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[quiet, ominous music fades in]
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[dramatic note plays]
[woman] February of 2005. I will never forget that day.
I was 26, and I was so sick of the snow and the ice in Michigan.
I was substitute teaching.
I didn't like driving in the snow, so I'd stayed home.
Like around noon, I'm just kind of waking up,
and I looked outside my blinds,
and there's this odd car parked behind the apartment.
And it wouldn't leave.
All of a sudden, there was a knock at my door.
[knocking echoes]
Dad had ingrained in me "stranger danger."
Make them prove to you who they are.
[door opens]
And so I cracked the door, and I put my foot in it.
I'm like, "Well, maybe I can stop him from coming in."
He's like, "I need to question you."
So I'm like, "What is going on?"
He's like, "Have you heard of BTK?"
[intense music playing]
An individual who has the uncontrollable desire to kill.
[anchor] A community in shock over the arrest
of the suspected so-called BTK killer.
[man] BTK. Bind, torture, and kill.
And then he goes, "Your dad is BTK."
-[anchor 1] Dennis Rader. -[anchor 2] Dennis Rader.
[man] Dennis L. Rader.
[reporter 1] 59 years old, Rader is married with two children.
He was an active member of Christ Lutheran Church, a Scout leader,
and worked for the suburban community of Park City as a compliance officer.
[reporter 2] The seemingly ordinary family man who's accused of killing
at least ten people over the last three decades.
[reporter 3] For years, police in Wichita, Kansas, say Dennis Rader lived and killed
among his friends and neighbors.
He was doing all the things that every other dad was doing.
A sexual sadist.
To kill was the thrill.
Can you imagine finding out that your father
is one of the most evil people on Earth?
[woman] I don't know who my father is, what he was hiding.
Was he using my family to hide?
Was he using us that whole time?
It's hard to know who I am if every moment in my life was a lie.
[somber music playing]
[woman] I would have sworn a year ago
that my father had just murdered ten people.
I'd been told from the get-go by the FBI, the detectives,
"Oh, just the ten. Just the ten. It was just the ten."
We've got a possible twist in the case involving the notorious BTK killer.
[reporter 2] This morning, authorities say the notorious BTK killer
who terrorized people in Kansas during the 1970s
could be linked to two more unsolved cases in other states.
And I was like, "What is going on?"
And the next thing I know,
the police called me to talk about it.
I know him better than anyone probably in the world.
Investigators can go in with all their knowledge and all their evidence,
but I'm the one that can, like, crack his codes and crack him.
If my father has committed more murders,
it's important to know,
because it gives answers to the families that have been waiting for decades.
Those families deserve answers, and the truth is the truth.
But the counterargument is… like, my life has value too,
and to what level do I sacrifice?
And what level do I put myself through trauma to try to help?
[intriguing music playing]
My father was arrested in '05, and I was 26.
We had everybody from Oprah to Larry King trying to interview us, Diane Sawyer,
and my family just said no.
So we had declined everything.
I'm checking all the boxes right. I'm cooking, I'm raising kids,
stay-at-home mom, leading women's ministry.
You would say, "Hey, she's doing great."
But the truth was that I was dying inside. They just didn't know I was hiding.
I spent almost ten years rotting inside after he was arrested,
not being able to speak, not thinking I was allowed to speak, you know,
the Midwest code, you don't ever air your dirty laundry publicly.
You just keep it inside, and you look appropriate on the outside.
That's how I was raised.
And then in September of '14, I was headed to bed,
and Darian, my husband at the time,
he goes, "Hey, Stephen King was on, like, a morning TV show."
"He was talking about your parents
because he wrote a short story and made a movie called The Good Marriage."
-Tell us about this. I mean, Dennis Rader… -[King] Mm-hmm.
…the guy who's this real-life sort of model.
He was a prototype for, uh, the guy in my… in my story,
and, uh, he murdered ten people, two of them were children,
and he had a long marriage, two kids of his own, and his wife said,
after he was caught,
uh, that she… she never knew.
And I'm sitting up in bed, I'm upset, I'm crying, I'm out of the bed,
walking back and forth, you know, just really upset.
Like, even upset at my husband and upset at Stephen King and just, like,
wishing none of this was happening.
I had been silent for so long,
and there was so much stuff that needed to come out.
My first interview ever, you know, I just spilled my guts for, like, 40 minutes
about who I was… who my dad was…
my mom, my life married, what the last ten years have been like.
And I was headline news, like, by that night,
and then international news by the next day.
[man] Kerri, thank you for taking some time to come on the program.
Thank you for having me.
When the FBI agent notified me, I was, like, holding onto the wall.
Everything I cared for was gone.
I was killing myself internalizing this and not talking about it.
I wasn't thinking it was that big of a deal.
I wasn't watching my mouth.
I had upset a lot of people with the words just… coming out of me.
And I just was, like, upset that
he had decided to use our… my parents for inspiration.
I'm going to always love my dad. I mean, he's my dad.
But I hadn't really gotten into
what my father had done as BTK. I hadn't gone into the crimes.
And I was in therapy, and it was getting all really mixed up.
Was he using my family to hide? Did he really love my mom?
Did he really love us, or was he using us that whole time?
I kind of went and grabbed everything and researched my own life
and researched my dad's life to be able to talk about it.
It was all just a big, jumbled mess.
[disturbing music playing]
[police siren wailing]
In 1974, my dad destroyed four members of a seven-member family.
A few months before that, he had been laid off from Cessna.
And he really liked that job.
And so he said when he got laid off in the fall of 1973, he got depressed.
And moody and bored.
And he said, you know, "Idle hands make for devil's work."
And he started thinking about bad things and putting those into action.
[Richard LaMunyon] In 1974, I was a bureau captain
for the Wichita Police Department.
Our police chief retired, and there was a nationwide search
for a new police chief.
And I thought, "Well, what the heck. I think I'll put in for it."
"I won't get it, but I'll put in for it."
[suspenseful music playing]
I think there was 110 applicants or something.
I ended up with the job.
[Larry Hatteberg] Wichita was a very calm, Midwestern city.
People go about their business.
And Wichita, at that time,
you didn't lock your doors, you didn't lock your car.
It was just a very calm, wonderful place to live.
[LaMunyon] Some of the things that I did when I first became the chief,
there were some major cases that were going on that had happened in the past.
Of course, when I became chief,
the possibility of a serial killer didn't enter my mind.
-[indistinct chatter on police radio] -[sirens wailing]
[reporter] The bodies of Joseph Otero, his wife Julie, their daughter Josephine,
and their son Joseph II were discovered in their East Wichita home.
[Hatteberg] In 1974, I was just a photojournalist at KAKE Television,
and I was sent to a house.
We knew that there had been a homicide there.
We didn't know how many. We didn't have details on it.
I noticed that nobody was talking.
The detectives had clammed up.
[LaMunyon] Older boy, Charlie, was coming home from school,
and he walked in and found this horrendous scene.
His parents murdered, his brother and sister murdered,
and he completely lost it.
He tried to untie them,
and then he ran next door to seek help.
Traumatic… for him. It would have been for anyone.
[man] This is a very bizarre case for this area of the country.
I think it's the worst one that I've seen
in the 30 years that I've been involved in homicide work.
And we're not going to give up on it.
It was just a horrible, terrible murder.
How could anybody… anybody kill a child?
That didn't happen here.
[sirens, police radio chatter]
[LaMunyon] I was briefed in the Otero case
from the command staff in investigations.
The direction that they were taking was that because of the nature of the crime,
they thought it was some kind of a revenge crime,
or perhaps some kind of a drug-related thing.
But then again, the other investigators were looking at the sexual aspect of it.
Keep in mind, there's not just one or two investigators on this.
There are several, and they're going in several different directions
to try to solve this thing.
[turn signal clicking]
[Rawson sighs dejectedly]
It's depressing to see Wichita just run down in places.
You know, like it's just… It's always been run down in places,
but it's just depressing as hell.
It is not pleasant to go to Wichita.
I mean, it is high levels of PTSD.
Something will instantly hit me, and I'll go…
I will… go into trauma world.
I totally forgot that I used to hike, ride bikes,
and, um, hike along this ditch with Dad.
Dad taught me the back roads,
and how to drive those instead of the highway.
He actually had more patience and was calmer and cooler about it than my mom.
My mom would, like, freak out.
He was pretty fun to hang out with, because he would let you, like,
do what you wanted, and get into trouble,
and get dirty, and he didn't care.
This is Christ Lutheran Church, here at 53rd and Hillside.
Mom and Dad met at church in August of '70.
It was like love at first sight for both of them.
And they got married, like, nine months later.
Probably my earliest memories are when I was, like, two or three.
My house was a three-bedroom house. We had a big garden growing up.
Dad built us this massive treehouse on stilts.
We used to camp out in the treehouse.
We helped with yard work. He taught me how to garden,
how to plant flowers.
He took me to the hardware store
every Saturday to get stuff when we were building the treehouse.
My dad never treated me like a girl.
He treated me like a tomboy and let me do whatever he was doing.
So as soon as I was walking, I was right there by him.
[Andrea Rogers] Kerri and I are the same age,
so we went through school together.
She was from the same neighborhood.
So we did Halloweens together. We did soccer team together.
We did everything.
It was a very small community, small town, so you knew everybody.
Growing up with the Raders, they were like every other family.
I mean, he did all the things that all the dads did.
We called him the dogcatcher of Park City.
[pensive music playing]
[Rader] We've been tracking 'em down.
The dogs are somewhat territorial as well as vicious,
and we've been trying to round them up and corral them as best as we can,
working with the reporting parties of where the sheep were killed.
[Rogers] He didn't just do dog catching.
He also did, like, violations for if your weeds are too high or whatever.
If somebody got a violation in Park City, we would always make a joke like, "Oh,
Dennis had his little ruler out again."
[Rawson] My father, on the outside,
looked like a very well-behaved, mild-mannered man.
But there's these moments of Dad.
Something will trigger him, and he can flip on a dime,
and it can be dangerous.
And as a kid, you just knew,
"I better not have my shoes out because I'm gonna get yelled at about my shoes."
So you just knew not to sit in Dad's chair at the kitchen table.
You knew to let him get lunch first.
You let him choose what activities you were gonna do,
what movies, where you were going…
Like, a lot of control, right?
And now you realize, like, who my father is, what he was hiding…
-[intriguing music playing] -[traffic passing]
[typing, office chatter]
[Bill Hirschman] The Wichita Eagle was a daily newspaper.
We had about 125 people working in the newsroom.
That would include photojournalists, that would include
sports, business, whatever.
Virtually everybody.
It was exciting.
Otero was talked about for a long time, because
you didn't have four people killed, including children, before.
I should point out that there's a lot of stuff about this
that wasn't known until later.
The police would say, "This was vicious,"
or "This is what they did," or "They tied this one up."
But there's so much that was not known.
We knew it was horrible, but we didn't know how horrible.
[LaMunyon] We had to keep certain things in the investigation secret.
In other words, we didn't want the community to know some of the details.
And then, in October of '74,
the department arrested the Sebring brothers.
These guys were pedophiles, is what they were.
They admitted, once they got in, that they had killed the Otero family.
Well, of course, this was major news,
and it was drawing a lot of attention from the news media.
And that prompted the letter.
[dramatic music playing]
[Hatteberg] The Wichita Eagle gets this letter.
Someone came forward and says, "Hey."
"The three guys in jail you have didn't do it."
"And the reason I know is…"
Basically, "I did it."
[LaMunyon] The details that were depicted in that
clearly indicated
that the person that wrote the letter was the person that committed the crime.
At the time, he was seeking identity.
The letter said, and I quote,
"I write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer, as well as your time."
"Those three dudes you have in custody,
they know nothing at all. I did it all by myself."
And then he starts to talk about each person he killed.
"Bondage, hand-tied with blind cord."
"Feet and lower knees, upper knees, and waist with a clothesline cord,
all one length."
"Death, strangulation."
The police department had to have cold chills
because they have pictures of what it was like.
He's describing it totally, 100% accurately.
He added a PS to his note.
"PS. Since sex criminals do not change their MO or by nature cannot do so,
I will not change mine."
"The code words for me will be
bind them, torture them, kill them."
"B.T.K. You'll see he's at it again."
"They will be on the next victim."
[music intensifies]
Of course, keep in mind you're not dealing with a, quote, "normal" criminal.
You're dealing with a person who is perverted, a person that is sick.
And with all probability, assuming that the person is still alive,
that person is gonna kill again.
We had profilers from the FBI that was providing us information.
And what we were being told was, "If he's not killing here,
he's killing someone else… somewhere else."
And so we put out an alert to other departments
and we sent detectives to several different places
to see if we had some kind of a killer that was hitting other places.
And we could never put those together at all.
And our conclusion was that the reason we couldn't find this individual
is that he's one of us.
[indistinct chatter on radio]
Now we have someone, locally, that we need to concentrate on
and we need to identify.
Shirley Vian was a single mother.
She had three children.
She was home ill at the time and was not feeling well.
So Shirley had sent her six-year-old out to the store.
And then on his way back, he's confronted with this man
with a briefcase,
and a discussion between them took place.
And as a result of that discussion, whatever that was,
the man gained entry into the house.
The assailant locks the three children in the bathroom.
They recognized that he's doing something terrible to their mother.
So as a result of that, they're able to escape
through the window of the bathroom
in order to scream and seek for help.
Once the assailant ran out of the house,
the kids go back in and, of course, they find their mother dead on the bed.
[somber music playing]
[indistinct chatter over police radio]
When this case came in, the investigators informed me
that after viewing the scene, that they believed
that this could be connected to the Otero case
because of the way the scene was left.
[man] Twenty-six-year-old Shirley Vian was found with a plastic bag over her head
and a cord looped around her neck.
Her children, who were locked in a bathroom, told police
the attacker was a dark-haired man in his late thirties or forties.
At the time, it was decided not to make a direct correlation between them
until it could be determined for sure.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man on phone] You will find a homicide at… [static] …South Pershing.
Nancy Fox.
[operator] 43 South Pershing?
[man] That is correct.
[reporter] 25-year-old Nancy Jo Fox
was found dead in her Pershing Street apartment.
She had been bound and strangled.
The slaying was reported by a man in a phone booth.
Police theorized the caller was the murderer.
[announcer] If you recognize that voice, call 268-4156.
[LaMunyon] With the Nancy Fox case, the phone line had been cut,
similar to the Otero case.
Based on the evidence that we had, it was clear in our mind, at that point,
that the Otero case, the Shirley Vian case,
and the Nancy Fox case
were a result of the same individual.
And that set the investigation off
for a serial killer.
[gloomy music playing]
[LaMunyon] On February 10th, 1978,
I received a call from Larry Hatteberg asking me to come over
and look at a letter that they'd received at KAKE Television.
[Hatteberg] The receptionist who sorted our mail
found this letter from BTK.
And she brought it back into the newsroom and she handed it to me.
I opened it, I looked at it,
and I thought, "Oh my God, here we go."
We confront the chief of police.
We say, "We've got this letter."
"And here's the letter."
"In return, we would like you to come and be on our newscast tonight."
And I thought he was going to say no.
