associated Press from his wheelchair in the Jefferson County jail. He said he had killed one more person, the foster son known as Dannie Boy Edwards, in 1996. He said he had killed only five people and that this was the last. He said he would rather be executed than spend his remaining years in prison. He admitted lying throughout his life but said his family had urged him to confess.
Asked about him, one of his daughters told the Associated Press only: "He is my dad and I love him." It is the opposite of the 2009 telephone call, and it is not a contradiction. One daughter notified a detective in 2009; another, in 2010, said she loved him. The family did not speak with one voice. Judy Straub’s brother, speaking after the same interview, said he did not believe anything Edwards said.
Edwards was sentenced to death by a Geauga County three-judge panel on March 8, 2011, and died of natural causes on April 7, 2011. In January 2018 People magazine published a feature on his daughter, and Investigation Discovery aired a related program. She said she had lived with guilt of two kinds and had not spoken to her father after his confessions. She said he had made the children watch programs about the unsolved California case of the Zodiac and shouted at the television that it had not happened that way.
The testimony of a relative has seldom carried a trial as heavily as it did in Riverside, California, in early 1929. Gordon Stewart Northcott, 21, was tried on three counts of murder: the death of a youth of about 18 whose name was never learned, and the deaths of two brothers from Pomona, Nelson Winslow, 10, and Lewis Winslow, 12. The prosecution’s chief witness was his nephew, Sanford Clark, 15, the son of Northcott’s sister Winnifred.
The Supreme Court of California, which reviewed the case in 1930, held that Northcott had illegally brought Clark into the country from Canada. The 1928 press reported that the boy had been brought from Saskatchewan and kept on a chicken ranch in Riverside County. Clark said he had been mistreated there and made to help his uncle. He told investigators in Los Angeles in September 1928 what had happened, and the court record shows what he told the jury. He testified that Northcott had said he killed the youth because the young man "knew too much." He testified that Northcott brought the Winslow brothers to the ranch and kept them confined for about ten days, that he was sent to take them food, and that he was forced to take part in the killing of one of the boys, with Northcott also taking part. A jury that accepted his account convicted Northcott on all three counts in February 1929, and he was sentenced to death.
A child who is a witness against a relative is not exactly a person who has chosen to speak. Clark was brought to Los Angeles by officers, questioned and placed on the stand. But his account was the case. The supreme court listed physical evidence at the ranch that supported it. The court also held that evidence of Northcott’s earlier conduct toward other boys had been properly admitted to show motive and a scheme to bring boys to the ranch. Northcott’s death sentence was affirmed on June 26, 1930. He was executed at San Quentin State Prison on October 2, 1930.
### His parents
Northcott’s parents were both from Caradoc, Ontario, Cyrus Northcott and Sarah Louisa, known as Louise. The Homestead Museum historian Paul R. Spitzzeri traced them through Canadian records in a 2026 series. Their daughter Winnifred, born in Caradoc, was Sanford Clark’s mother. Gordon, the youngest of their children, was born in Bladworth, Saskatchewan. In 1924 Cyrus, Louise and Gordon moved to Los Angeles, and when Gordon was 17, as Spitzzeri summarizes the 1928 coverage, he asked for a chicken ranch. The parents went back to Los Angeles to live near the county general hospital, where Louise worked in the laundry.
After Northcott fled to Canada, he was arrested on September 19, 1928, at Okanagan Landing, near Vernon, British Columbia, by a provincial police constable. His mother was arrested in Calgary, Alberta. Both were returned to California after legal delays. A Riverside dispatch of January 16, 1929, reported that Northcott would conduct his own case. The trial and the verdict followed within weeks.
Holly Ann Grigsby was 24 and living in Portland, Oregon, when she and her boyfriend, David Joseph "Joey" Pedersen, were arrested in Yuba County, California, on October 5, 2011. In the days before, four people had died in Washington, Oregon and California: Pedersen’s father, David Jones "Red" Pedersen, 56, and his stepmother, Leslie Mae "Dee Dee" Pedersen, 69, of Everett, Washington; Cody Faye Myers, 19, of Lafayette, Oregon; and Reginald Alan Clark, 53, of Eureka, California. Federal prosecutors later described the killings as part of a white supremacist campaign. According to court documents cited by the Associated Press, Grigsby told officers they had been heading to Sacramento to "kill more Jews."
