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Oklahoma Sheriff Names BTK Killer Dennis Rader the Prime Suspect in Cynthia Kinney's 1976 Disappearance

After digging at the site of Rader's former Park City home, Osage County investigators named him a prime suspect in the case of the missing 16-year-old.

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Dennis Rader, in a red jail jumpsuit, escorted by two officers

Cynthia Dawn Kinney was 16, a cheerleader in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, when she disappeared in 1976. Forty-seven years later the sheriff's office in Osage County, Oklahoma, put a name to its suspicion. On Wednesday, August 23, 2023, it said in a news release that Dennis Rader, the Wichita killer who called himself BTK, "is considered a prime suspect in these unsolved cases, including the Cynthia Dawn Kinney case."

The announcement followed a search the day before in Park City, Kansas, on the lot where Rader's house once stood. The house and the metal shed he built there have been leveled, and the site is now an empty field. Osage County investigators, working with Park City police, had public works move concrete blocks so they could dig. The sheriff's office said the search was "closely tied" to Kinney's disappearance and described what it recovered only as "items of interest," to be examined for their possible relevance.

Kinney's case had been investigated on and off for decades and was reopened the previous December. Sheriff Eddie Virden said a bank across the street from the laundromat where she was last seen was having new alarms installed at the time, and that Rader was then a regional installer for a security company, though the sheriff could not confirm that Rader installed those systems. Virden said he decided to look harder when he learned that Rader had used the phrase "bad laundry day" in his writings.

The inquiry did not stop with Kinney. "This ongoing investigation has uncovered potential connections to other missing persons cases and unsolved murders in the Kansas and Missouri areas, which are possibly linked to Dennis Rader," the sheriff's office said. Undersheriff Gary Upton told the Associated Press that Rader was also the prime suspect in the death of Shawna Beth Garber, 22, whose body was found in McDonald County, Missouri, in December 1990 and was not identified until 2021. Upton would not say how many other cases were being re-examined. "We sit just on the other side of the state line from Kansas and Wichita, which is his stomping grounds," he said.

Rader's daughter, Kerri Rawson, said she had been assisting investigators on the Kinney and Garber cases as a volunteer, including two visits to her father at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Before that, she had not seen him in more than 18 years. "I'm still not 100% sure my dad did commit any more at this point," she told Fox News, as quoted by the AP. "If my dad has harmed somebody else, we need answers."

Rader, 78, pleaded guilty in 2005 to 10 murders committed in Wichita and Park City between 1974 and 1991 and is serving 10 consecutive life terms. Being named a suspect is not a charge.

The Missouri case later went another way. On March 21, 2024, the McDonald County Sheriff's Office said it believed Garber had been killed by Talfey Reeves, a local man who died in November 2021, and said Rader was not the suspect. Investigators had interviewed Rader because of how she died. Cynthia Kinney's disappearance remains unsolved, and no court has found Rader responsible for it.

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