And he called in the chief of detectives.
They conversed for about 20 minutes.
And then they come out, and he says,
"Okay, I will be on your newscast tonight."
With us right now is Chief of Police Richard LaMunyon.
I have a couple of questions, Chief.
How can you be sure that the BTK letter is authentic?
There's absolutely no question that the only person
who would have the type of information that was included in the letter
would have to be the killer himself.
[anchor] BTK began today's letter with a question.
"How many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper
or some national attention?"
BTK claims to have strangled a total of seven women.
He provided a list of his victims, beginning with the number five,
where he wrote, "You guess the motive and the victim."
This was the first time that anyone outside the police department
was made aware that there was a connection
between the Otero murders, the Vian murder, and the Fox murders,
and a seventh murder that hadn't been identified.
[LaMunyon] We have an obligation to the community
to figure out who this new victim was.
Any way that we could keep him communicating with us,
hopefully, would give us the opportunity to put together
enough evidence to get some answers and find out who this individual was.
[Hatteberg] I always felt that Richard LaMunyon
was the finest police chief that Wichita had ever had.
Richard LaMunyon was one of those police chiefs who,
when he got on a mission to find a criminal, he didn't let go.
He was like a dog, and he had the information in his teeth,
and he wasn't gonna let anybody else derail him from his mission.
[anchor] This morning, Police Chief Richard LaMunyon
met with detectives working on the case.
Police frankly admit that they have lots of tips to check,
but nothing to indicate a major break in the case.
Tonight, LaMunyon will gather with a group of experts to study
all the available evidence in the investigation.
[man] In the letter to KAKE, BTK talked about killing seven people,
but he did not name one of his victims.
There have been many unsolved homicides over the years,
and police aren't sure who the seventh BTK victim was.
Several sources in the department, however, think it was Kathryn Bright.
[LaMunyon] In April 1978,
a man named Kevin Bright
was shot in the head, and ran outside,
yelling that there was a man in the house
that had shot him, and that his sister, Kathryn, was in there,
and that he had come in to rob them.
Kathryn Bright's brother, Kevin, had witnessed part of the murder,
and he was able to tell police, to some degree, what happened.
[LaMunyon] We found Kathryn Bright, stabbed, in her house.
Kathryn was a college student at Wichita State University.
She normally came home alone.
In this particular case, she came home with her brother, Kevin,
in the middle of the day.
The assailant was in the house, already waiting on her.
Based on what Kevin told us,
once they entered the house,
the person in there had a gun on Kevin
and instructed him to tie his sister, Kathryn, up.
He did so…
And then Kevin was taken to another room.
And he attempted to put a nylon on Kevin's neck,
and that's when a fight ensued, and Kevin was shot.
He fell to the floor and played dead.
Kevin was taken to the hospital with head wounds.
We worked with him in an effort to identify the assailant.
Kevin's description was pretty generic.
He was a Caucasian male, perhaps around 30,
normal, 180 pounds…
Basically, he just couldn't help us.
[Hirschman] Remember that it was only until BTK said, "Yes, I did all these,"
that the demand that something get done about it,
you know, quintupled.
And the feeling that he is still here,
and that he is still working, and for all I know, he lives next door…
Which, as it turned out, he did.
Man, this street is beat up.
My best friend lived there.
I'd babysit people there.
My babysitter lived on the other side, there, so this is it.
This is where I grew up.
They leveled it, so it wouldn't be torn apart
by people selling it on eBay piece by piece.
There was just a lot that happened when I… after I spoke up in the media,
and it was like Wichita kind of became this enemy territory.
So the first time I had gone back to my yard was in '15.
I mean, I hadn't been in my yard in that lot in ten years.
I mean, on one hand, I can tell you like a million memories,
and what I did in this tree, and what I did in that tree.
So this is where Dad and I gardened all the time.
He had every kind of vegetable. Then there was a flower garden here.
So all of this to here was garden.
There was a path here that came up.
There was a walking path back here.
And Dad planted grapes in here, which was crazy.
They were gross and sour.
You almost can see… I think you can see some of the vines still in there.
The grapes was one of his crazier ideas.
Um… Oh, is she taking photos?
[uneasy music playing]
Can somebody tell me if she's taking photos?
[producer] No, she is not.
[Rawson] It's really hard to be there because it…
Like, it takes me back to those places, right?
So even if everything was good in my yard, you're still right there
by that house where everything wasn't always good,
where you're right there where Dad was.
I mean, even today I can talk about it
down to the detail of what my father has done.
My father has done what we know.
But to actually believe it, it still goes in and out now.
Like, it's like, "Dad is BTK."
"Oh, what? Huh?"
It's like it doesn't come all the way home still.
That's another thing. People push back on it, they're like, "Wait."
Like, "Why is she saying in one moment,
like, she's a victim, and then why is she crying,
or why is she upset?"
"And then the next minute she's talking about how great life is." And I'm like,
because that's what my life was.
Like, it was mainly good,
with, like, these flashes of bad.
You know, and we just, we didn't understand,
like, underneath that flash was this whole iceberg of bad.
I mean, if you look at it, it's abandoned. It's like, "What happened to my family?"
Like, the fence is all rotted and torn down.
I don't even know why it's back there.
It's just all decayed and gross.
Our family, um, imploded.
You know, it took a long time.
But the, um, trauma of my father imploded us,
and so here we are.
[somber music playing]
[woman] You guys don't have any respect for other people's privacy.
She don't live here no more.
She doesn't have to go through this on a daily basis.
You understand that?
[Hatteberg] Kerri Rawson got a gig she didn't sign up for.
Everywhere she goes, when people understand that BTK was her father,
then she becomes BTK's daughter.
How do you outlive that?
I've been hiding everything about my father, my life, the abuse, the trauma,
because some public will absolutely,
like, treat you terrible for being the kid of a serial killer.
Like, "What were you hiding? Why didn't you know?"
"Why didn't you expose him to the world?"
I was waiting, really, for somebody to come along
and give me a chance to help or talk.
Like, Osage County is having me consult on this investigation.
It's not like I've chosen this.
Like, it's what I have been given. It's my life.
And you have to choose what to do with it.
You ready to dig into this stuff?
Uh, always, never.
I think one of the things that's gonna help with some of these answers
is getting you back up in this area
to see what your memories are.
And that helps us understand
and clarify the picture of where your dad may have been
or where he really didn't have any activity that you're aware of.
[quiet, tense music playing]
[Rawson] So, in the public, from '74 through '79,
there were these communications being dropped in Wichita from BTK,
um, to the newspaper and the police,
news stations.
Weird letters, poems,
somebody claiming to have murdered seven people.
This was all happening, really, before I was born or right when I was little.
So, the last letter was sent in '79.
Later, I found out it was the night of my first birthday.
My dad had a first birthday party for me
and then went out in the summer in a jean jacket and sent a communication.
And that was the last BTK communication for a long time.
He said later on that having kids slowed down his murders.
Dad said he got busy raising kids. Well, I think he got busy chasing me.
[sinister music playing]
So, I have photos here, and it's all, like, just a mix of years.
Like, one of the things I really enjoyed with my dad was going to the Grand Canyon,
and so we went in '86, just the rim,
and then in '95, we spent a week on the rim.
It was snowing, and it was cold,
and I actually slept in a tent next to my dad because I was cold.
I was glad to have him because he was warm.
We took these amazing family vacations.
We camped and hiked a ton,
did a lot of fishing and camping in Kansas,
hiked up in Colorado, up around Durango. The reservoir's up there.
We would do day hikes, and we would fish for trout,
and we did traveling in, like, Yellowstone
and the Tetons, and all of that.
I mean, when you're looking at these photos,
like, you just see a normal family, right?
