The police chief’s face filled the television screen, and the words he spoke turned the city cold. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a serial killer loose, and his name is BTK. ” We don’t know who he is. We can’t protect people.
Everybody needs to be on guard because there’s a guy out there, and we can’t stop him. It was February 1979 in Wichita, Kansas. The announcement was official. The lock companies were busy.
The alarm companies were busy. The gun companies were busy. Nobody felt safe anymore. It had started five years earlier, in January 1974.
Wichita was the kind of place people called a small town with a big heart. Clean air, good schools, good jobs. A terrific place to raise a family. The Otero family had just moved there.
Joseph Otero worked as a flight instructor and mechanic. He and his wife Julie had five children, ranging from nine to fifteen years old. They were a nice family. They hadn’t made many friends yet, but the friends they had made really liked them.
On January 15th, Joseph took his three older children to school and came home to his wife and their two youngest, nine-year-old Joseph Jr. and eleven-year-old Josephine. They were still bleary-eyed, eating breakfast, just getting ready for the day. While they sat at the table, a man sneaked up into the backyard and cut the phone lines.
Then he entered the home. They were all at the breakfast table when they were attacked. At 3:30 that afternoon, two of the Otero children returned from school. The garage door was open.
The family car was missing. Their mother’s purse lay dumped out on the living room floor. The breakfast dishes were still in the kitchen. Nobody answered when they called out.
Then, in the bedroom, they found the lifeless bodies of their parents. Charlie Otero came home to find his younger brother and sister in shock. They rushed out for help. Julie Otero was found fully clothed, face down on the bed, a rope around her neck and a plastic bag over her head.
Joseph Otero was strangled the same way. The little boy was found in his bedroom in a similar fashion, a bag over his head. A couple of hours later, an officer went down the steps into the dark basement, feeling around for a light switch. He brushed against something hanging.
He found the switch, turned it on, and saw a teenage girl hanging from the ceiling from a noose. The scene shocked even the most seasoned officers. All the victims were tied and bound. It was a very excruciating death.
Gruesome. Forensic experts went over the house square inch by square inch. The crime was premeditated. The killer had brought everything he used.
There was more than one kind of knot used to tie the hands, the ankles, the knees. Whoever did this knew a number of different knots. Detectives told each other the guy must be some sort of sailor. Who else would know all those varieties of knots?
Police found semen near one of the bodies, suggesting a sexual component to the attack. Word of the violent crime reached the local media. A reporter recalled getting called to the scene for a report of a dead body. Then it was two people, then three, then four, and two of those people were children.
They had been brutally murdered. The detectives were shaken. You could see it in their faces that this was something different. Wichita had never seen anything like this before.
It was inconceivable that someone could come into a family and kill four people. Killings like that happened on the East Coast, on the West Coast, but not in the heartland. The missing Otero car was found in a parking lot several blocks away. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen a mysterious man in the area, but the descriptions were vague.
A composite drawing led nowhere. Investigators wondered if this was a revenge killing. They dug into the Oteros’ connections, trying to find anyone who might have wanted them dead. The investigation went on and on.
It looked like it would become one of Wichita’s great unsolved murders. Perhaps somebody just flew into the city, killed the people, and headed out. Later that same year, a startling development. A premature news report about a possible suspect prompted a mysterious phone call to the Wichita Eagle.
An anonymous caller said the police were on the wrong track. If they really wanted to know who killed the Oteros, they should visit the public library and look inside a specific book. He claimed he had left a note about the crime. Police visited the library that same day.
Inside the book, they found a typewritten letter, a victim-by-victim account of the sadistic Otero murders. It was written in disjointed, broken English. It had all sorts of details only the killer would know. It described the position of each body and the rooms where they were found.
He was telling them he did this. He wanted the recognition. The letter ended with the code words: “Bind them, torture them, kill them. ” BTK.
Remember the initials. You’ll see them on the next body. The note proved untraceable. No concrete suspects.
Once again, the investigation reached a dead end. March 17th, 1977. Nearly three years after the Otero murders, Wichita police received a call on their emergency line. They found the body of a 26-year-old woman, Shirley Vianne, face down on her bed.
