"Something Drove Me to Do This": Dennis Rader on the Mendoza Tape, NBC's "Confessions of BTK", 2005
Hours after pleading guilty, Dennis Rader described to a defence psychologist how he chose and killed his victims, blamed "Factor X", and said he felt "like a star".
- Subject
- Dennis Lynn Rader
- Recorded
- June 27, 2005
- Runtime
- 1:23:56
Content warning: A serial killer describes in his own words how he murdered a family, including an 11-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy, and other victims; a son describes finding his parents' bodies; sexual motive, bondage and strangulation are discussed.
The Interview
On June 27, 2005, Dennis Rader pleaded guilty in a Wichita courtroom to the ten BTK murders. A couple of hours later, according to NBC, he sat down in jail with Dr. Robert Mendoza, a forensic psychologist hired by his defence team to assess his sanity, and was videotaped answering his questions. NBC says Rader knew he was being taped and that it might be shown on national television. NBC News obtained the tape, and Dateline NBC's Edie Magnus built a two-hour special around it, first broadcast on August 12, 2005. This version of the programme, introduced by Stone Phillips and shown under an "MSNBC Reports" banner, was updated after Rader's sentencing. Rader's own voice is heard for about a quarter of an hour in all, in many short excerpts set between narration and interviews.
Historical Context
Between 1974 and 1991 the killer who named himself "BTK" ("bind, torture, kill") murdered ten people in and around Wichita, Kansas: Joseph and Julie Otero and their children Josephine and Joseph II (1974), Kathryn Bright (1974), Shirley Vian (1977), Nancy Fox (1977), Marine Hedge (1985), Vicki Wegerle (1986) and Dolores Davis (1991). He taunted police and the press with letters and poems, fell silent after 1979, and wrote again in 2004. Rader, a Park City compliance officer, Cub Scout leader and president of his church council, was arrested on February 25, 2005. He pleaded guilty to all ten murders on June 27, 2005, and on August 18, 2005 was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
Circumstances of the Interview
Mendoza's evaluation was paid for by the State of Kansas, under a contract with the state board that provides lawyers for defendants who cannot afford one. Excerpts were broadcast on Dateline days before the sentencing hearing. In October 2005 Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline sued Mendoza and his colleague Tali Walters of Cambridge Forensic Consultants over the use of the tape. In 2007 Mendoza agreed to pay $30,000 to settle the state's claims, without admitting wrongdoing; the money went to the victims' families.
What the Interview Covers
Rader explains how a person became a "fantasy" he would replay "almost like a picture show", and how in late 1973 he began "trolling" neighbourhoods he called "haunts". He gives a long account of the Otero murders: following Julie Otero and her children to school, cutting the phone line, telling the family he was a fugitive who needed food and a car, and deciding to kill them because "They already know me, my, my face." He says Mrs. Otero's last words to him were "God have mercy on your soul." He talks about the "stalking stage", his "hit kit", the name BTK, the 1977 call to the police ("really a really stupid thing to do"), and says there are "a lot of lucky people out there". He blames "Factor X", demons and being dropped on his head; mocks the police (NBC says he called them the "Keystone Cops"); says he wrote again in 2004 because he wanted his story told "in my terms"; and explains why he stopped killing ("physically I ... wasn't up to it"). He describes his arrest, says he enjoyed the interrogation because he and the detectives "talked shop", weeps over the loss of his family and freedom, and says that after his plea he felt "like a star". Between the excerpts, criminologist James Alan Fox analyses his account; former Wichita police chief Richard LaMunyon, former KAKE-TV news director Ron Loewen and Wichita Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana describe the investigation; and Charlie Otero and Jeff Davis, son of Dolores Davis, speak about their families.
What Makes the Recording Significant
The Mendoza tape is an extended recording of Rader talking about his crimes outside a courtroom, made within hours of his guilty plea. This programme carries roughly ten times as much of it as NBC's earlier three-minute preview. In it he also describes his arrest and interrogation in his own words (no police interrogation audio is used). The programme sets his account beside the court record, the 1977 emergency call in his voice, and the testimony of the families he harmed.
Archival Importance
The tape was at the centre of a dispute over the commercial use of a state-funded defence evaluation, and its broadcast shaped public understanding of Rader before he was sentenced. The programme also preserves interviews with LaMunyon and Loewen recorded in 2004, before the arrest, and short clips of the plea and sentencing hearings.
Important Caveats
This is an edited television documentary, not the evaluation interview itself. Rader is heard only in excerpts chosen by NBC, with narration and comment between them. Everything Rader says is his own account, given to a psychologist working for his defence: his claims that the Oteros were chosen at random, that Julie Otero spoke those last words, that he did not realise how afraid the city was, and his explanations about "Factor X", demons and a childhood head injury. Criminologist James Alan Fox calls the "Factor X" explanation "just an excuse" and calls Rader "completely disingenuous" about the city's fear. NBC says the conversation took place hours after the plea, and on the tape the interviewer says "It's only been a few hours since that hearing"; one 2005 report (Crime Library) said instead that the taping was days before the plea. Whether every excerpt comes from that one session is not established. The upload is a later MSNBC edit; its air date is not known.
Announcer: On this edition of MSNBC Reports.
Dennis Rader: Something drove me to do this. Normal people just don't do this.
Narrator: For more than 30 years, he lived among us. Father, scout leader, serial killer.
Dennis Rader: I am BTK. I'm the guy they're after.
Narrator: Now, exclusive jailhouse recordings obtained by NBC News reveal the twisted mind and motives of the notorious killer Dennis Rader, the man called BTK.
Dennis Rader: That's been a big thing with me. It's having them bound and tied.
Narrator: His own chilling words reveal the monster inside the man, still craving attention.
Dennis Rader: I really feel pretty good. I feel like a, like a star right now.
Narrator: No remorse, little emotion.
Speaker: He just talks like he's coming home from a day at the office.
Narrator: Tears, only for himself.
Dennis Rader: You can't go out, out, fresh air, walk your dog, hug your wife.
Narrator: A minute by minute, year by year account of Rader's crimes and the shattered families left behind.
Jeff Davis: A beautiful, loving, kind, gentle person being murdered and dumped out in the ditch like a bag of dirty laundry.
Narrator: Sentenced to life.
Relative Of Nancy Fox: Nancy and all of his victims will be waiting with God and watching him as he burns in hell.
Narrator: You'll hear new details about the capture of the killer who eluded police for three decades.
Speaker: What nailed him was his hubris. He went too far.
Narrator: Edie Magnus, with exclusive tapes that take us inside the mind of BTK.
Richard Lamunyon: He's just evil, evil personified.
Announcer: And now, with "Confessions of BTK", here is Stone Phillips.
Stone Phillips: Good evening. What was so remarkable about the capture of the serial killer called BTK was that the man himself seemed so unremarkable. When police announced this father of two, Dennis Rader, was the killer who had preyed on parents, children, women, the mystery only deepened. Who is he? What drove him? Tonight, videotapes of a conversation with a killer, broadcast for the first time, might provide some insight. This jailhouse interview, disturbing as it is, might also offer insight to the families of BTK's victims, who have struggled for decades with the painful question, why? Here's Edie Magnus.
Narrator: Joseph Otero, a champion boxer and Air Force veteran, killed at 38. His wife, Julie, proud mother of their five children, was 34. Their daughter, Josephine, was just 11 years old, and son Joseph Jr. was nine. Kathy Bright, pretty and popular, whose life ended when she was 21. Shirley Vian, 24 and the mother of three, sang in her church choir. Nancy Fox worked two jobs to try to get ahead. She was 25. Marine Hedge, mother of four, was 53. Vicki Wegerle cared for children in her home, including her own two. She was 28. Dolores Davis, a grandmother and secretary, retired at age 62, just months before she was murdered.
Narrator: Ten innocent people murdered to satisfy the twisted needs of one selfish man. A man who, for more than 30 years, frustrated police, taunted the media and terrorized the citizens of Wichita, Kansas. BTK seemed uncatchable. Everyone wondered who he was, where he was, when a most unlikely man who'd lived among them all along, Dennis Rader, was arrested.
Dennis Rader: I am BTK. I'm, I'm the guy they're after, 100%.
Narrator: On this program, you'll see new information that offers insight into the deviant mind of Dennis Rader.
Dennis Rader: If I had never gone into sexual fantasies really off the deep end, I never became what I was.
Speaker: He is just the most unique, unprecedented combination of perversion, packaged to look like a human being, that I've ever seen.
Narrator: You'll hear his excuses on why he says he had to kill.
Dennis Rader: The fantasies are what got me in trouble. I just went from one fantasy to bigger and bigger, bigger. Pretty soon was involved in murder, and then that fueled the next one, and it just went on and on.
Speaker: There is one Dennis Rader, and that's a murderer, that's a coward.
Narrator: All told in an appallingly matter-of-fact manner.
Dennis Rader: And put a garrote over his neck and pulled up on it.
Dennis Rader: That's when I guess Factor X, or whatever, the monster [unclear: "took over totally then" / "took totally then"].
Speaker: There's no monster in him. He is the monster himself.
Narrator: Tonight, an exclusive jailhouse interview with the man who named himself BTK, for his propensity to bind, torture and kill his victims. We'll examine Dennis Rader's three-decades-long reign of terror and the exhaustive police investigation that finally caught him. We'll also get an inside look at a man with two lives: a husband, a father, a Cub Scout leader and church president living unassumingly in his community, but also a man who secretly hunted down and killed ten innocent people and then bragged about it in his insatiable thirst for attention.
