On February 16, 2005, the city desk of the Wichita Eagle received a padded manila envelope with no return address. Inside was a purple floppy disk labeled Test Floppy for WPD Review. The reporter who opened the envelope, Hurst Laviana, had been expecting it. The man who had been signing his correspondence with the letters BTK — for Bind, Torture, Kill — had asked the Wichita Police Department three weeks earlier, in a coded note left in a public park, whether a floppy disk could be traced. The police had lied to him. They had said it could not.

By the next afternoon, the Wichita Police computer forensics unit had recovered, from the metadata on a deleted Microsoft Word document inside the disk, two embedded fragments: the words Christ Lutheran Church, and a first name, Dennis. The pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, when contacted, confirmed that the president of his church council was a fifty-nine-year-old compliance officer for the city of Park City named Dennis Rader.

Nine days later, on the afternoon of February 25, 2005, officers arrested Dennis Rader on a residential street a block from his home in Park City, Kansas, as he drove home from work. He had killed ten people over a span of seventeen years. He had then stopped killing for thirteen years. He had then started writing to the newspaper again. And he had finally answered the only question that mattered, which was who he was, by mailing the answer to a reporter inside a piece of computer hardware that he had been promised could not be traced.

The Otero house, January 1974

The Otero family had moved to Wichita less than four months earlier, in October 1973, after Joseph Otero, a thirty-eight-year-old former Air Force pilot, took a job as a flight instructor. He and his wife Julie, thirty-three, had five children. They lived in a one-story house on North Edgemoor Street in northeast Wichita. On the morning of January 15, 1974, the three oldest Otero children left for school as normal. By that afternoon, when they returned, they would find their parents and their two younger siblings dead in the house.

The attacker had broken into the house in the early morning, before any of the family had finished breakfast. He had bound and strangled Joseph and Julie Otero in the master bedroom and the children’s nine-year-old brother Joseph II in his own bedroom. He had carried their eleven-year-old daughter Josephine to the basement and hanged her from a sewer pipe. The killer had taken his time. He had stayed in the house for some time after the killings. He had eaten food from the kitchen. He had taken Joseph Otero’s wristwatch and a small radio.

The Otero killings were the entry point of a serial homicide investigation that would, for the next three decades, be the most consuming open case in the history of the Wichita Police Department. The killer would attack again three months later, when he stabbed and killed twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Bright in her apartment on East Thirteenth Street, badly wounding her brother Kevin. He would then go quiet for almost three years before resurfacing.

A name he gave himself

In October 1974, a letter was placed inside a mechanical engineering textbook in the Wichita Public Library. The book was returned, the librarian found the letter, and it made its way to the Wichita Eagle. The letter contained details of the Otero killings that had not been released to the public — the kind of detail that, in the language of homicide investigators, could only have come from the killer himself or from a small handful of detectives.

The letter was signed by a man who described himself in the third person as a serial killer in the tradition of David Berkowitz and Ted Bundy, both of whom had been in the news at the time. The writer said his name was a code: BTK. Bind. Torture. Kill. He claimed to be a “factor X” beyond his own control.

Eight more victims would follow over the next sixteen years. Shirley Vian, twenty-four, strangled in her own bathroom in March 1977 while her three young children listened from outside the door. Nancy Fox, twenty-five, a young woman who had been training to be a nurse, killed in December 1977; BTK called 911 himself to report her body, in a recorded call that the Wichita Police preserved and that would eventually be matched against Rader’s voice. Marine Hedge, fifty-three, abducted from her home in 1985 and killed in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church, where Rader was a deacon. Vicki Wegerle, twenty-eight, attacked in her own home in September 1986 in front of her two-year-old son, who was later found by his father still trying to wake his mother on the kitchen floor. Dolores Davis, sixty-two, abducted and killed in January 1991.

And then, for thirteen years, nothing.

An ordinary man in Park City

By 1991, Dennis Lynn Rader was forty-six years old. He had served four years in the Air Force, attained an associate’s degree in electronics, a bachelor’s degree in administration of justice, and held several professional positions — most consistently as a compliance officer for the small Kansas suburb of Park City, where his job was to drive around enforcing local ordinances about dog leashes, lawn maintenance, and unregistered vehicles. He was married to a woman named Paula and had two children, Brian and Kerri. He was a Cub Scout leader. He was president of the church council at Christ Lutheran. His neighbors found him officious but inoffensive.

He had killed Dolores Davis in January 1991 and then, for reasons no investigator has ever been able to fully account for, simply stopped. His daughter Kerri, in a memoir she would publish in 2019, would describe the same period as ordinary in every respect she had access to as a child — family vacations, school plays, Sunday services, the kind of methodical, slightly overbearing father whose worst quality, before 2005, was that he insisted on tidy lawns.

For thirteen years, the BTK case sat dormant in the Wichita Police’s cold case files. Several officers who had worked the original investigation retired. The detectives who replaced them inherited boxes of evidence from murders that were older than they were. Television specials occasionally aired anniversary pieces. The case had — by any honest standard — gone cold.

