The BTK Case in Wichita, Kansas

Sam Dennis Rader, the man the press came to call BTK, killed ten people in and around Wichita, Kansas. This part of the story covers who he was before the killing began, and the first two attacks, which police did not publicly connect. He was born on March 9, 1945, in Pittsburg, Kansas, the oldest of four sons of William Elvin Rader and Dorothea Mae Rader, and he grew up in Wichita.

Sam He graduated from Wichita Heights High School in 1963 and attended Kansas Wesleyan for a short time. In 1966 he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He served on active duty until 1970, reaching the rank of staff sergeant, and stayed in the reserves until 1972. Years later, Rader told investigators that as a youth he had killed animals and developed violent sexual fantasies involving bondage. Those claims come only from him. They are not independently documented findings from his childhood.

Sam On May 22, 1971, he married Paula Dietz. They settled in Park City, a suburb north of Wichita. He worked briefly in a supermarket meat department and then, in 1972 and 1973, as an assembler at the Coleman Company, a Wichita maker of camping equipment. Two of the people he would later kill also worked at Coleman. In 1973 he earned an associate degree in electronics from Butler County Community College.

Sam Now to the first killings. On the morning of January 15, 1974, Rader cut the phone line and entered the home of Joseph and Julie Otero at 803 North Edgemoor, in east Wichita. Joseph was 38. Julie, who had worked at Coleman, is reported as 33 or 34, depending on the source. Their children, Josephine, 11, and Joseph the second, 9, were in the house too. All four were killed.

Sam All four had been bound. Joseph and his son were suffocated with plastic bags. Julie and Josephine were strangled. Semen was found at the scene, though the victims were not sexually assaulted in the ordinary sense of the term. Rader took a watch and a radio. Three older Otero children were at school that day. They came home and found the bodies. The family car turned up later at a Dillons store at Central and Oliver.

Sam In his guilty plea in June 2005, Rader told the court he had never strangled anyone before. He said he did not know how much pressure it would take, or for how long.

Sam The second attack came on April 4, at 3217 East 13th Street in Wichita. Rader was waiting inside, armed with a gun, when Kathryn Bright, 21, came home with her brother Kevin, who was a teenager. Kathryn worked at Coleman, as the Oteros' mother had. Kevin was shot in the head and survived. Kathryn was stabbed, and she died.

Sam As far as the city knew, these were two separate crimes, and the man responsible had a job, a wife, and a house in Park City. The wider public would not hear a name for him until the autumn of that year.

Sam In October 1974, nine months after the Otero murders, an editor at The Wichita Eagle took a phone call. By then three young men had been questioned, and one of them had allegedly confessed to the Otero killings. The caller directed the editor to a letter hidden in a book at the Wichita Public Library. It was the first word from the man behind the crimes.

Sam The letter said the men in custody knew nothing about the killings. It gave details of the Otero scene that had not been made public. And it gave the writer a name. An Associated Press compilation of his correspondence quotes the line: "The code words for me will be … Bind them, Torture them, Kill them, B.T.K." Those three words became the name the city would use for him.

Sam Police asked that many of the crime-scene details in the letter not be released. The reasoning behind that request is not recorded. But the effect was that the public would see only part of what the writer had sent.

Sam In the same weeks, on the other side of the story, Dennis Rader was starting a new job. In November 1974 he began work at ADT Security Services, a company that installed alarms. He would stay there until July 1988, putting security systems into homes in the same city where he had killed.

Sam On December 11, 1974, a new weekly paper, the Wichita Sun, printed portions of the letter. They included the writer's line that he could not stop "the monster." Readers now had the name and some of the words, though not the details police had asked to keep back.

Sam Rader's family grew over the next few years. His son Brian was born in 1975, and his daughter Kerri followed in 1978. The household was still in Park City, still an ordinary address on an ordinary street.

Sam The next killing came on March 17, 1977, more than two years after the letter. Shirley Vian lived on South Hydraulic in Wichita. Accounts of her age differ: an Associated Press timeline gives 24, and some other reports give 26. She had three young children at home.

Sam Rader locked the three children in a bathroom, then strangled their mother. The children got out. They gave police a description, but it was vague. Nothing in what they could tell investigators pointed to a particular man, and Shirley Vian's death was added to a file of unsolved killings.

Sam Nine months later came the last killing of that year. On December 8, 1977, at 843 South Pershing in Wichita, Rader bound and strangled Nancy Fox. She was 25.