Narrator: This interview, obtained by NBC News after it was completed, was conducted by a Harvard-trained forensic psychologist, Robert Mendoza, who performs more than 100 evaluations for criminal and civil cases each year. He was hired by the defense team to assess Rader's sanity.
Dennis Rader: Go farther. "Why don't you just shut it down?" I say, I can't. I can't.
Narrator: This specific conversation took place just a couple of hours after Rader had pleaded guilty to ten counts of murder in June, and put on what many people thought was a chilling performance in court. As you listen to what he says from behind bars, to see what light it may shed, keep in mind Rader knew he was being taped, and knew that it might be seen on national television. If you're looking for remorse from the BTK killer, you won't find it here.
Dennis Rader: Really, I was just a little embarrassed in front of the world, but not totally. And, you know, it didn't bother me too bad. You know, I could relax a little bit. I had water to drink. So I didn't really feel too bad about it.
Narrator: Dennis Rader was a hometown boy, one of four sons raised in the Wichita area by churchgoing Lutheran parents. But while Rader appeared a clean-cut high school senior in this 1963 yearbook, his writings speak of his already having bizarre sexual fantasies. He kept them hidden as he served his country in the Air Force, then married a girl from home in 1971. But a couple of years later, Rader could no longer keep those fantasies locked only in his mind. His obsession with sex and bondage evolved into deviant, violent acts carried out on real people, and ultimately led to murder.
Dennis Rader: I got this fantasy. I started working out this fantasy in my mind, and once that potential, that person become a fantasy, I can just loop, loop it over. I lay in bed at night thinking about this person, the events and how it's going to happen, and it become a real, almost like a picture show, you know. I wanted to go ahead and produce it and direct it and go through with it, no matter what the costs were, the consequences. This, that was going to happen one way or another. Maybe not that day, but it was going to happen.
Narrator: No one knows for sure why Rader had to kill to fulfill those fantasies. But in this interview with the psychologist, Rader says that he picked his first victims, members of the Otero family, utterly at random in late 1973. He recently had been laid off from a job and says he was feeling down and out at the time, and had begun trolling, as he put it, in certain neighborhoods, including along Edgemoor Drive, where the Oteros lived.
Dennis Rader: Well, that neighborhood, I guess, became a, what I call a haunt, as I call it. I had special appeal to it. I'd been there, I started knowing the roads, I knew the people. You, I'd drive by and watch cars, people pull out of their homes, and people go. Wrote telephone numbers down, wrote addresses down. This is how it really started, right here, is by haunts. That area, the Edgemoor area, was my first big haunt.
Narrator: Julie Otero, her husband and their five children lived on Edgemoor then. And it was just Mrs. Otero's terrible misfortune that she happened to catch Dennis Rader's eye while he was driving down her street.
Dennis Rader: She came out of the house and took the kids to school, so I followed them to school. And I thought, well, that's a corner house, that's a possibility. And I was in between work. Idle hands, what is it? Idle hands...
Interviewer: [unclear: "What's the devil's workshop?" / "What is that, a workshop?"]
Dennis Rader: Yes. And all these things seem to happen most of the time when I had idle hands.
Interviewer: Mm.
Dennis Rader: I had just lost a job at Cessna. That was demoralizing to me. So anyway, they became a potential target. So they were convenient.
Interviewer: Convenient. How did they fuel the sexual fantasy, then?
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "Well, I thought" / "Was there"] Mrs. Otero was attractive, and then I saw Josephine too.
Narrator: Josephine was the Oteros' 11-year-old daughter.
Dennis Rader: So I must have had that somewhere in my mind, a younger person that must have locked in on me.
Narrator: It would be nearly two months before Rader acted on the sexual fantasy involving Mrs. Otero and her daughter, which he says began brewing in his brain. And when he finally did, it would establish his pattern of brutality and deception toward all of his victims. Rader broke into the home of the objects of his obsession in January 1974. He says he entered the home that day a very anxious man, though he recounts the story with a strange lack of emotion.
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "We were all extreme" / "I was extremely nervous"], you know, and, and all of a sudden, I'd already cut the phone line, I'd already cut the phone line. And, and it's funny, because I left my knife, I left the cutters there, and I [unclear: "can't have come back" / "had to come back"] and get those later. But I, then the door opened. So here I am, you know. So do I just walk out the back door and they call the police? Or I go for it. And I went for it.
Narrator: Chilling details of his first killings, and of his victims' final words.
Dennis Rader: Mrs. Otero had woke up, and, and she actually said, said, "Have God, God have mercy on your soul."
Narrator: When "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Narrator: When Dennis Rader broke into the Oteros' home, even though he was brandishing a gun, he says the family didn't take him too seriously at first.
Interviewer: What happened once they saw you?
Dennis Rader: Okay, well, they thought it was a joke. I went in, I think it was a younger Otero. They were all in the kitchen. They were making sandwiches.
Interviewer: Male or female?
Dennis Rader: No, it was a younger, the boy, Junior, Joseph.
Narrator: Rader says to keep the family calm, he made up a story about why he was there.
Dennis Rader: Mr. Otero actually stepped up, and I told him I was, come in for some food. I was wanted in California, or wanted, I needed some food and water and some money and transportation. That was my ruse, to kind of calm him down. He kind of laughed a little bit. He said, "Well, this is a joke. Who said you were my brother-in-law?"
Narrator: Rader says the family bought his lie about being on the run from the law and not wanting to hurt them. And so at gunpoint, they acquiesced to his tying up all four of them, mother and father and younger son and daughter, without a struggle.
Interviewer: So they were cooperating with you 100%.
Dennis Rader: And that's probably was their demise. If they'd probably struggled and fought with me, that would have been a different story. But they felt fairly comfortable, so that's what I was going to do.
Narrator: As Rader tells this story, like he does so often, he paints his own conduct in the best possible light. So he says he took pains to make his victims feel even more comfortable by actually loosening some of the binds around their hands and feet.
Dennis Rader: I'm trying to comfort them as much as I could.
Interviewer: To keep them quiet, or because you actually were worried about it?
Dennis Rader: Both. Okay, well, yeah, [unclear: "go" / "come on"], I'm a bad guy. I care for people, you know. I have concerns for people. So, and I hadn't really crossed that path yet where I was going to kill the people yet, so I was still in that concern mode.
James Alan Fox: What you're seeing here is a very early form of a future serial killer, who's still trying to decide what it is he's going to get out of these crimes.
Narrator: We asked James Alan Fox, one of the nation's leading criminologists and a professor at Northeastern University, to give his analysis of this interview. He has studied serial killers for 25 years and has written numerous books. His most recent one on serial killers includes BTK.
James Alan Fox: He wants to fulfill his fantasy, but it's [unclear: "not necessary" / "necessary"] for them to feel excessive suffering. At this stage, he hadn't yet made a decision to kill.
Dennis Rader: I had all control completely. And then I, and then went in the other room and I thought, do I, do I just leave, or what? They already know me, my, my face. So I went back and put a plastic bag over Mr. Otero's head and, and put a garrote over his neck and pulled up on it. And that's when it, they really hit the fan then, because they all could see what I was doing.
Narrator: Rader describes first strangling the mother and father while their nine-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter watched. Although he is describing acts of unspeakable cruelty, his voice is utterly devoid of emotion, which makes listening to it that much harder.
Interviewer: Kids were watching this?
Dennis Rader: Yes, they were watching it. They were screaming and hollering.
Interviewer: Did you want to move them from the scene at all?
Dennis Rader: No, no. I had to get in control. They, it was really noisy. They were, you know, they were screaming, and...
Interviewer: The noise bothered you?
Dennis Rader: Yeah, the noise bothered me. And if the mailman would be out there, or somebody'd be walking by. So I had to control it very quickly.
Narrator: He says he found the noise annoying.
James Alan Fox: Because he only looks at these events from his own perspective. This is all a script designed to please him. Because remember, it was almost like these people weren't real. They were just actors, and they didn't matter. What mattered was his enjoyment, and the kids screaming was just taking away from his enjoying all of this stuff. How can he, how can he get aroused with all these kids screaming? He completely dehumanizes...
Narrator: Yes.
James Alan Fox: ...the kids. Serial killers are very good at that. That makes it possible for them to kill.
Dennis Rader: It was just something that I had to do. Once I started with Mr. Otero, I knew I had to do all, I had to do all four of them. It's like an execution. Once you started, if there was witnesses, you had to do it all the way around.
Narrator: For someone who seems so callous, you might assume Rader was always a coolly efficient killer. But the way he tells it, Rader didn't have a clue how much force it took to end a life, and so tried several times to strangle Mrs. Otero, only to have her wake up again. During the woman's last desperate struggle for consciousness, Rader says she was fully aware he was snuffing out the lives of her husband and two children. In what he says were her last words to him, Mrs. Otero's humanity shines against the killer's inhumanity.
Dennis Rader: Mrs. Otero had woke up, and, and she actually said, "Have God, God have mercy on your soul." That's what she said. [pause] Put her down permanently.
Interviewer: This woman, who probably knows now that she might be going to die, she is generous with you, asking God to have mercy on your soul.
Dennis Rader: Mm-hm. Yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: Pretty generous thing to tell [unclear: "somebody who's" / "the killer that's"] killed and tortured her family and is about to do the same to her.
