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Thread: Dennis Rader - "BTK-Killer"

  1. #1
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    Dennis Rader - "BTK-Killer"







    Dennis Rader was a serial killer who murdered at least ten people between 1974 and 1991 near Wichita, Kansas. In his anonymous letters to police, Rader claimed to be the "BTK" Killer, which he said stood for "Bind, Torture, Kill."

    Fast Facts:

    1. Born: March 9, 1945
    2. Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
    3. Education: Kansas Wesleyan University
    4. Military Service: U.S. Air Force
    5. Spouse: Paula Dietz
    6. Occupation: Dogcatcher
    7. Arrested: February 25, 2005
    8. No. of victims: 10 confirmed
    9. Sentence: 175 years
    10. Eldest of four brothers

    The Crimes
    Between 1974 and 1991, Rader, acting as the "BTK" Killer, murdered ten people, and afterwards claimed responsibility for the murders in letters to police. In 1974, he killed four members of the Otero family in the middle of the day. His next victims would all be women, most of whom he would strangle. After the 1991 murder of Dolores Davis, the murders and communications to police seemed to stop, until the BTK Killer contacted police again in 2004.Crime Library: Bind, Torture, Kill Strangler1

    Capture
    Between March, 2004, and February, 2005, the killer corresponded repeatedly with police and offered them information and evidence pertaining to the murders. After the killer mailed police a floppy disk, several clues, including the fact that the killer was a member of the Christ Lutheran Church and that his name was Dennis, led police to Rader. Authorities arrested Rader for the BTK Killer crimes on February 25, 2005, and he confessed almost immediately. Rader was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms. Although Kansas has the death penalty as an option, all of the crimes that Rader was tried for were committed before reinstatement of the penalty in 1994.

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    Golf tournament to be named in honor of homicide investigator Landwehr

    WICHITA, Kansas -- The Wichita Crime Commission today renamed its Make Good Choices golf tournament after late Wichita Police homicide lieutenant Ken Landwehr.

    Landwehr, who was credited with breaking the BTK murders, died of kidney cancer in January.

    Make Good Choices today works with area school resources officers who lead field trips for high school students to area prisons. There, the young people meet with specially trained inmates who are a part of the Reaching Out from Within program. During the visits the inmates talk with the students about how their incarceration began by making bad life decisions when they were young.

    The Ken Landwehr Make Good Choices Golf Tournament takes place at Terradyne Country Club on Monday, September 15, 2014. Those interested in playing should contact the Crime Commission at (316) 267-1235, or at info@wichitacrimecommission.org.

    http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/G...272594211.html

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    Dennis Rader cooperating on book about his 10 BTK murders

    BY ROY WENZL
    THE WICHITA EAGLE

    The BTK serial killer is cooperating with a book being written about his 10 murders, he wrote in a letter from prison this past week.

    He’s doing it, he said, to help the families monetarily.

    “I can never replace their love ones, my deeds too ‘dark’ to understand, the book or movies, etc. is the only way to help them,” Dennis Rader wrote.

    He said he is sorry that the police lieutenant who caught him has died.

    He gets a kick out of police recently taking “pot shots” at him.

    He’s apparently read “A Good Marriage,” a novella by Stephen King inspired by BTK. He knows King is coming to Wichita in November to promote a separate book.

    He loves his family very much, he wrote.

    And no, he said: His wife, Paula Rader, did not know anything about his 10 murders until he got caught, 31 years after he started committing them.

    “The family knew nothing about my ‘Dark Deeds.’ I carried that secret until the day I was arrested,” Rader wrote.

    In a four-page hand-written letter labeled “From the Desk of: Dennis L. Rader,” the former Park City code compliance officer explained the reason he’s not talked much. The letter, written in pen and pencil, contained the typos, odd spacing and missing letters characteristic of past messages he sent to the news media and police when he was operating as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill). His letter contains his first public comments on his crimes and the aftermath since he was sent to prison nine years ago.

    He is barred from profiting from his crimes by a court settlement, he explained. He signed over his media rights to the families of his victims after he was sent to the state prison in El Dorado in 2005.

