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World's Most Evil Killers S03E05
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00:00November 1974, Wichita, Kansas.
00:17The city was gripped by fear as a serial killer was attacking people in their own homes
00:22before binding, torturing, and ultimately killing them in pursuit of the thrill.
00:30The police found semen at the scene, so there was clearly a sexual element to this offending.
00:35And they also discovered that the faces of some of the victims were quite bloated,
00:39which suggests that the killer strangled them and then stopped strangling them and then strangled them again.
00:45The man behind these gruesome killings was living amongst his victims in the very town he was terrorizing.
00:53He is a man who, for all intents and purposes, was upright citizen.
00:58And yet, while he was that on the surface, underneath, there is no question at all, he was a monster.
01:05His evil is a different evil, mainly because he thinks that he's entitled to it.
01:10His name was Dennis Rader, but he would go on to create a murderous alter ego for himself, a brand of his own.
01:18Rader would stalk his victims. He would attack them in their homes. He would torture them and kill them.
01:24Rader's preferred method of murder, to bind, torture, and then kill, became his name, BTK.
01:33It took over 30 years for authorities to bring him to justice.
01:38Wichita didn't have a boogeyman. They had BTK.
01:41His gruesome crimes make Dennis Rader one of the world's most evil killers.
01:47January 1974, Wichita, Kansas.
02:11One of the world's most notorious serial killers began a reign of terror that would last over three decades.
02:20I think the thing that makes Dennis Rader one of the world's most evil killers is the sheer conceit and arrogance that runs through every vein of his body.
02:31The Otero family had just moved into the area where Dennis Rader lived.
02:37They became his first victims.
02:40He killed two children and their parents, leaving their other children to discover his crimes.
02:47Dennis Rader's first murder, he's chosen to kill four people.
02:51That is quite a significant undertaking.
02:54And I think that really is testament to his arrogance and his hubris, that he thought he could do this.
03:00A pillar of the community involved in the church and a scout leader, Rader would go on to kill another six times,
03:08with his last murder taking place in 1991, when he attacked Dolores E. Davis in her home.
03:15He's on a cub scout camp, which he slips away from, clearly supposed to give him an alibi,
03:22once again binds her, tortures her and eventually kills her, this time with her own pantyhose.
03:28And he dumps her body a long way away.
03:31But this killer's ego and new technology meant that he was finally in the sights of police and the FBI,
03:38after he wrote to local newspapers and a TV station to brag about the murders he'd got away with.
03:45If he'd have just sat there and kept his mouth shut, I'm not sure where he'd ever caught him.
03:48And so, you know, that kind of arrogance and complacency came back to bite him pretty hard.
03:56Rader liked to torture people, and that wasn't just his murder victims, it was the families of his murder victims.
04:04So when he has the opportunity to relive and to retell the stories of the horrendous acts that he's perpetrated,
04:10he really does seize on that.
04:12He enjoys revealing all of the explicit and the gory details.
04:16For the decades he remained uncaught, Wichita, the largest city in the Sunflower State of Kansas,
04:24lived in terror of the killer who'd named himself BTK, Bind, Torture, Kill.
04:30With killers like Rader, there is always knock-on effects.
04:37And someone who is killing in such a way over a period of time is going to damage the community.
04:45There is going to be fear.
04:47There's going to be looking out of the curtains at the neighbours.
04:51It just breeds an appropriate paranoia amongst people.
04:56When's it going to happen next?
04:58Who's it going to be next?
05:00When he was finally arrested in 2005, his reign of terror came to an end.
05:07But even then, he reveled in the attention.
05:11Rader confessed that he didn't deny having committed these murders.
05:15And actually, I think he quite enjoyed having that notoriety.
05:20Finally, people knew who BTK was.
05:22This killer story begins in 1945.
05:27He was born in Pittsburgh, Kansas, on March the 9th,
05:31the eldest of four boys born to William and Dorothea Rader.
05:37Rader was born in 1945, and he was one of several children
05:41within a very traditional nuclear family.
05:44His father was strict, but not particularly abusive,
05:47and many children grew up in households like this.
05:50He was upright, he was a scout,
05:53he was on all sorts of programmes for good children.
05:57He had the ability to blend in.
05:59He wasn't bullied, for example, as a lot of killers are.
06:05To his friends and family, he was a model child,
06:08but in private, Rader began to show his true colours.
06:12Rader claims that when he was a youngster,
06:15he abused animals, so he hung a cat and he hung a dog.