Narrator: Rader eventually took young Josephine Otero down to the basement of her home and hanged her from a pipe. The police found semen near Josephine's body. And going forward, recollections of what he had done with these victims fueled his desire to do it again. Rader says now the whole experience left him quaking.
Dennis Rader: Well, I was really, not a sexual high, I was just a scared high. I was really nervous. [unclear: "Sweat"], and I had sweat running off me all over the place, and I just, you, I had gloves on, I had [unclear: "rubber" / "PE"] clothes, they were just full of water, sweat. Was really, my clothes were just so sweat. Very nervous. Not like a master criminal at all. This was my first, my first time that I'd ever crossed that barrier.
Narrator: Several hours later, Charlie Otero, then 15, and his sister Carmen, then 13, came home from school.
Charlie Otero: As I walked through the back door, I noticed the kitchen was in disarray. Things were on the floor. It didn't look right. And I yelled out, "Is anybody home?" That's when I heard my sister cry out, "Charlie, come quick." I ran through the hallway down to the bedroom, and I found Carmen with my parents. My father was tied up. His eyes were bulging. His tongue was about bit off. My mother was on the bed. She didn't even look like my mother. And I looked at my dad, and I could, I could smell the death and the fear in the room.
Narrator: Charlie and Carmen had not seen what had happened to their younger brother and sister when they were taken to the police station. They say they told police to make sure Joseph Jr. and Josephine did not enter the home.
Charlie Otero: So I was telling the police the whole time, go to Josie and Joey's school and keep them from coming home. I do not want them to come home and find the house the way it is, with police everywhere.
Carmen Otero: We were afraid of, of what they would see. We were at the police department for quite a while, and we kept asking them, you know, "Did you get a hold of the little ones?" And finally they, they finally told us, "You don't have to worry about that." [pause] They were killed also. When they told me about Josie and Joey, I just died inside.
Charlie Otero: After that day, I lost my religion instantly. The minute I saw my mother, I said there cannot be a God. Not only can there not be a God, but I hate him if he is a God, if there is one.
Narrator: A despair not difficult to understand from a man whose mother, father, sister and brother were slaughtered in their own home, horribly and inexplicably. While the Oteros were the first, they would not be the last people to fall victim to Dennis Rader's hellish world. More bodies, more suffering loved ones, more questions about who he was, why he was doing this.
Narrator: Probing deeper into a dark mind.
Dennis Rader: I don't think it was actually the person that I was after. I think it was the dream. It was just an object. That's how it [unclear: "were" / "worked"].
Narrator: A cat and mouse game with the police begins, when "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Stone Phillips: When Wichita police learned that two children and their parents had been murdered, they of course looked at the likeliest suspects, people who knew the family. Police, however, were about to learn that they were dealing with a serial killer, a man who three decades later would offer details about his crimes and his callousness in tapes never broadcast before. Again, Edie Magnus.
Narrator: After murdering four members of the Otero family, Dennis Rader spent the next several years killing again and again and again. His next three victims were all young women. In this interview with the psychologist, Rader dismisses each victim as a project. He says he'd begin by stalking.
Dennis Rader: Stalking stage is when you start learning more about your victims, potential victims. Went to the library, I looked up their names, their address, cross-referenced, and called them a couple of times, drove by there whenever I could.
Narrator: And each time he struck, Rader said he was armed with what he calls his hit kit.
Interviewer: Kit contained what?
Dennis Rader: Plastic bags, rope, tape, knife, gun. All those would be the kit. [unclear: "They'd be where I could have them in the house and gather them up" / "they'd be broke and have them in the house and get them up"].
Narrator: Tools that would come to define the work of BTK. The victims were often discovered bound with tape or rope tied in unusual knots.
Dennis Rader: You had to have the control, which is the [unclear: "bonding" / "bondage"]. That's been a big thing with me. My sexual fantasy is, if I'm, if I'm going to kill a victim or do something, a victim is, have them bound, tied. Now, somewhere along the line, in my dreams, I had what they call torture chambers. And to relieve your sexual fantasies, you have to go to the, the kill.
Narrator: Three months after the Otero murders, in April of 1974, Rader's next victim was Kathy Bright, a 21-year-old college student. Once again, he'd selected her randomly while driving down her street, as he told the court in June.
Dennis Rader: And I saw her go in the house with somebody else, and I thought, that's a possibility.
Narrator: Rader's plan was to lie in wait and overtake Kathy when she came home. But the plan went awry when she unexpectedly showed up with her brother, Kevin. Rader said in court he was able to get brother and sister tied up, but the knots that bound Kevin were not holding.
Interviewer: Were you armed with a handgun at that time also?
Dennis Rader: Yes, I had a handgun.
Interviewer: What happened when you [unclear: "came" / "started"]...
Dennis Rader: I actually had two handguns. Well, I started strangling. The, either the [unclear: "garrote" / "gett" / "variant"] broke, or he broke his bonds, and he jumped up real quick like. I pulled my gun and quickly shot him, hit him in the head. He fell over. I could see the blood.
Narrator: Rader said he thought Kevin was dead, and turned to strangle Kathy when he heard Kevin move. The two men struggled again, and Rader shot him for a second time in the head. He then continued trying to strangle Kathy, but was unsuccessful, and so stabbed her multiple times in the chest. Meanwhile, much to Rader's surprise, Kevin had somehow managed to escape, though his head wounds from the gunshots left him unable to clearly describe the killer to police.
Dennis Rader: I thought the police were coming at that time. I heard the door open. I thought, oh, that's it. And I stepped out there, and he, I could see him running down the street. So I quickly cleaned up everything that I could and left.
Narrator: Six months later, in October 1974, Rader announced himself to authorities in the first of many letters he sent to newspapers and other media outlets, communiques that would come to include poems and puzzles. It began a campaign that would reveal his other motive to kill: publicity, a twisted desire for celebrity, a sick obsession that Rader, like some other serial killers, had, to be known and feared, to get credit for all his handiwork. It was Rader who came up with BTK as a name for himself.
Dennis Rader: I just put it in one of the first letters. I was always [unclear: "surprised I put it out that first" / "r... I put it out that first"]. I think it was just bind, torture, kill. Now I had a label on me, like the, like the Green River Killer and Son of Sam, and a whole slew of others, the Boston Strangler.
Narrator: The police now knew the murders of the Otero family and Kathy Bright were linked, that they had a serial killer in their midst. For tactical reasons, though, it would be several years before they disclosed that information to the public. Still, they wanted to communicate with the mysterious strangler. Police quietly placed a classified ad in the big hometown daily: "BTK, help is available." There was no response, and Rader did not kill again for three years.
Dennis Rader: You know, it wasn't something I just could do all the time. So whenever it was convenient. It would have been easier, probably, if you were like a spy or something, where you could go sit there and watch. But I didn't have that. I had to work under camouflage.
Narrator: Then, in March 1977, Rader struck again. His victim, Shirley Vian, 24 years old. He said in court he'd watched her young son walk into the house and spontaneously chose that family to victimize.
Dennis Rader: I kind of forced myself in. I just walked in, just opened the door, walked in, and then pulled a pistol.
Narrator: Shirley Vian was home with her three small children, whom Rader corralled into a bathroom.
Dennis Rader: The kids were really banging on the door, hollering, screaming.
Narrator: It's horrifying to remember that Rader himself was a young father at this time. His own son was not yet two. But with the sounds of the Vian children in the background, he said he simply worked as fast as he could.
Dennis Rader: Comforted her a little bit, and then went ahead and tied her up, and then put a bag, a bag over her head and strangled her.
Narrator: In another admission that reveals Rader's depravity, he told the psychologist the thrill had little to do with the kill, or for that matter, with the victim herself.
Dennis Rader: And I don't think it was actually the person that I was after. I think it was the dream. I know that's not really nice to say about a person, but they were basically an object. They're just an object. That's how it [unclear: "work" / "were"]. I had more satisfaction building up to it, and afterwards, than I did the actual killing of the person.
James Alan Fox: Many serial killers objectify their victim. They dehumanize them. They're tools. They're instruments for their own pleasures.
Edie Magnus: How does someone who is a married young father...
James Alan Fox: Mm-hm.
Edie Magnus: ...objectify people and kill them?
James Alan Fox: The process is called compartmentalization. Many people are able to divide the world into those they care about and love truly, and everyone else, who's expendable.
Edie Magnus: He says that he had more satisfaction anticipating his kills, and in the aftermath of killing, than he did in the actual killing.
James Alan Fox: That's his fantasy. The planning process, the stalking, the hunting, is very enjoyable to him. And the aftermath, once he's killed, to see that he, to see what he's done, that's fulfilling too. That's when he would literally climax.
Narrator: The sexual fantasies, the obsession with bondage. Rader claims it's been swirling in his head since he was a child. He remembers being aroused as a young child when his mother would spank him, Rader has written, in letters which no one's sure are true; that he secretly perused S&M magazines as a boy, stole panties, peeped in windows. He writes of hanging a cat, and then a dog.
Edie Magnus: How does sexual fantasy, and even an obsession with bondage, lead to murder?
James Alan Fox: It doesn't necessarily. What makes serial killers different than other people who might fantasize about power, dominance, control, is that they do not have a legitimate way to satisfy their need for power. So they take, they take and grab that power in the most violent way.
