Speaker 1: You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 1: and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: Now, what's my night terror? Somebody in my room on
Speaker 2: top of me in bed, trying to kill me?
Speaker 3: Why is that?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 2: I mean I was scared. I was scared of the dark.
Speaker 2: I was scared to go to the bathroom. This carried
Speaker 2: over into college.
Speaker 3: Why is that so?
Speaker 2: I've talked to detectives, talked to trauma therapists. Nobody knows
Speaker 2: how to fix this night terror of stuff, and nobody
Speaker 2: knows why is it the bad guy in the room
Speaker 2: try and kill me?
Speaker 5: Do you feel like the bad guy is your dad?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: My dad planned these things, premeditated these things. Was he
Speaker 2: practicing that murder in our house? Was he practicing Cornerherston closets?
Speaker 6: You're wondering if that feeling you had was maybe him
Speaker 6: actually in your room in the closet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, some sort of suppressed memory where I was scared
Speaker 2: shitless from my dad. Who's to say he wasn't doing
Speaker 2: something in my bedroom. I just would rather know, Like
Speaker 2: for me, I need to know, because once I know
Speaker 2: that I can deal with it. You can divorce a spouse.
Speaker 2: You can't divorce a father. You can't just divorce your dad.
Speaker 5: Did a part of you feel like you wanted to
Speaker 5: make it better somehow.
Speaker 2: I wanted to help him, Like I'm mad at you
Speaker 2: when one second and I'm worried you're cold and dealing
Speaker 2: with this blanket and this cold sell like I love you,
Speaker 2: I still love you.
Speaker 1: Do you still love him?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I told him that, and the letters
Speaker 2: early on like I love you and I don't know
Speaker 2: what's wrong, and I don't know why you did this,
Speaker 2: and I wrote it and I was like, I'm so sorry,
Speaker 2: Like I'm so sorry. Something must have happened to you.
Speaker 2: You're just thinking, something awful must have happened to you
Speaker 2: to turn you into this, and I'm so sorry. You
Speaker 2: know that you're alone and that we're not with you.
Speaker 8: Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 2: Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone
Speaker 2: lines had been cut, her door left open.
Speaker 8: You see the victim playing there with plastic bags over
Speaker 8: their heads, strangled.
Speaker 9: You could tell it was a plan scenario.
Speaker 10: Well, police have said no more about the contents of
Speaker 10: the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and
Speaker 10: implies the killer may strike again.
Speaker 11: He's gonna play with these victims. He'd get him to
Speaker 11: the point of death and then bring them back and
Speaker 11: then brings them back to the point of death.
Speaker 3: From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. I'm Susan Peters
Speaker 3: and This is Monster BTK. On August eighteenth, two thousand
Speaker 3: and five, Judge Gregory Waller sentenced Dennis Lynn Raider to
Speaker 3: ten consecutive life terms. The sentence, a minimum of one
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy five years without the chance for parole,
Speaker 3: was the longest the judge could deliver. The next day,
Speaker 3: August nineteenth, two thousand and five, Raider was taken from
Speaker 3: the courthouse to the Eldedo Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas,
Speaker 3: just thirty miles from Wichita. Our news station covered the
Speaker 3: caravan from departure to arrival, and we were on scene
Speaker 3: for the last sighting of Dennis Raider outside prison walls.
Speaker 6: He is getting out of car right now. He's in
Speaker 6: his orange jumpsuit. It looks as if his feet may
Speaker 6: be shackled. He's walking in the prison right now. They
Speaker 6: knocked in the door and there he is there. He
Speaker 6: is inside that's it.
Speaker 3: Closure is difficult for the families of Raider's victims. It
Speaker 3: may never come. But on that day in August, at
Speaker 3: the very least, we reveled in the peace of mind
Speaker 3: that came with the closing of his cell door.
Speaker 10: Unfortunately, through all of this and through the things that
Speaker 10: he has done, everyone was willing to listen because everyone
Speaker 10: wanted to hear from the man that committed these crimes.
Speaker 10: Now I think everyone is sick of what he has
Speaker 10: to say.
Speaker 3: The reason we know so much about Dennis Rader is
Speaker 3: because of his narcissism, his intense desire for publicity. And
Speaker 3: while US locals had had our fill, there were others
Speaker 3: who saw immense academic potential in studying Raider's mind.
Speaker 12: When this opportunity came up, I had just completed a
Speaker 12: book where I had looked back over the past century
Speaker 12: of mental health experts who had taken extra time to
Speaker 12: really learn about an extreme offender from the offender's point
Speaker 12: of view. And I was in a prime position then
Speaker 12: to do exactly the same thing. I had role models.
Speaker 3: Throughout this season, we've heard the inside scoop on Rader
Speaker 3: from forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland in twenty ten, she began
Speaker 3: a professional relationship with him, which culminated in the book
Speaker 3: Confession of a serial Killer. The Untold Story of Dennis Rader,
Speaker 3: the BTK serial Killer.
Speaker 12: I did not approach Rader. What happened is when he
Speaker 12: was arrested in two thousand and five, someone else had
Speaker 12: approached him to write a book. She worked with him
Speaker 12: for five years, corresponding thinking she was going to do this,
Speaker 12: and I saw her on Facebook and said, whatever happened
Speaker 12: to your book? And she begged me to take it over.