06:20We do see, in quite a few cases of serial killers,
06:23animal harm in the background.
06:25As he went into puberty,
06:27he described himself as looking at girly mags,
06:30developing a fascination with underwear,
06:32and then, significantly,
06:35and indeed deeply significant in his later crimes,
06:39was a fascination with bondage and sadomasochism.
06:43Having graduated from a local high school in Wichita,
06:50in 1965, Rader enrolled in Kansas Wesleyan College
06:55in Salina, 90 miles from home.
06:58However, he dropped out.
07:01In 1966, when Rader was 21,
07:05he joined the United States Air Force
07:06and remained in it for four years.
07:10He worked on systems.
07:11He was that kind of man.
07:14Systems are very much his kind of thing.
07:16He served abroad, sometimes in Europe.
07:20As far as we know,
07:21not a particularly distinguished career,
07:23but not a bad one.
07:25He returns to Wichita, Kansas,
07:27and marries a girl he was at school with.
07:30Rader marries and has two children,
07:33and from the outside,
07:34they do very much look like
07:35the respectable cereal box family,
07:38just like any other regular American family.
07:41In 1974, Rader suddenly and inexplicably changed
07:46from the respected X-Force's gentleman
07:48to a brutal, evil killer.
07:50There has to be something that set him off
07:56because that first explosion of violence
08:00was so shocking, so dramatic,
08:04so utterly horrifying
08:06that you couldn't possibly have imagined
08:10it was like going from nought to 60 in two seconds.
08:13A new family to the neighborhood
08:19became his first victims.
08:21The Ataro family had recently moved to Wichita
08:24because they wanted a new start.
08:26This was the beginning of a new chapter in their lives,
08:29but unfortunately, this was to be very short-lived
08:32because one day, the teenage children arrive home
08:35to the most horrendous scene.
08:37On January the 15th, 1974,
08:41Wichita police were called to the scene.
08:44Detective Tim Ralph was one of the task force investigators
08:48on the BTK case in later years.
08:52At the Ataro house,
08:54they were actually called by the children.
08:56The three older children had come home,
08:59and they had found their mother and father.
09:04They called, and the first responders
09:06or the first people that arrived at that time,
09:08they went to the bedroom.
09:09They found the father and the mother.
09:11The scene they discovered was horrendous.
09:14Dennis Rader had broken into the family home
09:17and murdered everyone in the house
09:19in a way that would become his trademark.
09:22He binds, ties up husband and wife
09:25with a Venetian blind cord, suffocates them.
09:30The older children didn't want their younger siblings
09:33to come home and find this
09:34because they thought they were at school.
09:36And so the officers went to their elementary schools
09:39in the area and found that both of the younger siblings
09:42had not made it to school that day.
09:45When officers searched the house,
09:48it soon became clear that the parents
09:50weren't the only victims.
09:53Nine-year-old Joseph and his sister,
09:55Josephine, 11, were both found murdered.
09:58Their 11-year-old daughter is found hanging in the basement,
10:05whether he killed her by hanging her or strangled her
10:08and then strung up the body.
10:11We have a situation where he's created elaborate knotwork
10:15and hung the body up.
10:18It's almost like some sort of macabre art display.
10:23Rader appeared to have fixated on the younger daughter, Josephine,
10:27because he seems to have spent the most time with her body.
10:32She was the prize, and the others were just obstacles
10:35that he had to get out of the way.
10:36He kills the boy, ties him up,
10:42leaves on the floor of his bedroom, again suffocated.
10:45Rader had killed four members of the Otero family,
10:4938-year-old Joseph, 33-year-old Julie,
10:529-year-old Joseph Jr., and 11-year-old Josephine.
10:57The Otero case provided an overall mindset of this person,
11:02that he certainly was into some kind of minding fantasy.
11:07The way Rader had killed the family
11:09showed the beginnings of what would become his modus operandi.
11:13The police found semen at the scene,
11:15so there was clearly a sexual element to this offending.
11:19And they also discovered that the faces of some of the victims
11:22were quite bloated,
11:23which suggests that the killer strangled them
11:25and then stopped strangling them and then strangled them again.
11:29So literally holding them on the edge of life and death,
11:33watching the life drain out of them and then giving it back.
11:36So having that power over somebody's survival or somebody's demise
11:40is something that this killer very much enjoyed.
11:45This was not, sadly, the act of a madman.
11:48It was the first of a series of killings in Wichita
11:52that would come to terrify the town.
