Background
The person who called himself 'BTK' was Dennis Rader, who was responsible for the deaths of ten people in Wichita, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. At the time Rader was known in the city as a churchgoing, married family man. This ordinary image helped him go unnoticed for years.
The first attack, in January 1974, ended in the deaths of four members of one family and caused great alarm in Wichita. Over the following seventeen years the killings attributed to the same person continued with long gaps, the last in 1991.
Letters and silence
Rader made himself known by contacting police and the press, sending letters and packages to newspapers and television stations. In these messages he called himself 'BTK'. After 1991 there was a long silence and the investigation stalled for years; the file became a cold case.
In 2004, around the thirtieth anniversary of the first killings, he began sending letters again. This new contact revived public and police interest, and investigators tried once more to follow the trail through details in the messages and packages. His wish to communicate eventually led to his own mistakes.
Arrest and court proceedings
In February 2005 a floppy disk sent by Rader proved decisive as digital evidence: the file's metadata pointed to a Lutheran church and to the name 'Dennis' as church council president. That information led to Rader, who was arrested on 25 February 2005.
On 27 June 2005 he pleaded guilty to all ten murders. Because Kansas had no death penalty when the crimes were committed, on 18 August 2005 he was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms. In court, relatives of the victims spoke about the decades since their loss and the pain they had lived with.
Among the notable details of this stage were police answering the offender's questions through a newspaper notice, and the assurance given that a disk could not be traced. The digital trail and other evidence allowed the investigation to conclude within a few weeks, closing a file that had gone unsolved for nearly two decades.
Where it stands today
The case is cited as an example of how digital evidence can resolve cold files, and it also showed the importance of managing communication between police and the press. In Wichita it remains a deep memory for the victims and their families.
On this page Dark Location remembers the victims and deliberately avoids foregrounding the nickname the offender gave himself.