My father just flew under the radar.
And they didn't find him for 31 years
because he was literally right under their noses.
They weren't looking for somebody like my father,
the everyday man that actually does have a family.
[Hatteberg] The Otero murder was in 1974.
There was the Otero murder, then another murder, then another murder,
then some other murders, and, I mean, it was just… building onto itself.
And then… nothing.
[unsettling music playing]
[man] Thirty years ago today, 15-year-old Charlie Otero comes home from school
to find his entire family murdered, and so begins the most infamous
unsolved serial killing spree in Wichita history.
[Hatteberg] The newspaper did a 30th anniversary story.
Thirty years ago, the Otero family was killed,
then subsequent killings over that.
But we haven't heard from BTK since then.
No one knew what had happened to him.
There were lots of theories, and I remember the theories were
that A, he was incarcerated for another crime,
B, he had died,
or he had just left the country, or left the area, never to be seen again.
When I first started here in the Wichita market
in 1984 as an anchor,
BTK was like this, "Oh, by the way, there's this thing called BTK."
"He killed in the '70s, and everything's all right now."
"And he's either dead or in prison."
And… that's what it was, a legend.
No one thought twice about BTK.
He wasn't on anyone's lips.
And that's the reason why he reappeared.
[man] This is a breaking news alert from KAKE On Your Side.
Good evening, everyone. The serial killer who terrorized Wichita for years
is causing new fears tonight.
Police now say it appears BTK is back in Wichita.
[Peters] And the way he reappeared
was so incredibly shocking.
He sent the Wichita newspaper
a driver's license from a killing
that nobody even knew he was a part of.
[police siren wailing]
[Ken Landwehr] A letter received by KAKE TV was turned over to us
last Wednesday.
We're proceeding on the possibility that this letter is from BTK,
and we have turned this letter over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
After BTK sent that letter, my boss came to me and said,
"Hey, we've been invited to participate. You want to go?"
And I said, "Well, absolutely, absolutely."
[reporter] BTK claims in the letter that
Vicki Wegerle was his eighth victim.
She was found strangled in her home in September 1986,
years after BTK's last known contact.
[Lundin] That letter included photographs taken at a crime scene.
The crime scene was of the victim, Vicki Wegerle.
And she was murdered in her home.
The thing about her murder is that when the emergency services crew arrived,
the ambulance transported her from there in an attempt to save her life
before any police detectives
or any photographs could be taken at the crime scene.
There were no police photographs of that crime scene.
But these photographs BTK sent us
clearly show that victim
in her home, basically dead.
And so we knew, whoever this was, he was the real deal.
He was, in fact, BTK.
Can you imagine
how he was overjoyed by this headline?
That was his goal, to get the publicity.
He got it.
[tense music playing]
We were just as much in shock
as the average person on the street.
Everyone in the media,
and to a certain extent, police officers, were like, "What?"
Just as everyone in Wichita,
KAKE employees were hoping BTK was an old story, just an old case.
But now that police say BTK is back, old fears return.
Stephen Relford was five years old when BTK murdered his mother,
but what may be worse is that he and his two siblings had to hear it all.
I still go through it today.
-[Peters] You do? -Yes, ma'am.
[Peters] What do you go through?
I'm the one that opened the door to some [bleep].
Let him in, you know.
You never forget that.
It was one of the most shocking revelations of my career.
And the worst part was
what was he gonna do next to get publicity?
[Lundin] As soon as this started to hit the media,
the phone was ringing off the hook,
emails were coming in.
There were leads coming in,
people suggesting who they believe BTK might be,
or whatever kind of tips.
And you can't work all those.
I mean, you can't handle each and every one.
But which one do you decide not to work? Is that the one that's gonna be the one?
It's very, very difficult.
[Glen Horn] Well, let me tell you what we got here.
Let's see. We got a very suspicious letter that was sent to us.
The outside from a Thomas B. King.
The second communication he sent, after he resurfaced, was to KAKE TV.
Yes, I'm Mr. Glen Horn.
[Peters] And it was "The BTK Story,"
the book he wanted to write about himself.
And then it said, "Chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four."
[Horn] "The BTK story. A serial killer is born. Dawn. Fetish. Fantasy world."
"The search begins. BTK's haunts. PJs. MO-ID-RUSE. Hits. Treasured memories."
"Final curtain call. Dusk. Will there be more?"
[Peters] The 13th chapter.
"Will there be more?"
Nobody knew whether he wanted publicity that badly
that he would kill again.
[dramatic music playing]
[Lundin] The FBI, the Behavioral Sciences Unit,
gave us instruction right from the start. They said,
"Your best chances of catching BTK are if you can keep him communicating."
"Make him… feel comfortable
in communicating with you."
And after that, we began to receive communications about every month
or six weeks.
[reporter] Just last week,
three packages were sent to a local TV station containing jewelry,
perhaps from a victim.
[woman] It was in the UPS box.
The UPS man opened an envelope that contained pictures
and a letter from BTK.
[reporter] Now he seemed to dare them to come find him,
teasing them with cryptic clues that may be true or may be not.
We knew he was watching us because he would write things
that indicated that he was watching us on a nightly basis.
I had mentioned, during the ten o'clock news,
Jeff and I both have a cold.
We got the crud or something.
Two days later, we get a letter
and it said, "I hope Susan's and Jeff's cold gets better."
I still
get the same…
complete feeling of fear in my body
when I talk about it.
This is one of the most challenging cases that I've ever been involved with.
Uh, and I find that the individual doing this would be interesting to talk to.
[indistinct office chatter]
[man] This one is a postcard, not a letter.
[Horn] It says…
"Between 69th North and 77th North on Seneca."
"Contents Post Toasties box."
"PJ Little Mex and Doll."
"Let me know somehow if you or Wichita PD receive this."
[Peters] So in this particular communication,
he gives another clue to the police department.
There's a Post Toasties box on this corner.
Right away, we sent a reporter and a photographer out there.
It was way out on a country road under a stop sign.
And we got all kinds of footage.
[reporter] Lieutenant Ken Landwehr and Detective Kelly Otis arrive
a short time later, and investigators spend hours at the scene.
Police have asked us not to reveal the location
until they have time to investigate.
[Peters] The police came and got the cereal box.
They're the ones who opened it up.
And inside was a Barbie doll
with a noose around its neck.
[Lundin] Through his cereal box communications,
he expressed his desire to communicate with us through floppy disks.
And, uh, he was concerned that we might be able to track him down.
And he said, "Will it identify me?"
And then he said something very interesting. He said, "Be honest."
And then after that, he directed us to make our reply through the newspaper,
and say, "Rex, it will be okay."
Kenny Landwehr placed the ad, just like BTK had asked.
And he followed up and sent us a disk.
The metadata indicated it had been used at the Park City Public Library,
Christ Lutheran Church…
And then a username.
And the name was simply "Dennis."
Within minutes, cross-checking the two organizations that was listed
showed that a person by the name of Dennis Rader
was the Congregational President of Christ Lutheran Church.
The IT people of Wichita PD were just, you know, they were thrilled.
[intriguing music playing]
And eventually, they came up with an address in Park City,
just outside of Wichita.
I was ready. I was like, "This is it. Let's go get him."
But Kenny Landwehr said, "We need to know absolutely that this is BTK."
"We need to get his DNA."
I noticed that his daughter had attended Kansas State University.
And I knew from having attended the university,
that, if you're a student there, and you have any kind of medical issue,
you're gonna go through Lafine Student Health Center.
And I said, "I'm gonna stop in and see if they have anything."
Records indicate while she was a student here, she had a pap smear.
They surrendered the sample to me.
I submitted it for DNA analysis.
