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Police Arrest Dennis Rader, a Park City Code Officer, as the Suspected BTK Killer

"The bottom line: BTK is arrested," Wichita's police chief told a packed news conference. Officials said Rader would face 10 homicide counts, two for killings newly tied to BTK.

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Illustration of officers beside an unmarked SUV on a quiet street of ranch houses in small-town Kansas in winter. Not an actual scene from the case.

For 31 years, the killer who called himself BTK evaded Wichita police. On February 25, 2005, officers arrested the man they suspected of being BTK at a traffic stop in Park City, just north of the city.

Dennis Lynn Rader, 59, was arrested without incident shortly after noon by the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office, Wichita police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation on East Kechi Road. The next day, at a news conference at Wichita City Hall attended by about 300 people, including relatives of victims, Police Chief Norman Williams announced, "The bottom line: BTK is arrested." Rader worked for Park City as a compliance supervisor in charge of animal control and code enforcement, and was active in his Lutheran church. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said she had been told that DNA evidence linked him to the killings.

Lt. Ken Landwehr, who led the task force, and Sheriff Gary Steed said police planned to file 10 counts covering killings from 1974 to 1991: eight first-degree murder counts and two other homicide counts. The killings began on January 15, 1974, when Joseph Otero, 38, Julie Otero, 34, and their children Josephine, 11, and Joseph II, 9, were strangled in their east Wichita home. The counts also covered Kathryn Bright, 21, Shirley Vian, 24, Nancy Fox, 25, and Vicki Wegerle, 28, as well as two Park City women whose deaths officials now tied to BTK: Marine Hedge, 53, killed in 1985, and Delores Davis, 62, killed in January 1991. District Attorney Nola Foulston said the death penalty could not apply, because Kansas reinstated it in 1994. BTK had resurfaced in March 2004 with a letter to The Wichita Eagle containing a copy of Wegerle's driver's license and photographs from the crime scene. Rader pleaded guilty to all 10 murders on June 27, 2005.

The Lawrence Journal-World reported that the Hedge and Davis killings had previously been believed connected to BTK, while CNN said only eight killings had been linked to him before the arrest.

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