    Because of that, he can’t talk much, he wrote. “But you and ‘The Wichita Eagle’ might be able to help the (Victims Family Trust), for I know the long work on a book is close to a deal, that media helps sales and interest.”

    Several of the families sued him for wrongful death after his arrest.

    As part of a settlement, he signed his media rights to those families, said James Thompson, a Wichita lawyer and one of the attorneys representing most of BTK victim families.

    The settlement means Rader can’t profit from from any product he produces about his crimes, Thompson said.

    “We could prohibit him from trying to do things like what (Serial killer Charles) Manson was doing,” Thompson said. “We can’t control the facts of the case, so much of all that went into the public domain. But we can stop him from doing some things. Making any kind of a profit, for example.”

    The settlement doesn’t bar him from cooperating on a book project involving the families, Thompson said.

    A percentage of any profits will go to the families, Thompson said.

    The author is Katherine Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology and program director of the masters program in criminal justice at DeSales University in Pennsylvania.

    She’s a nonfiction author of 54 books, most of them academic, she said. She helps train prosecutors and police and says the book she’s working on about Rader will be academic and nonsensational – an attempt to help investigators and criminologists understand killers like Rader. She has little regard for some of the lurid books written soon after Rader was arrested.

    “I’m trying to make this a serious effort that will have some benefit for people who study this kind of crime,” she said.

    She has corresponded with Rader to do that work, she said.

    Rader, in his letter, explained why he is cooperating.

    “The main reason for the book idea, is to help the VF’s (Victims Fund) monetarily wise; something I had hoped for years, to help them and in a way to pay my debt to them,” Rader wrote.

    He said he hoped to someday speak more fully.

    He turned down many media attempts to talk with him in the past nine years, he wrote, to stay true to the court agreement with the victim families.

    “I mean to burn no bridges,” Rader wrote, “and hope some day to open up. People like me, need to be under stood, so the criminal professional field, can better under stand, the criminal mind. That would be my way helping debt to society.”

    Rader wrote his letter last week to answer questions posed to him after his daughter, Kerri Rader Rawson, broke his family’s nine-year public silence about his crimes.

    She said in her interview on Sept. 25 that she thought Stephen King was “exploiting” her family. King’s novella about a wife who discovers that her husband is a serial killer was made into a movie released Friday.

    Rawson said she was also fed up with speculation “among people who don’t know” that her mother must have known about her husband’s crimes while they were occurring.

    That question put to Rader – whether Paula, his wife, knew – prompted an immediate response from Rader.

    “I’m sorry that my daughter is upset,” he wrote. “I would be, too.”

    He’s apparently read the Stephen King story that prompted his daughter’s ire, although his hand-written reaction to it is punctuated oddly.

    “Mr. King, in his book ‘Full Dark, No Stars;’ the last chapter ‘Good Marriage,’ the character (Fiction), also kept his secret, until his wife found his main ‘hidey hole,’” Rader wrote. “I’m sure other people have ‘dark secrets,’ that love ones don’t know about, and live normal Family lives.”

    “I figure with Mr. King coming to Wichita, once more ‘BTK’ will be in the spotlight.”

    Rader said little about his family.

    Paula divorced him soon after his arrest, and Kerri, his daughter, said she has never visited him in the nine years he’s served in prison. Only recently, she said, did she resume writing to him occasionally.

    “It’s just so weird,” she said last week. She was in her mid-20s and living in Michigan when her dad was arrested.

    “On the night before he was arrested he called me and asked ‘Hey, how you doing? How are things? Are you checking the oil on your car?’

    “He still asks that sometimes, when he writes,” she said. “Whether we’ve checked the oil. He still acts like he cares about us. But sometimes all that does is make you wonder: If you cared about us so much, what about the previous 31 years?”

    Rader, in his letter, said he appreciated knowing that his daughter had spoken out.

    “Thank you for your positive comments on Kerri,” he wrote. “Hope this helps, and hopefully you helped Kerri; she is a good daughter, and I love her deeply, but I respect her and Paula’s and Brian’s privacy.” Brian Rader, a U.S. Navy veteran, is Rader’s son.