And eventually, I got a phone call.
"It is the offspring of your BTK."
So the first phone call I made was to Kenny Landwehr.
"Kenny, it's him."
"Oh. All right. We'll see you first thing in the morning."
[suspenseful music playing]
[indistinct chatter on police radio]
That morning, the newsroom started picking up monitor traffic
from the police department, and our assignment folks said,
"Something's going down in Park City."
"Don't know what, but somebody needs to get up there."
[man on radio] Cab 6, this is checkmate 1-6, over.
[Lundin] We knew that Dennis Rader worked for the city of Park City
and that he leaves and goes home for lunch every day.
And so we set up on a road adjacent to his home
and waited for him to drive around.
When he went by us, the marked car pulled out behind him,
flipped on his emergency lights, and got him to pull over.
[siren wailing]
In my mind, I was thinking, "He's going to know this is the end."
"And I think he's gonna want to go out in a blaze of glory."
And I didn't want that.
And I pulled up by the uniform marked car,
and I got to Dennis Rader's truck just at the time he was opening the door
and starting to get out.
I just grabbed him and…
just spun him around, took him straight down to the concrete.
At that point, I was joined by several other members of the task force.
-[helicopter blades whirring] -[sirens blaring]
And we get him handcuffed, pick him up,
and I'm standing there, still got a hold of him,
and he turns to me and looks at me and says,
"Would you mind telling my wife I won't be home for lunch?"
"I assume you know where I live."
[siren wails]
[Rawson] My father was arrested in '05, and I was 26.
And, you know, the whole world just upended on me and my husband.
We had been married 18 months.
We were really just kids living in Michigan, alone, no family.
And we had one interview with the FBI that first weekend,
and then it was like… "See you later. You're on your own."
I was extremely mad. I was mad about the DNA.
I thought it was an invasion of my privacy.
I was embarrassed about the pap smear.
Like, I was already mad at the police. I was mad at the FBI.
I was mad at everybody.
It was just… Our lives were just gone.
Upheaval, totally insane. I was just mad at everybody.
[Lundin] After the arrest, I got assigned to execute the search warrant
of the house that Dennis Rader lived in with his wife.
When I walked in the door, the first thing I was confronted with
was pictures on the wall, above the couch,
that showed him and the family attending K-State functions,
KSU functions, football games, whatever. All kinds of things.
And I was like… And I was like, "Oh wow."
The stuff that we found in the house
just kind of created more questions in my mind.
For example, as you enter the front door,
is a… like a coat closet.
But on the… on the shelf,
right above the coats, was a kill kit.
It was a little bag that had pre-knotted ropes, uh, a bandana.
There were handcuffs, a .32 auto pistol.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
The shed out back had some interesting things in there.
Some trophies, jewelry. Things that had touched their skin.
Clothing, underwear in particular.
He kept all of it.
Stuff that obviously could have been used,
might have been used in torturing some of his victims.
As an investigator, I found it very, very disturbing.
And I thought, "Boy, this is really giving us a look at his mind."
This is the hot spot, drawing hundreds out here
just to come by and see the scene.
Park City, a small community where everyone knows everyone else,
or so they thought.
[Lundin] I talked to his wife, and she was in absolute denial.
She said, "Oh no."
She was very nice, very cordial. She didn't scream at us.
She said, "Oh no. You've got the wrong person."
And while we were talking with her, Kerri called in.
We didn't get a hold of my mom until later that day.
And she was a mess. She was like me.
Her and I just couldn't compute together.
She told Kerri, she said, "You know your father."
"You know this is not right. This is a… This has been a horrible mistake."
"That is… He is not a killer."
"This is not him."
I didn't think I was gonna make it through that night.
I mean, you're two people
who live together, interact together,
share a lot of things in common.
Do I think she… she knew anything?
No. Um…
Probably as close as she ever came
was…
They were sitting watching television,
and one of the media outlets
was reading one of the communications.
And after the news feature was over,
she said, "That BTK guy,
he writes just like you do."
And he…
He did not say anything,
but I got the distinct impression down deep in my gut,
had she pursued that,
he'd have gotten rid of her.
-[man] Dennis, I have a question to ask. -[Rader] Mm-hmm?
[man] How do you think we came to come to talk to you?
Well, I don't know.
Well, as a suspect, I assume you have something on me.
[man] Aren't you curious what it is?
Well, yeah.
[man] Want us to share that with you?
[Lundin] His initial interview was with Kenny Landwehr
and one of the behavioral scientists from the FBI.
Kenny basically laid out,
you know, all the damning evidence that we had against him.
-[Landwehr] Do you know what that is? -A floppy.
[Landwehr] Yeah.
And I mean the reasons why there are a whole… a whole lot of money
used on computer forensic people is for kiddie porn.
-Pardon? No, no. -[Landwehr] It's kiddie porn.
And so the FBI and locals
got really good
at looking at people's disks
and being able to track those down.
-That's interesting. -So if we get…
So if we receive something like that, then we can go in there
and we can find that it came from Christ Lutheran Church.
Then we can go to some of those computers and find out
that the person that was logged onto that would be Dennis.
[Lundin] And when it came to the DNA, he knew that was it.
Kenny Landwehr told him, you know, he said,
"We got your DNA match through your daughter."
[Landwehr] Things have occurred medically with your children.
And I can take those samples. I can test those.
And I know that BTK is the father of your children.
That's what brings me to you.
[Rader] Wow.
And I think that just… That really sunk him.
You could tell.
He said, "Dennis." He said, "Tell us, tell us who you are."
[man] Why don't you just say it?
Guess you guys know…
-[Landwehr] What else? -[man] Say it, say who you are.
BTK.
[man] You're BTK.
Once he was able to say that, to law enforcement,
I mean, the floodgates just opened, and he talked about every crime.
Two crimes that we
hadn't previously linked to him.
That was project "Dogside."
That's the code name for her.
I basically had some free time in the evening.
I killed her on a Friday night.
[reporter] January 19th, 1991. Dolores D. Davis abducted from her home.
Her body was found 13 days later
under a bridge in Northern Sedgwick County.
Well, I proceeded to tie her up,
and then I think she realized that that was gonna go bad.
She said, "Don't kill me, don't kill me."
And I slipped the pantyhose over her head and strangled her.
Took her up there, dropped her off
under the bridge.
[Rawson] January of '91…
Now my mom is really sick, and she's in the hospital
for like ten or 12 days with pneumonia.
And Dad's all stressed out because he's out of work.
We don't have enough money. He's trying to cook for us.
He couldn't cook. He made weird eggs.
Not long after that, he murdered Mrs. Davis.
He put her body in the back of our station wagon.
He then gave me that station wagon to drive in high school.
I just… I was like, "No, that's not okay."
[chuckles ruefully]
Thinking that Mrs. Davis had been in that vehicle.
[Landwehr] I have been assigned the investigation of Marine Hedge.
And, uh…
I'd kinda like to know… how did you get drawn to her?
[Rader] Well, as I explained to the other guys,
I had a whole bunch of these going on all the time.
I call them projects. She was "Project Flower."
No, cookie, "Project Cookie."
[ominous music playing]
[Rawson] I remember when I was six,
our neighbor, Mrs. Hedge, had gone missing.
They found her body a couple weeks later, and that she was found strangled.
[Rader] Uh, I did this
on a Scout thing.
It's a good cover for a guy like me.
You go out and camp out and slip away.
I parked my car at the bowling alley.
I got my bowling bag, and I buy a beer.
I cut the phone lines, pop this real quiet like,
and creep in here.
[Rawson] My dad's hit kit from Hedge's murder,
it was a maroon bowling bag, old with a white stripe.
Dad didn't bowl. We only went bowling a few times.