The letter in March 2004

On March 19, 2004, the Wichita Eagle received an envelope addressed to the city desk. Inside were three photographs of a 1986 crime scene that had never been publicly identified as a BTK murder — Vicki Wegerle’s house — and a photocopy of her stolen driver’s license. The envelope was signed BTK. The Wichita Police almost did not believe it. The case was nearly thirty years old by then, and the bureau had never had a serial homicide offender deliberately re-announce himself after that kind of silence. They confirmed the photographs against the original crime-scene file. Whoever had sent them was real.

Over the next eleven months, between March 2004 and February 2005, BTK sent eleven separate communications — letters, packages of word-puzzles and self-portraits, a chapter outline for an autobiography he was planning to publish, and increasingly elaborate instructions for how the Wichita Police should respond to him. He used drop locations around the city: parks, public mailboxes, library shelves. He had clearly enjoyed himself for thirty years and had decided, in late middle age, that he wanted credit.

The Wichita Police, under the supervision of Lieutenant Ken Landwehr, made what they would later describe as the most consequential single tactical decision of the entire case. They responded. Landwehr held weekly televised press conferences in which he spoke directly to BTK, treated him with theatrical respect, and built up a rapport. He used those press conferences to feed BTK pieces of information that he knew would draw him out further. When BTK asked, through a coded note in a parks-department envelope left at a Wichita storage yard, whether a floppy disk could be traced — Landwehr placed a small classified ad in the Wichita Eagle saying it would be safe. The promise was a lie, and they knew it.

BTK sent the floppy disk on February 16, 2005. He had not understood that the metadata Microsoft Word automatically embedded in any saved document would contain the name of the church computer he had used to write the file, and the first name of the user who had been logged in.

The man who confessed everything

When Wichita Police pulled Dennis Rader over on February 25, 2005, he reportedly said simply, “Okay. I’ll go.” He was taken to the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department, where he gave a thirty-two-hour confession over the next two days. He described each of the ten killings in clinical, near-rehearsed detail. He gave investigators the locations of trophies he had taken from victims — jewelry, photographs, undergarments — buried in his backyard in Park City and in compartments of a desk in a city hall storage room. The trophies were exactly where he said they would be.

He had begun planning the killings, he said, in childhood. He had killed cats and dogs in his teens. He had nearly killed his first intended human victim in 1973, a year before the Otero murders, but lost his nerve. The Otero killings had been chosen because he had seen Julie Otero on a walk in his neighborhood and become fixated on her. He had named his fantasies projects and given each victim or intended victim an internal codename. He had stopped in 1991, he told investigators, mostly because he had become afraid of being caught while his children were young. He had not, in any moral sense, stopped wanting to.

On June 27, 2005, Rader pleaded guilty in a single court appearance to ten counts of first-degree murder. He read aloud, on the witness stand, an unprompted seventy-five-minute description of each of the killings, addressing the families of the victims directly with what he seemed to believe was theatrical generosity. Several of the family members had to leave the courtroom. The judge, Greg Waller, eventually stopped him.

Because none of the killings had occurred during years when Kansas had a death penalty statute, Rader could not be sentenced to death. He was sentenced instead to ten consecutive life sentences, with parole eligibility no earlier than the year 2180. He is held at El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kansas. He is now eighty.

The cases that still wait

Since Rader’s 2005 confession, investigators in several states have re-examined unsolved disappearances and homicides that occurred in places he had visited during the 1970s and 1980s. Rader is known to have traveled frequently for his work with ADT Security Services, which gave him professional access to home alarm systems across the Plains states, and for Boy Scout events. In 2023, investigators in Oklahoma announced that they were considering Rader a person of interest in the still-unsolved 1976 disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney, a sixteen-year-old laundromat employee in Pawhuska. A Missouri sheriff also publicly considered him a person of interest in a 1976 disappearance in Osage County. Rader has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in those cases.

His daughter, Kerri Rawson, has spent much of the last decade as a public advocate for the families of unidentified missing persons and as a writer about what it is like to learn, at age twenty-six, that your father is a serial killer. She has not spoken to him since 2007.

Why he came back

The deepest unanswered question of the BTK case, in some ways, is not who did it. The man confessed in detail. The bodies were accounted for. The trophies were recovered. The deepest unanswered question is why a man who had successfully gone undetected for thirty years, who had a family and a job and a position in his church, who had not killed anyone in over a decade, would deliberately re-engage law enforcement, knowing — from the public record of the 1970s investigation — that the police would put their best resources into catching him.

The official Wichita Police theory, supported by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit consultants who interviewed Rader after his arrest, is that the publication of a Wichita Eagle retrospective on the BTK case in early 2004 — a piece that included quotes from a former victim’s son saying the killer had clearly been forgotten — functioned as a kind of ego-injury that Rader could not let pass uncorrected. He wanted to be remembered. He wanted to publish a book. He wanted, after thirty-one years, the same currency every artist wants: a name on the work.

What he got, instead, was eleven months of correspondence with a Wichita lieutenant who patiently fed his vanity, a floppy disk he had been promised was untraceable, and an arrest on a residential street a block from a house where his wife was making dinner. He is still, in a Kansas prison cell, the killer he always wanted us to see him as. He just does not get to control any of it anymore.

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Sources: Wichita Police Department case file; Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office sentencing transcripts, August 2005; FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit BTK case study; Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, Hurst Laviana, Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door (Wichita Eagle, 2007); Kerri Rawson, A Serial Killer’s Daughter (Thomas Nelson, 2019); Wichita Eagle archival reporting, 1974–2024.