Speaker 1: New episodes of Monster BTK are released every Monday and
Speaker 1: brought to you absolutely free. But if you want to
Speaker 1: hear the whole season right now, it's available ad free
Speaker 1: on iHeart True Crime Plus. For more information, check out
Speaker 1: the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 2: and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3: Delores Davis was reported missing on January nineteenth, nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 4: I remember my wife after the phone and I saw
Speaker 4: her come in. I can see her mouth the words,
Speaker 4: and I kind of waved her off and like, I
Speaker 4: don't have time for it. She said, it is just important.
Speaker 4: My name is Jeff Davis and I'm the son of
Speaker 4: Doloris Davis. So I picked up the phone and talked
Speaker 4: to my sister, and she's pretty ristals. She said that
Speaker 4: one of our cousins had called and they had been
Speaker 4: contacted by the Sriiff's office and had been told the
Speaker 4: mother's house had been broken into and the mother was missing.
Speaker 4: And I knew as an ext cop Fatman Hugh probably did.
Speaker 3: The body of Dolores Davis was found on February first,
Speaker 3: at the intersection of West one hundred and seventeenth Street
Speaker 3: North and North Meridian Street in Park City by a
Speaker 3: teenager named Nelson Shank. Again, police failed to connect it
Speaker 3: with BTK. With this murder, there were multiple opportunities where
Speaker 3: Raider could have been caught.
Speaker 5: With Deloris Davis. He wanted to do something different. He
Speaker 5: wanted to take her body and take it to a barn,
Speaker 5: but it was a foggy, snowy night, so he got
Speaker 5: lost and he had to finally just dump the body
Speaker 5: out under a bridge. So he comes back and he's
Speaker 5: in a change into the Boy Scout uniform stuff, and
Speaker 5: a cop comes along and they're checking people because they're
Speaker 5: looking for this missing woman. And the cop is supposed
Speaker 5: to check everybody. Had he checked Rader's car, he would
Speaker 5: have found things that would have been very suspicious. And
Speaker 5: Rader immediately started talking about, oh, you know, I'm a
Speaker 5: Boy Scout volunteer, you know this camp up here, and
Speaker 5: with the idea that no one would suspect somebody who
Speaker 5: volunteers with the Boy Scouts to be a nefarious killer.
Speaker 5: And he was right because the cop let him go.
Speaker 5: The cop did not do his job that night, because,
Speaker 5: of course, a nice guy like this isn't the kind
Speaker 5: of person I'm looking for. So stereotype and the expectation
Speaker 5: allowed Raider to be not caught.
Speaker 6: That night, someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 7: Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone
Speaker 7: lines had been cut, her door left open.
Speaker 8: You see the victim play in there with plastic bags
Speaker 8: over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a
Speaker 8: plan scenario.
Speaker 9: Well, police have said no more about the contents of
Speaker 9: the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and
Speaker 9: implies the killer may strike again.
Speaker 6: He's going to play with these victims.
Speaker 2: He'd get him to the point of death and then bring.
Speaker 6: Them back and then brings them back to the point
Speaker 6: of death.
Speaker 3: From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. I'm Susan Peters
Speaker 3: and this is Monster BTK. It was May of nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety one. Dennis Raider had gotten away with his tenth
Speaker 3: murder just four months earlier. A Raider could have used
Speaker 3: this success to keep killing, but instead he pulled back
Speaker 3: and got a job as a compliance officer for the
Speaker 3: city of Park City, a small suburb just outside of Wichita.
Speaker 3: This was a job that would keep Raider very busy.
Speaker 3: Here are his words from the book Confession of a
Speaker 3: Serial Killer.
Speaker 1: I revamped the program there instead of new animal control
Speaker 1: laws and enforced them and set up professional standards in training.
Speaker 1: I started code enforcement on junk cars, trashing the yard,
Speaker 1: unmowed grass, etc. The position became more professional throughout the years.
Speaker 3: This job earned Raider some unwelcome notoriety in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Here's Carrie Rawson, daughter of Dennis Raider.
Speaker 7: People in Park City, they knew him as a compliance officer,
Speaker 7: and there's stories of him getting a ruler and measuring
Speaker 7: their grass and being a hard knows about their animal
Speaker 7: being loose so that they didn't have the permit for
Speaker 7: their garage that they're building or their yard cell. I mean,
Speaker 7: he could be a total hard ass. We even had
Speaker 7: to change our phone number after you got that job
Speaker 7: because people were calling mad.