Speaker 12: I had to go through a process of being vetted
Speaker 12: by the victims' families and the attorney he had signed
Speaker 12: his life rights over to them through this other writer.
Speaker 12: That took some time, a couple of years, and in
Speaker 12: the meantime I got to know Rader by playing chess.
Speaker 12: We'd write some letters. He wanted me to solve some
Speaker 12: codes because he wanted to communicate with codes. So I
Speaker 12: began to just kind of follow his lead. He would
Speaker 12: write very long, like twenty page letters, and embedded in
Speaker 12: these letters would be these codes and their meaning, and
Speaker 12: I had to try to figure it out. Also, he
Speaker 12: wanted to communicate that way to keep the guards from
Speaker 12: knowing what he was talking about. That's kind of the
Speaker 12: gatekeeper if you're not going to do the code thing
Speaker 12: or not.
Speaker 3: Going any further.
Speaker 12: And then as all the legal stuff got into place,
Speaker 12: we began to talk on the phone. The very first
Speaker 12: time I spoke to on the phone an hour earlier,
Speaker 12: my father died, so it was very numbing, but at
Speaker 12: the same time it was a good weight into him
Speaker 12: because he remembered his father dying. I think it invited
Speaker 12: some warmth and compassion from him. As our first time
Speaker 12: we're talking on the phone.
Speaker 3: It feels jarring to hear ramseland talk about building compassion
Speaker 3: between herself and Raider, but developing this relationship was integral
Speaker 3: to her ability to study him.
Speaker 12: The third way we got to know each other was
Speaker 12: watching TV shows, which began to serve as metaphors for
Speaker 12: his experience. He wanted me to watch Bates Motel and
Speaker 12: The Americans, and I wanted him to watch The Walking Dead,
Speaker 12: and so between those shows we would talk about the
Speaker 12: characters in ways that demonstrated some of the things he
Speaker 12: was trying to tell me, like with the Americans its
Speaker 12: Soviet spies embedded in American culture and raising a family
Speaker 12: and acting as if they're completely like everybody else, exactly
Speaker 12: as he was doing. And he even thought of himself
Speaker 12: as a spy or Bates Motel, which is about the
Speaker 12: making of a serial killer, so whenever something would happen
Speaker 12: in one of the shows, he would use that to
Speaker 12: talk about his experience.
Speaker 3: Ramsland wrote about Rader before she began working on Confession.
Speaker 3: For instance, she mentioned him in her book Inside the
Speaker 3: Minds of serial Killers, but her coverage never went into
Speaker 3: this much depth.
Speaker 12: Only when the opportunity came my way did I realize
Speaker 12: what a unique opportunity it was, because he was not
Speaker 12: like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. I
Speaker 12: get a lot of questions from mostly high school students,
Speaker 12: asking what motivates a serial killer, and it's hard for me.
Speaker 12: I just say it's not a criminal type. They each
Speaker 12: have their own motivational spectrum, and you have to look
Speaker 12: at the factors in their development to understand why they're
Speaker 12: doing what they're doing, because it's different from one to another.
Speaker 12: Even if you categorize them as sexually compelled serial killers,
Speaker 12: there's still a lot of differences among them. I think
Speaker 12: looking at the raw ingredients of any extreme offender's developmental
Speaker 12: trajectory helps us with trying to understand at what points
Speaker 12: in their life did something change, did a trigger to
Speaker 12: violence become part of their perspective? What were some of
Speaker 12: the factors and elements involved. So RADA was an opportunity
Speaker 12: as an outlier to the thinking of the FBI to
Speaker 12: find out what's going on here, what do we need
Speaker 12: to know about this guy?
Speaker 3: There were logistical challenges communicating with Radar in prison, As
Speaker 3: Ramsland said earlier, their letters and phone calls were monitored.
Speaker 12: I told him we need to have a coherent set
Speaker 12: of codes if we're going to talk about some of
Speaker 12: these things. And so I created the codes that we're
Speaker 12: going to use. And I used a cave metaphor because
Speaker 12: he liked caves, and he had this whole thing about
Speaker 12: three being a magical number. So everything I did, like
Speaker 12: three layers of soil, three types of plants, three types
Speaker 12: of gardening tools, things like that.
Speaker 3: In the introduction to the book, she describes figuring out
Speaker 3: the code as one of the most complicated aspects of
Speaker 3: the project. What resulted is a symbolic alphabet with letters
Speaker 3: A through W all representing different phrases.
Speaker 12: A Bleeding Heart was going to be the victims so
Speaker 12: B one, B two, BH three that was going to
Speaker 12: connote whoever he was talking about.
Speaker 3: Of her work with Rader, Ramsland says this type of
Speaker 3: research could be used to develop treatment programs for kids
Speaker 3: who might be at risk of becoming one of these offenders,
Speaker 3: and because of this potential, she emphasizes that its use
Speaker 3: is more that of a textbook than entertainment.
Speaker 12: Is that a true crime book? It's a book where
Speaker 12: Dennis Rader and I explore his life story together with
Speaker 12: clinical tools. I call it a guided autobiography because he's
Speaker 12: not just blathering on about himself without any structure. It's
Speaker 12: structured to benefit my field, criminology and law enforcement.
Speaker 3: Reader's narcissism does make it difficult to discern his fiction
Speaker 3: from reality, but Ramsland's professional background and the relationships she
Speaker 3: built with him before starting the book allowed her to
Speaker 3: call him out on his lies.
Speaker 12: I had the complete transcript of the police interrogation. I
Speaker 12: had five years of correspondence from the other writer. I
Speaker 12: had the whole DA's file. So yes, I know he's
Speaker 12: going to play me if I can, but I have
Speaker 12: the objective background. He's obviously going to be able to
Speaker 12: talk more about what was really going on at the
Speaker 12: crime scenes in ways that no investigator will ever be
Speaker 12: able to do. But at the same time, he's narcissistic.
Speaker 12: He does want publicity, he does want to be known
Speaker 12: in a certain way, and I have to keep that
Speaker 12: in mind as well. But that's okay because that's data
Speaker 12: for me. I didn't care if he told the truth
Speaker 12: or he lied.
Speaker 3: All of that data.
Speaker 12: There are more layers than just what a killer says,
Speaker 12: So it's not really about asking that person a whole
Speaker 12: bunch of questions. To get into who they are. You
Speaker 12: have to watch their behavior and the inconsistencies and the oddities.
Speaker 12: For example, on a scene in The Americans, there was
Speaker 12: a really brutal scene where they put a burning car
Speaker 12: tire over the sky to get him to say something,
Speaker 12: and Raita was furious, just furious if that was on TV, Like, Okay,
Speaker 12: you're a serial killer, You've done terrible things to people,
Speaker 12: and this is a fictional scenario. Why are you so angry?
Speaker 12: When we started playing chess, he told me not to cheat.
Speaker 12: Really in your whole scheme of morality, that's what matters
Speaker 12: to you. That I'm not cheating at a chess game.
Speaker 12: To me, that's all very interesting behavior, because what is
Speaker 12: he showing me about what matters to him?
Speaker 3: On certain issues, Raider was more defensive than others.
Speaker 12: If it was something in which he had no real
Speaker 12: investment in how he wanted to present himself, then he'd
Speaker 12: sort of laugh it off. Yeah, you caught me, or
Speaker 12: something like that. One time he was talking about how
Speaker 12: much he loved his son. I said, well, you know,
Speaker 12: you used your son's car during your cat and mouse game.
Speaker 12: He was away in the navy, And I said, what
Speaker 12: did you think your son would feel like when you
Speaker 12: were arrested and they found out his car was the
Speaker 12: one on the surveillance video. His first response was, well,
Speaker 12: I was never going to get caught. I never even
Speaker 12: thought of that. Then he got upset with me because
Speaker 12: I was questioning the narrative that he loved his son.
Speaker 12: I was basically saying, saying, that's not a very loving
Speaker 12: thing to do to your son. What you did to
Speaker 12: satisfy yourself is not a loving thing to do to
Speaker 12: the family you say you love. And he got angry,
Speaker 12: and his response was to write a very long letter
Speaker 12: justifying everything I would tell you the members of his
Speaker 12: family don't feel that loved because he destroyed them, destroyed them,
Speaker 12: but he doesn't see it that way. He thinks they
Speaker 12: should just get over it and reconnect with them. That's
Speaker 12: how he views it. But that's again that notion of
Speaker 12: a very shallow emotional processing of the world. He thinks
Speaker 12: that what he's done does not have that much enormity
Speaker 12: and shouldn't and that they're his family and they need
Speaker 12: to forgive him and get back in a relationship with him.
Speaker 12: That is how he thinks.
Speaker 3: It's hard to imagine a world where anyone could forgive Raider.
Speaker 3: I think for the average person, it's common to wonder
Speaker 3: whether these types of violent offenders experience remorse, And when
Speaker 3: I think back to his court appearances, I know that
Speaker 3: Raider doesn't.
Speaker 12: These days, when Raider looks back, he regrets, it's not
Speaker 12: the same as remorse. He regrets hurting his family, He
Speaker 12: regrets that he's in prison, that he missed out on
Speaker 12: a lot of life. He sometimes thinks about religion, but
Speaker 12: I think for the most part, he does not believe
Speaker 12: that there's an afterlife, that he will have to face
Speaker 12: some kind of judgment. The killer part is essentially well,
Speaker 12: how he identifies that, he embraces.
Speaker 3: That there is a thread that ties everyone together. Who
Speaker 3: is still to this day interested in Dennis Rader. It
Speaker 3: is the desire to understand why he did it and
Speaker 3: if we could stop something like this from happening again.
Speaker 3: For Larry Hatteberg, his BTK days didn't end when we
Speaker 3: covered the caravan to El Dodo.
Speaker 11: I wrote to him in two thousand and five, and
Speaker 11: I did get three or four letters back from him.
Speaker 11: When I got the first letter from Denis Rader, the
Speaker 11: postman stopped out front, came up to my door, rang
Speaker 11: the doorbell, and he's holding the letter by the edges
Speaker 11: like it's a horrible thing, and he said, I just
Speaker 11: want to tell you I'm delivering this to you and
Speaker 11: I hate every moment of this. That is an appropriate
Speaker 11: response to receiving a letter from Denis Raider.
Speaker 3: In one of the letters, Rader had an eerie request
Speaker 3: for Larry.
Speaker 8: He said, look, Larry, I love your show. We used
Speaker 8: to watch Haddiberg's People all the time when I wasn't incarcerated.
Speaker 8: In here, he said, I want to be on Hadiberg's People.
Speaker 8: Haddeberg's People was the series that I did of great
Speaker 8: people in the community. So I wrote him back and
Speaker 8: I said, Dennis, the fact that you've killed ten people
Speaker 8: tends to negate any of the good that you've done
Speaker 8: in the community. And he didn't write me back after that.
Speaker 3: But in the last few years they've restarted their correspondence.
Speaker 3: Larry's received letters from Rader as recently as the end
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 11: The reason I stay kind of involved in it, and
Speaker 11: the reason I will occasionally write to BTK is that
Speaker 11: we still to this day do not know what caused
Speaker 11: BTK to become a murderer. And there are a million
Speaker 11: teachers there with kids in their classroom, and they know
Speaker 11: something is wrong with a child, but they don't know
Speaker 11: what to do. They don't know how to do it.
Speaker 11: So the question becomes, how do we identify these children
Speaker 11: who are going to grow up to become a BTK.
Speaker 11: Until we have those answers, the BTK story will never
Speaker 11: be dead, even if he dies tomorrow, and that's why
Speaker 11: I stay involved in it.
Speaker 3: On the other side of things, there are those who've
Speaker 3: decided it is better not to indulge their curiosity when
Speaker 3: it comes to Denis Raider. Here's Bob Smiser, a member
Speaker 3: of Raider's former church, Christ Lutheran.
Speaker 4: I really wanted to go see Dennis in prison, not
Speaker 4: because of anything I could ask him, or anything because
Speaker 4: he'd lie to you, but to see who he is
Speaker 4: strip that facade of Denis Raider facade. I think in
Speaker 4: prison you would have finally got to see him as
Speaker 4: he really is, and that interested me. Ultimately decided against
Speaker 4: it for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 3: Do you think you if you went to prison, could
Speaker 3: you talk to him as Bobby an old friend.
Speaker 4: I don't know that we'd talk as old friends, but
Speaker 4: we would talk about his mom and dad, those kind
Speaker 4: of things. Those conversations would be fairly simple, they'd be
Speaker 4: fairly easy, and they'd be natural. If there's anything left
Speaker 4: of the dentist raider facade or is he just BTK?
Speaker 4: One hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 3: Bob poses a good question, is there anything left of
Speaker 3: the dentist Raider? For sad? This is something Carrie Rawson's
Speaker 3: been trying to figure out for the last two decades.
Speaker 3: It took her years to sort through her complicated emotions
Speaker 3: after her father's arrest.
Speaker 2: For like the first nine and a half years. I
Speaker 2: was totally shut down. I was hiding who I was.
Speaker 2: I'm in like this megachurch outside Detroit, Michigan, where we
Speaker 2: moved in two thousand and three. I'm leading Bible study.
Speaker 2: I'm in this mops group with young mothers of toddlers,
Speaker 2: and I'm not telling people who I am. My picture
Speaker 2: had never been out there in connection with my dad.
Speaker 2: I didn't have social media at the time. I had
Speaker 2: gone through the worst day of my life, the worst
Speaker 2: thing I could imagine. I'm a trauma survivor, an abuse survivor,
Speaker 2: and I'm not telling anybody about this. The most I
Speaker 2: would say, well, this bad thing happened to me. It's
Speaker 2: really hard to sit in Bible study on a Tuesday
Speaker 2: morning and the woman next to you is saying like
Speaker 2: her worst day of our life is a dishwasher broken
Speaker 2: or kitchen flooded, and I'm literally having to leave the
Speaker 2: room and cry in the bathroom because how do you
Speaker 2: even drop dad into that. Like even with trusted friends
Speaker 2: of mine, I would try and they would tell me
Speaker 2: stop talking, you're giving me nightmares. I was so shut
Speaker 2: down those first nine and a half years because I
Speaker 2: was scared. I was scared of this man in their
Speaker 2: arrest photo. I was scared of what he had done.
Speaker 2: I was even scared of other family members or some
Speaker 2: lacko coming after me.
Speaker 3: She learned to compartmentalize to separate the father she'd known
Speaker 3: from the killer she'd been introduced to.
Speaker 2: With my father, I have to put Dad in BTK.
Speaker 2: When I interviewed with doctor Phil, he was helpful. He
Speaker 2: did a timeline and he put photos of my normal
Speaker 2: life above the timeline, and then underneath he put crime
Speaker 2: scene photos and photos of my dad after the arresting
Speaker 2: things BTK things, And he said, stay above the line
Speaker 2: as much as you can, because that's safe and sane.