The scene bore a sick similarity to the Otero murders. Same knots, same tape, tied to the bed. This time, there were survivors. Shirley’s three children, badly shaken but unharmed, painted a horrible picture of what took place.
A few hours earlier, five-year-old Steven had been sent to the store for groceries. On his way home, a man stopped him and showed him a photo, claiming he was looking for someone. Steven returned home. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.
The same man. He asked if anyone was home. Was the mother home? Shirley came to the door.
He said he was a private detective, maybe showed some fake ID. Then he shouldered his way into the home, pulled a gun, and took control. He started pulling out rope and tying them up. The children screamed in horror.
He forced them into the bathroom and tied the door closed with a rope. The oldest child was able to open the door a little bit as his mother was being killed, suffocated. Imagine anything more terrifying for a child than watching your mother be killed. Child psychologists worked with the kids to get as much information as possible.
They could only say he was a big man, white, wearing gloves, carrying a black bag. Inside the bag were probably weapons, tape, plastic bags, bindings. Police didn’t have much to go on other than a vague description of a white male. That was most of the male population in Wichita.
Although no hard evidence linked the murder to the Otero crime, there was a growing fear behind closed doors that the man known as BTK was behind both attacks. Police debated what to do. Should they communicate with him? Would that just make him kill more people?
If they warned the public, would that inspire more killings? The killer’s next move would force their hand. In December 1977, a man entered a downtown phone booth and called police. He told them there had been a murder, giving the address and the name of the victim, Nancy Fox.
Without identifying himself, he walked away from the booth. Officers responded, forcing the locked door. They found Nancy Jo Fox bound and gagged on her bed. Her closet door was open, and there was a pile of clothes, like somebody had made a little chair and waited in the closet.
He had cut the phone line and broken the back window. A search for prints led nowhere, but police found semen, just like at the Otero murders. Personal effects seemed to be missing, including Nancy’s driver’s license. Since the scene appeared untouched when they arrived, police realized only one man could have made the phone call earlier that day.
Nobody else would have known Nancy Fox was dead. Witnesses claimed to have seen the person on the phone. He didn’t hang up. He just walked off.
One witness described him as six feet tall, possibly with light-colored hair. Most revealing, he wore a uniform, meaning he might be a tradesman. Police got a recording of the phone call. Audio experts filtered out the background noise, but the voice was too generic.
A typical Midwestern voice, nothing specific. It didn’t pan out. The killer wasted little time in making contact again. In February 1978, an envelope arrived at the offices of Wichita’s KAKE TV.
Inside, a detailed typewritten letter claimed responsibility for a total of seven murders involving the Oteros, Shirley Vianne, Nancy Fox, and another unnamed victim. The envelope contained a detailed sketch of Nancy Fox face down on her bed, along with a poem titled “O Death to Nancy. ”
One line in the letter chilled everyone: “How many more people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper? ” He compared himself to Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Boston Strangler.
He reiterated his name of choice. Bind, torture, kill. Initials BTK. It was easy.
It was short. It said everything you needed to know about the mind of this man. Reporters took the envelope to Police Chief Richard LaMunyon. The accuracy of the sketch of Nancy Fox assured him it was from the killer.
It was obvious he had taken Polaroid pictures of the crime scene. At the risk of giving BTK the publicity he craved, police felt they had little choice but to sound the public alarm. The chief came on the television station that night on the ten o’clock news and announced to the public that a serial killer was loose and his name was BTK. This was a much more frightened community than after the Otero murders or the first BTK letter, because this was official.
Police fielded calls each evening from terrified residents too scared to enter their own homes. Officers would go into dark houses with flashlights and guns drawn, checking the phone lines, checking the phones, going through the whole house. Eventually they’d ask, “Where’s your bedroom closet? ” They’d check it last.
Nobody was there. In their search for suspects, police had little more than a vague description of a white male, possibly six feet tall, who might wear a uniform for work. They received hundreds and hundreds of calls. They made lists of known sexual predators, cross-checking with violent people and recently released criminals.
Since BTK referenced other serial killers in his letters, some felt he might have done research on the subject. Police went to the public library and got a list of who had checked out serial killer books. They did the same at Wichita State University Library. The locations of the crimes were mapped out and scrutinized.
They thought there was a comfort zone for BTK, a kill zone. Everything they knew about BTK occurred within that area: the phone calls, the kill sites, the dumping of the cars, the dropping off of the letters. They had maps with circles, and a circle of a certain radius would go through all the victims’ houses. They all occurred on a north-south street.
All the victims were on the west side of the street. But there was always an exception. The circle went through all the houses but one. They couldn’t explain the one.
Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. In April 1979, a 63-year-old woman named Anna Williams returned home after spending an evening with relatives. She noticed drawers in her bedroom had been left open and items were out of place. A few days later, she got a little parcel in the mail.
Inside was her scarf and a note that said, “You weren’t home, but I was. BTK. ” The parcel also included a poem titled “O Anna, why didn’t you appear? ” in which BTK recalled waiting for her in her home that night.
There was a crude drawing of what he intended to do to her. He intended to tie her up like Stone Age hunters would tie up a kill, bind her to a pole, and then kill her. BTK sent an almost identical package to KAKE TV. New contact by the killer sparked another wave of fear.
A lot of people were traumatized who had no connection to the case other than that they lived there. With few leads, many detectives believed the most direct path to the killer lay through the letters themselves. They were the only things they had that he had created, touched, handled. The letters were typewritten on a typewriter that wasn’t particularly well tuned.
The letters didn’t line up exactly right. And none of them were originals. They received photocopies. The typewriter examiner couldn’t identify the brand.
It was a common typeface. But police soon learned that copiers can imprint marks on pages they process. Some copy machines leave machine fingerprints just like human fingerprints. Industry help and careful lab work led to a breakthrough.
Technicians were able to identify a unique combination of machine, paper, and ink. Then it was all legwork. Detectives had to physically go touch every copy machine they could find in the city of Wichita. They were hoping maybe this was some guy in a business who didn’t realize the photocopy could be tracked.
They found what they were looking for. BTK’s original letter was clearly copied on a machine in the basement of the Life Sciences Building on the campus of Wichita State University. For the first time, they could scientifically prove that whoever made that copy had been physically on the university grounds. Maybe he was a student at Wichita State, using the library, using a machine.
Maybe he was studying, doing this in his spare time. Another new list was compiled for cross-referencing. This time, all white male students at WSU. That list was thousands of names long.
Several months passed with no new leads. Curiously, there were no new BTK messages or attacks. They always had the nagging feeling the guy was so hard to catch because he was so erratically random. In 1984, fearing the BTK case would grow cold, Police Chief Richard LaMunyon handpicked a special group of detectives to remain on the case.
The purpose of the task force was twofold. Number one, to catch him. That was the ultimate goal. But short of that, to make sure they had done everything a law enforcement agency could possibly do.
The team was soon dubbed the Ghostbusters for their closed-door meetings and elusive target. Working with the FBI, the secretive Ghostbusters enlisted the help of Steven Brady, a professor of mathematics at Wichita State University. He developed databases for all the lists. Once the data was in the system, his program would look for commonalities.
They had a list on about every aspect of a person you could think of. The software helped create a list of 200 persons of interest based on the number of times they appeared in the database. Although DNA technology was not yet available, police did know the blood type of the killer from the semen he left at two scenes. Visiting each person on their latest list, police secured saliva or blood samples for comparison.
Blood typing allowed them to eliminate some names but gave them no concrete suspects. By 1986, almost nine years had passed since BTK’s last known murder. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. The FBI believed he was dead, in prison, or living somewhere else.
They kept telling police this individual could not stop killing, and if he wasn’t killing in Wichita, he was killing somewhere else. Did they believe that? No. They knew he was walking among them.
That was the scary part. The Ghostbusters task force soon dwindled as detectives moved on to other assignments. Before going their separate ways, they vowed that should BTK ever resurface, they would play on his biggest weakness. They knew he was an egomaniac.
They would play to his ego and get him communicating. Over time, the case started fading away from the public mind and from the police department. January 2004. On the 30th anniversary of the Otero murders, the Wichita Eagle ran a newspaper story recalling the fear that plagued the city.
The article pointed out that while many older residents recalled the fear, many young people in Wichita had no idea who BTK was. He was, to some, a forgotten killer. The article infuriated BTK, who had never left town. March 19th, 2004.