You know, why is my mom not being… like, saying,
"Hey, why do you have a bowling bag all of a sudden?"
But where it gets crazy is that after he murdered Mrs. Hedge in her bed,
he carried her out in a blanket,
put her in her car, in the trunk,
took her to Christ Lutheran Church, where we go to church.
And then he undresses her, changes her clothes,
and he takes photographs while he does bondage on her dead body.
[man] So you'd already decided that you wanted to take her to the church.
Whether alive or dead, she was going to that church.
Basically, I was trying to work toward the BTK lair,
the home, the torture chamber thing.
That's what I was working towards in my fantasy world.
[Rawson] When I was a kid, I remember one Sunday,
I'm at Christ Lutheran Church,
and I'm climbing these really tall,
narrow pine trees that I always climbed at church.
When they found Mrs. Hedge a few weeks later,
they found some weird, long pine needles next to her body.
And they didn't know where they came from, because pines are pretty rare in Kansas.
To have a pine tree here, you've had to plant it.
Those pine needles came from those pine trees I climbed at church.
[Lundin] It was clear to me that he was very proud of these killings.
He wished…
He wished out loud to us that there were more.
He told us. He said, "If I was a lone wolf,
without all my social obligations, family, church, work…"
He said, "If I didn't have to do all that,
there would have been a lot more murders."
The national media is starting to gather here,
and we're getting people from Good Morning America,
from CNN, Dateline, Primetime Live.
They will all be converging on Wichita as the day progresses,
because this story is a story of national proportions.
[people murmuring]
[applause]
Of course, everyone's covering it live, and the Wichita police chief says…
The bottom line… BTK is arrested.
[cheers and applause]
[Peters] A cheer went up in the crowd.
There was a crowd there at that news conference.
And the national media was there going, "Who are these people cheering?"
But they didn't understand the relief we felt
that he was finally captured.
[reporter] For the city of Wichita, its police and its victims,
relief today after authorities arrested 59-year-old Dennis Rader.
It's kind of unbelievable, but it's good. It's good.
So we'll get rid of it all.
It'll all come out in the end, and he'll get… what's due him.
[man] It was a law enforcement team effort.
[Peters] What do you think about the fact that
he's lived in this community for all these years?
Living, breathing, working.
He's a smart, stupid son of a bitch.
It's all right.
I remember my brother calling me, um, the morning of the press conference.
He said, "They're saying that it's the Park City dogcatcher."
And I remember going, "What?"
I mean, "Park City dogcatcher"? There's only one Park City dogcatcher.
That's Kerri's dad.
I'll never forget my dad going, "There's no way it was Dennis."
And then I was glued to the television.
[Peters] Neighbors who I've talked to remember the people
who lived at the house where the police converged on.
It's terrifying. My parents called me. My dad was just about in tears.
Just the thought that… I'm a single mom with my two kids in this house,
and this man's been in my house several times.
I was totally, totally, totally shocked
that it could be anyone from this congregation
or anyone that I knew.
During the time that I have known Dennis, I can say that there is nothing
in our conversations that would even tend to lead to these accusations.
He was a great Scout leader.
You know, it's just as he got older and his kids got older and moved out,
he'd just kind of gotten a little weird.
I think the biggest shock for Wichita was that he was just a regular guy.
Had a job, you know, went to his work every day.
He had a family, had a wife, he had two kids.
And he's a serial killer?
Everybody wanted an interview with Paula or Kerri or her brother.
Everybody wanted that.
Of course, they're saying,
"How did you not know? How did they not know?"
And I remember being very, very protective of them,
that… they didn't know.
None of us knew.
He didn't just fool his family.
He fooled a church.
He fooled an entire city.
He literally fooled everybody.
[solemn music playing]
[igniter clicks]
[Rawson] That first weekend, after my, um… father was arrested,
you know… like, my mom was not well at all.
She was in shock. I was in shock.
Um, my grandparents were there.
My cousins were there.
My aunt ran out and got Kentucky Fried Chicken,
like, with all the fixings.
And we all just, like, sat around and ate.
And to me, it felt like being at a funeral.
[eerie music playing]
And you're just sitting down, and you're just having a meal.
And, like, even in that moment, you're laughing a little bit,
or you're crying at the same time.
You're sharing stories.
You know, and my mom said, really quickly then, she goes,
"It feels like your father has died and that we're gathered here
after his funeral."
And I said, "Yeah, I know, Mom."
[melancholy music playing]
And then my mom, the first night,
she was, like, crying, and she wanted me to sleep in her bed.
And I was like, I couldn't. I couldn't handle it. It was too much.
I was still shaking and still completely severed.
And I just… it was too much. I could not. And I, like…
literally had to leave my mom, alone.
I just… I just… It was too much. I just couldn't do it.
The relationship with my mother is not existent at this moment.
It is estranged.
Um, we were good growing up,
and, um… good after the arrest.
But I toed the line.
You don't talk about it. You just pull yourself up and go to work.
You don't tell people.
I'm the only one that's public of my family.
I don't know. It's frustrating as hell because,
like, Dad is still alive. He's still my father, right?
So for my mom, she can divorce him.
She can cut him off. She has that power.
Separate her life, try to move on.
For me and my brother, we don't have that.
He's always my dad, right? I look like him.
So for me,
I never thought of my dad as dead.
Early on, I… The pastor said he thought it would help
if we would write my dad and say what we needed to say.
So I started writing letters to my father in March of '05.
"Dad, hello. I am physically doing okay."
"I am safe and home in Michigan."
"The media was reporting I turned you in."
"That's not true."
"I didn't know anything like everyone else until the FBI knocked on my door."
"I tried to tell them what a great man you are,
what a wonderful dad you are,
how they totally had screwed up and arrested the wrong guy."
"I tried. We all did, but they didn't listen."
"We don't know who that other man is,
but we love the husband and father and man we know with all our hearts."
"I was wondering if something happened to you as a boy
and if you wanted to open up and talk about it."
"I'm so sorry if something did happen to you."
"You should know it's not your fault if something happened when you were little."
"Someday we would like answers if you're able to give them or have them yourself."
I was trying to be really careful in my letter, and not express anger,
not express too much emotion, let him know I still loved him.
He returned my letter March 26, 2005.
"Dear Kerri, happy belated Easter wish."
"Thank you so much for your letter."
"I was overjoyed with emotions and happiness."
"I was beginning to think
no family members were going to write to me."
"Your letter was very sincere,
and I can tell it came from a very loving and understanding daughter."
"Arraignment is on April 19."
"We talked about a plea for insanity, but I don't know whether
the state hospital or the prison will be the best in the long run."
He was wavering back and forth,
and we didn't understand what was going on.
Like, you know what they have on you.
You did it. Just, you know, man up.
You know, it was frustrating, so frustrating.
We didn't want to go through trial.
But then in June of '05, my dad pled guilty,
and that was the first time we had addressed it square in the face.
[reporter] It's difficult to believe that this is the man who authorities say
terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, since 1974.
But Rader is charged with ten counts of murder
in the cases that have come to be known as BTK.
[reporter 2] In the courtroom, families of some of BTK's victims
got their first real look at the man police believe killed their loved ones.
[bailiff] Please rise.
[Peters] Dennis Rader's preliminary hearing was in June of 2005.
And he pled guilty. We go, "Okay, good, now we can go home."
No way.
Dennis Rader went into detail
of each murder.
[judge] I want you to tell me in your own words why you believe you're guilty.
We will start off with count number one.
I had never strangled anyone before,
so I didn't know how much pressure you had to put on a person
or how long it would take.
She was fighting. I was basically losing control.
The strangulation wasn't working on her, and I used a knife on her.