11:56With few clues as to what had happened or why,
12:01the Wichita police were baffled.
12:03Just a few months later, in April 1974, Rader struck again.
12:11Rader starts escalating in the classic profile system.
12:17Catherine Bright, who's 21 years old, good-looking,
12:20he forces his way into the house with a gun.
12:23Catherine and her brother, Kevin, return at lunchtime to their house.
12:30And he forces Kevin to tie Catherine to a chair
12:34and begins to struggle with Kevin.
12:36Kevin is fighting back and Rader really doesn't like this.
12:40So he shoots Kevin in the head.
12:45Now, miraculously, Kevin survives
12:47and he's able to flee and summon help.
12:51But unfortunately, it's too late for his sister, Catherine.
12:56I think he tried to bind her up, but it just wasn't working.
12:59And the whole thing just came unraveled.
13:02And he would take out a knife
13:04and he would very viciously stab her several times.
13:06And then he left thinking that he had killed her.
13:11And I don't think he realized that Kevin had run out.
13:15And Kevin got a hold of a neighbor who called the police.
13:19When the first officers got there,
13:20Catherine was still alive, but she was barely breathing.
13:23And she couldn't identify her attacker.
13:25And she was taken to the hospital
13:27and she died in surgery just a couple of hours after that.
13:32She's bound, she's tortured, and she's eventually killed.
13:38Catherine's brother, Kevin,
13:40was the first person to give clues
13:42as to Rader's identity to police.
13:45He describes a white male, you know, 180 pounds.
13:48We were looking for a single person.
13:50You were looking for this white male in his late 20s.
13:53It could cover a description
13:56of quite a lot of men in Wichita, Kansas.
13:59But at least it's something.
14:01Rader once again slips behind the mask,
14:06returns to being a pillar of the community.
14:08The police are left struggling.
14:11With no substantial leads
14:13and a brutal killer still at large,
14:16it was only a matter of time
14:18before Dennis Rader struck again.
14:21In January, they have the Otero killings.
14:27In April, they have Catherine's killing
14:29and Kevin's attack.
14:31They have no idea what they have on their hands.
14:34I don't imagine they get an awful lot
14:36of these kinds of attacks in Wichita.
14:38By the end of the year,
14:40the police thought they'd had a breakthrough
14:42in their investigation of the killings.
14:45In October, 1974,
14:48the police arrest three men
14:50on the suspicion of the Otero killings.
14:54Rader is furious.
14:57This is an outrage.
14:59Those were my killings.
15:00Nobody else...
15:00I'm not...
15:01This is not acceptable.
15:03Absolutely not acceptable.
15:04You could almost hear him saying it to himself.
15:07This is not right.
15:09In sense that his murders
15:11were being attributed to someone else,
15:14Rader wrote a letter to the local newspaper,
15:16the Wichita Eagle,
15:18and hid it inside a textbook
15:19at the Wichita Public Library.
15:22He then phoned the Otero murder hotline
15:25to describe where the letter could be found.
15:28In his letter,
15:29claiming credit for the Otero killings,
15:31it's not quite, um, well-written.
15:34It's, uh, clumsy, misspelt, bad grammar,
15:38but the overall motive is absolutely clear.
15:44Rader attempted to justify the killings
15:47with the phrase,
15:48I can't stop it so the monster goes on
15:51and hurt me as well as society.
15:54Society can be thankful
15:56that there are ways for people like me
15:58to relieve myself at time
16:00by daydreams of some victims
16:03being torture and being mine.
16:07Understanding the fear he was causing,
16:10Rader went one step further
16:11and gave his murderous alter ego a name.
16:15He wanted a brand.
16:17He wanted an identity.
16:18He didn't just want to be a nameless killer.
16:21So he didn't want to get caught,
16:22and he also wanted recognition for his crime,
16:26so he had to come up with a moniker,
16:28bind, torture, kill.
16:29Dennis Rader was to be known as BTK,
16:34and as he communicated with the press,
16:36Rader made a chilling threat
16:38that he was to strike again.
16:41He'd gone to work for a security company
16:43installing home security kits.
16:46Well, you can imagine
16:47what the residents of Wichita were doing
16:49at this moment.
16:51Suddenly, there's a serial killer on the loose.
16:53What are they going to be doing?
16:54They bought elaborate security systems
16:57and burglar alarms,
16:58which actually turned out to be quite ironic
17:00because the killer who was targeting the victims
17:03had actually worked for a security company.