Speaker 2: When I was talking about unleashing all the BTK stuff,
Speaker 2: I didn't do it in a healthy way. I just
Speaker 2: pulled it all out. And so when I went back
Speaker 2: into therapy, she goes, okay. Now, for the first time,
Speaker 2: I got to go put it in order. So we
Speaker 2: took the Wichita Eagle book by Winslow and three other journalists,
Speaker 2: and I took it into trauma therapy for months. My
Speaker 2: paperback was like dogyard covered marked up in pen. I
Speaker 2: had to go line by line through that thing in
Speaker 2: therapy and I couldn't even do it in order. I
Speaker 2: couldn't handle the seventies, and so I started with hedge
Speaker 2: and I worked up through in the ninety one, and
Speaker 2: then I went back to the seventies. And so when
Speaker 2: I was done with therapy, Dad was strictly BTK to write,
Speaker 2: and I had to go back and then separate that
Speaker 2: and go back and find Dad and then find me.
Speaker 3: Once Carrie had found herself again, she realized her story
Speaker 3: might be able to help others, so she took a
Speaker 3: chance at sharing it.
Speaker 2: I started talking to the media in fourteen. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's rare to get somebody like me, a family member
Speaker 2: of these guys to talk. It sets off your PTSD.
Speaker 2: You know, there's shame in it too, because we've been
Speaker 2: beat up in the media. We've been beat up by
Speaker 2: people commenting and social media, some of us going to hiding,
Speaker 2: change our names. I thought the answer was to hide,
Speaker 2: but hiding meant tearing more insight. It's like when you
Speaker 2: band each a wound two tide. It's festering and rotting
Speaker 2: underneath because you're not letting it.
Speaker 3: Get air or light.
Speaker 2: When I started speaking up, I realized not only was
Speaker 2: it healing, me to talk about it. I was getting
Speaker 2: an inbox full of people saying I was reaching them
Speaker 2: because I was talking about something in forgiveness, or they
Speaker 2: were a soldier that had come home with PTSD and
Speaker 2: they had identified with me in my night terrors or
Speaker 2: my fears, my anger, or family members of criminals that
Speaker 2: were going back and forth between they still love this person,
Speaker 2: but they were angry at them, and how do they
Speaker 2: deal with the media. Something I was sharing, something I
Speaker 2: was saying people were identifying with and it was helping them.
Speaker 3: While Carrie was working through her trauma in therapy, she
Speaker 3: kept her distance from her father. Their communication ebbed and flowed,
Speaker 3: and there were several years where she had no contact
Speaker 3: with him.
Speaker 2: We stayed in touch with letters off and on. I
Speaker 2: had forgiven him in twenty twelve. I had wrote him
Speaker 2: that night after five years of no communication, and we
Speaker 2: had been talking back and forth in letters.
Speaker 3: More.
Speaker 2: He read in the witch Tight Eagle article in fifteen
Speaker 2: called for kipnesses and tidy, and he said, when he
Speaker 2: read that article in the Eagle, he realized at that
Speaker 2: moment more the impact is what he had done to
Speaker 2: our family, and he did fill it and he said
Speaker 2: it caused him to shed a tear. But in that
Speaker 2: same letter or in the next letter to me, he's
Speaker 2: back being a narcissist, trying to control whatever he has.
Speaker 3: Left, and the only thing he has left in this
Speaker 3: world is his physical body.
Speaker 2: He's very scared of his own death, ironically, and we
Speaker 2: told him after he died, we would have him be
Speaker 2: cremated and we would scatter his ashes out in the
Speaker 2: floothills because we can't have a gravestone for him, and
Speaker 2: we wouldn't want one anyway, would just get to face.
Speaker 2: And we've had to tell him over and over and
Speaker 2: over and over again in letters. So now Harry is
Speaker 2: in fifteen telling me in this letter he knows he's
Speaker 2: had this massive impact on my family. And in the
Speaker 2: same letter he's saying, well, you guys aren't really communicating enough,
Speaker 2: and you're not sending me money. And there's this woman
Speaker 2: in Arkansas, she's in my fan club. I think maybe
Speaker 2: I'll just sign my papers over and she can have
Speaker 2: my body and give me a gravestone, because that's all
Speaker 2: he has left right is his dead body. So he's
Speaker 2: literally holding it over my family.
Speaker 3: Raider isn't the first serial killer to have a fan club.
Speaker 3: Black market memorabilia has been popular for killers like Ted Bundy,
Speaker 3: Richard Ramiers and Jeffrey Dahmer. Here's Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 12: Even when he was doing the cat and mouse with
Speaker 12: police and he would see this stuff being covered by
Speaker 12: the local TV station or the newspaper, he imagined that
Speaker 12: he had a band club that he had to please.
Speaker 12: And I think he still feels that way today. I
Speaker 12: mean he's slowing down, he's tired.
Speaker 9: We talk about that.
Speaker 12: He wants to cut back on all the correspondence, and
Speaker 12: yet if he gets new correspondents who feed into this
Speaker 12: need that he has, he keeps them.
Speaker 3: No one person, of course, can reverse the horrific damage
Speaker 3: done by Raider. A genuine apology from the killer would
Speaker 3: even fail to do so. But unfortunately that doesn't stop
Speaker 3: us from wishing it could all be undone.