Got her a glass of water, comforted her a little bit,
and then I went ahead and tied her up, and then,
put a bag over her head and strangled her.
[reporter] It was like this for 45 terrible minutes.
60-year-old Dennis Rader calmly,
even clinically, detailing the ten murders he says he committed.
We stayed away from court. We didn't want to be in there.
We couldn't handle the media.
We wanted the families to have that time in court.
We didn't want to cause a disruption. We just really could not handle it.
It was really, really hard to hear him take a guilty,
and hearing it in his own words.
If you read much about serial killers,
they go through what they call different phases.
That's one of the phases they go through as a trolling stage.
Basically, you're looking for a victim at that time.
But once you lock in on a certain person, then you become a stalking,
and that might be several of them, but you really home in on that person.
That's… That's the victim.
[judge] All right, is that correct?
All of these incidents, these ten counts,
occurred because you wanted to satisfy a sexual fantasy, is that correct?
Yes. Mm-hmm.
All right, you may be seated, Mr. Rader.
That's Dennis Rader describing ten brutal homicides
like it was a job.
You're right. It was like it was just a job for him,
and he was just going through the motions of his job.
My co-anchor and I were like,
"This is not happening."
Can you imagine being his daughter or son or wife that day?
[Rawson] A lot of the stuff that came out, I disassociated from it.
It was a disaster. It was… There was just…
I could not handle it. You know, I just could not handle it.
[bailiff] All rise.
[Peters] It promises to be an emotional few days in a Kansas courtroom.
Formal sentencing gets underway this morning
for serial killer Dennis Rader.
[reporter] The proceedings have blanketed Wichita, a town of 350,000,
where many have never known life without BTK.
[Peters] The district attorney, Nola Foulston,
had every intention during that sentencing hearing
to humiliate Dennis Rader to the nth degree.
[Foulston] What is that, sir?
This is a plastic, uh, mask.
[Lundin] Several search warrants were executed around the city of Wichita.
Dennis Rader said, "You'll find the mother lode in my office,
in my file cabinet."
It was an unlocked file cabinet, so he felt obviously very secure
in maintaining these things here.
There was a lot of photography,
pictures that he had taken over a span of time,
and a lot of drawings.
He had everything identified, dates, alphabetized.
There was a cross-reference so he could find stuff easily.
He basically created kind of a worksheet
of his projects.
[man] These are devices that he took photos of.
[Rawson] When I was writing my dad, Dad told us worse stuff was coming,
and I was like, "What could be worse than murder?"
[Foulston] Oh, there are more of these?
He had hundreds, if not thousands of those.
[Peters] The district attorney showed pictures of Dennis Rader
with nylon stocking over his own head,
and she wanted to show the world what a sick human being this was.
All of a sudden, it's coming out about my dad in bondage
and naked in my grandparents' basement, dressed up in victim's clothing.
And it's just like a never-ending show of hell.
[Peters] The prosecutors are laying out the horrifying details.
Some of the victim's families are right there in court reliving the nightmare,
and today those families will get to confront Rader himself.
Despite Dennis Rader's efforts to destroy my family, we survived,
stronger and closer now more than ever.
Our love for each other was forged with pain and loss.
As far as I'm concerned, when it is all done,
Dennis Rader has failed in his effort to kill the Oteros.
Although we have never met, you have seen my face before.
It is the same face you murdered over 30 years ago,
the face of my mother, Julia Otero.
The pain and suffering that he has caused our family
and the loss of such a beautiful young lady at 21,
he's got to go on and live his life, 31 years now,
with raising a family and children.
I cannot begin to explain to you.
There are not words to make you understand what losing Nancy…
[sobbing] …has meant to me and my family.
I lost a friend, a confidant.
My children will never have an aunt,
and I'll never have another sister.
It's been almost 19 years now that my brother and I
had the most important woman in our lives taken from us.
[sniffles]
It's not fair that we had so little time with her.
[Rodney Hook] Uh… I would only ask that the court provide the maximum sentence
allowed by law to this monster.
I haven't… Um…
prepared for this statement, but…
you know,
I'd just like for him to suffer for the rest of his life.
And,
you know, I don't…
Uh, that's all.
[emotional music playing]
Speaking for my mother with us in spirit, for my own family,
and I hope for the entire family of survivors here today,
we dedicate this day to the memories of those who cannot be with us.
Today we will each silently remember a father,
a brother,
a wife,
a mother,
a sister,
a daughter, a grandmother.
While you agonize over the reality
that your last victims were ironically your own family,
we will embrace the new family we now have,
with whom we will always share a common bond
forged from the pain of adversity and loss.
[Peters] The victims' families were incredible.
When the judge gave Dennis Rader a chance to talk,
they did not want to make Dennis Rader feel like he won.
Mr. Rader, do you desire to say anything on your own behalf,
in mitigation of punishment?
And so, the victims' families walked out of the courtroom.
[Rader] Your Honor, Sedgwick County, the victims.
I do realize that the crimes I've committed…
Should I continue, or…
Okay.
[Rawson] After the victims' statements, they let him talk.
He's now got a shot to apologize
or say something meaningful or, you know, say that he regretted everything.
And instead he gets up, and he thanks everybody.
So he thanks the police, he thanks the DA,
he thanks the victims' families, he thanks the judge.
It's, like, the most bizarre thing.
[judge] Mr. Rader, would you please stand?
Sir, based upon your plea,
which occurred on the 27th day of June 2005 before this court,
I once again adjudge you guilty.
[Rawson] The judge sentenced him to 175 years in prison,
and that is the last time that man has been outside of walls.
[vehicle approaching]
[intriguing music playing]
After my dad was arrested, I hadn't talked about any of this stuff.
I hadn't… I hadn't addressed any of it for, like, ten years almost.
When people were like, "Tell me about your life or your father,"
or, you know, just in casual conversation,
I would say I'm estranged from my father, or at the most I'd say my dad is in jail.
I was following the Midwest code. Don't talk about the bad things.
And then that night I found out about Stephen King…
Like, when I… when that reporter called me from the Eagle,
it was like the first time somebody had given me permission
to just talk, to just let it out.
And as soon as somebody said, "No, it's okay, you can talk about it,"
it was like I let it… it got out of me, and then I started healing.
In 2015, I started learning how to write.
It took me four years to write my first book,
and then it became a national bestseller in, um, 2019.
You are an incredibly courageous person for writing this, for getting out there.
I've been through hell and I'm still here. So my message is hold on.
Hope's just around the corner. Don't ever give up.
When I'm sitting, like, here…
[exhales]
like, I'm surrounded by stuff like my dad,
like, photos of my dad, my book with my dad.
I mean, a lot of who I am now,
and my identity, is unfortunately wrapped into my father.
I've had some problems on Facebook, and I've had, like, people email me
and Instagram message me, text me,
stalk me, threaten to kill me,
say things like they wish my dad had left an 11th victim, which is me.
My trauma therapist said, recently, like,
"What would happen if you just walked away from all of this?"
And I said it would be peaceful.
But, like, my reality is my career is now tied into all of this.
[Reed] If you look at this and look at that,
that's, you know, this pertains to an unsolved homicide.
Um…
That's why I wanted to visit with him about that.
[Rawson] "26-year-old mother who disappeared Saturday
while out to dry her laundry may have fallen victim to foul play."
Uh, "Denise Rathburn, 25,
left her home between 3 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Saturday,
pushing a baby carriage full of wet laundry."
"She did not return."
How are you feeling about this area?
We used to drive bikes over there.
We would ride bikes over there.
-So we can go look and all of that. -Mm-hmm.
We had a sit-down. I got in my dad's records.