Speaker 10: I mean, there are people been liking, including people sometimes myself,
Speaker 10: because he could be abrasive.
Speaker 3: This is Bob Smiser, a Wichita native who personally knew
Speaker 3: Dennis Raider.
Speaker 10: If Dennis was nothing else, he was very very by
Speaker 10: the book, there was no gray, it was black and white,
Speaker 10: and he was very precise in how things were doing
Speaker 10: and if you worked with Nis, that's the way you
Speaker 10: did it. I'm not saying it was bad. I'm just
Speaker 10: saying that that's how he saw things. Was ABC.
Speaker 3: And Rader went to the same church, Christ Lutheran in
Speaker 3: Park City. Most of their interactions were normal, if not kurt,
Speaker 3: but there was one incident with Rader that had put
Speaker 3: Bob on edge.
Speaker 10: One of my older daughters lived in Park City in
Speaker 10: the house that her grandparents had lived in then the
Speaker 10: street from Dennis. But my daughter came to me and said, Dad,
Speaker 10: you know Dennis has showed up in our backyard a
Speaker 10: coup foers. And I said, really, well, are your dogs
Speaker 10: getting out? Is there something? No, No, we didn't have
Speaker 10: any problem with the dogs. Get out. We got that
Speaker 10: fixed up, she says, just creepy. I said, okay, And
Speaker 10: I happened to catch Dennis at church. I said, hey,
Speaker 10: what's up with my daughter and her husband? He asked
Speaker 10: me where they lived and I told him why. Well,
Speaker 10: she said, you know, you've showed up in the backyard
Speaker 10: a few times. Just found it a little creepy, just
Speaker 10: sort of wondering, Oh, it's their neighbor. I'm militia. The
Speaker 10: neighbor in the last couple of years and I've talked
Speaker 10: about it. She told me that her neighbor was single.
Speaker 3: A single woman, single, vulnerable women were Raiders bread and butter.
Speaker 3: From the middle of nineteen ninety one on, Raider used
Speaker 3: his compliance officer job as a way to stalk women.
Speaker 1: There were other pjs, PJ Tube, PJ Webb, PJ twin Peaks,
Speaker 1: PG Music, PJ Clip, and PJ Spider. This last one
Speaker 1: was a bee where I entered and waited, but no
Speaker 1: one came home. Most of these were in Park City
Speaker 1: area or north of Wichita. I was always on the prowl.
Speaker 5: It's a common thing in the true crime books that
Speaker 5: are written about Raider to say that he went dormant
Speaker 5: between nineteen ninety one and two thousand and four, and
Speaker 5: he says that's not true.
Speaker 3: Author and professor of forensic psychology Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 5: He gave me a list of fifty five different projects
Speaker 5: of women he had seen and stalked, and he had
Speaker 5: named them, he had their address, he had described them.
Speaker 5: He just broke in their house and they didn't come home,
Speaker 5: or there wasn't a good opportunity, you know. During his
Speaker 5: college years he could say I'm writing a paper at
Speaker 5: the library and then goes stalk someone without anyone suspecting anything.
Speaker 5: But once he was a father and husband and really
Speaker 5: had to have a schedule, it was much harder to do.
Speaker 5: But he did not go dormant. It's just that he
Speaker 5: didn't succeed, and he talks about it being like a fisherman.
Speaker 5: He goes out to fish and sometimes comes home empty handed.
Speaker 3: We don't know for sure if Rader killed again during
Speaker 3: this time period. It's possible, but nothing has ever been confirmed.
Speaker 3: If he did, in fact stop killing, it's the question
Speaker 3: why why would he stalk but never kill.
Speaker 5: I don't think it was anything like some moral idea
Speaker 5: like maybe I should be attending to my soul now
Speaker 5: or I don't think it was anything like that. I
Speaker 5: think it was bad timing. I don't think he had
Speaker 5: any reason to stop. I think he just didn't have
Speaker 5: the opportunities that he had had earlier, and he was
Speaker 5: feeling much less agile. His body strength wasn't what it
Speaker 5: had been. That put him at risk for getting caught
Speaker 5: if he had to jump out a window or something
Speaker 5: like that. So I think he was feeling kind of
Speaker 5: vulnerable and that maybe some of the things he had
Speaker 5: done earlier, he was not going to be able to
Speaker 5: pull them off.
Speaker 3: As the years passed, everyone in the Wichita area wondered
Speaker 3: what happened to BTK. Bob Smyser says that on more
Speaker 3: than one occasion he was with Raider when that very
Speaker 3: question was brought up.
