Why We Love Serial Killers (21 page)

Upon entering the house, despite his careful planning, things did not go as he had expected. Rader discovered that in addition to the two females, Julie’s husband, Joe Otero, age thirty-eight, and Joey, the couple’s nine-year-old son, were also at home. Undeterred, Rader somehow was able to control all four people using his gun. He told them he was a criminal on the run and needed money, food, and a car to escape. Using his unemotional and nonthreatening demeanor, Rader convinced the Otero family that he meant no harm and he was able to get all of them tied up without incident.

Everything changed for the worse when Rader put a bag over Joe’s head that morning. Rader was about to become a mass murderer by killing a family of four that day. However, Joe fought back hard—tearing holes in the bag. Rader had to devise a cord ligature to subdue and strangle Joe. Rader then attempted to manually strangle Julie but it took considerably longer and much more effort to strangle someone in real life than it did in his fantasies. Julie passed out but revived after a time. The second strangulation attempt by Rader was successful. Julie begged him not to kill her children, and told him, “God have mercy on your soul.”
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Despite his mother’s pleas, little Joey was the next Otero family member to die that day. Rader led him into his bedroom and killed him by strangulation and suffocation. According to Rader, the boy rolled off the bed and died lying face down on the bedroom floor. Incredibly, Rader brought a chair into the bedroom and sat there to watch little Joey die.

He then moved on to the real target of his desires, that is—the daughter of the Otero family—eleven-year-old Josephine. After an attempt at strangulation by Rader, the girl unexpectedly revived. Improvising at the scene, he forced her to go down to the basement. He put a noose around her neck and coldly informed her that she would be going to heaven to join the rest of her family. Rader hanged Josephine from a sewer pipe in the basement of her home and left her partially disrobed. He then masturbated over her bare body, leaving his semen
behind. After the killings, Rader cleaned up a bit, collected his things and left after basking in his work for a time. When he left, he took Joe’s watch and a small radio as mementos.

Law enforcement authorities in Wichita were baffled by the grizzly Otero murders. They wondered who would possibly kill four members of an innocent family and why. The horrible but brilliantly planned and orchestrated mass murder required surveillance, perfect timing, and the ability to subdue a group of people who were normally more than capable of defending themselves (Joe Otero was a former boxer and Julie practiced judo). The crime had the hallmarks of a military operation but there were also nagging details of sex and bondage that the police did not want to discuss. Police Chief Floyd Hannon told the
Wichita Eagle
newspaper in January of 1974 that “the way in which family members were slain indicates a fetish on the part of the assailant.”

After a short cooling off period, Rader struck again in the spring. Waiting in their apartment on April 4, 1974, he confronted Kathryn Bright and her brother Kevin. He startled them by emerging from the bedroom and pointed a gun at them. Rader forced the two of them into a bedroom where he tied them up. Rader had inadvertently forgotten his hit kit materials that day, so he had to improvise from materials available in the home.
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As a result, Kevin worked his way loose and got into a brutal fight for his life with Rader and nearly succeeded in taking the gun from him. Rader managed to grab the gun back and shot Kevin twice in the face. Kevin appeared to be dead or dying, so Rader went to work on Kathryn. She gave him a powerful fight, too. In order to end the scene quickly, Rader switched from attempted strangulation to stabbing Kathryn in the abdomen. She died in the hospital a few hours later despite desperate attempts to save her life through surgery and blood transfusions. Kevin was left in critical condition from his head wounds but, incredibly, survived. He still bears the scars and damage done to him that day. Kevin described his attacker as “an average-sized guy, bushy mustache, ‘psychotic’ eyes,” according to a
Time
magazine article. Rader said he learned from that experience to never again leave his hit kit at home when he went out to kill.
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BTK Steps into the Media Spotlight

In October 1974, Rader began to seek fame and public notoriety for his crimes. That month an editor of the
Wichita Eagle
newspaper received
a phone call directing him to a letter hidden in an engineering book at the Wichita Public Library. Instead of checking it out himself, he notified the police, who found the letter at the library. It was a gruesome description of the unsolved Otero murders that included intimate knowledge of the crime scene that only the killer could possess. Rader boldly took responsibility for killing the Oteros in the letter. It ended up in the local newspapers and the poorly written message gave authorities some idea of just who they were dealing with. Rader wrote (abridged with misspellings intact):

It hard to control myself. You probably call me “psychotic with sexual perversion hang-up.” I can’t stop it . . . It a big complicated game my friend of the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting . . . the pressure is great and sometimes he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has already chosen his next victim or victims. I don’t know who they are yet. The next day after I read the paper, I will know, but it to late. Good luck hunting.

YOURS, TRULY GUILTILY

In this first message to authorities, Rader described his uncontrollable urge to kill as a monster that lived inside him. This letter clearly demonstrates how much he wanted to dictate and control his public image as a killer. Although it was unsigned by Rader, in a postscript he requested to be called the “BTK Strangler.” By giving himself a brand name, Rader demonstrated his narcissism, as well as his desire to attain the criminal notoriety of the Zodiac Killer or Jack the Ripper.

In an ironic twist of fate, Rader soon got a job at the Wichita office of ADT Security Services, a home security company. He worked at ADT for fifteen years, between 1974 and 1989. According to the
Associated Press
, Rader “held positions that allowed him access to customers’ homes, including a role as an installation manager.” A majority of the ten murders committed by BTK occurred during the period that Rader was employed by the company. I believe that he used his position with ADT to seek out potential victims and to gain access to their homes for surveillance and planning purposes. Certainly his training at ADT helped him to break into the homes of his victims without being detected. Many of his customers who employed ADT over the years to stop BTK from entering their homes were completely unaware that the killer himself was installing the alarm systems.