Narrator: At the end of 1977, in December, Dennis Rader killed his seventh victim, Nancy Fox.
Dennis Rader: Broke in and waited for her to come home, in the kitchen.
Narrator: This time, Rader's plans went smoothly, as the single working girl, who was just 25, came home alone.
Dennis Rader: I confronted her, told her there I was a, I had a problem, sexual problem, that I would have to tie her up and have sex with her.
Narrator: Rader said he handcuffed and tied Nancy Fox, strangled her with a belt, left his telltale semen by the body, and got out without a hitch. Then he called the police. Rader actually had the audacity to phone 911 and alert authorities to his own crime.
Dennis Rader: You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing. Nancy Fox.
911 Dispatcher: I'm sorry, sir, I can't understand you. What is your address?
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "843 South Pershing" / "84..."] [recording cut].
Narrator: In the jailhouse interview, Rader said in hindsight he thinks that call was dumb.
Dennis Rader: That was kind of a, that was kind of an impulse. Really a really stupid thing to do, because they, I left my voice pattern and my voice on there.
Narrator: And still, Rader was not done communicating. The following month he sent a poem, written with a child's printing set on an index card, to the Wichita Eagle newspaper. The poem, patterned after a nursery rhyme, referred to Shirley Vian's murder. Several days later, he sent another letter, the most disturbing one yet, the one that finally put the killer on the news and put the community in a tailspin.
Ron Loewen: What kind of leads do you have?
Richard Lamunyon: We have absolutely nothing that will point us to any one particular individual.
Narrator: A killer now in the spotlight he craves.
Ron Loewen: He absolutely terrorized the community. Everyone was a suspect. The fear was palpable.
Narrator: When "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Ron Loewen: I sat in my office and read his account of what he had done. And I wasn't ready for that.
Narrator: It was February 1978, and then TV news director Ron Loewen was reading, with disgust and revulsion, a letter that had arrived in his newsroom at KAKE-TV.
Ron Loewen: There was no doubt in my mind it was from BTK.
Narrator: In a two-page, single-spaced letter, Rader, using the name BTK, again announced himself as a serial killer, and then went even further in his bid for publicity, comparing himself to Son of Sam in New York, Jack the Ripper in London and the Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles, claiming they were all driven to kill by what he called Factor X. "It seems senseless, but we cannot help it," he wrote. "There is no help, no cure, except death or being caught and put away."
Ron Loewen: He was making it clear that he wanted to be elevated to the serial killer hall of fame. This is the league that he said he should be in. He listed 15 to 17 additional serial killers, infamous serial killers...
Edie Magnus: Through the ages?
Ron Loewen: Through the ages. "BTK is a student" was the first thing that flashed through my mind, of serial murders.
Narrator: Along with a lurid description of the Otero killings, Loewen says the killer was literally begging for ink.
Ron Loewen: A little paragraph in the newspaper would have been enough. "How many people do I have to kill until I get the recognition I deserve?"
Speaker: I've always thought that, you know, he had the misfortune, given his aspirations, to live in a small media market. You know, he never got the attention because he lived in Wichita. If he'd done any of this in Los Angeles, it'd have been a different story.
Narrator: Even more chilling, BTK threatened he was bearing down on murder victim number eight.
Ron Loewen: He said that, in fact, he was stalking a victim right now. He'd picked his next victim. He indicated how he was going to kill that person. And then the last sentence was, "Maybe it's you."
Edie Magnus: He was trying to frighten people?
Ron Loewen: Oh, definitely. And he succeeded.
Narrator: It turned out the Wichita police had been intentionally denying BTK publicity for some time. Profilers had warned them against caving in to the killer's demands for attention, on the grounds that if he got it, he'd kill again. But that tactic clearly hadn't worked. BTK kept on killing anyway. Now, faced with the strangler's written threat to take yet another life, the police abruptly changed strategy.
Richard Lamunyon: At that point, we need to step up and say, yes, we recognize you as BTK, and, and we do have a serial killer here.
Narrator: So police chief Richard LaMunyon and news director Ron Loewen appeared on TV that February 1978, side by side.
Ron Loewen: BTK claims to have strangled a total of seven women.
Narrator: It was Loewen himself who broke the story of BTK to the community. During that newscast, Loewen, who never talked publicly about these events before discussing them with us, became, in effect, live bait.
Ron Loewen: The police said, I guess based again on their talk with their behavioral people, that this is a cry for help. This guy has more that he wants to say. "We'd suggest that you do the story so that it has someone that he might choose to communicate with again."
Edie Magnus: How did you feel about offering yourself up as someone who would be willing to communicate with this deranged mass murderer?
Ron Loewen: Well, you know, you want to help. So if he wanted to write letters and they came to my attention, why not?
Narrator: It was quite a risk. BTK had already murdered seven people, and Loewen could end up getting far more than just a letter in the mail. But there he sat...
Ron Loewen: What kind of leads do you have?
Narrator: ...asking questions of Chief LaMunyon for which there were no good answers.
Richard Lamunyon: Very honestly, we have no solid leads at all.
Ron Loewen: It was horrific news. Everything changed for me. Everything changed for everyone in Wichita.
Narrator: Loewen says the effect of the bombshell announcement on this gentle, family-oriented city was instantaneous.
Ron Loewen: He absolutely terrorized the community. Everyone was a suspect. Girlfriends were concerned about their boyfriends. There were parents who turned in their children. The fear was palpable.
Narrator: Hoping BTK would contact him, the police brought Loewen inside the investigation. Loewen was provided a photo of a possible suspect, and a police revolver.
Ron Loewen: That gun creeped me out. It was the tangible reminder that there was a killer out there, and that at some level the police thought that he might be coming to see me.
Narrator: Just what was it that drove Dennis Rader to bind, torture and kill so many innocent people?
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "Factor X is probably something we'll never know" / "Dr Factory x is probably something we never know"].
Narrator: In his jailhouse interview, Rader blamed his murder spree on that mysterious force he has always claimed was way beyond his control: Factor X.
Dennis Rader: Something that, I use it, I actually think I'm maybe possessed with demons. I was dropped on my head when I was a kid. I've talked to some theological Christian people, and some of those people are really strong. They actually think, well, the Bible says that, that there's demons, and within you, or come into you. That's the only thing I can figure out. I have, you know, you know, something drove me to do this. You know, normal people just don't do this. You can't stop it. I can't stop it. It's just, it controls me, you know. It's a, it's, it's like it's in the driver's seat. You, that's probably the reason we're sitting here. You know, I could just say no, I don't want to do this, and go crawl in a hole. But it's, you know, it's, it's, it's driving me.
Interviewer: You've actually used the term monster, that there's this monster inside of you. It almost sounds like that's something separate and apart, like a different person.
Dennis Rader: Yeah, it's, it's part of the compartment. It's like, switch back and forth. And once this character takes over, whatever it is, it drives me onward. [unclear: "I don't know what it is" / "know what it is"].
Narrator: But criminologist James Alan Fox says he knows what it is: it's bunk.
James Alan Fox: "Don't blame me. I'm really a good guy, but Factor X, I just couldn't resist. It's the monster inside of me." To use a technical term, it's poppycock. It's just an excuse. It was Dennis Rader making decisions, not Factor X.
Edie Magnus: He speculates at one point that he was dropped on his head...
James Alan Fox: Yeah.
Edie Magnus: ...and that might have done something.
James Alan Fox: Sure, he'd like to believe that too. It's someone else's fault. There are lots of kids that fall off tricycles and fall out of cribs, and they bang their heads, and they don't have Factor X or go on killing sprees. It's just a way to deflect blame. Dennis Rader is someone who's selfish, narcissistic, committed to his own pleasures, committed to fulfilling his sexual fantasies, no matter who he hurts in the process.
Narrator: In 1978, of course, nobody knew what Rader's excuses were. All they knew was that BTK was out there, a seven-time murderer who was promising in his Factor X manifesto that he was about to take another innocent life. So the investigation went into high gear, unprecedented, and yet unsuccessful for many years, even though, you know, he was right under their noses.
Narrator: Desperate police devise an unusual plan, a secret message to BTK.
Edie Magnus: You were hoping that perhaps your killer might see it. Did you get any phone calls?
Speaker: BTK was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Narrator: It was 1979, and Ron Loewen was studying yet another package from the mysterious serial killer at large in Wichita. This one, which arrived in Loewen's TV newsroom more than a year after BTK had last been heard from, was announcing not another murder, but a failed attempt.
Ron Loewen: He'd broken the glass. He was in the basement, waiting.
Narrator: The intended victim, a 63-year-old woman Rader had been stalking, unexpectedly spent the night out, which saved her life. But Rader made sure everybody knew he was still primed to commit murder, sending the media that package, containing some personal items he'd stolen from her home, and including one of his trademark poems.
Ron Loewen: Which was a poem of death. He said that he was disappointed she didn't come home, that he intended to kill her.
Narrator: Rader now claims in this interview with the psychologist that this woman wasn't the only one that got away.
Interviewer: Is it safe to say that there are at least a few lucky people out there?
Dennis Rader: There's a lot of lucky people out there.
Interviewer: Who you didn't kill?
Dennis Rader: That, you had, [unclear: "didn't make it to the house" / "didn't need make of the house"], they come home, or for some reason I didn't go. There's a lot of lucky people out there, yes.
Interviewer: There'd have been more?