Speaker 10: Every Sunday, monks in the North Exa this group of
Speaker 10: guys that we went fishing and did those things. We
Speaker 10: all got together and talked and BTK came up. Dennis
Speaker 10: was always really quiet. One of the guys said, you know,
Speaker 10: BTK must have been pretty smart, you know, and Dennis said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: he was. He thought, you know, I'm the smartest guy
Speaker 10: in the room and they're never going to catch me.
Speaker 3: It's likely that Raider did think he was the smartest
Speaker 3: guy in the room because he'd miraculously gotten away with
Speaker 3: murder over and over again. Police at this point thought
Speaker 3: BTK had either died or been arrested on other charges,
Speaker 3: when in reality, Raider was walking through people's yards and
Speaker 3: collecting items from their homes.
Speaker 7: He can't help himself. I guess sometimes my dad could
Speaker 7: be a dickhead or something growing up, but it's just
Speaker 7: It's like an iceberg, right, like you're only seeing the
Speaker 7: very tip of somebody with him, You're not seeing all
Speaker 7: this stuff underneath.
Speaker 3: We're pressing. Those feelings turned Raider into a pressure cooker
Speaker 3: ready to explode at any moment, and his family usually
Speaker 3: paid the price when he did. Carrie recalls the time
Speaker 3: when Rader got violent with her older brother Brian.
Speaker 7: In August of ninety six. It was a week before
Speaker 7: I was to go to Case statu as a freshman.
Speaker 7: My cousin, Michelle, she was killed in a g vaccinaw
Speaker 7: on my mom's side of the family. It was a
Speaker 7: really horrible accident. She was like a sister to me,
Speaker 7: and I was deeply grieving. All my family was and
Speaker 7: I come home after my first week of college. My
Speaker 7: mom had made manichotti for us after working all day
Speaker 7: and gone to all this trouble. My brother was still
Speaker 7: living at home in ninety six. For some reason, we
Speaker 7: got into a family fight. Now I'm sure grief spilled over.
Speaker 7: My dad's dad William at leukemia, So there's a lot
Speaker 7: of stress going on. We've got this old kitchen table
Speaker 7: and somebody pounds on the table. A metal leg comes out,
Speaker 7: and so all like the plates come crashing down on
Speaker 7: the floor. There's like Manicotti red sauce all over everywhere,
Speaker 7: and my dad is blaming my brother. And my dad
Speaker 7: snaps and he just lunges out of his chair at
Speaker 7: my brother. He starts strangling him from the front.
Speaker 3: These sorts of violent outbursts were not uncommon, and they
Speaker 3: were typically directed at Brian. In fact, a similar incident
Speaker 3: happened again just a few years later.
Speaker 7: Maybe around two thousand, two thousand and one. My dad
Speaker 7: went for my brother again, up against the utility closet
Speaker 7: in the kitchen where he stored everything. He pushed him
Speaker 7: against the same thing again with the hands, and after
Speaker 7: that my brother moved out. My Dad's done it twice,
Speaker 7: and we're not telling anybody. I don't know what do
Speaker 7: they tell domestic abuse victims. If they're strangling you, they're
Speaker 7: escalating and they're going to kill you eventually. There's literature
Speaker 7: about it. If they're strangling you, they're going to escalate,
Speaker 7: and you're gonna end up debt. Of course, I don't
Speaker 7: know that. I'm not even equating it to abuse.
Speaker 5: Then.
Speaker 7: I literally had had conversations with my mom. We would
Speaker 7: read something in the news, and she's like, why are
Speaker 7: these women staying with these guys? Why are these battered
Speaker 7: women not leaving? And we talked about it that we
Speaker 7: would always leave and we wouldn't do that. We were
Speaker 7: that family. I mean, there's sort of like this whole
Speaker 7: Midwestern thing, like you don't talk about your problems and
Speaker 7: you look like you have it together or everybody has problems,
Speaker 7: and so you're not special. But like mom and dad
Speaker 7: are firstborns, and we look a certain way, and we
Speaker 7: wear are nice clothes to church, our kids are well behaved,
Speaker 7: get together with our families.
Speaker 3: As time went by, Raider became less and less able
Speaker 3: to control his anger. As much as he tried to
Speaker 3: be a father at home, he was instead becoming more
Speaker 3: of a monster, and it only got worse as he
Speaker 3: got older. Raider's neuroses became more pronounced at home. Growing up,
Speaker 3: Carrie was made to feel paranoid and confused by her father.
