To everyone in Wichita, Kansas, Dennis Rader was exactly the kind of neighbor you’d want on your block. He was the president of the congregation at Christ Lutheran Church. He was a Cub Scout leader. He was the compliance officer who’d show up at your door if your grass got too long or your dog got loose. He’d lived in the same Park City house his whole adult life. He had a wife and 2 kids. He went to Sunday services. For 17 years he also killed people, and nobody had any idea.
He’d murdered 4 members of the Otero family on January 15, 1974 — Joseph Sr., 38; Julie, 33; and 2 of their children, Josephine, 11, and Joey, 9 — cut the phone line, walked in, and didn’t leave until all 4 were dead. Then he went and got a job.
From 1974 to 1988, Rader worked for ADT Security Services in Wichita installing home alarm systems. His co-workers called him Blue Book Man because he’d memorized the entire company policy manual. He was meticulous. The whole city was terrified of BTK, “Bind, Torture, Kill,” and ADT’s business had never been better. People who’d never thought about home security were suddenly calling for installations.
At one point, a co-worker asked Rader directly whether she should get an alarm system to protect herself from BTK. He told her not to bother. He said BTK usually cuts the phone lines before entering a house. It disables the alarm. She was asking the killer how to protect herself from the killer, and he talked her out of it.
He killed 6 more people between 1974 and 1991. He sent taunting letters to police and newspapers the whole time — poems, drawings, crime scene photos. He loved the attention. He needed it. Then in 1991 he stopped. No more murders. No more letters. For 13 years Wichita slowly exhaled. Most investigators assumed BTK was dead or locked up somewhere for something else. He wasn’t. He was at Sunday services. He was writing citations for unleashed dogs.
Related: Richard Ramirez Terrorized All of California for 14 Months and Was Never Caught by Police; His Neighbors Recognized Him From a Newspaper Photo and Took Care of It Themselves
In January 2004, the Wichita Eagle ran a 30th anniversary story about the BTK murders. The article suggested the killer had probably died or wound up in prison for something else. Rader read it and decided to correct the record. For a man who’d successfully stayed hidden for 13 years, the decision to come back for attention was the only mistake he ever made. He started sending packages to police and local media practically every month — cereal boxes, padded envelopes, letters, drawings. He was enjoying himself.
Then he got confident. He sent a message asking police whether he could communicate via floppy disk without being traced. “Can I communicate with Floppy and not be traced to a computer?” he wrote. “Be honest.” Police placed a coded ad in the Wichita Eagle: “Rex, it will be OK.” On February 16, 2005, Rader sent a purple 1.44-megabyte Memorex floppy disk to local TV station KSAS-TV and waited to see what happened next.
“How Come You Lied to Me?”
Officer Randy Stone of the Wichita Police Department examined the disk. He found metadata in a deleted Microsoft Word document that Rader hadn’t realized was still there. The document had been created by a user named “Dennis.” It was linked to “Christ Lutheran Church.” Rader’s home computer had been broken, so he’d brought his murder correspondence to his own church and typed it up there. A quick internet search turned up “Dennis Rader” listed as president of the congregation. Police confirmed the connection with security footage of a black Jeep Cherokee. DNA matched evidence from multiple crime scenes. On February 25, 2005, Rader was driving home from his job as a compliance officer for lunch when police surrounded his car and arrested him.
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During interrogation, he was furious. “How come you lied to me?” he asked investigators. He’d expected honesty from the people he’d been taunting for 30 years. He pled guilty on June 27, 2005, and gave a graphic account of all 10 murders in open court. He was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms — a minimum of 175 years without parole. He’s been at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas ever since.
In August 2023, investigators from Osage County, Oklahoma, dug up Rader’s former property in Park City, Kansas, and found pantyhose and other items of interest. Sheriff Eddie Virden said Rader is now the prime suspect in the 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old cheerleader Cynthia Dawn Kinney from Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Rader’s been uncooperative.
His daughter Kerri Rawson — who visited him in prison in June and July 2023 to try to get him to talk — flew to Oklahoma to help investigators herself. She’s the subject of a new Netflix documentary, My Father the BTK Killer, that started streaming October 10. When she visited him, he didn’t recognize her at first. “He’s lost like seven inches, and he’s in a wheelchair,” she told NewsNation. “He’s pretty much rotting to his core.” He spent 30 years outsmarting everyone. A floppy disk ended it.
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