Speaker 2: I want my dad back. I want the seven families
Speaker 2: to have their families back. I don't want the generational impacts,
Speaker 2: community impacts, the thousands of people he's impacted, the detective's live,
Speaker 2: Sea's run. If you could wipe all of that out
Speaker 2: and just have the ten living people back and have life,
Speaker 2: that would be ideal. But you can't do that right.
Speaker 2: There's no time machine, there's no time loop, marble whatever.
Speaker 2: This is reality. I can't change anything. I can't help
Speaker 2: who I am. But I can do something good with
Speaker 2: what I've got, and this is what I have, so
Speaker 2: I do it.
Speaker 3: January fifteenth, twenty twenty four, marked fifty years since the
Speaker 3: tragic O Taro murders.
Speaker 5: I can't believe it's been that long. Yet it feels
Speaker 5: like yesterday.
Speaker 3: Charlie O Tarum the eldest O Taro Ship.
Speaker 5: The pain is still there, the intensity of the anguish
Speaker 5: and the grief is still there, but I've learned to
Speaker 5: push it aside when it gets overwhelming and embrace the
Speaker 5: good knowing that I am where I'm at today is
Speaker 5: because of the full turnaround of all of this. I
Speaker 5: got my life back when he got caught.
Speaker 3: Over the last few years, Charlie's turned his pain into
Speaker 3: a platform, giving speeches at prisons throughout the country.
Speaker 5: I'm doing well, and I only hope to do more
Speaker 5: good work in the future, and I'm gonna use this
Speaker 5: fiftieth anniversary as a catalyst. If I can to do
Speaker 5: the work that I started doing, it makes me feel better,
Speaker 5: It makes me feel good to take all the stupid
Speaker 5: stuff I've done in my life spin it into a
Speaker 5: lesson for the guys to learn from my mistakes. I've
Speaker 5: always believed it's cheaper to learn from other people's mistakes,
Speaker 5: and if talking to other people about what I've experienced
Speaker 5: helps them deal with whatever trauma or victimization they've had
Speaker 5: in their lives, then I'll continue. I don't live for
Speaker 5: the poor Charlie thing. I live to honor my promise
Speaker 5: to the Lord given my life. So you know, I'm
Speaker 5: not a great Christian, but I try to be a
Speaker 5: good one. And if I can keep one criminal from
Speaker 5: getting out and hurting another family, then I will continue
Speaker 5: to go to jails in prisons and reach out to
Speaker 5: the guys who are getting out.
Speaker 3: And he tries not to dwell on the trauma of
Speaker 3: his past.
Speaker 5: I live with the memories of my family in a
Speaker 5: good place. I don't like to think of them the
Speaker 5: day they died anymore. I like to think of what
Speaker 5: we had before, going to the beach, being together, going
Speaker 5: to church, all those goods. And for me, the past
Speaker 5: is good for two things and two things only in
Speaker 5: that's fond memories and lessons learned.
Speaker 3: Jeff Davis, son of Dolores Davis. I go to a
Speaker 3: similar sentiment when we're calling his own mother.
Speaker 7: I know I'll see her again, so that in itself
Speaker 7: brings a lot of hope. I'm not getting a younger
Speaker 7: and there'll come a time where I won't be here,
Speaker 7: but where will be We'll be with her. We had
Speaker 7: a lot of good, little, average everyday kind of time
Speaker 7: that we spent before she killed her. We just talked
Speaker 7: and laughed and shared the stories and made fun of
Speaker 7: show and stuff. She used to say, Are you comfort
Speaker 7: from that? She knowing that I know, I know what
Speaker 7: the future holds, and I know what the past was,
Speaker 7: and those are all positive and that helps. After thirty
Speaker 7: two years, even the worst wounds start to score over.
Speaker 3: As for his thoughts on Raider, I'd.
Speaker 7: Like to say I've forgiven him and all that kind
Speaker 7: of stuff that I'm supposed to do. I haven't. It's
Speaker 7: just something that I think about. I just haven't got
Speaker 7: there the way I justified this. I don't think about
Speaker 7: him at all. He's a little insect, just skitterers around
Speaker 7: in his eight by twelve style, still thinking everybody thinks
Speaker 7: he's cool. He thinks all the guards like him. That's
Speaker 7: how delusionaling is. He's not worth my time thinking about.
Speaker 3: In the years I've known Steve Raulford, son of Shirley
Speaker 3: I am, I've watched him have a rougher go at it.
Speaker 3: Have you been able to forgive yourself?
Speaker 13: Forgive? No, to deal with myself? Yeah? I don't think.
Speaker 13: Oh I forgive myself. I tried. I get drunk, I
Speaker 13: get fucked up trying to forgive myself.
Speaker 9: It.
Speaker 13: Don't worry. Nothing works. It's all right. That ain't working.
Speaker 3: You know, you were six years old. You had no idea.
Speaker 3: There's no reason to feel any amount of guilt or anything.
Speaker 13: Yeah, that's what people say. But I can't help I feel.
Speaker 3: Did BT k ruin your life forever?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 13: He he fucked me for life.
Speaker 3: In twenty seventeen, Steve himself was serving time in elderat
Speaker 3: the very prison that holds his mother's killer. How did
Speaker 3: that feel? What did that do?