She pleaded guilty on March 11, 2014, in federal court in Portland to a single racketeering count that, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said, included all four murders as its pattern. On July 15, 2014, a federal judge sentenced her to life without possibility of release. The Attorney General had decided in February 2014 not to seek the death penalty, and her plea agreement barred prosecution in Oregon, Washington or California. At the plea hearing, asked by the judge whether she had killed Leslie Pedersen, she answered "No," and she and her lawyer continued to deny it at sentencing. Prosecutors alleged otherwise, and she had told investigators after her arrest that she had.
The relatives who spoke were hers. Her father told the Associated Press that she was involved in the white supremacist movement and had a history of drug problems. Her husband, a man in Portland to whom she was married at the time of the killings, told the Associated Press that she was gullible and had been manipulated by Pedersen. Two explanations sit side by side in those statements. A father says his daughter was an adherent. A husband says she was a follower. Neither was tested in court, because no one was tried, and the federal sentencing record does not choose between them.
The record around them is more specific. Grigsby was sent to prison starting in 2006 on charges that included identity theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle, and after finishing probation she was sentenced again in 2008 on identity theft charges and served two years, the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville and CBS News reported. CBS News reported that her views were known to other inmates at Oregon’s women’s prison. Pedersen, 31 in 2011, had spent most of his adult life in prison, and the two met through mutual friends in June 2011, the Appeal-Democrat reported. In a jailhouse interview after her arrest, Grigsby said of the relationship that "it wasn’t planning to be crime partners or co-defendants."
Leslie Pedersen’s two daughters, who met Joey Pedersen and Grigsby only once, in September 2011, told The Herald of Everett that Grigsby sat apart from the other women, said little about herself and avoided eye contact. "In hindsight, Joey was just too polite," one of them said. They are the only relatives here who describe the couple as they appeared before anything had happened, and they had no way to know what they were looking at.
In April 1997 the Athens Security Police arrested a 35-year-old taxi driver, Dimitris Vakrinos, at a taverna in Nikaia, in the Piraeus area. Greek press accounts say that under questioning he confessed to five killings, seven attempted killings and five armed robberies between 1987 and 1996. Greek newspapers and television called him the country’s first serial killer. He died by suicide at Korydallos prison on May 12, 1997, about a month after the arrest, before any trial. No court heard the case. Every killing linked to him rests on his own statements to police and on the police investigation.
He was born in Pyrri, a village in Gortynia, Arcadia. The birth year is 1962 in Athens Voice and 1963 in Enimerotiko and Reader.gr. His family was very poor, and his father drank. "He was a drunk," Vakrinos told police in 1997, as Enimerotiko later quoted him, and Athens Voice writes that the father was mocked in the village and abused his son. At 13 he left for Athens. He worked in a taverna, trained as a welder, took a job in the shipyards on the Gulf of Elefsina and drove a taxi on the side, then full time after 1992. Reader.gr gives his height as about 1.65 meters, and the Greek press returns again and again to his size. The press repeated his own words that, in the moment of violence, he felt himself grow taller.
### His mother and his first wife
His mother told reporters she could not believe that her son had done such things, Enimerotiko reported.
His first wife was more specific. Vakrinos married in 1990, and the marriage lasted about 14 months. She later told reporters that they did not get along, that he did not want children, and that he had no friends. She said he had warned her that children only bring trouble. By her account, quoted by Reader.gr, she asked him to move out after he became hard to talk to and began spending time with people she did not know. He went to the police to complain, and was told they could not help him. "He had no temper," she said. "He raised his hand to me and my mother only once." He later claimed that his mother-in-law had hit him, which she denied.
After the separation, in 1992, he set fire to his father-in-law’s summer house on the island of Salamis, according to Athens Voice, Enimerotiko and Reader.gr. Enimerotiko adds that in the same period he committed a burglary in Keratsini, for which a court sentenced him in absentia to a two-year suspended term. In August 1996 he married again, and his second wife worked at the taverna in Nikaia where he was arrested, eating with the best man from his wedding, Enimerotiko reports.
### What the experts added
The psychiatrist Markos Skondras examined Vakrinos twice in custody, according to Enimerotiko. The press accounts, without always naming the experts, summed up the assessments in similar terms: a man of very low self-esteem, hypersensitive to insult, with a deep sense of inferiority about his body, whose anger could be traced to his father’s abuse. By his own account, each person he targeted had, as he saw it, done him some wrong: a quarrel over a rifle, a remark about his height, a fare taken at a rank, a car sold below the agreed price, a courtship spoiled. Athens Voice reports that he refused to have a lawyer appointed for his trial. There was never a trial, and so the first wife’s sentence, that he had no temper, stands as a witness statement about a man no court ever tested.
