For thirteen years the Wichita police had nothing on BTK, and then he wrote to ask them a favor.
Dennis Rader killed ten people in and around Wichita between January 1974 and January 1991. He was a Cub Scout leader, president of the congregation council at Christ Lutheran Church, and a compliance officer for Park City whose job was measuring grass and impounding dogs. Before that he spent years fitting burglar alarms for ADT, which put him inside other people's houses for a living during the same period he was breaking into them. He served four years in the Air Force, married in 1971 and raised two children. Nobody who knew him in any of those capacities worked it out.
He gave himself the name. In October 1974, after two men were wrongly held for the killing of the Otero family, he phoned a tip to a reporter and pointed police to a letter he had hidden inside an engineering book at the Wichita Public Library. The letter carried details that had not been released. It also asked what he should be called, offered several options, and settled on B.T.K., for bind, torture, kill. A man who wanted to be talked about had just told the press what to call him.
The killings themselves ran cold and domestic. On the morning of January 15, 1974 he cut the phone line at a house on North Edgemoor Street and let himself in, and killed Joseph Otero, thirty-eight, his wife Julie, thirty-three, and two of their children, eleven-year-old Josephine and nine-year-old Joseph junior. The three older Otero children came home from school and found them. In April he attacked Kathryn Bright, twenty-one, and her brother Kevin at their house. Kathryn was stabbed and died. Kevin was shot twice, survived, and described him.
He killed Shirley Vian in March 1977 and Nancy Fox in December of the same year, and he called the police himself from a phone booth to report the Fox murder. Then Marine Hedge, his own neighbor, in April 1985. Vicki Wegerle in September 1986. Dolores Davis in January 1991. After that he stopped writing to anyone, and after that he stopped killing. The case went quiet for thirteen years and the file stayed open with nothing moving in it.
What ended it was not police work in the ordinary sense. It was his own decision to start again. In March 2004, apparently set off by newspaper coverage of the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero murders, he sent The Wichita Eagle photographs of Vicki Wegerle's body and her driving license, neither of which had ever been made public. Over the following year the packages kept coming.
Then came the question. In one of the packages he asked whether a floppy disk could be traced back to the machine it was written on. It is worth sitting with what that means. He was asking the people hunting him to confirm that a particular method of communicating with them was safe, and he expected an answer.
They gave him one. The police placed a classified advertisement telling him it could not be traced. In February 2005 he sent a disk. It carried metadata naming Christ Lutheran Church and a user called Dennis, which is the whole of the mystery collapsing in a single file property. Investigators then obtained a DNA sample from his daughter's medical file at a university clinic, and the family match confirmed it. He was arrested near his house on February 25, 2005.
He pleaded guilty on June 27 and then spent the better part of an hour describing each of the ten murders to the court, in the flat procedural register of a man delivering a work report, correcting the judge on points of detail. On August 18, 2005 he received ten consecutive life sentences with a minimum of 175 years. Kansas had no operative death penalty covering the years in which he killed, which is the only reason he is alive. He is held at El Dorado Correctional Facility.
The thirty years of not being caught are usually told as a story about how careful he was. The ending suggests something narrower. He was careful for as long as he was silent, and he could not stay silent, and the moment he wanted to talk again he asked the one question that a man who understood his own risk would never have asked out loud.