Speaker 13: I could know that I was in the shame fucking
Speaker 13: provent of him and couldn't get to him. I think
Speaker 13: I ride in my bait and cried every fucking not
Speaker 13: not I do sometimes now, but I'm a strong moved.
Speaker 13: Motherfucker you are.
Speaker 3: You're still around, and you're still surviving, and you're still trying.
Speaker 3: You're still trying, Steve.
Speaker 13: Well, I can't succeed. I'll go back to our game.
Speaker 3: It is nearly impossible to find silver linings in the
Speaker 3: wake of these tragedies. But I take a little comfort
Speaker 3: knowing that through all of this, Charlie and Steve were
Speaker 3: able to develop a brotherly relationship.
Speaker 5: I met Steve at the Monteu Williams show. We're giggling
Speaker 5: to each other. He gave me a two dollar bill
Speaker 5: and I gave him an eighteen ninety something silver dollar
Speaker 5: for friendship. Because I went one way, he went the other.
Speaker 5: He's like my little brother.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 5: I worry for him, and I pray for him, and
Speaker 5: I'm happy when he's happy. I care about him because
Speaker 5: I know what he went through. He didn't have the
Speaker 5: opportunities I had. He was a lot younger when stuff
Speaker 5: happened to him. I was blessed to have been raised
Speaker 5: with a solid childhood. Steve didn't have that.
Speaker 13: After I heard my backbones said, I've been here, Susan Peters, Charlie,
Speaker 13: he number two. We have a bond and I'm wacom back.
Speaker 3: You share something in common, you and Charlie. What is that?
Speaker 13: Both have lost? He lost more than dude, but chilled
Speaker 13: lost and we connect.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty three, it had been a long time
Speaker 3: since Dennis Raider's name made the news, but seemingly out
Speaker 3: of nowhere, a cold case in Oklahoma got new legs.
Speaker 2: Just confirmed within the last two hours. A sheriff's office
Speaker 2: out of Oklahoma in Park City today searching the former
Speaker 2: property of BTK serial killer Dennis Raider.
Speaker 3: In a breaking news alert. None of us were expecting
Speaker 3: BTK was back again.
Speaker 9: Our case close to home is in Pahusco, Oklahoma, which
Speaker 9: is Osage County. We had a young female cheerleader sixteen
Speaker 9: years of age that came up missing from a laundromat
Speaker 9: in downtown Pahusca in nineteen seventy six. Her name was
Speaker 9: Cynthia don Kenney. I'm the under Sheriff of Osage County,
Speaker 9: Gary Upton. In December late December of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 9: Sheriff Verdin couldn't sleep one particular night, and he woke
Speaker 9: up at three thirty in the morning and decided, if
Speaker 9: I can't sleep, I'm going to watch some TV, and
Speaker 9: so he tuned into Netflix and he watched a episode
Speaker 9: of Catching Killers, and it was the episode titled Bind
Speaker 9: Torture Kill BTK. After having watched it, the wheels in
Speaker 9: his head started to turn and he started to think
Speaker 9: about the distance between Pahaska and Wichita and Park City
Speaker 9: and determined that two hours away was close enough that
Speaker 9: this might be a guy that he should at least
Speaker 9: look at.
Speaker 3: Sheriff Verndon took a trip to visit Raider at Eldaredo.
Speaker 9: He spent three hours talking to Dennis Rader in late January,
Speaker 9: but did not reveal the reason for his visit. At
Speaker 9: the tail end of that interview, Dennis Rader, unsolicited seemed
Speaker 9: to offer up a tidbit of information. Rader said, you know,
Speaker 9: I have a fantasy that I wish I could have
Speaker 9: lived out, and he asked Sheriff Verdon if he wanted
Speaker 9: to hear it, and he goes, I've always wanted to
Speaker 9: kidnap a female from a launder maat. I'd sit outside
Speaker 9: the laundromat and I'd wait and watch until she was
Speaker 9: in there alone, and then I would go in and
Speaker 9: I would grab her and just take her. After that,
Speaker 9: Sheriff Verdon went to Wichita Police got copies of evidence
Speaker 9: and journals, and we used that intervening time to meticulously
Speaker 9: pour over those journals page by page, taking notes, connecting dots,
Speaker 9: seeing how something from one page related to another page.
Speaker 9: In a spiderweb kind of passion.
Speaker 3: What they found in those journals was big.
Speaker 9: We see a lot that points him towards Bahuska. The
Speaker 9: particular journal entry that we saw in nineteen seventy six
Speaker 9: called bad wash Day, and that particular journal entry indicated
Speaker 9: that he was going to try to do a breaking
Speaker 9: an entering someplace on seventeenth Street. Pahusca has a seventeenth Street.
Speaker 9: He indicated in that same journal entry that that was
Speaker 9: unsuccessful due to too much noise, and he moved on
Speaker 9: down to a laundermap. He has a notation called C nine,
Speaker 9: the letter C and the numeral nine that indicates a
Speaker 9: chapter in his unpublished manuscript, and chapter nine was dedicated
Speaker 9: to all his successful kills, and those were his personal notes.
Speaker 9: That was nothing that was meant for the eyes of
Speaker 9: the police or the media, so it wasn't a brag
Speaker 9: or a taunt.