Dennis Rader: Probably, if I would have succeeded. I'm almost guarantee it.
Narrator: After that failed murder attempt, Wichita's most famous and sought-after strangler seemed to disappear from the scene. After five years and seven bodies, he stopped communicating in 1979, and the police simply couldn't find him, despite a manhunt unprecedented in scope that went on for years.
Richard Lamunyon: [unclear: "We spent" / "Who spent"] a lot of their money working on this case, and no one complained, not one bit.
Narrator: We first met former Wichita police chief Richard LaMunyon last year, before Dennis Rader was arrested, and he talked quite candidly about the failure to catch BTK on his watch.
Richard Lamunyon: I think the community was probably as frustrated as I was. And I don't think they were mad. I think they had kind of the same feeling I did: hey, they're doing everything that they can possibly do to catch this guy.
Narrator: LaMunyon says they'd tried everything, from old-fashioned detective work to some ideas that sounded downright nutty.
Richard Lamunyon: We were trying to get this guy to communicate.
Edie Magnus: But did you feel at the time like, I don't care how wacky it sounds, let's try it?
Richard Lamunyon: Anything short of, of psychics. I wasn't into psychics.
Narrator: But he was into trying a technique that, as far as we know, has never been attempted by law enforcement before or since. The police once arranged to have a subliminal message, one devised by profilers, inserted into a local evening newscast at KAKE-TV. To viewers, the subliminal message looked like this: just a flash of light. But slow it down, and there it was: "Now call the chief."
Edie Magnus: And you were hoping that perhaps your killer might see it. Did you get any phone calls? Did anybody's subconscious get tapped at all?
Richard Lamunyon: No, we didn't get anything out of it.
Narrator: Wherever he was, the killer could not or would not be reached. Even when the police got a break, and were able to track down a letter BTK sent from a photocopier at Wichita State University, they still couldn't catch him. Turns out Rader was a student there, studying criminal justice.
Richard Lamunyon: We tracked the communication that he sent us to that copy machine that was at the activity center, and we had detectives go back to Xerox company, and they confirmed that's where it came from. But he was on a list with several thousand others. If you were a white male between 18 and 35, you were on that list. But we couldn't match him to either, or any other list.
Dennis Rader: You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing.
Narrator: And they had the killer's voice on tape, of course, from that time he'd boldly called 911 to tell them he'd murdered Nancy Fox. In time, the police were able to have the technical quality of that taped call enhanced, and it was played repeatedly on radio and TV.
James Alan Fox: He said it was probably stupid, but he liked it. He liked the fact that it's been played over and over and over, for years and years.
Narrator: Yet even with all that exposure, nobody recognized the voice as that of a man named Dennis Rader. Another dead end.
Dennis Rader: I think I was lucky. I think I was lucky quite a bit. Pretty lucky guy. Pretty lucky guy. I think they got close a couple times. I was just lucky.
Narrator: Incredibly so, for a killer who may well have been seen several times. A handful of eyewitnesses helped police make sketches of how they remembered the suspect, but the drawings weren't especially helpful, because nobody could quite agree on what BTK looked like. As DNA matching evolved during the 1980s, the police tried to use that technology to catch their killer. More than 200 samples were taken from men living near the victims who fit BTK's profile, and compared to the semen they'd preserved from several of the crime scenes. Nobody matched.
Edie Magnus: You had DNA evidence.
Richard Lamunyon: Yes.
Edie Magnus: You had his voice on tape.
Richard Lamunyon: Yes.
Edie Magnus: And you just couldn't get him.
Richard Lamunyon: Couldn't get him.
Edie Magnus: You had the best behavioral science minds in the country...
Richard Lamunyon: Mm-hm.
Edie Magnus: ...helping you develop a profile of who he was and what he might do, and you couldn't ever anticipate him.
Richard Lamunyon: Could never anticipate him.
Narrator: Still, LaMunyon says now that while they didn't know anything about Dennis Rader, they knew a lot about BTK.
Richard Lamunyon: After he went dormant and stopped killing, the theory was, and everyone was saying, well, he's in prison, or maybe he has an illness, or something happened. And I never, I never bought that. I was convinced he was one of us. We had him pegged in terms of the type of individual we were looking for. We had everything but a name.
Narrator: In the jailhouse interview with the psychologist, which we showed former Chief LaMunyon, Dennis Rader was openly scornful of local law enforcement, and the police, or the "Keystone Cops", and disdainful of all their years of effort.
Dennis Rader: You know, they traced a lot of stuff down. They traced the copier down, the copiers I used out at WSU, but they couldn't make the connection from there. They had 30-some years to break it. They couldn't do it. The taxpayers are paying the money for [unclear: "Sedgwick County" / "such a kind" / "CRA County"]. They really need to have, I think, a sharper punch. Although they tried, they tried, they tried.
Edie Magnus: But were you offended when you heard him say the Wichita cops couldn't close this case?
Richard Lamunyon: I'm not offended by anything he says at all. It's all about him. I know that the police officers did everything in their power. I know that they finally caught him.
Edie Magnus: With everything you know about him now, do you think that you should have been able to get him?
Richard Lamunyon: I'd like to tell you yes. I really don't think we could have done any more than we did.
Edie Magnus: He called the Wichita police the Keystone Cops.
Richard Lamunyon: I heard that. Again, that's just Dennis Rader, because what he was saying is, to allow the Wichita police to catch him, you know, would be demeaning to him. And it just bugs him. It just drives him crazy. So therefore he has to belittle the police department in order to elevate himself. The conventional wisdom was that somehow he was so smart, because he always stayed one step ahead of the police. I don't think he's smart at all. We're not talking about a genius here, you know. We're not talking about a Hannibal Lecter-type individual. I think he was just more lucky than anything, in terms of what he did, because he did it in such random fashion, and because there was no connection between them, and because he did it alone. And it was so sporadic, and it was over such a long period of time.
Narrator: And probably most important, LaMunyon says, is that Rader apparently told absolutely no one about what he had done.
Richard Lamunyon: I don't think he even joked about it. I don't think he said, "Oh, I could be the strangler", type thing. I don't think so.
Narrator: Year after year went by, and the once-hot BTK investigation eventually became a cold case. By the mid-'80s, the elite police unit created to hunt down the killer closed up shop. Once the city's public enemy number one, BTK became part of Wichita legend. And what was Dennis Rader doing all those years? Hiding in plain sight.
Narrator: Those who knew the killer best: were there hints of his secret life?
Edie Magnus: Wouldn't those closest to Dennis Rader, his wife, his children, have had to know something?
Narrator: When "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Stone Phillips: He spent years stalking and killing innocent people, and then Dennis Rader, known only as BTK, seemed to stop. He gradually disappeared from the headlines he craved, and that is something he now says he could not tolerate. Here again, Edie Magnus.
Narrator: After BTK disappeared in 1979, police would spend 25 more years in a frustrating search to try to capture him.
Edie Magnus: Did you ever look around?
Ron Loewen: Oh, always.
Narrator: BTK, Ron Loewen knew, could be anyone, anywhere. Just listen to what the former Wichita news director told us about the killer a year before BTK was caught.
Ron Loewen: I think this guy is probably a lot more normal than anybody thinks. He told us that it was easy after he, after he killed someone. He just assumed his rightful place in the world. He's a person who has been walking in that community, and he's really the stranger beside you.
Narrator: Today, that all sounds positively prophetic, because that's just what Dennis Rader was doing all those years: hiding in plain sight, raising his children, going to church, getting a degree in his spare time, attending Kansas State University home football games. In fact, Loewen, who took a look at Rader's interview with the psychologist, says the serial killer is even more ordinary than he imagined.
Ron Loewen: His family is so wonderfully Kansas. His daughter was a high school golf champion. His son is, I think, in the Navy. His, his wife sings in the church choir, has a, a job in a, in a convenience store. They're average people, making a, a simple, good life together. Boy, you, you would never pick him out of a crowd. I, I thought there would be something that would be more evident, but he was just as beige as beige could be.
Narrator: Mike Fitch knew Rader when they were both employees at ADT, where Rader worked for nearly 15 years installing home security systems. He remembers Rader as a stickler for perfection. Making his customers happy was Rader's top priority, even if he could be cranky and critical of others.
Mike Fitch: I definitely didn't want to get on his wrong side, so I was intimidated by him when I first started working.
Narrator: But Fitch says he saw no hint of Rader's violent side.
Mike Fitch: We'd sit around and have popcorn before he went home.
Narrator: And what could be more solid American citizen than being active in his young son's Boy Scouts?
Bob Monroe: I signed Dennis up as a Cub Scout leader.
Narrator: Fellow scouting leader Bob Monroe says Dennis Rader always set a good example for the boys in his troop, and for Rader's own son, who went on to be an Eagle Scout.
Bob Monroe: [unclear: "Yes, he" / "You say he" / "He"] took part in everything that we did in scouting, and with his son, which is very important in Cub Scouting, that you do work with your boys. And so I considered him to be a very good parent and a very good scout leader, at that time, of course.
Narrator: Contrary to the common assumption that serial killers are generally loners or social outcasts, criminologist James Fox says they can often seem to be one of us.
James Alan Fox: Many serial killers have families and, and children and friends, and no one suspects them, because they have this ordinary, normal-appearing life. And what people don't know about is the darker side, the hidden side.
Edie Magnus: So you can be someone who binds, tortures and kills one minute, and has a seemingly normal life the next?