17:06So the very person
17:08who should have been invested in keeping people safe
17:10was the one who we had to watch out for.
17:13It would, however, be nearly three years
17:16before Rader killed again.
17:18In 1977, Rader murders Shirley Veyen.
17:24Now, she's a 26-year-old mother of three.
17:28Rader follows home Shirley's five-year-old son.
17:33Once again, he forces his way into her house.
17:38He locks the children in the bathroom
17:40and he proceeds to torture and kill Shirley.
17:43Your children are screaming in the bathroom.
17:48The only thing you must be grateful for
17:50in imagining this horrifying scene
17:53is they couldn't actually see
17:54what was happening to their mother.
17:58Once again, Rader used strangulation
18:01to claim his victim.
18:03It was becoming increasingly clear
18:05that Rader had an obsession with tying ropes
18:08as part of his murderous action.
18:11This is so far outside normal experience.
18:14The body seems to be almost secondary
18:17to displaying his skill at tying knots.
18:21Yet again, Rader disappears the scene
18:24as if a ghost.
18:27There's no clear forensic evidence.
18:31It's a random killing.
18:33Later that year, on December the 8th, 1977,
18:37with the police still having no clue about his identity,
18:41Rader would strike again.
18:45After the murder of Shirley Byron,
18:47Rader kills Nancy Fox.
18:48She's a 25-year-old secretary
18:50and he'd likely stalked her for some time.
18:54He's getting better at his offending
18:56at this point in time.
18:58He's looking at the house.
19:00He cuts the phone lines outside.
19:02He waits for her inside the house.
19:05He waits until she gets home.
19:07She is, if you like,
19:09the archetypal BTK victim.
19:13He broke into her house,
19:15completely invading her privacy.
19:17He tied her up.
19:18He strangled her with a belt.
19:19He masturbated at the scene.
19:21But that wasn't all.
19:22He actually called the police.
19:24So there is a tape of Dennis Rader's voice.
19:28So they have the voice of the offender.
19:30This is Rader celebrating, once again,
19:51his own power.
19:53Here he is, swaggering.
19:55There could be no other word for it.
19:57That he knows something that nobody else knows.
20:00And he's taken another life.
20:06Within four years,
20:09Rader had murdered seven people.
20:11And yet the police had nothing to go on,
20:13bar odd clues and a crackly voice recording.
20:17He had continued to evade capture
20:19and baffle the police.
20:20But he wanted more.
20:23Rader sees all of the attention
20:25that serial killers like Ted Bundy are getting.
20:28And I think he wants a slice of that action.
20:30But he wants to be more than Ted Bundy,
20:33more than the other serial killers.
20:35And I think that's very much what drives his offending
20:38and the form that that takes.
20:40A month after Nancy's death,
20:44Rader sends a note to the local television station
20:47in which he explains that he can close her eyes,
20:51that she can pass away.
20:54I mean, it's an act of the most extraordinary vanity.
20:58And again, refers in the note to the television station
21:01to, I'll be doing it again.
21:03Those seven murders back in 1978
21:06became directly attributed to BTK.
21:09And he had made several communications.
21:13He'd sent them through the local paper at the time.
21:16So those seven were always attributed to him.
21:19Local police detective Randy Stone
21:22noticed that Rader was enjoying the attention
21:25that he was getting.
21:26He liked watching himself on TV.
21:29So, you know, communicating with the news media
21:32was part of his way of achieving the notoriety
21:36and being publicized and everything.
21:38And he enjoyed watching himself on TV.
21:40And he favored the news media
21:41that had the best signal reception on his television.
21:44I think one of the things
21:46that sustains Rader's appetite for publicity
21:50is that he knows full well
21:52that he's not just terrifying individual victims.
21:55He's terrifying the whole town.
21:57They are in absolute fear.
22:02The sales of his security systems are going up rapidly.
22:06It's quite clear that there is a serial killer at work.
22:09It's quite clear that all the victims are in Wichita,
22:12which is not a huge town.
22:13And it's quite clear the police have no suspects.
22:17The community were particularly terrified by these murders
22:21because the police had to tell the community
22:23that there was a serial killer on the loose.
22:26They had to do this in order for people to take steps
22:28to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
22:32The quiet and the peacefulness of 1970s suburbia
22:35really has been completely shaken by these murders.
22:38After scores of officers investigating
22:41and thousands of man-hours,
22:43the police realized they had nothing to stop this killer.
22:47But then BTK seemed to have stopped himself.
22:52Years went by without any further sign from him.
22:55The case went cold.
22:57Could Dennis Rader have got away with it?
23:00He disappears, again.
23:04And indeed, pretty much disappears completely.
23:07Two years pass.
23:09Three.
23:12Rader goes dormant for a period of time.
23:16Whether there are murders that aren't linked to him or not
23:18is a matter of speculation.
23:21As the years went by without another attack from BTK,
23:25Wichita police called in the FBI.
23:28The local police form a task force
23:31which, ironically, they nicknamed Ghostbusters
23:35to try and find whoever the killer is.
23:39They are singularly unsuccessful.
23:42They do not get anywhere near Rader.
23:46The Ghostbusters team would keep investigating BTK
23:50for the next three years.
23:52There was a theory that he was either in jail or dead
23:57or had left the area.
23:59That theory was the basis for Ghostbusters,
24:03was the theory for the basis for searching for men
24:08that had left the area after 1979.
24:11Over 600 suspects were tracked by the task force,
24:16but none of them could be connected with the BTK murders.
24:19Questions and rumours began to swirl about BTK's fate,
24:25and with no more murders in the Wichita area,
24:28some considered the horror over.
24:30So it isn't until 1985 that he kills again.
24:36But this time, he moves his victimology.
24:41Instead of a young woman, it's an older woman, 53,
24:45called Marine.
24:46In fact, she lives very close to Rader.
24:49OK, he hasn't actually killed anybody for years.
24:52Can you imagine what must be building up
24:55inside that tortured mind?
25:00With Marine Hedge, Rader is changing his modus operandi.
25:07Not only does he murder her,
25:10he then takes the body of all places to a church
25:14where he poses her in degrading positions
25:18and takes photographs
25:20and ultimately dumps the body.
25:23This is the use of a human being
25:27as an object, as a play thing.
25:30BTK was back, still evading capture
25:34and growing in brazen confidence.
25:38Rader dumps Nancy's body about seven miles away
25:41in a ditch,
25:42clearly takes some trophies,
25:45as is won't,
25:46and shows no regard for his victim whatever.
25:50That case was not initially connected to BTK,
25:53mainly because it was
25:54a completely different part of town.
25:56It was a few miles outside of Wichita
25:58and how it's, you know, almost bordering Wichita,
26:01but at that time in a little city called Park City.
26:06A year later, on the 16th of September, 1986,
26:10Rader murdered 28-year-old Vicky Wegerly
26:14while she was at home with her two-year-old son.
26:19Rader spots an attractive 28-year-old mother called Vicky
26:23walking towards her house.
26:25We're not exactly sure how Rader got access to her,
26:30but what we do know is he did exactly what he's done before.
26:34Her husband is driving home for lunch.
26:36Their two-year-old son is left in the house
26:38with the body of his dead mother.
26:41Her husband discovers the two-year-old
26:42sitting on the floor on his own
26:43and goes into another room to discover his wife's body.
26:47This time, BTK was not a suspect.
26:50Police initially believed this was a domestic homicide
26:53and Vicky's husband was questioned.
26:56Judge Kevin O'Connor,
26:58who was deputy district attorney at the time,
27:01recalls the case.
27:02Mr. Wegerly, her husband,
27:04was always considered to be a suspect.
27:08So at the time I became involved
27:10was when the DNA could be replicated.
27:12And so they had the ability to replicate the DNA
27:16so you would have enough to be able to test it
27:19without using up your full sample.
27:21By the late 80s,
27:23police were beginning to have new technology to work with,
27:26and homicide cases like this
27:28were the first places it was being used.
27:32We started to learn about things like DNA,
27:36and there was so much more,
27:39even video and computers came along,
27:42and the ability to track people
27:43through all those different medians
27:45became something that we had to kind of look back
27:50and see if we could use some of that new technology
27:53for some of the old evidence.
27:55The DNA from the scene soon proved
27:58the husband was innocent,
28:00and the Wegerly murder went unsolved.
28:03BTK had got away with murder again.
28:07Radar disappears.
28:09No contact with the police,
28:11no contact with the local television station
28:13or the local newspapers.
28:15He sinks back into the facade
28:18that he's been presenting for so very long
28:20of being an upright citizen.
28:23Married father of two.
28:25Indeed, he doesn't kill again for five years.
28:29Radar's final known murder
28:31occurred on the 19th of January, 1991.
28:35The victim, 62-year-old Dolores E. Davis.