The newest case here is also the least settled. Dwight William Rhone, 74 in 2025 and 2026, of San Diego, was arrested in December 2024 in the October 2023 killing of Bernardo Moreno, 54. On June 10, 2026, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office filed three more murder counts, bringing the total to four, with a special-circumstance allegation of multiple murders: Heriberto Ruiz in 1993, Ronald Johnken in 2002 and Michael Brown. Rhone pleaded not guilty on June 10, 2026, in Chula Vista. As of June 2026 he was held without bail, with a preliminary hearing set for March 24, 2027. He is presumed innocent.
When the district attorney named him a person of interest on December 3, 2025, ABC 10News in San Diego went to his family. One of his brothers, who asked not to be named, said: "Dwight’s not a savory character. He’s a unsavory character." The station also reported on court documents from 2017, in which Rhone’s sister-in-law, who then owned the house where he lived, sought a restraining order against him, alleging that he brought intoxicated people into the house, broke down her bedroom door when she confronted him and threatened her repeatedly. The station reported that a 2019 court filing said he had been convicted of at least 17 felonies and seven misdemeanors since 1969.
Those are family judgments of a man’s character, not evidence about four deaths, and none of it has been tried. Nothing in the brother’s words, or in the sister-in-law’s filing, bears on whether Rhone is guilty of the murders he is charged with, and a prosecutor, McNee, told reporters after the hearing that the investigation was continuing and that the office was still trying to determine whether he could be linked to other cold cases. District Attorney Stephan said her office "will never stop seeking the truth no matter how many years have passed."
The people in these cases spoke for different reasons and at different cost. One daughter wrote a book, one gave interviews with other families, one called a detective, one told the Associated Press she loved her father. A nephew told a jury what happened to him. A father and a husband described a woman as an adherent and as a follower. A mother in Athens said she could not believe it. A brother in San Diego did not want his name used.
What they supplied is rarely a confession and never a verdict. Rawson’s letter from her father, Edwards’s daughter’s pointer to a book, Clark’s account of ten days at a ranch, a first wife’s recollection of a man with no temper: each is a fragment of a life that the criminal case treated as secondary. They did not change a sentence, except in the two cases where the relative’s words went straight to a detective or a jury. The rest changed only what the public understood about the household behind the name.
• September 1928: Gordon Northcott’s nephew, Sanford Clark, tells investigators in Los Angeles what happened on the ranch in Riverside County.
• September 19, 1928: Northcott arrested near Vernon, British Columbia; his mother arrested in Calgary.
• February 1929: Riverside jury convicts Northcott on three counts of murder on his nephew’s testimony.
• June 26, 1930: Supreme Court of California affirms; Northcott executed at San Quentin October 2, 1930.
• 1962: Edward Edwards captured in Atlanta after reaching the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list; paroled 1967 and speaks to young people about avoiding crime.
• 1975: Keith Jesperson marries; the divorce becomes final in 1990.
• August 9, 1980: Tim Hack and Kelly Drew leave a wedding reception in the Town of Concord, Wisconsin.
• January 1990 to March 1995: Jesperson’s killings across western and southern states.
• 1994: Anonymous letters from Jesperson reach The Oregonian and a Portland prosecutor’s office.
• March 24, 1995: Jesperson telephones a Washington sheriff’s detective; arrested that month; two wrongly convicted people freed November 27, 1995.
• April 1997: Dimitris Vakrinos arrested in Nikaia; dies by suicide at Korydallos prison, May 12, 1997.
• February 25, 2005: Dennis Rader arrested; pleads guilty June 27; sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms August 18, 2005.
• Early May 2009: Edwards’s daughter telephones a Wisconsin detective; Edwards arrested July 30, 2009.
• June 2010: Edwards pleads guilty in Wisconsin and Ohio; a daughter tells the Associated Press, "He is my dad and I love him"; sentenced to death March 8, 2011; dies April 7, 2011.
• October 5, 2011: Holly Grigsby and Joey Pedersen arrested in Yuba County, California.
• March 11, 2014: Grigsby pleads guilty; sentenced to life without release July 15, 2014.
• 2019: Kerri Rawson publishes A Serial Killer’s Daughter.
• June and July 2023: Rawson visits Rader twice in prison.
• September 11, 2023: Oklahoma district attorney says the evidence is insufficient to charge Rader; Rawson resigns from the task force, announced November 3, 2023.
• March 21, 2024: Missouri sheriff closes a 1990 case and says Rader is not linked.
• December 3, 2025: San Diego prosecutors name Rhone a person of interest; June 10, 2026, three more murder counts filed.
• August 27, 2026: Riverside County District Attorney’s Office announces the last of Jesperson’s victims identified.