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Speaker 3: I think he would have eventually killed again. But what
Speaker 3: really got him to finally surface, which was his downfall?
Speaker 3: It was the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. A lawyer
Speaker 3: in town was going to write a book. When he
Speaker 3: read that, he says, no one's going to write this book.
Speaker 3: What do they know about me? They don't know the
Speaker 3: motive or anything. I'm going to be the one to
Speaker 3: write this book. That's how he surfaced.
Speaker 4: This was definitely the opportunity that he was waiting for
Speaker 4: to come forth. Here he is back in the news
Speaker 4: and in his mind, you know, his hero status, and
Speaker 4: now he's starting to show off the trophies. He's starting
Speaker 4: to send his trophies. He wants to be back in
Speaker 4: the news, he wants his fifteen minutes of fame, he
Speaker 4: wants to be identified and I kind of set up
Speaker 4: with tongue in cheek that if we hadn't figured out
Speaker 4: who it was, he would have called it to a
Speaker 4: news conference.
Speaker 5: He wanted to control the narrative. He thought about what
Speaker 5: if he got caught, and he had kind of a
Speaker 5: plan in place as to what he would do about that.
Speaker 5: So he decided he was going to come back and
Speaker 5: start doing this cat and mouse thing where he would
Speaker 5: send these missives to the police to show that story
Speaker 5: isn't over and that he's also looking.
Speaker 6: For the next victim.
Speaker 5: He used it on a church computer so that it
Speaker 5: was traceable back to that computer. His name was there.
Speaker 5: So finally the police watched his routine the way he
Speaker 5: had been watching victim routines to figure out he goes
Speaker 5: home for lunch every day. This is when to get him.
Speaker 7: Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members
Speaker 7: of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Raider, fifty nine
Speaker 7: in a white male in Park City, Kansas.
Speaker 5: And so they pulled him over and he acted like,
Speaker 5: what took you so long? I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 8: Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 6: Had you vanished from her home?
Speaker 3: Suddenly?
Speaker 6: Last weekend, her phone lines had been cut, her door
Speaker 6: left open.
Speaker 4: You see the victim play in there with plastic bags
Speaker 4: over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a
Speaker 4: plan scenario.
Speaker 9: Well, police have said no more about the contents of
Speaker 9: the letter.
Speaker 6: It does contain some sort of threat and implies the
Speaker 6: killer may strike again.
Speaker 7: He's got to play with these victims.
Speaker 3: He'd get him to the point of death and then
Speaker 3: bring them back and then brings them back to the
Speaker 3: point of death.
Speaker 10: From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters
Speaker 10: and this is Monster BTK.
Speaker 11: Moments ago a press conference in the City Council Chambers
Speaker 11: at City Hall concluded, we finally came down to an
Speaker 11: announcement of what a lot of Wichetan's have been waiting
Speaker 11: for for well over thirty years.
Speaker 4: He actually named himself BTK, Bind, torture and kill. This
Speaker 4: coward killed the father in the house that day, he
Speaker 4: killed the mother, tied them both up and towards of them.
Speaker 11: And again the question that arises is in one of
Speaker 11: the questions that is he had to be answered. Was
Speaker 11: he trying to be caught?
Speaker 10: On February twenty fifth, two thousand and five, Dennis Raider
Speaker 10: was revealed to be the BTK killer. To everyone's surprise,
Speaker 10: he was a seemingly normal guy fifty nine years old,
Speaker 10: worked a city job, owned a house with his wife,
Speaker 10: two kids, wore glasses balding. As my former KTV anchor
Speaker 10: Larry Hadeberg says, this is not the guy we were expecting.
Speaker 8: When people said BTK, you think of a wild eyed
Speaker 8: Manson like character, just a crazy person. What we didn't
Speaker 8: understand is he was the guy next door. He went
Speaker 8: to a local church, he was in charge of the congregation.
Speaker 8: He worked in an important job in Park City, Kansas.
Speaker 8: He was going to the grocery store with us. He
Speaker 8: was going to the movies with us. I would have
Speaker 8: never ever guessed that.
Speaker 10: Hours after he was captured, I realized I had seen
Speaker 10: this man before, and very recently. Only two weeks prior,
Speaker 10: Dennis Rader, along with a tour group from Christ Lutheran,
Speaker 10: had visited KKTV. In fact, he had personally requested the
Speaker 10: tour for himself and six other members of his church.
Speaker 6: I remember I.
Speaker 10: First saw him sitting in a folding chair three feet
Speaker 10: away from me as we reported the latest on the BTK.
Speaker 10: In fact, he walked around the studio, chatting it up
Speaker 10: with all of us. He then asked if he could
Speaker 10: take pictures with his thirty five millimeter camera, and then,
Speaker 10: to my surprise, without asking, he slung his arm around
Speaker 10: my shoulder and snapped a photo with me looking back.
Speaker 10: I am filled with dread realizing that he was in
Speaker 10: fact the BTK killer. After he was caught, I was
Speaker 10: just shocked by how brazen this was. One of the
Speaker 10: first people to learn about btk's identity was his daughter,
Speaker 10: Carrie Rawson.
Speaker 6: People are like, how did you not know these things?
Speaker 6: But Dad was dad.
Speaker 9: I mean, he'd always had been short tempered at times,
Speaker 9: short fused, controlling.
Speaker 6: I didn't know any difference.
Speaker 10: In the aftermath of his capture, everyone wanted to know
Speaker 10: the details of this now famous killer named Dennis Rader,
Speaker 10: But Carrie says her father's life was pretty normal, at
Speaker 10: least on the outside.
Speaker 9: We were pretty much the classic Midwestern family, middle class,
Speaker 9: three bedroom ranch, meticulous yard flowers, tulips, the grass mode.
Speaker 6: We go to church on Sundays religiously.
Speaker 9: He was like full suit tie. He would polish his
Speaker 9: shoes the night before.
Speaker 10: Years later, Carrie was forced to come to terms with
Speaker 10: who her father was, and she was plagued by the
Speaker 10: obvious question, how how could an average joe like her
Speaker 10: dad become such a monster?
Speaker 9: I mean, I think his three brothers turned out fine.
Speaker 9: So if you're going to do nurturn nature debate, I mean,
Speaker 9: all have the same genetics in the same home life
Speaker 9: and they're fine. So what makes one person turn into
Speaker 9: this a monster and other.
Speaker 6: People not be?
Speaker 9: I don't think anybody really knows, and I don't think
Speaker 9: he knows. One of the keys to my dad is
Speaker 9: figuring out what drives that. But also, like, is there
Speaker 9: a way to like help somebody like that before it
Speaker 9: turns into murder? Or give them an outlet it's safe
Speaker 9: outlet where they're not hurting anybody.
Speaker 10: As to how a supposedly normal guy could murder innocent people,
Speaker 10: Carrie says she is just as stumped as everyone else.
Speaker 6: There isn't just one answer to these guys.
Speaker 9: It's complicated, and you're relying on someone that's not a
Speaker 9: reliable narrator to help you figure out what's wrong with them.
Speaker 9: They hold their keys and they don't even know what's
Speaker 9: wrong with them. And then he's over here reading trying
Speaker 9: to figure out what's wrong with them.
Speaker 10: Throughout this podcast, Carrie will provide first hand insight on
Speaker 10: her father, Dennis Raider. There is perhaps no better time
Speaker 10: than right now to revisit the BTK story. According to
Speaker 10: many sources, Raider's health is declining. He may not have
Speaker 10: many years left to live. His victims are finally speaking up,
Speaker 10: ready to tell their stories after all these years, and
Speaker 10: most frightening of all, it might not be over.
Speaker 12: The Osage County, Oklahoma Sheriff's office says an old crossword
Speaker 12: puzzle from Dennis Rader links the serial killer to the
Speaker 12: disappearance of Cynthia don Kinney from Pahuska, Oklahoma.
Speaker 10: That's right. In twenty twenty three, police discovered new cases
Speaker 10: in Oklahoma and Missouri that might be the work of
Speaker 10: BTK cases we didn't know about until now. Raider refuses
Speaker 10: to give straight answers from prison, but he's playing along.
Speaker 10: It seems like he's enjoying the fame and publicity. It's
Speaker 10: a level of sickness that's difficult to fathom.
Speaker 5: For any psychopathic offender who really doesn't have any remorse
Speaker 5: for what they're doing. I don't think their values comport
Speaker 5: with most of the world, and that's why they can
Speaker 5: get away with. What they can get away with is
Speaker 5: they don't feel any remorse about the things that they're doing.
Speaker 5: And although Raider has never been given the psychopathy checklist evaluation,
Speaker 5: I think it's pretty clear that he has psychopathic features.
Speaker 5: My name is Katherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology,
Speaker 5: the author of Confession of a serial Killer, about Dennis
Speaker 5: Rader and written with Dennis Raider, and an assistant provost
Speaker 5: of the Sales University.
Speaker 10: Ramsland is one of the most knowledgeable people on the
Speaker 10: planet when it comes to the inner workings of Dennis
Speaker 10: Raider's mind. Following his capture, she spent years interviewing Raider
Speaker 10: in person in prison. To her, Raider is one of
Speaker 10: the most peculiar cases out there. First of all, he
Speaker 10: didn't fit the typical image of a serial killer.
Speaker 5: Why didn't he look like Ted Bundy. They were pretty
Speaker 5: disappointed that he wasn't this kind of sexy hotshot that
Speaker 5: Bundy had presented himself to be. He's this kind of pudgy,
Speaker 5: aging guy. That was a disappointment. He was not like
Speaker 5: a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. What does
Speaker 5: it say about what we think are formulas. I mean
Speaker 5: the formulas came out of the FBI, they were not
Speaker 5: correct about well the factors in the background of a
Speaker 5: serial killer. So Raider was an opportunity, as an outlier
Speaker 5: to the thinking of the FBI to find out how
Speaker 5: did he become a serial killer? Why did he want
Speaker 5: to do this?
Speaker 10: That's a really good question. When most people think of
Speaker 10: a serial killer, they imagine this mysterious genius, some evil
Speaker 10: celebrity type, someone who stands out. But to the naked eye,
Speaker 10: Raider was none of those things, at least on the surface.
Speaker 10: Raider had a fairly average Midwestern upbringing.
Speaker 5: Nothing about his childhood stands out as something you would
Speaker 5: expect for a person who grew up to become a
Speaker 5: serial killer. He didn't have abuse, he didn't have neglect.
Speaker 5: I mean, there really wasn't anything. He had an intact family.
Speaker 5: They didn't have a lot, but they had a house,
Speaker 5: they raised chickens and rabbits, and he had a dog.
Speaker 5: So pretty normal.
Speaker 10: But what you see isn't always the truth. Dennis Raider
Speaker 10: grew up in and around Wichita. Dennis was the eldest
Speaker 10: of four boys.
Speaker 5: So as the oldest brother. He was kind of the leader.
Speaker 5: They did a lot of cowboys in India, says kids
Speaker 5: out in the Midwest do. He had friends. He did
Speaker 5: a few pranky things, breaking into his school once. For
Speaker 5: the most part, he was a pretty good kid.
Speaker 10: But as Ramsland and others have learned since, there were
Speaker 10: peculiar and haunting signs in Raider's early life.
Speaker 5: He had some resentment towards his mother. Most of the
Speaker 5: things he remembered about his mother were when she humiliated
Speaker 5: him or made him feel powerless. That's important to his
Speaker 5: development into a murderer, specifically of women.
Speaker 10: Apparently, Raider didn't think very highly of his mother, but
Speaker 10: more than that, he almost seemed to hate her.
Speaker 5: His feeling was that she wasn't a very good Christian,
Speaker 5: which I think is interesting. The memories that stood up
Speaker 5: most of him are when she shamed him once when
Speaker 5: he had an omission in his underwear and she was
Speaker 5: horrified and said, you know, when your father gets home,
Speaker 5: I'm going to tell him about this, and this is
Speaker 5: not something good boys do. And she made him feel
Speaker 5: awful about himself, powerless. The one memory had that he
Speaker 5: kept saying over and over and over was so important.
Speaker 5: It was one time she was moving furniture around got
Speaker 5: her ring caught on a spring on a couch, and
Speaker 5: she told him to go get help. And he said
Speaker 5: that seeing her helpless and him in position to have
Speaker 5: some power over her had been very arousing. He was
Speaker 5: just a young boy, but it was really exciting to
Speaker 5: him to see that look of helplessness on her face,
Speaker 5: and that would become the image that he wanted to
Speaker 5: replicate on the faces of his female victims. Was that
Speaker 5: completely helpless woman who who needs him to do something,
Speaker 5: and what he does is killed them.
Speaker 10: A Raider was also infatuated with TV and movies as
Speaker 10: a kid. The media he consumed left a large and
Speaker 10: lasting impression on him.
Speaker 5: One of the most formative things that happened to him
Speaker 5: as a kid was watching a movie called The House
Speaker 5: of Wax. And it was only when I watched it
Speaker 5: that I realized how inappropriate this movie was for kids
Speaker 5: to see. There is a guy who was taking live
Speaker 5: people and covering them in wax for his museum.
Speaker 13: You shouldn't have done that, my dear.
Speaker 6: It is Kathy.
Speaker 10: It's Kathy's body under the wax.
Speaker 8: I knew it.
Speaker 5: But one scene that I think was very memorable to
Speaker 5: young Dennis was a dark haired woman's whose mother was
Speaker 5: dark haired, being bound and she's naked. You don't see
Speaker 5: all of her, but you definitely know she doesn't have
Speaker 5: clothes on, and she's struggling as she's about to get
Speaker 5: the hot wax dripped on her, killing her. And I'm
Speaker 5: sure that he was just fixated on that image of
Speaker 5: a dark haired woman struggling and bound, because that became
Speaker 5: central to his sexual fantasies later on.
Speaker 10: This was just the beginning of Raider's obsession with torture.
Speaker 10: As a young boy, Dennis Raider's fascination with bondage took root.
Speaker 10: As Catherine Ramsland says, he developed a love for garments.
Speaker 5: He would cozy up to his grandmother and the silkiness
Speaker 5: of her ribbons in her hair, and then sometimes he'd
Speaker 5: through the drawers of his mother and grandmother and the
Speaker 5: slips and the underwear. He just loved the silkiness of that,
Speaker 5: so that became part of it. But nothing was quite
Speaker 5: as forceful for him as bondage. He got in the
Speaker 5: barn and tie ropes around his waist, and eventually, as
Speaker 5: he matured, he would have orgasms when he did this
Speaker 5: without touching himself. According to him, just that pressure around
Speaker 5: his waist would be enough, and so bondage became a
Speaker 5: huge deal for him. And as he merged that with
Speaker 5: the image of the struggling bound of woman, that became
Speaker 5: the central figure of his erotic fantasies. Then he discovered
Speaker 5: when he was fourteen, he discovered true Detective magazines that
Speaker 5: his father was reading and hiding in the car, and
Speaker 5: one of them was about Harvey Glatman. And Harvey Glatman
Speaker 5: was a serial killer from the fifties who would persuade women,
Speaker 5: beautiful women to come and model for him. He'd pretend
Speaker 5: to be a photographer and then he'd say, well, he's
Speaker 5: taken photographs for these True Detective magazines and he needs
Speaker 5: to bind them because you have to have the bound,
Speaker 5: terrified woman. And they would let him, and then once
Speaker 5: he had them bound, he would tell them he was
Speaker 5: going to kill them and then get these photos of
Speaker 5: the utterly terrified, bound, trapped female. And they did end
Speaker 5: up on the covers of a True Detective magazine, and
Speaker 5: Raider saw this image of a totally helpless woman, which
Speaker 5: is similar to that image of his mother. This totally helpless, bound,
Speaker 5: scantily clad female and sealed itself. So he's fourteen and
Speaker 5: he's looking at this and going that is the image
Speaker 5: that he would always want to try to replicate, bondage,
Speaker 5: which was erotic to him as self. Bondage became part
Speaker 5: of what had to be in all of his murders.
Speaker 5: He had to have the bondage thing always.
Speaker 10: Raider's daughter Carrie now even remembers her dad talking about
Speaker 10: these detective magazines.
Speaker 9: Now, I thought maybe those were inappropriate, but somebody told
Speaker 9: me they were pretty normal in a drugstore, bondage photos
Speaker 9: of women. So my dad was influenced by this. When
Speaker 9: he was seven or eight years old, he's reading these
Speaker 9: detective magazines.
Speaker 6: He's influenced by these photos.
Speaker 9: If you talk to my dad, it sounds like he
Speaker 9: probably had what nowadays we call a conduct disorder when
Speaker 9: he was a young boy.
Speaker 6: There was no help. In the forties and fifties.
Speaker 10: It only got worse. Raiders' fantasies became more and more elaborate.
Speaker 5: He would imagine creating what he called girl traps where
Speaker 5: they would be totally helpless. He would have complete control
Speaker 5: and domination over them, and so that was a big
Speaker 5: part of his fantasies. He would draw that on the
Speaker 5: board in his classroom while other people are out at recess.
Speaker 10: On the farm. Raider tested out his ideas on animals.
Speaker 3: A very good precursor for crimes is animal cruelty. Animal
Speaker 3: cruelty is a big, big one, and he got heavily
Speaker 3: involved with that, killing cats, killing dogs. My name is
Speaker 3: John Douglas. I was with the FBI for twenty five years.
Speaker 3: Wrote a book about inside the Mind of the BTK Strangler.
Speaker 3: I was one of the first people to analyze a
Speaker 3: case and was pretty good analysis.
Speaker 10: You've probably heard about John Douglas before. He is the
Speaker 10: famed FBI profiler who helped kickstart the agency's study on
Speaker 10: serial killers in the nineteen seventies. He was also the
Speaker 10: inspiration for the Netflix series mind Hunter. Like Catherine Ramsland,
Speaker 10: he dedicated years of his life to trying to understand BTK.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 10: The best place to look, he says, is in early
Speaker 10: childhood and pretty early on, Dennis Rader took interest in
Speaker 10: some very troubling behavior. As he just mentioned, Raider took
Speaker 10: joy in causing harm to animals.
Speaker 3: He went on a family grouping where they had a
Speaker 3: chicken to cook. They bound the chicken up and he
Speaker 3: tied him to a post before they killed the chicken,
Speaker 3: and he liked that. He got excited about that as well.
Speaker 10: As Douglas says, this all came back to his bondage fetish.
Speaker 10: He enjoyed being in control while something or someone was helpless.
Speaker 3: He liked the appearance of bondage and where someone is
Speaker 3: stuck someone's control, someone can't get away, The chicken can't
Speaker 3: get get away.
Speaker 10: Eventually, Raider became bored with the fantasies, the magazines, and
Speaker 10: the chickens. As a young man, he escalated to finding
Speaker 10: women and stalking them. At first, it started with just looking.
Speaker 3: He was certainly at peeping Tom, and he was already
Speaker 3: beginning to be fetishistic where he wanted underwear clothing that
Speaker 3: he was steel offul lines in the neighborhood. And then
Speaker 3: he was involved in peeping tom, looking through the windows,
Speaker 3: looking at people being undressed. He would not enter until
Speaker 3: he got older, but when he was younger he was
Speaker 3: just looking and fantasizing about what he could do. As
Speaker 3: he began to age, he then began entering the houses.
Speaker 5: He thought of himself like a spy. He did do
Speaker 5: some surveillance of people, some following women.
Speaker 10: This is Catherine Ramsland again. She says that after high school,
Speaker 10: Raider joined the Air Force in nineteen sixty six. He
Speaker 10: did basic training in Texas before being stationed in Okinawa
Speaker 10: and eventually Tokyo, and his experiences there only deepened his
Speaker 10: fanatical tendencies.
Speaker 5: He had sexual experiences when he was in the military
Speaker 5: with sex workers that kind of sealed the fantasy, and
Speaker 5: it was after he came back and had gotten married
Speaker 5: that he began thinking about abducting women.
Speaker 10: Raider left the Air Force in nineteen seventy and moved
Speaker 10: back to Wichita. There he met Pauladetz, whom he married
Speaker 10: in nineteen seventy one. But, as Catherine Ramsland said, his
Speaker 10: marriage did not stop him from pursuing his fantasies of abduction.
Speaker 10: He started to pick women in the neighborhood and think
Speaker 10: about ways to snatch them.
Speaker 5: He wanted to take them to an abandoned farm, so
Speaker 5: he had scouted out farmsteads around Kansas, and he wanted
Speaker 5: to abduct this bank teller.
Speaker 10: Ramselin elaborates on this incident in her book Confession of
Speaker 10: a Serial Killer. Here is what Raider told her.
Speaker 13: I saw a bank teller at the Twin Lakes Bank.
Speaker 13: I had seen her when Paula and I did business there.
Speaker 13: I knew when she had a lunch hower. The bank
Speaker 13: teller parked her car across the street of twenty first North.
Speaker 13: Many cars there could shield me in hiding. I knew
Speaker 13: her car.
Speaker 5: He didn't know what he was going to do. He
Speaker 5: hadn't planned very far, except that he was going to
Speaker 5: take this young woman out to the abandoned barn, find her,
Speaker 5: do something with her.
Speaker 13: My main theme was to hang someone. The act of
Speaker 13: hanging was sexually exciting to me. Of being bound or
Speaker 13: straining with the rope or noose around the neck, legs bound,
Speaker 13: and no escape. For self gratification, I had hanged myself
Speaker 13: to the point of almost passing out. I had an
Speaker 13: old barn in mind. We could be completely alone and
Speaker 13: I could better control them. I loved old barnes, and
Speaker 13: there were several located around Wichita that I could use
Speaker 13: for hanging victims.
Speaker 5: That was the first time he really acted on the
Speaker 5: fantasy is I'm going to grab somebody.
Speaker 13: Timed like a clock. She entered her car, I approached
Speaker 13: and tried to force myself in. She screamed and fought back.
Speaker 13: I finally gave up and told her I'm sorry. I
Speaker 13: was trying to take a vehicle and leave the area.
Speaker 13: It was a ruse that calmed her down. I told
Speaker 13: her I was going to leave her alone, and I
Speaker 13: quickly left.
Speaker 5: But that was the start, and the fact that he
Speaker 5: crossed that line was important. The second line he crossed
Speaker 5: was breaking into houses. As he began to break into houses,
Speaker 5: he felt very powerful people were not there, but he
Speaker 5: would stand in their home, and he felt that sense
Speaker 5: of violation. That gave him a lot of courage because
Speaker 5: he realized he could get into their home, take something,
Speaker 5: and get out and not be caught. That empowered him
Speaker 5: with the sense that now he could do this, He
Speaker 5: could get into a home and abduct somebody, which was
Speaker 5: the first plan.
Speaker 10: What follows is a sequence of events that eventually pushed
Speaker 10: Raider into his first violent act. Not long after getting married,
Speaker 10: Raider got a job at Cessna, the big aviation company
Speaker 10: based in which Talk Kansas, Rader discussed this job. Here
Speaker 10: are his words, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13: Cessna had been my ideal job, working in the electrical
Speaker 13: tool and died part of a plant. It was a
Speaker 13: challenging job, but one that I was learning to love.
Speaker 10: But Raider wasn't at Sessna for very long due to
Speaker 10: rising gasoline prices. The aviation industry was in financial dress.
Speaker 5: And he got laid off. That's the job that he loved.
Speaker 5: What he will say is that's what triggered the first
Speaker 5: murder is he was angry. He did not like the
Speaker 5: fact that his wife was now the bread winner. He
Speaker 5: felt powerless. So again he's in this situation where a
Speaker 5: woman has power over him.
Speaker 6: He isn't like this.
Speaker 13: I had low frustration tolerance in stressful situations. If criticized,
Speaker 13: especially if I'm right, I literally blowed. Don't count to ten,
Speaker 13: I get hot, break into a sweat, and seek mental revenge.
Speaker 13: I believe I'm too smart to go postal, so if
Speaker 13: I made a revenge attack, it would be with stealth
Speaker 13: and planned. Loss of personal power can cause burning resentment.
Speaker 13: Frustration seems to be a key either the system or
Speaker 13: a person not understanding me on the issues surrounding the problem.
Speaker 13: I believe job loss causes a lot of anger and frustration.
Speaker 13: Ego is the key.
Speaker 10: Raider decided it was time, no more fantasies. This time
Speaker 10: he was actually going to kill, and he found his
Speaker 10: first victim or victims. The following excerpt comes from the
Speaker 10: book bind Torture, Kill, The Inside story of BTK.
Speaker 14: Dennis Raider had seen the woman and the girl day
Speaker 14: while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration.
Speaker 14: His wife didn't like driving in the snow. On Edgemore Drive,
Speaker 14: he saw two dark skinned females and his station wagon
Speaker 14: backing onto Murdock Avenue. After that, he stalked them for
Speaker 14: weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as
Speaker 14: she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that
Speaker 14: they left about eight forty five and that it took
Speaker 14: Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the
Speaker 14: husband left for work around eight am. He did not
Speaker 14: want to confront the husband, so he timed his own
Speaker 14: arrival for about eight twenty. The husband would be gone,
Speaker 14: the boy would be there, but he was incidental to
Speaker 14: the plan. He would kill the boy, but he didn't
Speaker 14: want him. He wanted the girl.
Speaker 10: The girl was eleven year old Josie o'to. The mother
Speaker 10: was thirty four year old Julia Otero. It was on
Speaker 10: January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, that Dennis Raider took his
Speaker 10: first visvictims. As you heard in episode one, he broke in,
Speaker 10: tied up the family, and one by one he strangled
Speaker 10: all of them. There was no going back. Denis Raider's
Speaker 10: transformation into BTK was complete. After Dennis Rader escaped the
Speaker 10: Otero crime scene, he slipped back into life at home.
Speaker 10: He disguised himself as a regular family man in Wichita
Speaker 10: once again. Raider and his wife Paula had been married
Speaker 10: nearly three years. By this time. They attended church weekly
Speaker 10: with their parents, and he helped out with the youth group,
Speaker 10: and he decided to take classes at Wichita State nearby.
Speaker 10: But in his time alone, he allowed himself to explore
Speaker 10: his fantasies. The following is an excerpt from the book
Speaker 10: Buying Torture Kill, The Inside Story of bt.
Speaker 14: He liked to study crime novels, detective magazines, and pornography.
Speaker 14: He liked to masturbate while playing with handcuffs. In their
Speaker 14: snug home only nine hundred and sixty square feet, he
Speaker 14: hid small trophies on his wrist. He wore Joe o
Speaker 14: Taro's watch. It ran well and got him to school
Speaker 14: on time. Wichita State University had started spring classes, and
Speaker 14: he had chosen a major administration of justice that let
Speaker 14: him study police officers closely and learn more about his
Speaker 14: new pursuit. He enjoyed the irony.
Speaker 10: The events of January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, where the
Speaker 10: violent culmination of years spent fantasizing about bondage, torture, and murder.
Speaker 10: Raider had mentally built himself into the murder he'd envision.
Speaker 10: The Otero family was his first taste of success.
Speaker 9: What really pisses me off about my dad is that
Speaker 9: he knew what he was or what he was capable of.
Speaker 9: He even talks about that in Catherine Ramson's book, that
Speaker 9: he could have walked into a mental health institution before
Speaker 9: he murdered the Otaros and asked for help. And he
Speaker 9: knew that, and he didn't do it anyway, because he
Speaker 9: just wanted that thrill and that hit, and those are
Speaker 9: words he uses, thrill and.
Speaker 10: Hit again Carrie Rawson. She mentions that how each opportunity
Speaker 10: during the Otaro murders, her father chose to cross the
Speaker 10: point of no return.
Speaker 9: I mean, everybody has those dark thoughts or the what ifs,
Speaker 9: But I mean there's a big gap between reading something
Speaker 9: or watching something on TV or thinking something versus when
Speaker 9: you're premeditating and planning these things. If you're in the
Speaker 9: store buying rope, that's when you need to stop. That point,
Speaker 9: you probably don't have the ability to stop yourself, and
Speaker 9: you're probably not wanting to. Now he had a choice.
Speaker 9: This is where I get really pitied. He comes in,
Speaker 9: he doesn't have a mask on, and he blames them.
Speaker 9: He says, well, they saw my face, so I had
Speaker 9: to put them down. He's literally talking like when he's
Speaker 9: a compliance officer putting an animal down.
Speaker 6: Those are his words. I had to put them down
Speaker 6: because they saw my face. No, you didn't. You could
Speaker 6: have left.
Speaker 9: That's where you're not insane. You're in control. You're in
Speaker 9: enough control to murder for people and not get caught
Speaker 9: for thirty years.
Speaker 6: You totally could have left.
Speaker 9: But he's such a freaking narcissist. He puts it on them.
Speaker 10: Nothing about the Otero murders had gone his plan, But
Speaker 10: as a testament to his delusion, Dennis Rader didn't believe
Speaker 10: that it was his fault. Here's forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 5: He thought he had left nothing to chance. That was
Speaker 5: in his head that he had stopped her and knew
Speaker 5: everything about the house. He had done a terrible job.
Speaker 5: They had a dog too that he didn't know about,
Speaker 5: and also their car had no gas in it, so
Speaker 5: he's going to abduct them in their car and that
Speaker 5: wouldn't have worked out either. So none of the things
Speaker 5: he had in mind for his first act actually happened
Speaker 5: the way he had imagined it, and he was terrified
Speaker 5: that he was going to be caught. He dropped his
Speaker 5: knife sheet out in the yard, had to go back
Speaker 5: for it. It's the middle of the day, neighbors could
Speaker 5: have seen it. It's a house in a neighborhood. Many
Speaker 5: mistakes made, but still he did not get caught. So
Speaker 5: that empowered him to think that, wow, I can kill
Speaker 5: almost an entire family and nobody came for me.
Speaker 10: The Otero murders would only be the beginning of raiders
Speaker 10: murderous career. Despite all the mistakes he made, he felt unstoppable.
Speaker 10: In confession of a serial killer, he had this to
Speaker 10: say about his first killing spree.
Speaker 13: My green was on fire, cut out and collected the
Speaker 13: newspaper clippings on the oteros and started my first Heidi
Speaker 13: hole file using those college colored folders for turn papers
Speaker 13: with three holes, I had cut and taped the clippings inside.
Speaker 13: I stored this in the attached shed in the back,
Speaker 13: an area that my wife would not find. I also
Speaker 13: listened and watched for any information on the radio or TV.
Speaker 13: One thing for sure, that area was now off limits forever,
Speaker 13: except for maybe just to drive by.
Speaker 10: After the Otaro murders, Raider recognized he had crossed over
Speaker 10: to what he called the dark path. He considered chalking
Speaker 10: it up to a bad day and moving on with
Speaker 10: his life, but his killer instincts overrode that sense. He
Speaker 10: now saw himself as a serial killer, and he liked it.
Speaker 13: I thought I could control it. I soon realized I
Speaker 13: was in over my head, and I was too embarrassed
Speaker 13: to ask for help. I quickly was into sexual fantasies
Speaker 13: beyond my control. I had set my goals to be
Speaker 13: a white hat high, but the lifeboat drifted away from
Speaker 13: my reach until the deep water became my coping. I
Speaker 13: had trusted myself to steer the right course, but when
Speaker 13: I studied books about past serial killers. The more I learned,
Speaker 13: the closer I came to believe I could someday become one.
Speaker 13: I was on a powerful train and could not get off.
Speaker 13: The track was set. Superman could stop it, but I
Speaker 13: was not Superman. To cope with what I was doing,
Speaker 13: I cubed like I would do as a kid.
Speaker 10: Cubing is a concept Raider came up with. It's similar
Speaker 10: to compartmentalization. Here's Catherine Ramsland again.
Speaker 5: He is all the different bases of the cube. Family man,
Speaker 5: church leader, thief, boy, scout, volunteer, all of that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. But each face doesn't see any of the others.
Speaker 5: So when he's a family man, he's a family man
Speaker 5: in his mind because it's only a present moment truth.
Speaker 5: When he sees the opportunity to be a thief or
Speaker 5: a killer or a liar, he can turn that face out,
Speaker 5: so it's all integrated as a whole, but none of
Speaker 5: the faces see each other.
Speaker 6: And he came up with that concept.
Speaker 5: Psychologists call this compartmentalizing, but that conveys the idea that
Speaker 5: they're all distinct compartments. When you think of it as
Speaker 5: a cube, a unified entity with multiple faces. That can
Speaker 5: be switched around to meet the circumstances. That's a much
Speaker 5: more powerful concept, and that's his concept. He had ways
Speaker 5: to keep it all hidden, but he didn't think but
Speaker 5: as pretending. It was. That's what I do then, But
Speaker 5: I also have social obligations. I also am a good dad.
Speaker 5: I'm also a good churchgoer. I'm also a good employee.
Speaker 5: All of those things worked for him, and I think
Speaker 5: it's difficult for people to look at such strongly contrasting
Speaker 5: morality in the same person. That's the mystery. How does
Speaker 5: that happen? But it does happen. It happens then for
Speaker 5: anyone who's having an affair. It happens with con artists,
Speaker 5: it happens with a lot of different people who live
Speaker 5: double lives of some kind. I don't think they think
Speaker 5: about it as pretending. I think they just think they
Speaker 5: have developed alternate life frames, and those alternate life frames
Speaker 5: are in motion when they're in specific situations. Raider could
Speaker 5: have been out driving around with his and he spots
Speaker 5: a young woman and decides he's going to come back
Speaker 5: to that neighborhood to see if he can figure out
Speaker 5: where she lives.
Speaker 10: That's exactly what Rader did next. In the weeks following
Speaker 10: the Otero murders, he decided he wanted to kill again
Speaker 10: and soon. Here are his words from Confession of a
Speaker 10: serial Killer, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13: I believe that by February or March the hunt begin again.
Speaker 13: I found it exciting to prowl at day or night.
Speaker 13: He was very easy for me to spend a little
Speaker 13: time after classes to prowl or day drive that area.
Speaker 13: Going to class worked well for me as a cover.
Speaker 13: I could say I was at the library or use
Speaker 13: that time to prowl or stalk.
Speaker 10: Rader was becoming restless. He started to pick out new projects.
Speaker 10: Projects are what he called the women he would Each
Speaker 10: of his projects following the Otaros were younger women spotted
Speaker 10: alone in the wild. Some of them had a family,
Speaker 10: but Raider had already proven he wasn't averse to taking
Speaker 10: the lives of children. Raider zeroed in on a young
Speaker 10: woman named Catherine Bright. She was a fellow student at
Speaker 10: Wichita State.
Speaker 13: So it was one day after classes or in between.
Speaker 13: I spotted Bright arriving home with a friend, another female,
Speaker 13: maybe a sister. She was at her mailbox. She fit
Speaker 13: my fantasy profile a co ed dishwasher, blonde small. I
Speaker 13: saw her go into the house, and I thought, that's
Speaker 13: a possibility. My heart raced as the hit came into focus.
Speaker 13: From that moment on, I locked in on that house.
Speaker 10: Next time on Monster BTK, he.
Speaker 6: Was constantly trying to trip the police up.
Speaker 13: I was planning on tying her up on the bed,
Speaker 13: either half naked or totally.
Speaker 4: This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly.
Speaker 4: He loses control of the situation. We had arrested a
Speaker 4: couple of brothers who admitted that they had killed the oteos.
Speaker 13: If I was doing the Otero's, this is how I
Speaker 13: would have done it.
Speaker 5: He considered himself to be among the elite serial killers,
Speaker 5: and so he named himself BTK.
Speaker 8: He enjoyed communicating with KKTV. KKTV was his favorite station.
Speaker 8: He had watched it since he was a child.
Speaker 13: I'd write this letter to you for the sake of
Speaker 13: the taxpayer as well as your time.
Speaker 2: Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and
Speaker 2: Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on
Speaker 2: behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay
Speaker 2: alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 2: iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Speaker 2: Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising Producerrima Ilkali. Marketing
Speaker 2: support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright at iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 2: and Caroline Origemma at tenderfoot TV. Auditional research by Claudia Daffrico.
Speaker 2: Original artwork by Kevin Mister soul Harp, original music by
Speaker 2: Makeup and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and
Speaker 2: the team at UTA and the Nord Group. Podcasts from
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.