    Rader poked fun at a newspaper story, published on Sept. 21 in The Eagle, that related how in 2004, while still operating as BTK, he coaxed several police officers, including Wichita police officer Randy Stone, into coaching him about how not to get caught if he communicated with police by e-mail.

    Stone, a cybercrimes cop, related in that story how he unknowingly explained to Rader that day at the Park City administration building that tracing e-mail identities, even from anonymous senders, was reasonably easy.

    BTK never sent an e-mail. Stone became the officer who in February 2005 discovered Dennis Rader’s name on a message BTK had sent police on a floppy disk. It was the break that brought the 31-year murder case to an end.

    “Your newspaper story in 9-21: I got a humorous kick out of the police taking ‘pot shots’ at me,” Rader said. “I guess if you catch a ‘Big Fish,’ every time you tell the story it grows ‘bigger and bigger,’ be gone the real facts or truth.”

    “But that’s okay,” Rader added. “I would blow my own ‘horn’ as well.”

    “I was sorry to hear about Landwehr,” he wrote.

    Ken Landwehr, the longtime homicide unit commander for the Wichita Police Department, was the leader of the BTK task force that in 2004 and 2005 hunted down and tricked BTK into revealing himself in that floppy disk message Stone deciphered with software. Landwehr died in January of kidney cancer.

    “He (Landwehr) was respected and I’m sure, a good family man, just doing his job,” Rader wrote.

    “I hold no bad feelings with the Wichita Police Department.”

    http://www.kansas.com/news/local/cri...le2514060.html


    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #4
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    August 19, 2016

    BTK serial killer Dennis Rader planned to murder 11th victim but was arrested before he could carry out sick crime

    WICHITA, Kan. — The BTK serial killer planned to kill an 11th victim by hanging her upside down in her Wichita, Kansas, home, according to a new book by a professor of forensic psychology. It's a story police heard from Dennis Rader himself in 2005, but decided at the time to suppress to protect the woman.

    The story was made public in "Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer," which has a scheduled release date of Sept. 6.

    The book was written by Katherine Ramsland, a professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania who worked with Rader on it under an agreement that proceeds from its sale goes to the victims' families trust fund.

    Lust and a desire for fame and power drove Rader — he called himself BTK for "bind, torture and kill" — to murder 10 people in Wichita from 1974 to 1991, according to the book's author.

    Wichita police detectives who captured Rader in 2005 told the Wichita Eagle they are incensed with the pride he exhibits as he goes into detail about the tortures he planned to inflict on the 11th victim. He was arrested before he was able to carry out the murder.

    "For him to reveal this information now is cruel," said Tim Relph, a former BTK task force investigator.

    Relph and fellow task force investigator Kelly Otis said the book allows Rader to carry out one more act of horror.

    Rader wrote three and a half pages of the book about his plans for his last kill.

    "This was supposed to be my opus, my grand finale, and to make it different, I would set the house on fire using propane canisters," he wrote.

    He said he got into the woman's backyard and knocked on her door, but aborted his plan when a city street crew showed up unexpectedly to work outside the house. He planned to kill her the following spring, but was arrested in February 2005.

    Otis said the problem with anything Rader says is that most of it is fantasy, although police found that a street crew did show up outside her house on Oct. 22, 2004.

    Police said they suppressed most of the details of the planned murder for 11 years because they feared what the shock of a public revelation might do to the woman. But authorities did inform the woman after finding out that defense attorneys for Rader had hired investigators who might contact her.

    "She's a pretty tough lady, but this shook her up quite a bit," Relph said.

    Rader's daughter, Kerri Rawson, told the newspaper that her father cooperated on the book because he's proud of his murders. She said the book feeds his ego and his narcissism, and disputed some of the accounts of his family life in the book.

    "He's a psychopath," she said. "You can't take anything he says as truth."

    Ramsland said the purpose of her book was to give criminologists, forensic psychologists and others some insights into a serial killer's mind by relating the stories he tells and how he tells them.

    http://nydn.us/2btFXYD

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Notorious serial killer says ‘demon’ possessed him in new confession

    By Nika Shakhnazarova
    The Sun

    The notorious US serial killer known as BTK has revealed he believes a “demon” inside him drove him to murder 10 people, including two children.