The Eagle received a letter containing a photocopy of three photos and a driver’s license. The license belonged to Vicki Wegerle, a Wichita woman killed in her home around the same time the Ghostbusters disbanded. Some felt they were dealing with a hoax, that the photos were crime scene photos taken by police. One reporter, however, pointed out a disturbing difference.
The woman’s hands were in different positions, her top had been moved from photograph to photograph, and there was a slightly different body position. Police never move a body at a crime scene. These were not crime scene photos. The return address had the initials BTK.
The story hit Wichita like a bombshell. It was front page news. It was the lead story on all the TV stations. There was true fear that went through the city during this period.
Here this guy was back. Would he kill again? Nobody knew the answer. Working with the FBI, Ken Landwehr, one of the last remaining members of the Ghostbusters Task Force, helped implement the strategy devised in the 1980s: playing on BTK’s ego and love of publicity.
They decided very quickly they would start calling press conferences, which would look like real press conferences but were really ways to very subtly get him to communicate, and to communicate a lot. It worked. May 4th, 2004. KAKE TV received an envelope from BTK with a word puzzle.
Words like spot, victim, and follow emerged from the page, suggesting the way he prepared for a kill. Others like realtor, insurance, and serviceman indicated the way he gained entry to homes. The envelope even contained chapter headings meant to outline his life of crime. The killer was writing his own book, the BTK story.
One month later, a Wichita resident found another BTK package. It contained typewritten pages under the title “Death on a Cold Winter Morning,” a grisly account of BTK’s first known murders, the four members of the Otero family in 1974. In the next eleven months, there were close to a dozen messages. He was very busy.
Another package found in a park contained a doll bound and gagged along with a driver’s license taken from Nancy Fox, murdered in 1977. Typewritten pages titled “Chapter Nine” painted a horrifying picture of how he stalked and killed the young woman. He was seeking publicity. He loved it.
He was reading the newspaper and turning on the TV every night because he wanted to see himself as BTK on television. Police were calling these semi-news conferences to get him communicating, to the point where he made a mistake. On January 25th, 2005, police got their first big lead. KAKE TV received a postcard from BTK.
It led police to another package and letter, this one left in the back of a truck sitting in a hardware store parking lot. Detectives visited the hardware store and spoke with staff. One employee recalled finding a cereal box with markings on it in the back of his pickup truck two weeks earlier. At his home, he retrieved it from the garbage for police.
Inside, police found a note from BTK asking whether it would be safe for him to send his next writings to police on a computer floppy disk. He told police to respond in the newspaper classifieds using another nickname, Rex, Latin for king. Knowing that a computer disk may contain hidden data about its user, police responded with an ad. It read simply, “Rex, it will be okay.
”
While police awaited BTK’s next move, the hardware store employee showed them where he was parked the day the package turned up. The spot was within sight of one of the store’s security cameras. An FBI analyst went through the video and found the date and time of the drop. A vehicle pulled in next to the employee’s truck.
Someone got out, approached the truck, hung around the bed of the pickup for a while, got back in the vehicle, and left. The vehicle appeared to be a dark-colored, fairly new Jeep Cherokee. Contacting the DMV, police learned there were only 2,500 matching SUVs registered in the area. They started down that list, looking at people who had Jeep Cherokees.
As they honed in on a possible suspect, another BTK package arrived at a local TV station. Police responded and opened it. Inside was a computer disk. Moments later, a copy of the disk was placed in a computer loaded with special forensic software.
There was one valid file on the disk. At some point in time, the original title of that document had been “Christ Lutheran Church. ” Whoever had been last using it was logged in to a computer using the username or account name of Dennis. A Google search for the church website brought up the congregational president at the very top of the page: Dennis Rader.
What’s Dennis Rader’s address? Click, click, click. There it is. Four detectives were out the door.
Minutes later, in the Wichita suburb of Park City, they slowly cruised past the house in question. They saw a black Jeep Cherokee. That was independent corroboration that they were on the right person. If their suspicions were correct, this church-going family man might also be one of America’s worst serial killers.
February 20th, 2005. Police kept a close watch on 59-year-old Dennis Rader. Although they still lacked hard evidence tying him to the original crimes, police believed he was the BTK Strangler. Needing a DNA profile to be sure and not wanting to tip off their suspect, police subpoenaed a tissue sample belonging to Dennis Rader’s daughter.