James Alan Fox: Absolutely. We've seen it time and time again.
Narrator: John Wayne Gacy of Chicago, who murdered 33 young men, appeared normal enough. He was once named Jaycees Man of the Year. Ted Bundy, considered charming, was a law student and socialized in political circles until he was caught. He killed at least 33 women in five different states. On the other hand, New York's David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, who shot six, was a loner. And so too was Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee, who dissected dead animals as a child, then later murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys. But why would anyone ever suspect a man like Dennis Rader, considering his substantial involvement with his local Lutheran church? Paul Carlstedt has known Rader through the church for 30 years, and says he was an exemplary member.
Paul Carlstedt: He will be an usher. He will run the sound system. He'll count the money after the service. If something needs to be done, Dennis was always available to help.
Narrator: As hard as this may be to believe, the serial killer told the psychologist in his interview that he considers himself a religious person.
Interviewer: Do you pray?
Dennis Rader: Yes, I do. Study the Bible daily, and that helps, not only for, not only just for spiritual, a lot of it's good meanings in it, good concepts, things that you can use in life.
James Alan Fox: Even serial killers can believe in God. This is not inconsistent with the kind of person who can fulfill his sexual fantasies, who feels he has the right to do it with people whom he dehumanizes: objects, things.
Narrator: And Dr. Fox sees special significance in Rader taking over as the president of his church congregation just weeks before he was caught.
James Alan Fox: Being in charge, being in control, power, importance, is a, is a theme in his life. That's why he pursued this role in the church.
Narrator: In 1991, Rader had found a day job that could give him control and power too. He was made a compliance officer. Rader was now, ironically, in charge of making certain others follow the letter of the law in Park City, just north of Wichita. His duties included making sure homeowners complied with various local ordinances, like keeping their grass cut, their yards free of junked cars, or their dogs from running wild.
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "We've been tracking it down" / "Who'd been tracking it down"]. The dogs are somewhat territorial as well as vicious.
Narrator: That's him being interviewed by a local TV station, the killer himself, right there on the screen for all Wichita to see. Who would ever suspect this public servant was actually the monster BTK whom everyone feared? But it was in that job that at least some people saw a darker side to Dennis Rader. D. Stewart, a longtime acquaintance of Rader's, has a good friend who reported to him in the compliance department. His friend, she says, found him controlling and belligerent.
D. Stewart: There were times when he, when he yelled at her in front of other employees. He demeaned her. He told her she would never be as smart as he was.
Narrator: But she says he could turn his good and bad sides on and off.
D. Stewart: He could be berating her, he could be screaming at her, and if the phone rang and it was a member of his family, he turned into Ward Cleaver.
Narrator: Dr. Fox says this apparent Jekyll and Hyde personality is classic for many serial killers.
James Alan Fox: I don't believe there are two Raders in one body. It's just that we all have a range in our personality. And someone like Dennis Rader indeed has two different shades, sides to his personality, and he hides from the people in his life the dark, negative, brutal.
Edie Magnus: Wouldn't those closest to Dennis Rader, his wife, his children, have had to know something?
James Alan Fox: Nope. We'd like to believe that. We, we think it's incomprehensible that those closest wouldn't know. John Wayne Gacy was burying bodies in the crawl space of his home while he lived in that house with his wife. And there was a horrible odor coming from the crawl space, and she'd ask him about it, "What's that odor?" And he would say it was sewer gases, and he would take care of it. And she believed him. Dennis Rader's wife would never suspect. He gave no signs.
Narrator: They'd find out eventually, because it seems Dennis Rader couldn't stand staying hidden forever.
Dennis Rader: I can just really stir the hornet's nest by just showing them pictures and puzzles and playing a game with them. I don't even have to go out and kill anybody this time.
Narrator: After years of silence, BTK emerges from the shadows. More clues for police, more heartbreak for victims' families.
Jeff Davis: Mom's house had been broken into, and we didn't know what happened to her. That is a trip to hell.
Narrator: When "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Narrator: January 2004 in Wichita, Kansas. Dennis Rader was 58, still living in the house on Independence Street, still a compliance officer for Park City, still an active member of the Christ Lutheran Church. He'd been married 32 years. His son and daughter were all grown up now. And the other Dennis Rader, the brutal strangler who'd so far gotten away with all those murders all that time, and hadn't been heard from in 25 years?
Dennis Rader: BTK was retired. He was, he was going to go off the face of the earth.
Narrator: Or so he says. Soon enough, an excuse to grab the limelight would come again. The Wichita Eagle published an anniversary article about the mysterious serial killer known only by the name he'd given himself, BTK, for bind, torture and kill, and who had committed his first murders 30 years earlier. Of course, it was all so long ago, Rader found his exploits weren't even front-page news anymore. He says it all made him feel a little itchy.
Dennis Rader: That really stirred it. I read that in the paper, and I thought, I always thought, you know, I'd like to bring this back out again, but should I? And I think I'd reached the point in their life, the kids were gone. You know, not really bored, but kind of bored.
Narrator: And something else. Rader knew a local lawyer was writing a book about him, or about BTK, that is. That didn't sit too well either with the man who had such an enormous appetite to draw attention to himself. Rader felt only he could do justice to his story.
Dennis Rader: Eventually I was going to tell a story in my terms, and not his terms. They already had the killings, and so that's factual. But they didn't know how, how I worked and moved around the projects, the haunts, how I picked out victims. They didn't know how that worked. I can just really stir the hornet's nest up with, through the media, by just showing pictures, puzzles, and playing a game with them.
Narrator: So in March 2004, Rader made contact, not just signaling that he was still around, but, far more ominously, sending what appeared to be proof of yet another murder, another young woman whose death had never been conclusively linked to BTK. The innocuous-looking piece of mail landed on Wichita Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana's desk.
Hurst Laviana: Copied the envelope, copied the letter, took the letter straight to the police department.
Edie Magnus: Did you read it?
Hurst Laviana: There's nothing to read. There are no words on it. I thought it was crime scene photographs, that some crackpot had gotten a hold of them on the internet or something.
Narrator: The pictures appeared to be pictures of a dead woman. Her body had been posed several different ways.
Hurst Laviana: These were clearly not police photos.
Narrator: And there was something else: a photocopy of a driver's license.
Hurst Laviana: Vicki Wegerle's driver's license. And I immediately knew this probably came from Vicki Wegerle's killer.
Narrator: In September 1986, Vicki Wegerle, a young mother, was found tied up and strangled in her home, and a trophy had been taken, in this case her driver's license. So police had naturally suspected BTK. But there were differences too, especially that the killer had never publicly boasted about it afterward, as was his pattern. Now, all these years later, in addition to the copies of the photos and the driver's license, there was the envelope they came in. The return address: Bill Thomas Killman. BTK.
Hurst Laviana: And that's when we realized this may be the real deal.
Edie Magnus: Tell me about that moment.
Hurst Laviana: It was just total disbelief that he was still here.
Narrator: Laviana agreed to give the police two days to nail it down, and then broke the story. The ghost was back. Police could now say that, more than 17 years earlier, Vicki Wegerle had indeed been BTK's eighth known victim.
Ron Loewen: So by resurfacing in, in 2004, and sending a, a letter with a photograph, driver's license of a victim, say, "I'm still here. You never caught me, and I've been here all along." His need for attention is apparently un-, unquenched. I absolutely thought that, that this was the tip of the iceberg.
Narrator: Former Wichita TV news director Ron Loewen made that prediction to us almost a year before Dennis Rader was caught. And sadly, when it was all over, he'd be proven right. There had been two more murders, never before connected to BTK, that brought the total number of his victims to ten. In 2004, Rader was still hiding evidence about his murder of Marine Hedge. She lived on his block, and they knew each other. In court, Rader described how, after bowling one evening in 1985, he broke into her house and waited for her to come home.
Dennis Rader: And she screamed, and I jumped on the bed and strangled [her] manually.
Narrator: Rather than leaving her body, Rader changed his M.O., confusing police at the time.
Speaker: Killed her in her house, put her in the trunk of her car, took her to his church, put her on a blanket, tied her up in different [unclear: "bonding" / "bondage"] situations, took pictures of her, then put her back in the trunk, and took her out and dumped her. It was the middle of the night. He had a key, because he was one of the leaders of the church.
Narrator: Marine Hedge's body was later found buried under some leaves and branches in this ditch, several miles from her home. And even as his persona, BTK, re-emerged in 2004, Rader was also hiding evidence about his last victim, Dolores Davis, whom he killed in 1991.
Narrator: He'd seen her out in the yard working and had sexual feelings.
Narrator: Her son, Jeff, talked to us recently, after viewing Rader's interview with the psychologist.
Jeff Davis: She was a very kind, considerate, empathetic, gentle person. Given the circumstances of her death, I think she kept her class and her dignity and her poise right up to the end.
Judge: All right, so you used a concrete block to break the window?
Narrator: In court, Rader said he used a concrete block as a battering ram to crash through Dolores Davis's sliding glass door and enter her home.
Dennis Rader: Removed her handcuffs, and, and then tied her up, and then, and then eventually strangled her.
Narrator: Rader then took her body from the house. Authorities knew only that she was missing.
Jeff Davis: Probably kidnapped at best, or dead at worst. So that kind of started the clock on a 13-day, seemingly 13-century time frame, where we didn't know what happened to her. And that, that is, that is a trip to hell.
