Dennis Rader
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
Dennis Rader (born March 9, 1945, Pittsburg, Kansas, U.S.) American serial killer who murdered 10 people over a span of three decades before his arrest and confession in 2005. He called himself BTK because he bound, tortured, and killed his victims.
Rader was raised in Wichita, Kansas. He later claimed that as a youth he had killed animals and developed violent sexual fantasies that involved bondage. In the 1960s he served in the U.S. Air Force, and in 1970 he returned to Wichita, where he married and had two children. He held various jobs, including a brief stint as a factory worker for the Coleman Company, a maker of camping equipment. In 1979 he graduated from Wichita State University, where he studied criminal justice. During this time he began working for ADT, a home-security company, and in 1991 he became a compliance officer in Park City, Kansas. Rader was active in his church, and he served as a Boy Scout leader.
On January 15, 1974, Rader committed his first murders, strangling four family members, including two children, in their Wichita home; the mother had worked for Coleman. Semen was found at the scene, though none of the victims had been sexually assaulted. Rader took a watch from the home, and he would acquire souvenirs—often underwear—from subsequent victims. In April 1974 Rader targeted a 21-year-old woman who was another Coleman employee. After breaking into her house, however, he also encountered her brother, who managed to escape despite being shot. Rader fatally stabbed the woman before fleeing. Later that year he wrote a letter detailing the January murders and saying that “the code words for me will be…bind them, torture them, kill them, B.T.K.” He left the note in a book at the Wichita Public Library, and it was eventually recovered by the police.
Over the next two decades, Rader killed five more women. His sixth victim was strangled in March 1977 after he locked her three young children in the bathroom. Following the death of his next victim in December 1977, Rader grew irritated by the lack of media coverage. In a letter to a local TV station he wrote, “How many people do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention.” The resulting coverage helped set off a panic. Rader then waited eight years before murdering a neighbour in her home in 1985; he reportedly later took her body to his church, where he photographed her in bondage. A 28-year-old mother of two was killed in 1986, and in 1991 Rader committed his last murder, strangling a 62-year-old woman in her secluded home. The cases subsequently went cold.
In 2004, on the 30th anniversary of Rader’s first murders, a local paper ran a feature in which it speculated that the killer had either died or been imprisoned. Rader responded by sending various evidence from his ninth murder—notably a copy of the victim’s driver’s license as well as photographs of her body—to a reporter. For the next year, he sent packages to the media or simply left items around Wichita. He often used cereal boxes—possibly a reference to “serial killer”—to hold drawings; crime souvenirs, including photographs; written descriptions of the murders; and even dolls posed to mimic the various deaths.
In January 2005 police received a break after recovering a cereal box that included a note in which Rader asked police whether they would be able to trace a floppy disk he wanted to send them. Through a classified ad, law enforcement officials indicated that it would be safe. He then sent them a disk, which the police quickly traced to his church, where he served as president of the congregation. Rader’s DNA was then matched to the semen found at the first crime scene. He was arrested in February 2005, and he soon confessed to the crimes—and expressed shock that the police had lied to him. In June Rader pled guilty, and two months later he was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms.