The Devil's Dozen (28 page)

While many profiles were offered, one was actually generated via a computer program. A Virginia-based company called EagleForce Associates gathered the evidence and weighted it for significance. The data analysts then cross-correlated all the data, showing that BTK was likely a white male around sixty, with military experience and a connection to the local university. EagleForce saw from the video that he drove a black Jeep Cherokee. Now the pool of suspects was further narrowed, but not by much.

Then the police got a break. BTK had left a message in an empty box of Special K cereal, and the note opened an interesting door. He asked if he could communicate with police via a computer disk without being traced, urging them to “be honest” and to run an ad in the
Eagle
to assure him. The detectives wondered if he could really be so stupid, but they had nothing to lose by telling him he could send them a floppy disk, so they ran the ad. Then they tested X-rays on floppy disks to make sure they would not ruin one by checking for a bomb, just in case.

Rader thought using a computer would save him a lot of time, because he would not have to photocopy anything. He asked his minister at the Christ Lutheran Church how to use it. He then prepared the disk with a “test” in rich text format that directed police to read the three-by-five card included for details on how to communicate with him in the newspaper. It said that all future communications would be assigned a number and he instructed officers to leave another ad.

They hardly cared about his orders. They had him. While they struggled with reporters who wanted to publish this development, the department’s computer expert got to work on the disk. They did not want any “TV experts” letting BTK know that the disk could be traced. He might burn all evidence and run for the hills.

Computer forensics has become an important addition to investigations. It helps to organize evidence, link one piece of evidence to other crimes, identify offenders, and reveal offender communications. Officials can remove three types of data: archival, active, and latent. Active information is stored in files and programs, detectable on the hard drive. Archival data has been backed up and placed in storage. Latent data is the kind that computer users believe has been deleted but a trace remains that can be recovered

On BTK’s floppy disk, the police found the name Dennis, and by re-creating data on it that had been overwritten were able to trace it back to a computer at Christ Lutheran Church. (Some reports indicated that there was a hidden electronic code on it that tied it to the church computer.) They learned on a Google search that the president of the congregation was Dennis Rader, and it was easy enough to use another program to get his address. Officers went to the church to question the pastor, who admitted that he had shown Rader how to use the computer to print out notes from a meeting. Digital footprints were found on the hard drive that indicated that this computer had been used to write one of the BTK messages to a local television station. But there was more: Rader had graduated from Wichita State University and in his driveway was a black Jeep Cherokee. A DNA sample subpoenaed from Rader’s daughter’s medical files clinched it. Rader, a family man, security specialist, and seemingly stable citizen, had bound, tortured, and killed from six to eight people.

Landwehr instructed the task force on how to approach the suspect. At this point, they had kept him under surveillance and knew his every move. Landwehr also called retired members of the force to be present. On February 25, everyone got into place, staving off calls from reporters who had heard rumors. Then they waited for the designated lunch hour. Two detectives pulled Rader over as if they were making a traffic stop, and detectives and FBI agents swarmed in to subdue and cuff him. On his face, they saw panic. They forced him to the ground, under the threat of shot-guns, Glocks, and submachine guns. He didn’t have a chance. A hint of his guilt was clear when he failed to ask why they were treating him like this; clearly he knew. He merely asked them to call his wife to tell her he would not be home for lunch.

During the postarrest interview, Rader danced around the point, but they told him they could match his DNA to the crimes and that they had him dead to rights with the computer disk. This seemed to finish him. He finally told them he was BTK. He seemed disappointed that the cops had lied to him, tricking him and trapping him, acting as if he’d deserved more respect. This amused them, but they were quickly unsettled when Rader began mimicking what some of his victims had cried out as they were tortured. He went on to confess for many hours.

The police persuaded him to give up his hiding place, so he drew a map. The search produced photos of some of the victims, as well as photos of Rader himself in bondage. It was no surprise that he kept newspaper clippings about the incidents and copies of all his communications, but his gruesome drawings of torture turned stomachs. Detectives were alarmed to see the number of victims that Rader had stalked over the years, many of whom could easily have ended up dead. They wondered if there might be more victims in other places that he wasn’t mentioning.

He was about to be charged with the known eight murders, but BTK had news for the police: he confessed to ten and said he’d already targeted his next victim. Had they not caught him, there would have been one more. In retrospect, it was clear when police reexamined his communications that in one of his enigmatic puzzles he’d actually provided his name and home address.

When Rader went to court to confess to his crimes as part of his plea deal, he obviously relished the attention. In a monotone voice, he went meticulously over the details of his “projects,” describing them as if each murder had just been business. He appeared to revel in the national limelight, although many reporters were disappointed that a killer once deemed so cunning was such an ordinary, even boring man. He said he had killed to satisfy his sexual fantasies, but tried to minimize his actions by claiming that a demon had possessed and driven him to perform torture and murder.

In several interviews, Rader was adamant in asserting that his decision to resurface in 2004 had not been a way of trying to get caught. He’d made a mistake, which embarrassed him, but he certainly did not wish to spend the rest of his life in prison or embarrass his wife and children. He claimed to feel bad for them. As punishment, Rader received ten consecutive life sentences, to be served at the El Dorado Correctional Facility, for a minimum of 175 years before there was any possibility of parole. His wife divorced him.

The investigators realized that capturing BTK had relied on a carefully controlled media strategy, knowing that the person they sought paid attention to the newspapers. In fact, what had lured him back out in the open was the mention of someone else daring to undertake to write his story. His personality was such that he needed to control the way others viewed him. The police had also had to resist media pressure to provide more details, and stick to their plan. The whole investigation had been a difficult balancing act, and it was the cyber-forensics personnel who had made the difference. Knowing how to trace a disk, do an Internet search, and find files on a hard drive had all played a role, adding an extra layer of expertise to what many teams of detectives had accomplished over the years.

Other types of technology are also growing in prominence in criminal investigations, especially methods and protocols that appear to read minds. What could be better than discovering what offenders
really
know, whether they like it or not?

 

 

“BTK Killer: Demon Got Me Early in Life.” Associated Press, July 8, 2005.

Chu, Jeff. “Who Was the Killer Next Door?”
Time,
March 7, 2005.

Cohen, Sharon. “Computer Fisk and DNA Led to BTK Suspect.” Associated Press, March 3, 2005.

_. “Experts: BTK Lived Double Life.” Associated Press, March 1, 2005.

Gibson, Dirk C.
Clues from Killers: Serial Murder and Crime Scene Messages.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Grinberg, Emanuella. “Prosecutors Reveal Nightmarish Details of BTK Serial Killer Methods,”
CourtTV.com
, August 20, 2005.

Jones, K. C. “Surveillance Technology Helps Catch Serial Killer.”
Information Week,
January 5, 2007.

“Magazine Highlights BTK Search,”
kbsd6.com
, retrieved January 6, 2007.

Nixon, Ron, and Dan Browning. “Computers Leave a High-Tech Trail of Crime Clues.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
March 31, 2005.

Rosen, Fred.
There but for the Grace of God: Survivors of the Twentieth Century’s Infamous Serial Killers.
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Shiflett, Dave. “BTK Killer: A Monster Tripped up by His Ego.”
Newsday,
November 18, 2007.

Simons, Erica B. “Forensic Computer Investigation Brings Notorious Serial Killer BTK to Justice.”
Forensic Examiner,
Winter 2005, 55-57.

Singular, Stephen.
Unholy Messenger: The Life and Times of the BTK Serial Killer.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Wenzl, Roy, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, and Hurst Laviana.
Bind, Torture, Kill.
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Around 2:45 a.m. on a Friday morning in 1984, the Missouri Highway State Patrol discovered Julianne Helton’s red-and-cream Citation abandoned at the Marceline junction in Macon County, Missouri. It was January 8, a cold day for a woman to have just walked away. Officers learned who owned the vehicle and made some calls. They found Julie’s parents, also living in Marceline, who told the officers their daughter had failed to return home from a party in New Cambria the evening before, and they had filed a report that she was missing. Calls to her acquaintances and people from the party turned up nothing. She had simply vanished.

Julie, a lifelong resident of Marceline and an employee of the Walsworth Publishing Company, was only twenty-five. Her parents could think of no reason that someone might want to hurt her. She was reliable, gregarious, and well liked at her job, and having grown up in the area, she had a large network of relatives. Every indication supported the frightening possibility that she’d met with foul play.

Damage to a water hose had caused her car to stall, but closer inspection showed a deliberate cut. This discovery threw a spotlight on men at the party who might have seen her and decided to be her “rescuer” when the car inevitably failed. Investigators sensed a setup. It seemed unlikely to have been a random incident, where a predator just happens along when a young woman needs help, but no known associate of Julie’s seemed a likely culprit. Since it was clear that the breakdown had been planned, it was also clear that someone had been watching her.

Dr. Lawrence Farwell,
a neuropsychiatrist on the
cutting edge of brain research.
Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc.

Investigators intensified their efforts to find her. She was last seen wearing a navy blazer, blue jeans, and a rose-colored sweater. The search party, armed with this knowledge, spread out around the area, covering more than a hundred square miles, in both Macon and Linn counties. They drove along roads that connected to where the car had stalled, and into wooded areas and farmland.

Three days later, on January 11, two volunteer searchers from the railroad company came across Julie’s fully clothed body. It lay in a snow-covered field near the Santa Fe railroad tracks, about eight miles northwest of where her car had stalled. The area was quickly sealed off and the body examined. Julie’s hands had been bound in front of her with baling twine and she’d been stabbed to death. There were two sets of footprints in the snow, the victim’s and prints of a size that implicated an adult male. This set led to and away from her body. A pool of blood had settled in the snow more than ten feet from the body, where weeds were smashed down, but no blood was found beneath the body. It appeared that Julie had died on the morning she disappeared. Her purse and the implement used to stab her were both missing.

An impromptu coroner’s jury was held at the site and these six people requested an autopsy. The frozen body was moved to the morgue, where the postmortem showed bruises and scrapes, as well as blunt-force trauma and deep stab wounds to the neck. Julie had also been raped. Her right hand showed defensive wounds, affirmed by broken fingernails, which suggested she had fought to save herself.

Julie’s family held a funeral service and the police continued to investigate. However, all they had were the footprints, which had probably changed from the time when they were left in the snow to the time when the body was found. A reward of $5,000 was offered for information. It would be the killer himself who would eventually supply this information.