Narrator: Thirteen days later, his mother's body was found under a bridge. But of course, police didn't know then who'd done it. Jeff Davis says he slipped into despair and depression that destroyed his marriage, and worse.
Jeff Davis: I would go to bed every night, for the better part of five years, and I prayed to God that he'd let me die.
Narrator: Dolores Davis's driver's license and Social Security card had gone missing. That was certainly the kind of thing BTK did to his murder victims. But there were many other aspects of this crime that strayed from his usual M.O. So until Rader was caught, and the police announced Dolores Davis as the tenth victim, her son was left to wonder.
Jeff Davis: I guess there was the remote possibility that there was some phantom serial out there, but honestly, I never connected it with BTK.
Narrator: How Dennis Rader led police straight to his door.
Richard Lamunyon: He said, "We've got him."
Narrator: "Confessions of BTK" continues in a moment.
Narrator: Would he kill again? That was the question consuming much of Wichita, Kansas, in the weeks after serial killer BTK announced himself in 2004, following years of silence.
Wichita Resident: I'd definitely lock my doors at night till I find out more.
Narrator: Here in the heartland, fear of the unknown monster among them penetrated yet a new generation.
Wichita Resident: My mom's going to watch out for my little sister more.
Narrator: People were learning karate, buying guns, beefing up security systems, and looking at strangers with a suspicion not felt in years. In his jailhouse interview, Rader now claims he didn't know he was having this effect.
Dennis Rader: But I didn't realize the city really lived in fear that bad. All I see, little spurts of it on the news. Women come home and look under their doors, and under their beds, and just literally lived in fear. I didn't realize that I had that attention.
Speaker: I dropped my jaw, and I had a pad of paper, and I made a note, and I just scrawled "liar". Once again, even with the learned psychologist there, he's playing a game.
Narrator: At the very least, says criminologist James Fox, Rader is being completely disingenuous. He says for the serial killer, the fear is all part of the twisted fun.
James Alan Fox: Part of the enjoyment that serial killers have is not just manipulating the victims, tying them up, but manipulating a community, and tying them up in a grip of terror.
Narrator: What's now known is that Rader hadn't taken a life since 1991. His explanation to the psychologist about why he stopped at ten victims is once again chillingly matter-of-fact.
Interviewer: Why aren't there more?
Dennis Rader: Why aren't there more? It seemed like as I got older, I started making, well, physically I was just, wasn't up to it. I knew, like, [if I] had [a] fight with somebody, you'd have to be an older person, because just, he just went into, wouldn't be able to fight physically. I don't know. I think it was just starting to mellow out a little bit.
Narrator: Fox believes it's probably not just coincidence that Rader stopped committing murder around the time he got that job as a compliance officer.
James Alan Fox: Now he really had some power. Now he could really push people around. So he didn't have to do it with physical violence. He could do it through his job.
Narrator: The killer still lusted for notoriety, however. So after first revealing himself in that letter to the Wichita Eagle, he sent a slew of letters and packages throughout 2004 and into early 2005 to local TV stations, the police, even leaving clues in a public park: a doll with dark hair, her face colored with makeup, her arms bound behind her by a pair of pantyhose, her head contained in a plastic bag. And next to the doll was a copy of the driver's license of one of BTK's victims, Nancy Fox; a handmade word puzzle, which investigators now see contains a group of letters spelling "D. Rader" and the numbers of his address. It all put Wichita's serial strangler front and center again, just how he liked it.
Interviewer: Was that exciting to you? Was that sexually exciting to you?
Dennis Rader: Probably the media. Not maybe sexually, but the media attention. You, I listened to the news quite a bit, and yeah, I get, I get pretty excited to read the paper.
Interviewer: Did you ever think you were going to get caught?
Dennis Rader: No, no, no, no, no. This guy was not going to get caught. Absolutely not. No, I didn't want to get caught.
Interviewer: Okay.
Dennis Rader: I wanted to put everything on floppies. They would go from a floppy to a CD. The CD would either go to safe deposit or a very hidey-hole, and I could always bring it back out.
Narrator: Many have speculated that Rader's repeated messages were indeed a cry to be captured. But James Fox says it's just the opposite.
James Alan Fox: He felt invincible, unstoppable. And that's why many serial killers do communicate with the police. Not because they want to invite capture. It's because they feel that the police are no match for their skill, their cunning, their stardom, their brilliance. So what often happens among serial killers is they get so cocky, and they make a mistake.
Narrator: And that's just what happened. It was Rader himself who helped bring police to his door. It started in January 2005, when Rader placed a letter in a pickup truck at this Home Depot, which eventually made its way to police. In it, Rader, identifying himself only as BTK, asked the police whether they could catch him if he used a computer disk to communicate. He asked the police to respond in a classified ad, and he asked them to be honest.
Interviewer: [unclear: "He" / "You"] actually asked the police if they could catch you.
Dennis Rader: They said no.
Interviewer: They said no. Did you really think they were going to tell you the truth?
Dennis Rader: No, I thought they would. I, I thought they wanted me to finish the story. I really thought I had a rapport with them, you know, and I really did.
Edie Magnus: I mean, doesn't that seem kind of dumb?
Richard Lamunyon: Yeah, it does.
Edie Magnus: To believe that the police would tell you the truth about something like that?
Richard Lamunyon: I mean, he's been playing games with us for 30 years, and you think we're, we're going to shoot straight with you? I don't think so.
Narrator: So naturally, the police lied, and told the killer they couldn't trace a disk to him, and waited to see if he would fall for it, which he did. Rader's last communication was a computer disk filled with more taunts and puzzles. He sent it to a local television station. The police were able to trace it to a "Dennis" and a computer at Rader's church. By Googling the church name and "Dennis", police quickly zeroed in on Dennis Rader.
Edie Magnus: What nailed him, ultimately, was the last floppy disk, he said.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, what nailed him was his hubris. He went too far.
Narrator: Police also used a surveillance tape from that Home Depot to figure out that the person who dropped off the BTK letter was driving a car registered to Dennis Rader's son. But to make certain they had their man, they needed a DNA match. So authorities got a warrant for a tissue sample from Rader's daughter on file at a Kansas medical clinic. Tests showed it was a close match to the evidence drawn from the crime scenes. It was now early in the week of February 21, 2005, and former police chief Richard LaMunyon remembers quite well when he got the news he'd waited more than 30 years to hear.
Richard Lamunyon: He simply said, "We've got him." He said, "It's just a matter of time. We've got him."
Narrator: Locked up and choked up.
Dennis Rader: That first Sunday was probably my lowest day of all my life.
Narrator: Tears from a killer, but not for his victims, when "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Narrator: Dennis Rader spent the morning of February 25, 2005, on the job in Park City, where he was the town's compliance officer. Rader was responsible for things like corralling mad dogs, or chewing people out if their grass grew too high.
Dennis Rader: Normal work day. Didn't have any suspicions. Although I've been, been really careful about watching people and actions and stuff. I usually pretty good about that.
Narrator: He says he noticed nothing unusual, except maybe a moment when he overheard on his police radio the FBI was up to something in his town.
Dennis Rader: And I thought, well, you know, maybe something's coming down. Shall I run? But where would I run, if they were after me? I just took a calculated guess that that was something else, and hoped for.
Narrator: Then at midday, the killer went home for lunch.
Dennis Rader: Drove home, and just as soon as I got started, turned down there, there's a frontage road, I saw this whole line of police cars, and I thought, oh, that's not good. And it was just, they were right on me, just that quick. I thought maybe, maybe it's a traffic stop or something, but as soon as one of them was behind me with the red lights and sirens, I knew that was it.
Narrator: With that, Dennis Lynn Rader, the man believed to be BTK, was finally in custody, after 31 years.
Dennis Rader: They arrested me. They got out of the car, they pulled the guns on me, told me to lay down, and I sprawled out, and they grabbed me real quick like, handcuffs, and stuck me in a car. "Mr. Rader, do you know why you're going downtown?" I said, "I have suspicions. Why?" At first, I was hoping it was kind of a, kind of a cat and mouse game, that they had a suspect. But, but it, but, but kind of hurt, you know. You know, like you said, I had the power. You know, I was a law enforcement officer, technically. And here I am, these law enforcement officers are trying to do their, do my duty. That kind of hurt a little bit.
Narrator: But before long, Rader, in his self-obsessed arrogance, was talking up a storm, and says in this interview with the psychologist he actually was having a good time connecting to the police officers.
Interviewer: Also, during the interrogation, it seems as though you were enjoying being one of them at times. It's almost like colleagues talk shop. Camaraderie.
Dennis Rader: Camaraderie, you know. Yeah, we talked shop. I know a lot of police terminology. I know how they do things. So yeah, it's kind of a bonding type thing.
Interviewer: Did you enjoy it on any level?
Dennis Rader: Yes, I did. Yeah. All I knew was sunk, or soon would be, but yeah, I enjoyed it. And, and once, once the confession was out, and I admitted who I was, then, then the bonding really started, you know. I just really opened up, and, you know, we shared jokes and everything else. It's just like we were buddies.
Speaker: He's proud of what he'd done. He was having, in a perverse way, fun, talking with his, his colleagues, the police.
Edie Magnus: What do you make of the camaraderie he says he enjoyed with all of the police officers who were interrogating him when he was arrested?
