Dennis Lynn Rader was born in Pittsburg, Kansas, on March 9, 1945, and grew up in Wichita, the eldest of four brothers. He served four years in the Air Force, married Paula Dietz in 1971, and had two children. He fitted burglar alarms for ADT through the years he was killing, then worked as a compliance officer for Park City, measuring grass and impounding dogs. He was a Cub Scout leader and president of the congregation council at Christ Lutheran Church. That double life, sustained for thirty years without a crack, is the whole difficulty of the case.
On the morning of January 15, 1974, he cut the phone line at a house on North Edgemoor Street and let himself in. He killed Joseph Otero, thirty-eight, his wife Julie, thirty-three, and two of their children, Josephine, eleven, and Joseph junior, nine. Three older Otero children came home from school and found them. On April 4 he attacked Kathryn Bright, twenty-one, and her brother Kevin at their house; Kathryn was stabbed and died, and Kevin was shot twice and survived to describe him. He signed himself BTK, for bind, torture, kill, and that is the name the case is known by.
In October 1974, after two men were wrongly held for the Otero killings, he telephoned a tip to a reporter and directed police to a letter he had hidden inside an engineering book at the Wichita Public Library. It gave details only the killer knew and asked what he should be called. He offered several names and settled on B.T.K., for bind, torture, kill.
He killed Shirley Vian in March 1977 and Nancy Fox in December, and called the police himself from a phone booth to report the Fox murder. He killed his neighbour Marine Hedge in April 1985, Vicki Wegerle in September 1986, and Dolores Davis in January 1991. Then he stopped writing, and after 1991 he stopped killing. The case went cold for thirteen years.
He brought it back himself. In March 2004, apparently prompted by newspaper coverage of the thirtieth anniversary, he sent The Wichita Eagle photographs of Vicki Wegerle's body and her driving licence, which police had never released. Over the following year he sent a stream of packages, and in one of them he asked whether a floppy disk could be traced back to him. Police answered in a classified advertisement that it could not. In February 2005 he sent a disk. It carried metadata naming Christ Lutheran Church and a user called Dennis. DNA taken from his daughter's medical file at a university clinic confirmed the family match, and he was arrested on February 25, 2005, near his house.
He pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005, and spent most of an hour describing each murder to the court in the flat procedural voice of a man giving a work report, correcting the judge on details. On August 18 he was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms with a minimum of 175 years. Kansas had no operative death penalty for the years in which he killed. He is held at El Dorado Correctional Facility.