28:40Dolores doesn't entirely fit the picture
28:44with what he's been doing before.
28:46She's older, quite a lot older.
28:48He's on a Cub Scout camp,
28:50which he slips away from,
28:52clearly supposed to give him an alibi,
28:55once again binds her, tortures her,
28:57and eventually kills her,
28:59this time with her own pantyhose.
29:02And he dumps her body a long way away.
29:05So the police find it difficult
29:08to fit a pattern here.
29:10This lady, Dolores,
29:13is again naked, dumped,
29:16but it's not anywhere near the house.
29:18The scenes were different.
29:20He removed them from the house.
29:21He had to kind of move his victim,
29:24his ideal victim had to move
29:25to where he could control them more,
29:27and that meant a little bit more mature victim.
29:30Police still had nothing
29:31that could help them identify the killer.
29:34This time, Radar returns to the body
29:36and takes Polaroid pictures of the victim,
29:39all the while wearing a feminine mask.
29:42Yet again, the police are confused.
29:46Radar disappears again off the radar.
29:51BTK had now murdered 10 people.
29:54He continued to roam the streets of Wichita,
29:57a free man for over a decade.
29:59But then, in 2004,
30:02the 30th anniversary of his first murders
30:04ignites his ego once again.
30:08A local is going to write a book
30:10called Nightmare in Wichita.
30:12If ever there was anything
30:13that was going to provoke Radar's vanity,
30:16it was going to be that somebody else
30:18was going to tell his story.
30:20No, if anyone's going to tell my story,
30:23it's going to be me.
30:24Wichita, Kansas, 2004.
30:31The residents of this heartland U.S. town
30:34knew Dennis Radar as a church-going family man.
30:38But for decades, he was getting away with murder,
30:42binding, torturing, and killing his victims
30:45to build his own sick alter ego, BTK.
30:49It had been 30 years since his first murders.
30:55The anniversary of the killing of the Otero family,
30:58one of the newspaper reporters did his story
31:00to say, you know, here's the anniversary story.
31:02It's another year and it hadn't been solved.
31:04And evidently, BTK read that story
31:06and read in the story that
31:08there was a book being written about it.
31:10Kind of had the opinion that
31:11who's more qualified to write the book than him?
31:14At this point, Radar resumes writing to the media.
31:17He wants to be back in the spotlight.
31:19He wants to be in control of the story.
31:22It's very, very important to him
31:24that he has credit for these crimes that he committed.
31:26He doesn't want anybody else taking away from that.
31:30Radar wrote to the paper under his usual pseudonym,
31:34Bill Thomas Kilman, initials BTK,
31:37and included a copy of Vicky Wegerly's driving license
31:41and photos from the murder scene.
31:44This was the start of a trail of clues
31:46connecting Radar to all of his victims.
31:50First of all, he leaves little items
31:53that he's taken from the scenes
31:55in unlikely places.
31:58He starts taunting the police, literally,
32:00saying, well, of course, you think you may know,
32:02but actually I know,
32:03and what's more, I can prove it.
32:05Here's some examples.
32:06BTK had returned to tease the police,
32:11and they knew that this time they had to catch him.
32:16One of his communications
32:18allowed investigators to make a breakthrough.
32:22He had left a cereal box at Home Depot here in Wichita.
32:28He thought it was funny to use cereal boxes
32:31because he's a serial killer.
32:33Law enforcement went out to Home Depot
32:35and started doing some interviews,
32:37and one of the employees there said,
32:39yeah, he found something in the bed of his pickup truck,
32:43but he threw it out.
32:45He took it home, opened it up.
32:47There was a doll.
32:47There was some other stuff in there,
32:48and he thought it was just some joke or prank,
32:51so he threw it away.
32:53He didn't take the garbage down
32:55to the end of the driveway,
32:56and law enforcement was able to recover that package.
33:00And during the course of the investigation,
33:02Home Depot was able to provide us with a video
33:06of the parking lot.
33:08And so we were able to see a vehicle come in,
33:11and that vehicle could be identified
33:14as a Jeep Cherokee or a similar type vehicle.
33:18That was important to us
33:20because that was information at that time
33:23that law enforcement knew,
33:25but he didn't know law enforcement knew.
33:27The police finally had sight of BTK,
33:32but with grainy, unclear CCTV footage,
33:36it was the smallest of clues.
33:39In an effort to keep himself hidden,
33:42BTK's communication methods
33:44were becoming increasingly complicated.