Speaker 7: My dad was so ocd, it's so weird. He murdered
Speaker 7: two children, right, He murdered Josephinotaro and Joey O'taro. In
Speaker 7: seventy four, he murdered an eleven year old and a
Speaker 7: nine year old. Yet he became so overly protective, especially
Speaker 7: if me and my mom. He had dead bolts on
Speaker 7: our front door and our back door in the kitchen.
Speaker 7: It was almost like he was protecting us from him.
Speaker 7: But it's because he knew how bad people could be.
Speaker 7: He had that keen ability to read bad people. I
Speaker 7: know to stay clear.
Speaker 3: But Carrie knew none of that. To her, this was traumatizing.
Speaker 7: When I'm little, he's teaching me these things. You're not
Speaker 7: supposed to be telling kids about home invasions, right, And
Speaker 7: he's telling me like, well, the kitchen door isn't that
Speaker 7: great because the windows too big, and somebody can just
Speaker 7: punch out the glass and then they can reach in.
Speaker 7: But if it's dead bolton and the key's not in,
Speaker 7: then they can't get in. They got a leg jam
Speaker 7: the door.
Speaker 4: More.
Speaker 7: He's telling me when I'm little, don't open the door
Speaker 7: to strangers. Question them, make them show you like they're badger.
Speaker 7: They're telling you they're a cop or a maintenance man.
Speaker 7: Check their uniform because he literally used it.
Speaker 3: What he calls the roofs.
Speaker 7: He has and will break into homes with women home
Speaker 7: during the day taking care of children and murder these
Speaker 7: women in front of their children, and yet he is
Speaker 7: obsessive fleet trying to keep me safe.
Speaker 3: Reader would continue to train Carrie as she got older
Speaker 3: about how to look out for bad guys and to
Speaker 3: defend herself.
Speaker 7: This is mid nineties, around fifteen or sixteen. We're a
Speaker 7: twin Link shopping mall, not far from where Vicky Wurgily
Speaker 7: was murdered in eighty six. We're at Seers and he
Speaker 7: decides at that moment that there is a good time
Speaker 7: to teach me safety and security in a parking lot.
Speaker 7: He's physically showing me, Now, if a bad guy rushes you,
Speaker 7: you can knee him in the ball so you can
Speaker 7: poke their eyes out, or you can jab him with
Speaker 7: their elbow. He's literally showing me how to bite him off.
Speaker 7: He's like, you're going to start driving now, so when
Speaker 7: you're going to a dark heart night, check your back
Speaker 7: seat and make sure there's not somebody laying in your
Speaker 7: back seat, or check underneath your car, because somebody's skinny
Speaker 7: could be under there in the slice ankle. And he's
Speaker 7: showing me how to do the key as a woman
Speaker 7: on women know, you stick the key in between your
Speaker 7: hands and you can use it as a weapon. He's
Speaker 7: teaching me that when I'm fifteen.
Speaker 3: On the surface, there's nothing sinister about a father teaching
Speaker 3: his daughter self defense. For normal families, this wouldn't raise
Speaker 3: any red flags, and it didn't for raiders. But his
Speaker 3: self defense lessons weren't the only obscure clue to raiders
Speaker 3: dark secrets.
Speaker 7: My dad never bowled, but nobody questioned, Like this maroon
Speaker 7: in my bowling bag that was kept by our door,
Speaker 7: And of course you never looked at anything of dad's
Speaker 7: because it wouldn't make your life really uncomfortable and awful.
Speaker 2: Boys in there.
Speaker 7: It was his hic hit. We camped a lot, so
Speaker 7: we had tubs with rope and canvas tarps because he
Speaker 7: would build two shelters when we're camping, and he would
Speaker 7: store this stuff, so it wasn't unusual to have these
Speaker 7: things in your house. And you don't go snooping in
Speaker 7: dad's stuff.
Speaker 3: Carrie says it's when she thinks back to her father's hobbies,
Speaker 3: many of which were likely covers for his murderous activities.
Speaker 7: I used to go to the hardware store with my
Speaker 7: dad when I was the kid. He built this massive
Speaker 7: treehouse that was one of his projects he threw himself
Speaker 7: into after gardening. I found out later he would get
Speaker 7: supplies for his hit kits while he was at the
Speaker 7: lumber store, probably with me. I used to share cryptograms
Speaker 7: with my dad. He taught me how to do him.
Speaker 7: That was another thing I shared with my dad.
Speaker 3: As the years passed, Raider's children got fed up with
Speaker 3: his controlling behavior, they got older, and both eventually moved out,
Speaker 3: but Carrie says she never forgot about her father's defensive
Speaker 3: training or the paranoia that came with it.
Speaker 7: In two thousand and one, I'm up at k State.
Speaker 7: I've been in the dorms for five years. I'm ready
Speaker 7: to have my own apartment. I call my dad. I said,
Speaker 7: I've I find this little apartment on the corner in Manhattan.
Speaker 7: It's a one bedroom. I want to live by myself.
Speaker 7: And I said, the problem is the only door is
Speaker 7: a patio door. Now I'm upstairs, but the door's pretty flimsy.
Speaker 7: The lock is really flimsy, and I don't have any
Speaker 7: way to get out if there's a fire somebody gets
Speaker 7: in my home. He said, well, are there any other windows?
Speaker 7: And I said, yeah, in the bedroom upstairs, if I
Speaker 7: had to, I could jump out of that in a fire.
Speaker 7: He said, well, tell me about the location. I said, well,
Speaker 7: it's on a busy corner. It's across from a pizza
Speaker 7: hut and a Dylan's. I said, it's well lit, it's active.
Speaker 7: And he said, no, you're fine, you're safe. No one's
Speaker 7: going to mess with you there on that corner. He said,
Speaker 7: go ahead and rent it, and when I come up,
Speaker 7: I'll rig something up to secure your door. So he
Speaker 7: took a broom and he took the broom part off
Speaker 7: of the handle, and he wedged the handle in the
Speaker 7: door for me, so that every night when I went
Speaker 7: into my apartment, I would wedge it so that even
Speaker 7: if somebody broke my flimsy lock, they couldn't open the door.
Speaker 3: This story really struck me. It sounded odd that Rader
Speaker 3: would tell his daughter that no one would mess with
Speaker 3: her on a busy corner when he himself had committed
Speaker 3: murders in broad daylight on busy streets. In my visits
Speaker 3: to the victims' homes, I was often shocked by how
Speaker 3: public the properties were. But yet again, Raider's mind doesn't
Speaker 3: work like the rest of us. When Carrie and Brian
Speaker 3: moved out of the house. Dennis invested more time and
Speaker 3: responsibility at Christ Lutheran Church. This is where he and
Speaker 3: Bob Smiser got to really know each other.
Speaker 10: I think that for him in the church that it
Speaker 10: may have been repentance. He was trying to figure it out.
Speaker 10: I've stood at the front of the church with him
Speaker 10: when we had communion and it was just him and
Speaker 10: I in front of Pastor Clark. You know, you say
Speaker 10: a little and I always had to wait for Dennis.
Speaker 10: I mean, he was always a little longer at it.
Speaker 10: Now was that show? I don't know.
Speaker 3: Bob says that Dennis always seemed like a loner. They
Speaker 3: rarely talked about anything important.
Speaker 10: Dennis and I were never best friends, but I don't
Speaker 10: nobody had one. He always felt like he was a
Speaker 10: little bit guarded. He did help my mother. I had
Speaker 10: a fire at ninety five out here on West Central
Speaker 10: in the apartment she was living in id bet Her
Speaker 10: had a fire. She had bunch smoke, damaged, water damage
Speaker 10: and called Dennis, and Dennis went out and helped halt
Speaker 10: her stuff open to my cousin's house.
Speaker 3: Bob never imagined that this man had a twisted dark side.
Speaker 10: I had not seen that component of Dennis. Yeah, I
Speaker 10: hadn't seen that component.
Speaker 3: Neither did Pastor Michael Clark, who had a close relationship
Speaker 3: with Dennis. In fact, Clark relied on Dennis for chor
Speaker 3: around the church.
Speaker 10: If when the acolytes hadn't got there and the candles
Speaker 10: didn't get lift, he always had always turn to Dennis
Speaker 10: and say Dennis, and Dennis would do that. Their relationship
Speaker 10: was good, and he was somebody kicked to Bendo.
Speaker 3: Looking back, Bob never would have expected that raider was BTK,
Speaker 3: but he felt that something big was going to happen
Speaker 3: regarding the mysterious BTK killer.
Speaker 1: And soon.
Speaker 10: I just got this feelding, I want to know this guy.
Speaker 3: In two thousand and four, Bob's premonition would begin to
Speaker 3: take shape. That year was the thirtieth anniversary of the
Speaker 3: Otaro killings, the first BTK murder. It's pretty common for
Speaker 3: news outlets to program anniversary retrospectives for big events. In
Speaker 3: the case of unsolved murders, where there's been no justice
Speaker 3: for the victims or their families, there's an added goal
Speaker 3: of potentially generating new leads, and that's what happened in Wichita.
Speaker 7: The Wichita Egle ran an anniversary piece and there was
Speaker 7: a show on the Otto murders on the thirtieth anniversary
Speaker 7: that ran in like January two thousand and four, and
Speaker 7: that's supposedly woke my dad up. He said that he
Speaker 7: was kind of bored. The kids were grown, we were safe,
Speaker 7: we were out of the house. He had raised us well.
Speaker 7: Nobody remembered BTK, and he wanted to terrorize the community again.
Speaker 3: On January seventeenth, two thousand and four, the Wichita Eagle
Speaker 3: newspaper ran an article titled BTK Case Unsolved thirty years later.
Speaker 3: Here is an excerpt.
Speaker 11: It was a routine followed by thousands of wichital women
Speaker 11: in the late nineteen seventies. Upon arriving home, checked the
Speaker 11: phone immediately. If the line is dead, get out. What
Speaker 11: made the case frightenedly different for city residents was the
Speaker 11: fact that the killer sent several taunting letters about the
Speaker 11: crimes to local media.
Speaker 3: The article, written by reporter Herschelaviana, was a complete retrospective
Speaker 3: on Btk's many terrible deeds. Dennis saw the article. To him,
Speaker 3: it was a resume of his many accomplishments. Part of
Speaker 3: the article features Robert Beatty, who wrote a book about
Speaker 3: the hunt for BTK. In it, Baty said that he
Speaker 3: did not think BTK would ever return. Dennis took that
Speaker 3: as a challenge.
Speaker 10: We went on a fishing trip every year the guys
Speaker 10: do and Dennison never went with us. In two thousand
Speaker 10: and four we asked him again. Dennis said nah, He said,
Speaker 10: I can't. I can't come along this year. I got
Speaker 10: some projects I'm working on.
Speaker 12: Eight minutes past now. In decades after a serial killer
Speaker 12: terrorized Wichita, Kansas cops say the case that was once
Speaker 12: cold may be warm yet again. In his letters to
Speaker 12: media organizations, the killer used the initials BTK, standing for bind,
Speaker 12: torture and kill. They never caught that guy, and twenty
Speaker 12: five years of silence have followed, and today a Wichita
Speaker 12: paper says it received another letter claiming responsibility for an
Speaker 12: eighth victim who was killed in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: On March nineteenth, two thousand and four, the Wichita Eagle
Speaker 3: received a new letter from someone claiming to be BTK.
Speaker 13: The newspaper received that letter including photographs of the dead
Speaker 13: woman's body as well as her driver's license as proof
Speaker 13: that this was in fact BTK. Now he is also
Speaker 13: claiming that she is victim number eight. He is not
Speaker 13: just responsible for killing seven people. Now, the victim number
Speaker 13: eight is Vicky Wagery. She was strangled back in nineteen
Speaker 13: eighty six, but her case had never been solved over
Speaker 13: all these years, nor had it been connected to BTK. BTK,
Speaker 13: he is sadistic, he is psychopathic, and investigators worry about
Speaker 13: why he is suddenly making public contact.
Speaker 8: That letter was from Bill Thomas Killman, so BTK. It
Speaker 8: had three polaroids of Vicky Wagery and it had her
Speaker 8: driver's license. My name is Kevin O'Connor. I was the
Speaker 8: deputy District attorney in wich Daw Sedgwa County, Kansas during
Speaker 8: the Dennis Raider investigation. The experts on that say that
Speaker 8: that is him potentially giving up a momento. The polaroids
Speaker 8: were significant because missus Wager was in very bad condition
Speaker 8: when the medics found her, so they removed her and
Speaker 8: took her to the hospital to try to save her.
Speaker 8: So there were no crime scene photos of her, and
Speaker 8: so this had to be the killer or somebody who
Speaker 8: had come across or had access to the killer's stash.
Speaker 3: Before now, authorities had no idea that Vicky Weggerley was
Speaker 3: connected to BTK. In exchange for his name in the paper,
Speaker 3: Raider was willing to give up his trophies. He wanted
Speaker 3: to start up a new cap'n Mouse game, so along
Speaker 3: with the polaroids and driver's license, he sent along a cipher.