Speaker 3: From there, they got in contact with Kerrie Rawson.
Speaker 9: To get her on board was a little bit of
Speaker 9: a uphill climb. We started revealing little tidbits of information
Speaker 9: here and there to her, and she started communicating with
Speaker 9: the media about her skepticism in regards to us. After
Speaker 9: a visit where we flew her here, we gave her
Speaker 9: a peek inside of Pandora's box and we showed her
Speaker 9: the information that we had. We showed her journal entries
Speaker 9: that related to what we believed it was. Then I
Speaker 9: think that she became a real believer and the idea
Speaker 9: that her father had killed more than ten people.
Speaker 3: The Sheriff's department then went digging in raiders backyard for evidence.
Speaker 3: This was the impetus for the new surge in media attention.
Speaker 9: You can look behind me and you can see the
Speaker 9: sidewalk here that it has been dug up, and neighbors
Speaker 9: tell me that law enforcement have been sifting through there
Speaker 9: like they were going through gold. This latest news surge
Speaker 9: is something that we as a sheriff's office didn't want.
Speaker 9: It was somewhere in Park City in this second visit
Speaker 9: to his property that we were outed. Since the cat
Speaker 9: was out of the bag, We've decided we just have
Speaker 9: to take our shot.
Speaker 3: The Osage County Sheriff's Department had already made a trip
Speaker 3: out to Raiders property. The house and Raiders tools shed,
Speaker 3: though were raised back in two thousand and six to
Speaker 3: deter tours and media attention. Investigators went to the lot
Speaker 3: to look for personal effects and potentially a driver's license.
Speaker 9: When we went there in April, we discovered that the
Speaker 9: city owned the property. It was still flat and devoid
Speaker 9: of any construction, with the exception of a sidewalk that
Speaker 9: had been poured from the street all the way through
Speaker 9: the property around behind the houses to a playground. It
Speaker 9: was a brand new sidewalk that was poured in twenty twenty.
Speaker 9: So in April we did not have permission to tear
Speaker 9: up the sidewalk, but Park City police stood by while
Speaker 9: we dug on the edges of it, and it was
Speaker 9: then that we discovered the pantyhose. It was tied in
Speaker 9: a knot that would be suitable for a bondage of
Speaker 9: either wrists or angles.
Speaker 3: They had to get under the sidewalk.
Speaker 9: So fast forward and when we have gotten permission to
Speaker 9: remove the concrete sidewalk once again, we had Park City
Speaker 9: on hand. They removed the concrete and we discovered the
Speaker 9: Heidi hole. It was lined with shingles and the inside
Speaker 9: of the hole had a lot of gravel. We cleared
Speaker 9: all that out, discovered personal items that looked like trophies
Speaker 9: that would belong to a female, and we also found
Speaker 9: bondage material, chain clips, and a small length of chain.
Speaker 9: It looked like what Dennis's talked about it as writing before.
Speaker 3: Not everyone has been on board with this new series
Speaker 3: of events. Not only was Kerry skeptical, but so was
Speaker 3: the Wichita Police Department.
Speaker 9: At first, everyone kind of starts out wondering what our
Speaker 9: motives are. Obviously, you know, even KBI, even OSBI. Our
Speaker 9: next hurdle is our approach to the FBI, and obviously
Speaker 9: the ultimate goal is closure for the victims' families.
Speaker 3: BTK still has not been confirmed as the killer of
Speaker 3: Osage County Cynthia don Kenney. In twenty twenty four, Raider
Speaker 3: was absolved of the nineteen ninety killing of a Missouri
Speaker 3: woman named Shauna Garber. This case had been reopened in
Speaker 3: response to the Oklahoma investigation. The last updates police had
Speaker 3: on Kenny's case, we're in September of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: To me, this case in Oklahoma confirms something I believed
Speaker 3: for years, that Denis Rader is one of the most
Speaker 3: evil killers in American history. I've called Wichita home for
Speaker 3: over thirty years, and in my time here, we've been
Speaker 3: through so many phases of the BTK story, and every
Speaker 3: single time we think we've made it to the end
Speaker 3: of btk's reign of terror, it all comes spiraling back.
Speaker 3: Over the course of this podcast, I've spoken with multiple
Speaker 3: people whose lives were upended by Denis Raider, but none
Speaker 3: of them are victims. All of them are survivors. Their
Speaker 3: example strengthens my result to keep telling their stories, their
Speaker 3: stories not of lives ended by BTK, but stories of
Speaker 3: redemption and hope things Denis Rader will ever have. It
Speaker 3: is my hope that we can continue to build a
Speaker 3: compassionate community in spite of a seemingly never ending saga
Speaker 3: of darkness.
Speaker 1: Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and
Speaker 1: Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on
Speaker 1: behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay
Speaker 1: alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Speaker 1: Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising producer Rima Ilkali.
Speaker 1: Marketing support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 1: and Caroline Origemma at Tenderfoot TV. Additional research by Claudia Dafrico,
Speaker 1: original artwork by Kevin Mister Soul Harp, original music by
Speaker 1: Makeup and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and
Speaker 1: the team at UTA and the Nord Group. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.