The next crimes attributed to BTK occurred in 1977. In March of that year, he tied up and strangled Shirley Vian, age twenty-four, with a rope after locking her children in the bathroom. Driven by his narcissistic personality and obsessive need for attention, Rader actually reported his next murder to authorities himself. On December 8, 1977, he strangled Nancy Fox, age twenty-five, with a belt in her home and then called the police to tell them about the homicide. In January 1978, shortly after Fox’s murder, BTK sent a poem to the
Wichita Eagle
about the killing of Shirley Vian. Written in all capital letters it read:

SHIRLEY LOCKS! SHIRLEY LOCKS

WILT THOU BE MINE?

THOU SHALT NOT SCREEM

NOR YET FEE THE LINE

BUT LAY ON CUSHION

AND THINK OF ME AND DEATH

AND HOW ITS GOING TO BE.

B.T.K.

Several weeks later, he sent a letter to a local television station stating that BTK was responsible for killing Vian, Fox, and another unknown victim. He made allusions to several notorious serial killers, including Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz, demonstrating his grandiosity and thirst for celebrity status.

Despite his cat-and-mouse game with authorities, Rader was able to keep a lid on his secret, murderous life as BTK for decades. He continued to work at the ADT home security company. It has been said that Rader was a very polarizing figure at ADT—people either hated him or liked him. As the
Wichita Eagle
reported, some people saw him as “arrogant, by-the-numbers, rude and confrontational. Others said he was efficient, nice, friendly and a regular guy.”

Back at home, Rader and Paula had their first child, a son, in 1975 and a daughter in 1978. On the surface, Rader seemed to be an attentive husband and father. In 1979, he graduated from Wichita State University with a bachelor’s degree in the administration of justice. He fantasized about carrying a badge and his college education gave him insights into policing that were useful in his killings. Rader continued to taunt authorities through written communication and he appeared to be poised to strike again.

In April 1979, BTK waited in the home of an elderly woman but left before she came home. Incredibly, Rader sent her a letter to say that the BTK Killer had been there and she had been lucky not to be home. After several years without a known crime, Rader strangled and killed his neighbor Marine Hedge, age fifty-three, with his bare hands on April 27, 1985. She was a grandmother who lived only six doors down the street from Rader. Her body was found days later on the side of the road. On September 16, 1986, he strangled and killed Vicki Wegerle, age twenty-eight, with nylon stockings in her home. BTK’s final known victim, Dolores Davis, age sixty-two, was strangled to death with pantyhose in her home five years later on January 19, 1991.

BTK Disappears for Thirteen Years

There is much speculation over why Dennis Rader stopped killing. As a result of my correspondence with him I have come to believe that it had to do in part with a new job that gave him some of the authority and control over others that he craved so much. Rader left ADT in the late 1980s and started working as a Park City compliance officer in 1991. In that role, he finally carried a badge of sorts and was tasked with everything from animal control to home inspection. That position was the closest Rader ever came to being a real policeman. According to all reports, he took great pleasure in exerting his limited authority over his neighbors and other members of the community. Rader gained a reputation as a “control freak” for his zealous enforcement of even the pettiest regulations. He harassed a neighbor over the height of her grass, and he chased stray animals with a tranquilizer gun. Although complaints were submitted to his superiors by both staff and citizens regarding his inappropriate behavior and abuses of authority, they were largely ignored. In fact, he was promoted to supervisor as a result of his perfectionism.

While some people in town found Rader to be confrontational and arrogant, others considered him to be helpful and pleasant which could be inferred from his community service as a Boy Scout troop leader and council president at his Lutheran church. Completely unknown to those who thought of him as a charming character and far beyond the worst possible suspicions of those who believed him to be a mean-spirited bully, Rader kept a secret treasure chest of trophies from his murders and sexual paraphernalia, which he called the “mother lode,”
in his basement at home. The materials inside that box revealed the grotesque but true nature of Rader. There were personal items such as jewelry, ID cards, bras, and panties taken from his victims. There were cut-out photos of child swimsuit models from magazines which had sexual fantasies written on the back. There were photographs Rader had taken of himself wearing pantyhose and a bra and posed in bondage positions or lying in a grave. There were also drawings and actual photographs of the last living moments of his murder victims.

Following the capture of BTK in 2005, Paula Rader said the only indication over the years of her husband’s terrible alter ego was that he kept a box in the basement, which was strictly off limits to everyone but him. She found that to be odd but, otherwise, her husband seemed to be a hard-working, normal man. Paula could not possibly have imagined what ghastly secrets that box contained. No one knew that Rader was satisfying his sexual needs and delaying his compulsion to kill for months and even years at a time through a prolific autoerotic fantasy life in which he relived his murders and reached a sexual climax with the aid of materials from his trophy chest. I believe that his autoerotic fantasy life combined with the feelings of power and control he gained from his job as city compliance officer enabled Rader to curb his urge to kill after 1991. What he could not curb, however, was his egomania and narcissism which were ultimately his undoing.

The Return and Capture of BTK

In 2004, news stories marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero family murders started to appear in the local Wichita media. Rader began to miss his notoriety as BTK, and he also hungered for a new victim. His obsession with public attention could not be denied, so the BTK Killer resurfaced. Rader sent local media outlets and law enforcement authorities a number of letters between 2004 and 2005. The letters were filled with items related to his crimes, including pictures of one of the victims, a word puzzle, and a book outline for the official “BTK Story.” Rader also sent packages to local television stations which contained more clues and details from his crimes. One such package contained a computer floppy disk that finally led authorities to Rader when they traced it to a computer at his Lutheran church. Law enforcement authorities also observed a white van owned by Rader on video surveillance tapes at some of his package drop-off locations. In
addition, the police were able to obtain a DNA sample from Rader’s daughter which locked up their case against him.