Speaker 1: I had kept photos of missus Weggerley in my dark
Speaker 1: green box in my Heidi hole in the false bottom
Speaker 1: drawer of the cabinet. The code I placed on top
Speaker 1: was a German fractional. Very simple. You line up the
Speaker 1: alphabet in columns and put your code word in the
Speaker 1: first line. It was a message to the author lit
Speaker 1: beads for his book.
Speaker 3: After years of hiding, BTK was back. Rayder loved the
Speaker 3: attention he was getting in the news, and he wanted more.
Speaker 3: He felt it was time to re emerge and claim
Speaker 3: his credit.
Speaker 1: With thirty years of material and growing older each year,
Speaker 1: I knew I needed to get it out of the house.
Speaker 1: I had for many years wanted to take my secret murders, clippings, drawings,
Speaker 1: and stories and put them in a book or story format.
Speaker 1: My BTK years as a young serial killer were done.
Speaker 3: The Eagle ran its story on btk's return on March
Speaker 3: twenty fifth, two thousand and four. Here is an excerpt.
Speaker 11: A serial killer who terrorized Wichita during the nineteen seventies
Speaker 11: by committing a series of seven murders has claimed responsibility
Speaker 11: for an eighth slave and is now probably living in Wichita,
Speaker 11: police said Wednesday. The photographs appear to be authentic, said
Speaker 11: Lieutenant Ken Landware. I'm one hundred percent sure it's BTK.
Speaker 3: Of course. At KKTV we also reported on this letter
Speaker 3: sent to the Eagle this morning.
Speaker 14: We have more information on the letter sent to the
Speaker 14: Wichita Eagle by the BTK killer. Even thirty years after
Speaker 14: btk's first known murders, investigators are still working the case.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 14: Police believe BTK is alive and living in Wichita. Btk's
Speaker 14: trademark writing letters to the paper and KKTV detailing his
Speaker 14: murders and taunting police.
Speaker 3: The last known letter.
Speaker 14: Linked to BTK was received in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 3: What we didn't anticipate was that very soon we'd be
Speaker 3: roped into it ourselves again. Less than two months later,
Speaker 3: on May fourth, two thousand and four, another letter appeared,
Speaker 3: this time at k TV and in an envelope from
Speaker 3: a Thomas B. Kingman.
Speaker 15: It read the BTK story One, A serial Killer is Born,
Speaker 15: two Dawn three, Fetish four, Fantasy World five, The Search Begins, six,
Speaker 15: Btk's Haunts, seven PJS, eight, mo id Ruse, nine Hits, ten,
Speaker 15: Treasured Memories, eleven, Final Curtain Call, twelve, Dusk thirteen Will
Speaker 15: there be More?
Speaker 3: This was an outline for a thirteen chapter book about BTK,
Speaker 3: told by him and him alone. The letter also included
Speaker 3: a word puzzle, a blacked out ID card, and a
Speaker 3: special office first badge for Rader. Sending the letter to
Speaker 3: KKE was an obvious choice.
Speaker 1: KKE TV was my favorite media spot for me. They
Speaker 1: seemed to cover the BTK case very well.
Speaker 6: It's a very odd feeling to go to work every
Speaker 6: day and know that you have to feed the national media,
Speaker 6: you have to feed the local media.
Speaker 3: This is Larry Hadiberg, my dear friend and former colleague
Speaker 3: at CAKE. Larry and I would lead every single newscast
Speaker 3: with the latest information on BTK. We felt like it
Speaker 3: was our responsibility to tell people everything we could about BTK.
Speaker 6: This was an odd time in my journalism history. Susan
Speaker 6: and I were in it together and Jeff and several
Speaker 6: of the other reporters who worked very hard on this,
Speaker 6: and we had to cover each other's But because we
Speaker 6: didn't know where it was going, we didn't know how
Speaker 6: it was going to end.
Speaker 3: Deep down, everyone at CAKE was scared. It was a
Speaker 3: time when we had to look out for each other.
Speaker 3: We had no idea if BTK would one day just
Speaker 3: walk through the station doors.
Speaker 6: One night when we were walking out of CAKE, it
Speaker 6: was quarter eleven or so, and we get just past
Speaker 6: the concrete stepping into the thing, and a bicyclist is
Speaker 6: down at the end of our driveway and he comes
Speaker 6: at us seemed like one hundred miles an hour, and
Speaker 6: I thought we're in trouble. I didn't know who that
Speaker 6: guy was, and he's coming at us one hundred miles
Speaker 6: an hour on that bicycle pulls up in front of us,
Speaker 6: and I thought we're going to shot stab something, and
Speaker 6: he was just a viewer.