James Alan Fox: Well, it, it implies a certain degree of, of, of control here on the situation. "I'm a good guy, they're a good guy, we're all in the same profession here. I worked law enforcement, technically." And he was a wannabe cop. It makes him feel better to, to think of them as peers.
Narrator: But however much Rader may have imagined he was still in control, the reality was just the opposite. Richard LaMunyon, who once headed up the department Rader dismisses as the Keystone Cops, says the script was going their way now.
Edie Magnus: Were they, in fact, playing him?
Richard Lamunyon: Absolutely. These, these officers that were interviewing him were handpicked. They had studied him. They knew the characteristics. They were playing to his ego, to his strength. They were bringing him up, making him think that, you know, hey, we're buddy-buddies.
Narrator: Then, just as quickly, they shut him down. The interview ended, the attention stopped, and the officers went home. It was only then, Rader tells the psychologist, that the reality of his past, and the impact on his future, finally started to sink in.
Dennis Rader: Was there any way of, of getting out of this? You know, is there any possible way? And I thought, no, there isn't any way. They just got too much on me. And then most of my thoughts went back to my family, you know, how my family was holding up, how are they taking this. That was the main thing. Just, you know, you're, you're caught, incarcerated, and all those things that you enjoyed, you, they're gone, you know. You just, just, you know, you have to be in the position to realize it. I don't think normal people out there in the world can visualize that, you know. Just like right now, you know, you just, you know, touch people and hold them, and, you know, your kids and stuff. [weeping] Sorry. [unclear: "Let it go" / "It's gone"].
Narrator: This was one of the few moments during the interview where Rader revealed any emotion: when he was talking about himself and his family.
Dennis Rader: Well, anyway, you know, people don't realize that, you know, once you're gone, you can't go out, out in fresh air, walk your dog, hug your wife, kiss your wife, you know, go to a movie, have a pizza, hamburger. It's all gone.
Richard Lamunyon: It's all about him.
Edie Magnus: When you watch him, do you feel anything?
Richard Lamunyon: You feel pain, because every time I see him, I see all of those victims, and the tortured looks on their faces from all the crime scenes, and what he actually did. He left that part out. He never mentioned them.
Narrator: Instead, all Rader could do was complain to the psychologist about how he missed all the attention he'd been receiving from his police interrogators.
Dennis Rader: [unclear: "He did not come Saturday" / "They did not come Saturday"]. It's probably that, that first Sunday was probably my lowest day of all my life. I was really depressed.
James Alan Fox: He called it the lowest day of his life. Can you imagine? This is a man who's already been arrested. He's ripped from his family, probably forever. They despise him. Oh, by the way, he's killed ten people. And the lowest day of his life is when the interrogation doesn't continue. Doesn't this tell us a lot about, about Dennis Rader?
Narrator: And next, the killer gets his day in court. Will heartbroken families get peace?
Jeff Davis: People use the word closure. There is no such thing.
Narrator: When "Confessions of BTK" continues.
Wichita Police Chief: The bottom line: BTK is arrested.
Narrator: While Dennis Rader sat in his cell with no one to satisfy his desire to keep talking about himself, the police and a cast of dozens proudly announced his capture to the citizens of Wichita and the world.
Wichita Police Chief: Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Rader, 59, a white male.
Narrator: But it wasn't until late June, when Rader appeared in court for what was supposed to be the first day of his trial, that people got a good look at, and earful from, the man who had killed so many people over so many years. Instead of maintaining the not guilty plea he'd entered earlier, there was a surprise.
Judge: Mr. Rader, would you please stand with counsel? Sir, I have been advised it is your desire to enter a plea of guilty in this case. Is that correct?
Dennis Rader: Yes, sir.
Narrator: People in and out of court listened aghast to Rader as he detailed each murder in his cold, chilling, emotionless manner.
Dennis Rader: I manually strangled her when she started to scream.
Narrator: Ron Loewen watched Rader's court appearance on TV.
Ron Loewen: People make a lot of the point that he didn't show any emotion. He was showing incredible emotion: the detail that he used, he paused and he'd search for words, the graphic, graphic description that he gave. This wasn't someone who was stumbling, who was nervous. This was showtime for him. He couldn't have asked for a better stage.
Narrator: The killer was clearly puffed up by his court appearance, bragging about it afterward when he spoke with the psychologist.
Interviewer: It's only been a few hours since that hearing. How are you feeling?
Dennis Rader: I really feel pretty good. It's kind of like a big burden that was lifted off my shoulders. And on the other hand, I feel like I'm, like a star right now.
Narrator: As you might expect, a certain former police chief would love to lower the curtain on Dennis Rader right now.
Richard Lamunyon: I'd like to be the one to be able to put him in a cell and turn his lights out. That's what I'd like to do.
Edie Magnus: So how does someone like Dennis Rader get to be this way?
James Alan Fox: Well, that's the $64,000 question that we don't completely know. Part of it is the propensities that you're born with, and part of it, too, is, is what kind of environment you're growing into. These are all the, the intangibles that we can't predict and don't fully understand.
Narrator: Rader told the psychologist he'll make amends, in his way, to his God.
Interviewer: I know it's personal, but could you tell me what you pray for?
Dennis Rader: Actually, like, for the other day, I prayed for, that the family would accept me on, there in the court, that they would, you know, you know, accept that as forgiveness.
Interviewer: Your family? Whose family?
Dennis Rader: My family. And also, I mentioned there the victim families, that they would, you know, not, they can forgive me, but maybe someday they can realize, you know, I got some problems.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. There's the classic understatement of the world.
Narrator: We asked Jeff Davis, the son of Rader's last victim, what he thought about that.
Jeff Davis: He does have problems, all of which are of his own making. He did not come from any abused family. He can't blame any environmental factors. He can't blame anybody, or any sickness, or being dropped on his head. Wish they'd dropped him a little harder. He can't blame anything.
Narrator: Davis, who, like so many other family members, is also a victim of BTK, wrote a book to help him and others cope with the trauma of loss, and to make sure people knew how special his mother, Dolores, was.
Jeff Davis: I would be damned if her legacy ended with her being murdered. A beautiful, loving, kind, gentle person, and her legacy is being murdered and dumped out in the ditch like a bag of dirty laundry for the dogs to go through. And I was not going to let that happen.
Narrator: Just after Davis's book was published in 1996, he received a letter from a taxpayer who Davis now firmly believes was Dennis Rader. It has never before been made public. The letter said, "We'll call the serial killer the Phantom of Northern Sedgwick County," which is where Rader lived. It also said, "I'm sure that he probably blends in with a crowd."
Jeff Davis: I'm Jeffrey Davis, son of Dolores Davis.
Narrator: At Rader's sentencing, Davis was able to speak directly to the killer.
Jeff Davis: For the last 5,326 days, I have wondered what it would be like to confront the walking cesspool that took my mother's precious life. Even if you could begin to fathom the depth of my hatred for you, I would still refuse to waste any breath on you, because that would once again allow you the satisfaction of being in the limelight, and that attention I refuse to allow you. As of today, you no longer exist.
Narrator: Charlie Otero and his sister Carmen spoke too.
Charlie Otero: Rader, you not only affected my life, but you took away the joy of the ultimate grandparents, aunt and uncle relationship my children deserve.
Carmen Otero: Just recently, I realized that I could not remember my mother's voice. It was a painful discovery. But as I put my thoughts on paper, it comes to me: I am my mother's voice, and I know we've been heard.
Narrator: Family members of other victims gave their thoughts.
Relative Of Nancy Fox: On the day he dies, Nancy and all of his victims will be waiting with God and watching him as he burns in hell.
Narrator: When it was time for Rader to speak to the court, he characteristically showed little emotion.
Dennis Rader: Now that I've confessed, put myself out to let everybody know what's going on, I expect to heal and to have life. And then, hopefully, someday God will accept me. And finally, I final apologize to the victims' families. There's no way that I can ever repay them.
Narrator: The murders were committed before Kansas reinstated the death penalty. When it came time to sentence Rader, the judge showed no mercy, giving him the maximum sentence.
Judge: ...to serve a term of life, for which you will not be parole-eligible until the expiration of 40 years.
Narrator: Jeff Davis says even though he was finally able to confront the killer of his mother, he is left feeling empty.
Jeff Davis: People use the word closure. There is no such thing. Closure happens when you go back to that moment in time, and it doesn't happen, and the person's still there.
Narrator: Charlie Otero, who also faced a hard life after the murder of his parents, sister and brother, knows what Davis means.
Charlie Otero: I would wonder about what they were thinking, and the feelings that they had while this was happening to them. You know, this has been the most intense and challenging. My family's murder is with me daily. It never leaves me. The memories of my family come back to me whenever I see a husband hug his wife, or a father and a son play. I think of my family, and what I had lost, for so long.
Narrator: Charlie Otero, Jeff Davis and so many others have wanted to know why, why their loved ones were victims. And now they know it was one man's inability to control his sexual fantasies, one man's depraved indifference to human life, and terrible coincidence for ten innocent people who were caught in Dennis Rader's murderous web.
Richard Lamunyon: I keep seeing these victims, I keep seeing these people that he tortured and murdered and killed, and, and I just look at him in wonderment, thinking, how can someone just stand there and talk like we just had lunch and had a sandwich or something, and just go on with it? He, he's just evil. Evil personified.
Stone Phillips: That's all for now. I'm Stone Phillips, for Ann Curry and all of us at NBC News. Thanks for watching. ---