Dennis Rader

What the record shows

Dennis Rader is an American serial killer, known by the self-chosen name BTK, who pleaded guilty in June 2005 to ten murders committed in Wichita and neighboring Park City, Kansas, between January 1974 and January 1991. He was arrested on February 25, 2005, more than 30 years after the first killings, and on August 18, 2005, a Sedgwick County judge sentenced him to ten consecutive life terms, one for each victim. He is held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas. In 2023 the Osage County Sheriff's Office in Oklahoma named him a prime suspect in the 1976 disappearance of a 16-year-old girl; he has not been charged in that case and denies involvement.

According to the Wikipedia article, the first four victims were members of the Otero family, Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their children, Josephine, 11, and Joseph Jr., 9, killed in their Wichita home on January 15, 1974. Kathryn Bright, 21, was killed on April 4, 1974; her brother Kevin was shot but survived. Shirley Vian Relford was killed on March 17, 1977, and Nancy Fox, 25, on December 8, 1977. After a gap of several years Rader killed Marine Hedge, 53, his Park City neighbor, on April 27, 1985; Vicki Wegerle, 28, on September 16, 1986; and Dolores Davis, 62, on January 19, 1991. Most of the victims were strangled. The killings went unsolved for decades, during which the killer sent letters to police and media that gave him his nickname, short for bind, torture, kill.

Through these years Rader lived an outwardly ordinary life in Park City. The Wikipedia article records that he served in the U.S. Air Force, worked as an installer for ADT Security Services in Wichita from 1974 to 1988, and from 1991 was a compliance officer and dogcatcher for Park City. He was a Scout leader and, the article says, was elected president of the congregation council at Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita in January 2005, weeks before his arrest. At sentencing he was 60, and USA Today reporting carried by The Spokesman-Review described him as a church president, Scout leader and suburban dogcatcher.

The case revived after BTK resumed contact with the media in the early 2000s. According to the ABA Journal, Rader sent 19 messages in all, ten of them in the 11 months before his arrest. He asked police whether he could communicate by floppy disk without being traced, and police replied through a newspaper advertisement that it would be safe. The disk he then sent to a Wichita television station showed it had last been saved by a user named Dennis and had been used at Christ Lutheran Church. Investigators also obtained, under subpoena, a medical tissue sample from his daughter, Kerri, and DNA testing showed a familial link to the killer, the ABA Journal reported; the Wikipedia article says the comparison was to DNA from under Vicki Wegerle's fingernails. Rader was arrested near his home on February 25, 2005, and charged three days later with ten counts of first-degree murder.

Rader changed his plea to guilty in June 2005, on the day his trial was to begin. At the sentencing hearing on August 18, 2005, he received ten consecutive life sentences. KWCH, the Wichita television station, reported that he must serve a minimum of 175 years before he can be considered for parole, and the Associated Press, via KMUW, listed his earliest possible release date as 2180. His wife divorced him in 2005, The Spokesman-Review reported. He was transferred to the El Dorado Correctional Facility, where he remains.

In 2023 the Osage County Sheriff's Office in Oklahoma, led by Sheriff Eddie Virden, named Rader a prime suspect in the disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney, 16, who was last seen at a laundromat in Pawhuska on June 23, 1976, and has never been found. On August 22, 2023, investigators working with the Park City Police Department and assisted by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation searched the lot where Rader's former home had stood and recovered what they called items of interest, though no body or bones, KWCH reported. Undersheriff Gary Upton said the office was certain of Rader's involvement. The sheriff's office pointed to journal writings by Rader about laundromats and to his work at the time as a regional alarm installer, though the AP reported the sheriff could not confirm Rader installed alarms at the bank across the street. Rader told reporters he had been questioned but denied any role.

The district attorney did not share the sheriff's view. On September 11, 2023, Osage County District Attorney Mike Fisher said the information shared with him was insufficient to file charges and asked the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to open a formal investigation, NBC News reported. Investigators also examined whether Rader was linked to the 1990 death of Shawna Beth Garber in McDonald County, Missouri; the Wikipedia article says cold-case investigators later concluded a different person was responsible. As of the sources reviewed, Rader has not been charged in either case.