33:48The police and he start communicating
33:51through small ads in the Wichita Eagle.
33:54Finally, he asks the police
33:56in one of the communications,
33:58what if I were to give you a floppy disk
34:01with more details of the killing?
34:04Could you identify me?
34:07He asked us, you know, be honest,
34:09you know, because the police can't lie.
34:11Well, we can lie if we're catching a serial killer.
34:13And then he was told,
34:16you can send us whatever you want.
34:17We won't trace it.
34:19BTK sent a disk to the local TV station.
34:23The police took a look,
34:25and suddenly, with this one mistake,
34:28the case was blown wide open.
34:31We were contacted by KSAS Fox TV,
34:35and they had received a package.
34:37They didn't initially recognize it as being from him,
34:41but then when they opened it up and saw the contents,
34:43which included the floppy disk,
34:45they called the police department.
34:47They called me and said,
34:48hey, we got a floppy disk.
34:49And I remember, and we'll never forget,
34:52being present when the disk was put into the computer,
34:57and Randy Stone, the computer expert,
35:01went through the language on the disk,
35:04which is beyond me.
35:06You know, at the time,
35:07I'm sitting in the little cubicle,
35:08facing the laptop, doing the thing,
35:09and I look behind me,
35:10and there's like 20 people all crowded around,
35:13a semicircle around me.
35:14So it's one of those no pressure,
35:16don't screw this up type of things.
35:17So I imaged it,
35:18and I opened up the image
35:19and started looking through it,
35:21and there's the file on there,
35:22testa.rtf,
35:24which was a Microsoft Office,
35:26or it's a Word document file.
35:27And then you see Dennis,
35:30and then more gibberish,
35:32and you see Christ Lutheran Church.
35:35When you saw that,
35:36there was another detective sitting next to Randy,
35:40who then googled the Christ Lutheran Church,
35:44and there up in the corner of their website
35:46was a picture of the president of the church, Dennis.
35:49I still get goosebumps remembering that
35:54because you're looking at that
35:57and going, that's him.
35:59Finally, the team had a suspect.
36:02Now they had to prove Dennis Rader was BTK.
36:07So then we were off and running.
36:08We learned that Rader had an address in Park City,
36:11and we went down the street
36:13that Rader was said to have lived on.
36:15You remember that little vehicle
36:17that was in the Home Depot parking lot?
36:20It was in Rader's driveway.
36:22At that point is when you knew,
36:25you know, you didn't know how this was going to end,
36:26but you knew we'd got him.
36:28And I made a phone call
36:29I didn't think I'd ever be able to make,
36:30but I called Kenny and I said,
36:31you know, we got him.
36:34But police still didn't have enough
36:36to make an arrest.
36:38They needed hard proof
36:39that Dennis Rader was the BTK killer.
36:43They had got no probable cause
36:45to demand a DNA sample from Rader.
36:48So they take the unlikely step
36:50of going to the hospital,
36:52asking for a cervical smear
36:55that his daughter had given
36:57and comparing the DNA
36:59that they got from various crime scenes,
37:02the semen they'd found.
37:04And they find that it's extremely close.
37:07The match is increasing.
37:08Must be a family member.
37:10The police could finally move in.
37:14A large contingent of people
37:16were sent toward Park City
37:17on February the 25th of 2005.
37:22And at 12.15,
37:23he was taken into custody.
37:26Rader is finally arrested
37:27and is eventually charged
37:29with ten murders,
37:31including the Oteros.
37:32The police had many crimes
37:36they suspected Rader
37:37and his alter-ego BTK of committing.
37:41But at that time,
37:43only he knew the full extent of the truth.
37:46The interrogation was a delicate affair.
37:49We had broken up the case
37:51into several different sections,
37:52so we started to rotate in investigators.
37:55And he would be more than a year
37:58and talked for almost 34 hours.
38:01And he almost saw himself
38:02as an instructor of,
38:04as he called it,
38:05you know,
38:05the golden age of serial killing.
38:08When they're done with the interviews,
38:09I'm back from doing my search warrants.
38:11He's in the interview room
38:12and they put the vest on him
38:15and they're hooking him up
38:16with the shackles and belly chain
38:17and that kind of thing.
38:19And I just kind of stuck my head
38:20in the door and said,
38:21it's nice to be able to put a face
38:23to go along with the name
38:24that I found on the floppy disk.
38:26And he looks up
38:26and he's kind of got the shackles like that
38:28and he looks up and says,
38:29oh, so you're the one, huh?