    In a previously unheard interview, Dennis Rader opened up about his crimes as well as his childhood, soon after he confessed 13 years ago.

    Rader, a native of Wichita, Kansas, called himself BTK, which stands for “Bind, Torture, and Kill.”

    He was arrested in 2005 and is serving 10 consecutive life sentences at a Kansas prison for his crimes.

    A new Oxygen documentary titled “Snapped: Notorious BTK Serial Killer” will focus on Rader as its main subject, including an unheard interview he gave to a local television reporter after he confessed to the murders.

    “How could a guy like me, church member, raised a family, go out and do those sort of things?” he told reporter Larry Hatteberg during the interview on KAKE-TV.

    “I want the people of Sedgwick County, the United States and the world to know that I am a serial killer.”

    Rader then told Hatteburg what spurred him to commit his crimes.

    He said: “I personally think, and I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me.”

    “At some point in time, it entered me when I was young, and it basically controlled me.”

    Hatteburg asked him if he had any feelings for the 10 victims whom he had killed, and Rader replied: “Yes I do.”

    “I mean, I have a lot of feelings for them.”

    Rader also revealed how the murders made him feel.

    He said: “I guess it’s more of an achievement for this object in the hunt, or sort of more of a high.”

    Rader was a former church leader and lived at home with his wife and two children.

    He hid all of his killings from his family and said in the interview that he started noticing his dark side back in eighth grade.

    He previously said that lust and desire for fame and power drove him to murder, MailOnline reports.

    For over 30 years, Rader evaded authorities but continuously taunted police about the killings, which later led to his downfall.

    He also communicated with Wichita police detectives via a floppy disk, which eventually authorities traced back to his church.

    In 2016, Rader worked with Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychology professor at DeSales University, to publish a book, “Confessions of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, BTK Killer,” about his crimes.

    Ramsland wrote the book under an agreement that proceeds from its sale would go to the victims’ families’ trust fund.

    The book contained three-and-a-half pages about his plans to kill his 11th victim, whom he was planning on hanging upside down in her home before he was arrested.

    “This was supposed to be my opus, my grand finale, and to make it different, I would set the house on fire using propane canisters,” he wrote.

    Rader got far enough to get into the woman’s garden, and knocked on her door, but aborted his plan when a city street crew showed up unexpectedly to work outside the house.

    His murder plan was moved to the following spring, but he was arrested in February 2005.

    Wichita police detectives said Rader showed pride and shared many details about the tortures he planned to inflict on the 11th victim.

    Following his arrest, several of the victims’ relatives sued Rader and secured a settlement that stated he could never profit from his crimes or coverage of them.

    Rader’s murders include the brutal slaying of four members of the Otero family in 1974.

    He killed the mother and father, as well as their two children, ages 11 and 9. The Oteros’ third child discovered the carnage when he came home from school later that day.

    Rader’s next murder was a few months later when he killed 21-year-old Kathryn Bright by stabbing her to death in her home.

    Three years later, he reappeared in 1977, when he entered the home of 24-year-old Shirley Vian.

    Rader locked her children in the bathroom and strangled the woman.

    He strangled another woman later that year, which put every resident of Wichita in fear.

    In 1985, he strangled 53-year-old Marine Hedge in her home in the suburbs of Wichita.

    He later strangled two more women in 1986 and 1991.

    https://nypost.com/2018/09/03/notori...ew-confession/
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    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    BTK killer Dennis Rader prime suspect in multiple murders after ‘items of interest’ found in Kansas

    By Michael Stavola
    The Kansas City Star

    Oklahoma officials who dug up serial killer Dennis Rader’s former property in Park City, Kansas, found “items of interest” but are not saying what specifically.

    Rader is a "prime suspect" in the cold case disappearance of a 16-year-old girl from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, the Osage County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Wednesday. While investigating that case, the sheriff’s office said it also pegged Rader as a prime suspect in other unsolved murders, including a one in Missouri and at least one in Kansas.

    ‘Binding type items’ found at BTK site; officials call Rader prime suspect in killings

    Osage County Undersheriff Gary Upton said Wednesday morning they found “something worthy of disclosure” when they dug at the Park City site on Tuesday. He said he would need to speak with the sheriff before releasing more details.

    Sheriff Eddie Virden did not immediately return a call from The Eagle. However, Virden did speak with Fox News Digital.

    “The short version is, through the investigation, we developed information of some possible trophies of Dennis Rader’s, and we followed up on those leads and worked with Park City,” Virden told Fox News Digital. “Did a dig in the area. And we did recover some items of interest.”

    He added: “We can’t release what they are.”

    “I don’t know yet if they’re related to new crimes,” Virden told the media outlet. “With the information we developed where these items were, items that were never located, I absolutely believe they’re related to Dennis’ crimes.”

    The sheriff’s office said in a news release that the “items of interest” will “undergo thorough examination to determine their potential relevance to the ongoing investigations. At this stage, Dennis Rader is considered a prime suspect in these unsolved cases, including the Cynthia Dawn Kinney case from Pawhuska.”

    Cynthia ‘Cyndi’ Dawn Kinney went missing in 1976 after leaving an Osage County laundromat and getting into a 1965 beige Plymouth with two women, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

    She was 16 at the time. The area she went missing from is about a two-hour drive from Park City.

    Kerri Rawson, Rader’s daughter, previously told FOX that the “theory is he could have placed evidence of cases under stone pavers under the metal shed he built early to mid 90s. Like drivers licenses in jars.”

    Asked if that was what they were looking for in the yard, Upton said: “She’s not too far off.”

    A picture from the sheriff’s office shows officers digging and using a metal detector to go through an area where it looks like a sidewalk was ripped up.

    Rader, who gave himself the nickname BTK (bind, torture and kill), was a husband, father, church leader and a Boy Scout volunteer. He also worked as a Park City code compliance officer.

    The search connected to Rader originally sought to see if he had been involved in the disappearance of Kinney. However, the Osage County Sheriff’s Office investigation has also linked Rader to other cases, Upton said, including Shawna Beth Garber.

    Garber, 22, had been raped and tied up for two months before she was found in December 1990, according to KSNT. Garber’s case is out of McDonald County in Missouri, which is about a four-hour drive from Park City.

    Upton would not say how many total missing persons or murders the investigation has involved with Rader as the suspect, but said it was more than the two.

    “This ongoing investigation has uncovered potential connections to other missing persons cases and unsolved murders in the Kansas and Missouri areas, which are possibly linked to Dennis Rader,” the news release says.

    Upton said Rader has admitted to the 10 killings he is in prison for, but has not confessed in any other cases.

    TMZ reported earlier this year that Rader “categorically denied any involvement in the Kinney case.”

    Upton said: “Well, I wouldn’t believe a serial killer.”

    Rawson, in a phone interview Wednesday, said she started working with the Osage County Sheriff’s Office this summer to help them with the investigation. Her help included breaking her several-years silence with her father and seeing him in person.

    She said he denied his involvement in the killings, but also changed his alibis in the cases multiple times. Though, she said, that could be just because of his memory. He is 78.

    “I’m still not 100% sure my dad did commit any more at this point,” she said, adding: “If my dad has harmed somebody else, we need answers.”

    She said, if it is true, it also opens up the door for other cold cases to be reopened since BTK had claimed other murders.

    In addition to looking under where the shed was, Rawson said she also told officers to look where Rader had buried the family dog. Rawson said she wasn’t told they would be digging Tuesday, but found out about it from the news.

    The home and shed have been leveled, she said, and the city now owns the property.

    https://www.al.com/news/2023/08/btk-...in-kansas.html
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    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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    Rader is well known for his cat and mouse games. It’s extremely possible that there are other victims he hasn’t disclosed, possibly because they weren’t “perfect”.
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

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    Senior Member CnCP Addict maybeacomedian's Avatar
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    Dennis Rader 2023
    I don't care whether murderers go to heaven or hell; I just care about getting them there.

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    He looks like the old man in a horror movie that everyone is scared of but is actually harmless
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

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