Speaker 3: Fear was a dominant emotion for us all the line
Speaker 3: will there be More at the end of Btk's letter,
Speaker 3: in particular, would haunt everyone at k TV and across Wichita.
Speaker 2: I would go to the.
Speaker 3: Grocery store and BTK was all that people would talk about.
Speaker 3: Enrollment and self defense classes went way up, and people
Speaker 3: started locking their doors again. We all reverted back to
Speaker 3: the habits of the seventies. After over twenty years of peace,
Speaker 3: Wichita was once again in a panic. Here's Bob Smeiser.
Speaker 10: When that first letter came out, some of our neighbors,
Speaker 10: some of the kids were just petrified. A lot of
Speaker 10: people didn't know about the seventies. There's a lot of
Speaker 10: younger people just didn't know. I think that most people
Speaker 10: thought he was dead. To be real honest with.
Speaker 3: You, the day after we received btk's letter at Cake News,
Speaker 3: the police went on air to ask for tip.
Speaker 16: Based on the information contained in this letter. We're again
Speaker 16: asking for help from the public. We want to talk
Speaker 16: to any citizen who he calls a man seeking access
Speaker 16: to their resident by presenting identification as the employee of
Speaker 16: a school or a utility company.
Speaker 3: Kevin O'Connor says it became an all hands on deck
Speaker 3: effort to find BTK. Everyone from local police, to state
Speaker 3: police to federal authorities were called in. O'Connor was one
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 8: It was very strange and difficult time for my family.
Speaker 8: I couldn't tell my wife. I mean it was news,
Speaker 8: there was reporting on it now. But my particular role
Speaker 8: is I couldn't tell anybody, so I might be having
Speaker 8: dinner or something and get a call and go, I
Speaker 8: gotta go. We had Witchtop Police, we had the Sheriff's apartment,
Speaker 8: we had FBI personnel, we had Kansas Bureau Investigation that
Speaker 8: helped out. We even had law enforcement from the United
Speaker 8: States Postal Service. Everybody worked together. It was a beautiful
Speaker 8: thing to see, really about how all the different agencies
Speaker 8: focused on finding the right person rather than worrying about
Speaker 8: who got credit.
Speaker 3: None of us knew how long this would go on.
Speaker 3: As it turns out, this was just the beginning.
Speaker 1: This was my fantasy. The cat and mouse game gave
Speaker 1: me an adrenaline rush or a high. It also set
Speaker 1: a stage for the police to know that a serious
Speaker 1: minotaur was in their midst. I've spotted a female that
Speaker 1: I think lives alone. Just got to work out the details.
Speaker 1: I'm back.
Speaker 3: Next time on Monster BTK.
Speaker 9: This is the strongest warning and yet police have issued
Speaker 9: for widgetants to watch out and take extra precautions after
Speaker 9: a letter was found at the widgeta public library early
Speaker 9: Saturday morning.
Speaker 8: They opened it up and it was a doll purported
Speaker 8: to be Nancy Fox and a description of the Nancy
Speaker 8: Fox murder.
Speaker 17: We had one instance in which a news director started
Speaker 17: to withhold one of the postcards and try to trade
Speaker 17: it for an interview with the police chief.
Speaker 7: They got a subpoena and they got a warrant without
Speaker 7: my knowledge, and they went to case date.
Speaker 8: And so the plans were made, search warrants were drawn
Speaker 8: in advance, and then that was the time to make
Speaker 8: an arrest.
Speaker 2: Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: The show is written by Noames Griffin, Trevor Young, and
Speaker 2: Jesse Funk is Susan Peters. Executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 2: Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, alongside supervising
Speaker 2: producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 2: include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers Nomes Griffin
Speaker 2: and Jesse Funk and supervising Producerrima Ilkali. Marketing support by
Speaker 2: David Wasserman and Alison Wright at iHeart Podcasts and Caroline
Speaker 2: Origemma at tenderfoot TV. Auditional research by Claudia Dafrico, original
Speaker 2: artwork by Kevin Mister Soul Harp, original music by Makeup
Speaker 2: and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the
Speaker 2: team at UTA and the Nord Group. For more podcasts
Speaker 2: from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.