He had these little spiral notebooks, and he would recreate notes,
and his projects, which were, like, stalkings and sometimes murders
and breakings and enterings. He's got, like, at least 70 or 80 of them.
And they're just… they just let me go.
Like, that stuff had been in existence in evidence since '05,
but nobody had ever let me in, right?
Specific location things where we can actually drive and physically look.
[Rawson] I'm reading through my dad's notes, and he has a notation,
'81 for the year 1981.
I would have been… two, three.
In all caps, he has "Kerri/B and D," which is bondage/game.
And I see that, and I'm like, "What the holy crap?"
And then there's another one… right after that
that says, "Kids/bath/S,"
and that's for sex for my dad.
So I'm like, "Did dad molest me in the bath when I was, like, three?"
And what is… why… Why is my name on a bondage game?
And so I am, like, just full spinning at this point. Really, really confused.
Maybe dad had been practicing in my room.
Was he practicing on me?
I had night terrors and issues in my bedroom growing up.
Part of that night terror stuff,
wetting the bed, scared of the dark, terrified in my bed,
had to do with something with, like, a bad man in the house.
But it was like a home invasion thing.
That's what he did to victims.
I never knew where that came from.
I think my subconscious was trying
to get it out of me since I was a little girl.
Saying, "Hey, there's a bad man in my house."
Seeing my name in his own handwriting, in his project notes, it's just a lot.
The only person talking to me, really…
or the only people talking to me is Osage County.
So of course I'm going to get pulled into their narratives, right?
We're trying to figure out, "Did he do any more?"
I… I don't know if he did any more.
Everybody and their dog wants a piece of me.
"Can we write your dad? Can you get us in to your dad?"
There's very few people I can trust at this point that want to get to know me
because it's all… It's all around my dad.
Then I get trolled on Twitter,
and people are like, "You're nothing without your dad."
"You have no life and no career."
So I'm upset today.
Like, frustrated and angry and sad,
and wanting to give up,
and just… run away.
I was feeling really bad about all of this, and my therapist said,
"You know what, law enforcement's just looking into things,
and they're asking questions, and that's okay."
Like, "That's their job. It's okay."
It really helps me when somebody says it's okay.
They asked for me to go in and see my dad in prison to find out,
did he commit any more crimes? Are there any more murders?
If my father has committed more murders,
then we really do need to get to the bottom of the truth,
and we need to get to it before my father passes away.
They could tell I was anxious.
I mean, I hadn't seen him for 18 and a half years,
but they're not getting in to see my father without me.
So… no, I was not done with Dad.
I had worked for days for things to talk to my dad about.
Law enforcement was with me.
They said, "You can't bring the sexual abuse up."
"It's gonna cause him to shut down."
When we got to the prison,
you have to go by, like, this inner watchtower,
and you go through a series of, like, locked doors.
And I go in with two investigators, a male and a female.
You know, he's frail.
He's in a wheelchair.
And he was literally, like, crying, so happy to see me.
Like, just over the moon to get to see his kid.
He's only, like, three or four feet across from me at a table.
And then I'm in there for a couple… two, three hours,
asking him questions about everything that's going on.
I said, "There's a series of missing women."
"There's these cases that look like they could be you."
"They match your MO, or they're close enough to it, or timeframes."
And he goes, "What are you talking about?"
And he said, "Can't we just reminisce?"
"Can't we just have a father-daughter? Can't we just have memories?"
And I was like, "Dad, that's not why I'm here."
He's dodging things, saying he's forgetting things,
but then he has this really sharp memory.
Deny, deny, deny.
He's completely innocent,
that he's a saint, other than for all the other things he did.
He said, "Oh, you know, I just… It was just the ten."
And he turned on a dime.
He was angry about the investigation.
He was angry about the media. He thought things were wrapping up.
You know, he was just angry.
So I shouldn't have done this. I ended up asking my dad
about the notation in his journal.
I said, "Dad, what does 'Kerri Bondage game' mean?"
And my dad goes, "That was just a fantasy. I never touched the family."
He goes, "You're just making stuff up about me now to be, like, famous."
My PTSD just went…
[imitates explosion]
-[dog barks] -Everything closed in.
I couldn't see. I couldn't think.
I was like, "That's it. I'm done. I don't care."
And it was just, like, a blast of, like, 45 years of anger
and everything at my dad.
I'm just, like, completely off script.
And I just nail him about everything, about Mrs. Hedge,
the pine needles, about being six
and putting me in the back of that Oldsmobile
that later he put Mrs. Davis's body in.
I'm just nailing him with all this stuff that had been inside me.
It's just a big, huge ball of trauma, and I'm just ramming him with it.
It was like I was back in my house with that man coming home,
walking in that door, and you didn't know who was coming home.
Is Dad coming home? Is angry man coming home?
[unsettling music playing]
I was upset, and he's like, "Kerri, Kerri, you brought this on yourself."
[thunder crashing]
And he was literally, like, gaslighting me, manipulating me,
lying to me, five feet from me.
It was like I wasn't talking to my dad.
It was like I was talking to, like, a subhuman.
And so when everybody talks about him being a psychopath
and a narcissist and not wanting to be around him,
I had still been able to find humanity in him, and then I wasn't able to.
I don't ever want to go anywhere near that person again.
That's not my dad. I don't know who that is.
[somber music playing]
I'll grieve those memories and that girl and that family.
I lost all of it.
But I just didn't really want to give him any of me anymore,
and I really didn't want any of it in my life.
I started building space between me and this really…
nastiness right over here in my father.
It was a decision to separate myself from, you know, vileness.
How many years has it been since?
-What is that? Since high school. -Twent… twen…
-[Rawson] Ninety-six? -I can't math.
I can't either.
[Sheffield] I know. I remember it's been, like, 25…
[Rawson] Twenty-seven.
[Rogers] No!
Twenty-seven since high school, and 26 since our freshman year.
[laughs]
Yeah, it's bad. It's really bad.
Because then you add that to how old you were, and you're like, "No."
[Rogers] You didn't make it to the reunion.
Oh God, I'm not going to no reunion. Are you kidding me?
They'd be, "What was it like growing up with him? You look like him."
-You guys know my mom. I look like my mom. -[Sheffield] That's what I would've said.
And nobody knows what my mom looks like, so I'm like, "I look like my mom. Stop."
Anybody that knows me
before Dad's arrest know me as Kerri and my family that way.
Right? And they respect that.
Andrea, I've known her since kindergarten.
Rita I've known since middle school.
And they still just see me as who I am.
[Rogers] I was talking to my husband the other day, and I said,
"At the end of the day, what I wish for Kerri
is that you find peace,
but able to live your life without this black cloud."
-[Sheffield] You deserve it. -Yeah, you do.
You absolutely do.
I know.
I've learned to build boundaries. I've learned to speak up.
I've become a public figure, you know, to advocate for crime victims
and trauma victims and survivors,
and lend my voice, you know, not just for people that have been through what I have,
but families like mine and…
you know, other victims.
I'm just going to keep trying to use my voice and speak up,
advocate for other families when needed.
[indistinct affectionate muttering]
Every freaking headline for the last ten years has said,
"BTK's daughter, BTK's daughter."
One got it right and said, "Kerri Rawson, daughter of Dennis Rader, the BTK killer."
I want to be identified like… Kerri Rawson.
On a bigger level, I guess that that's how I'm identified,
but I'm so much more than that.
Good girl. That's a good girl.
I'm a mom, so I spend time with my kids and we go to the beach.
I like to read and watch TV and… like anybody,
and just chill out, so I'm just a normal person.
And most days, I don't even really think about who my dad is.
I don't think about him.
Come on, let's go get a drink. Good girl.
I'm just me.
[quiet, bittersweet music playing]
[music ends]