38:30And I said, yeah, I'm the one.
38:32So we kind of joked back and forth.
38:33And he was in good mood.
38:34He was joking.
38:35And he said,
38:36oh, if I ever get out of here,
38:37I'm going to have to find you
38:38and stuff your mouth full
38:39of a case of floppy disks.
38:41Finally, the infamous BTK
38:43was off the streets
38:45and in custody.
38:47So we took him over to the jail.
38:49Everybody in the holding cells
38:51and the area in there
38:52knew that it happened.
38:54The cells in there
38:55are all glassed off.
38:56And so all the inmates in there,
38:58they all come up to the glass
38:59and they're looking at the glass
39:00and then they start pounding
39:00on the glass,
39:02chanting his name,
39:03chanting, you know,
39:03pounding on the glass,
39:04B-T-K, B-T-K.
39:06And then he's got a big old smile
39:07and he's got his hands there.
39:08He goes, two thumbs up
39:10because he's two thumbs up
39:11to everybody chanting his name.
39:12So, I mean, he just loved that.
39:15On the 1st of March, 2005,
39:18Dennis Rader had been charged
39:20with the murders of the Otero family,
39:23Catherine Bright,
39:24Shirley Vian,
39:26Nancy Fox,
39:28Maureen Hedge,
39:29Vicky Wegerly
39:30and Dolores E. Davis.
39:32When he first is charged
39:36and formally brought before a judge,
39:38he refuses to say anything,
39:40to plead.
39:41So the judge pleads not guilty for him.
39:45Rader says nothing.
39:47That was in March 2005.
39:50In June 2005,
39:52he's finally brought to trial.
39:54But before the trial properly begins,
39:57Rader changes his plea.
39:59So he did not necessarily
40:01want to have a hearing.
40:02He pled guilty to the murders
40:03and he tried to avoid
40:05any type of hearing whatsoever.
40:07The district attorney thought
40:09that it was very important
40:10that the community knows what happened.
40:13And the best way to do that
40:16is to have a public hearing.
40:18Because once it's a public hearing,
40:20then it's open.
40:22Now, the monster is really out of the bottle.
40:25Because Rader is perfectly prepared
40:28to accept that he's got away
40:29with it for 30 years
40:31and that he's going to go down
40:33in history as BTK.
40:35And what's more,
40:36he's going to make sure
40:37the world knows just how evil he was.
40:41During the hearing,
40:42Rader described the murders
40:44showing little remorse
40:46and with no apology
40:47to the horror of viewers.
40:50Most of these sentencing hearings
40:51take a couple of hours.
40:52This one took three days.
40:53And they would present
40:56evidence from the murders
40:57and really just kind of combine,
41:00this is what we had
41:00at the crime scene.
41:01This is what his confession says.
41:03And it was just to kind of
41:05confirm to the community,
41:06this is really him.
41:07This is what happened.
41:10And then you had an opportunity
41:12for the victims
41:13and their families
41:15to make a statement.
41:15And it was just truly heartbreaking
41:18and painful.
41:19But hopefully it helped them
41:21that finally,
41:23after all these years,
41:24the person that had murdered
41:25their loved one
41:26was done,
41:29was going to prison.
41:30Rader was sentenced
41:32to 10 consecutive life sentences
41:34with a minimum term
41:36of 175 years.
41:39He remains in solitary confinement
41:41where he will stay
41:43for the rest of his life.
41:45One of my favorite shots
41:46is him being led into
41:48the penitentiary
41:49over in El Dorado, Kansas.
41:52There is something about Rader
41:53that genuinely chills the soul.
41:56And something about
41:57that look in his eyes,
41:58I can never, ever
41:59get it out of my mind.
42:00That little smirk,
42:02that little glimmer of,
42:05I'm better than you.
42:06I really am God.
42:08I'm not only the devil,
42:09I am God as well.
42:11Dennis Rader crafted
42:12a depraved alter ego
42:14that terrified
42:15a whole generation.
42:18But it was his own arrogance
42:19that would eventually
42:21be his undoing.
42:23For over 30 years,
42:25he was one of the world's
42:26most elusive criminals,
42:28taunting the police
42:29and teasing the press.
42:31He brutally murdered
42:3310 people,
42:34including two children,
42:36by binding,
42:37torturing,
42:37and killing them,
42:39all to fit his sick brand,
42:41BTK,
42:42and make him
42:44one of the world's
42:45most evil killers.
42:46We'll see you next time.