Since family members have extremely similar DNA, a simple lab test should tell them everything they needed to know. They sat around waiting. They had been told the results would be back within a certain number of hours, then it got extended a couple of times because of difficulties with testing. Finally, they called and said, “It’s a match.
Dennis Rader is BTK. ” Everybody was relieved. Everybody was excited. February 25th, 2005.
Police in unmarked cars took up positions in the suburb where Dennis Rader lived. They wanted to get him away from his business, away from his home. At 12:15, Rader appeared driving his truck home for lunch. As he passed, police made their move.
They went up to him. He got out, went down on the ground, got handcuffed. The best suspect in a case three decades old was soon at the FBI’s offices in downtown Wichita. After he protested his innocence for a few hours, police finally confronted him with the fact that they had DNA evidence to prove their case.
They also showed him a copy of the computer disk he had mailed to them only days earlier. The FBI agent leaned forward a little bit and said, “Just say it. Say who you are. ”
Dennis Rader looked at them and said, “I’m BTK.
I guess you guys got me. I’m BTK. ”
What followed was one of the most shocking confessions ever heard by police. Showing little emotion, Dennis Rader led them through his crimes victim by victim.
Along with what were now eight known murders, he confessed to two others: Marine Hedge and Dolores Davis, both killed in his own Wichita suburb. In each case, he explained how he picked his victims at random and stalked them. Once inside their homes, he bound and tortured them before finally killing them. He was a ritualistic killer.
He would bind the person, suffocate the person, but he would take a garrote and put it around the neck and pull it tight. The person would almost pass out, and then he would let it loose again and whisper in their ear, “I am BTK. ” Then he would pull it tight again. Every word of Rader’s confession was backed up by material found at his office and at his parents’ home.
He had stalked hundreds and hundreds of women over the course of time, taken notes, figured out escape routes, figured out who they were, written down their addresses. As far as the motive behind his crimes, Rader could only explain it as fantasy and sexual compulsion. In some of his writings, he called it “the monster” or “factor X,” an urge that drove him to torture and kill. He had family.
He had jobs. Most of the time he was doing all of this. Dennis Rader’s life was a complete lie. Police noticed that Dennis Rader did appear once in their many lists over the years as one of the thousands of students at WSU, where his student identification gave him access to a photocopier.
Although he managed to elude police for over 30 years, his love of the public spotlight was his undoing. Attention. It was always about attention. His ego got him caught.
For the first time ever, headlines about BTK spread relief. People were about as happy as they had ever been. It was very hard for people to come to grips that this was over, because people had spent three decades thinking they would never get to the bottom of it. But there was also a sense of disbelief.
Nobody could believe this guy was it. He was the guy next door. That was the most terrifying thing about him. On June 27th, 2005, Dennis Rader pleaded guilty to 10 counts of murder in a Wichita courtroom.
The judge had Rader describe in his own words each of his brutal crimes. The mood in the courtroom was absolutely dead silence. People couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Here was a man talking about killing people like it was no big deal.
There was no emotion in his voice. He didn’t sound sorry. He wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He was just detailing it like he was talking about building a house.
Detail by grisly detail. In a separate sentencing hearing, family members unleashed years of anger and grief. “They’ll never ever get to meet her. She’s never had a life.
You now lost everything, and you will forever remain nothing. ” Another said, “Despite Dennis Rader’s efforts to destroy my family, we survived, stronger and closer now more than ever. As far as I’m concerned, when it is all done, Dennis Rader has failed in his effort to kill the Oteros. ”
The image that stood out was Josie Otero, the few pictures where she was alive, just a little kid growing up.
This was what this was really about. This is what this guy did. He ended this little girl’s life. He did it horribly, and he did it to her parents, her brother, and six other people.
Dennis Rader’s crimes were committed at a time when Kansas’ death penalty law was not in effect. Instead, he received 10 consecutive life sentences, the harshest penalty the standing law allowed. You could never have justice for someone murdered the way he murdered these individuals. But you could find peace in the fact that he had been identified and that he was in prison and he wasn’t going anywhere.
He was in a box, and he was going to stay there for the rest of his life. That was justice.