Sam After the killing, he went to a pay phone and called police. Biography.com, drawing on the recorded call, quotes him telling the dispatcher: "You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing." Police had a recording of his voice, reporting a death he had caused. For now, no one knew whose voice it was.

Sam On January 31, 1978, The Wichita Eagle received an index card carrying a poem. It began "Shirley Locks, Shirley Locks, wilt thou be mine," and it was aimed at Shirley Vian. A mail clerk took it for a Valentine ad and sent it down to the classifieds department.

Sam Ten days later, on February 10, 1978, the television station KAKE received a letter. It claimed the Vian and Fox killings and at least one other. Later reporting widely quotes it asking, "How many people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?" It also offered nicknames for the writer, among them "The B.T.K. Strangler."

Sam Wichita Police Chief Richard LaMunyon then held a news conference. He told the city that a serial killer was at large and capable of killing again.

Sam On April 28, 1979, Rader waited for Anna Williams, who was 63. She did not come home on time, and he left. Weeks afterward she received some of her own belongings in the mail, along with a poem titled "Oh, Anna, Why Didn't You Appear." She was not killed.

Sam In August 1979, police broadcast the recording of the 1977 Fox call. Tips poured in, and none of them produced anything usable. After that, the letters stopped, and they would stay stopped for 25 years.

Sam In that same year, 1979, Rader graduated from Wichita State University with a bachelor's degree in administration of justice. He was a Boy Scout leader. He later became president of the congregation council at Christ Lutheran Church in Park City.

Sam In 1984, Chief LaMunyon formed a BTK task force, nicknamed the Ghostbusters, to organize the old evidence. A young detective on it, Ken Landwehr, would later run the case that caught Rader.

Sam On or about April 27, 1985, Rader strangled his neighbor Marine Hedge. She was 53 and lived on North Independence in Park City, a few doors from his own house. Court paperwork later cited by The Wichita Eagle lists the date as April 28. Her body was found days later. Police did not connect her death to BTK at the time.

Sam On September 16, 1986, he posed as a telephone repairman and entered the home of Vicki Wegerle, 28, on West 13th in Wichita. He strangled her with a nylon stocking. Her husband, Bill Wegerle, came home at lunch and found their toddler alone and his wife dead. For years, Bill Wegerle was the main suspect. DNA under her fingernails would later match the killer from the Otero and Fox scenes.

Sam In July 1988, Rader left his job at ADT. In 1991 he began work as a compliance officer for the city of Park City, handling animal control and code enforcement.

Sam Then, on January 19, 1991, Rader broke into the home of Dolores Davis, who was 62. He strangled her and left her body near a bridge. She was his tenth and last known victim.

Sam By the early 2000s, the BTK file was a cold case. In 2000, detectives Kelly Otis and Dana Gouge were assigned to the murder of Vicki Wegerle, the 1986 killing at her home on West 13th. For fourteen years that case had pointed, in the main, at her husband. The new assignment would turn on the DNA found under her fingernails.

Sam A male DNA profile had been taken from under her fingernails. It was entered into a national database of offenders, and it matched no one. Then the same profile was compared with semen from two older scenes, the Otero home in 1974 and the Fox apartment in 1977. It matched both.

Sam Now to 2004. On January 17, near the thirtieth anniversary of the Otero murders, Wichita Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana published a story noting that many younger residents had never heard of BTK. Robert Beattie, a lawyer who was writing a book on the case, told the paper that his students showed zero recognition of the name. Rader later said that story pulled him back.

Sam Two months later, on March 19, 2004, the Eagle received an envelope with the return name "Bill Thomas Killman." Inside were photocopies of Vicki Wegerle's missing driver's license and of photographs of her body, along with the old BTK signature. Now police had a public link between Wegerle and BTK.

Sam Fear came back to Wichita. The New York Times reported that spring that gun sales had risen. The city that had been told in 1978 of a killer at large was hearing from him again, and his target was a woman killed in 1986.

Sam More mail followed through the year. In May, a word puzzle and a set of chapter titles were mailed to KAKE, the television station that had received his letter in 1978. Detective Ken Landwehr, by then head of homicide, was the one who had been on the old task force as a young detective. He used news conferences to keep the correspondence going, and he used the killer's ego to do it.

Sam After the arrest, Landwehr said the bad spelling in the letters was not a disguise. His words were: "The fact is that Mr. Rader is a very bad speller. He doesn't know how to write."

Sam In December 2004, a package was found at Murdock Park in Wichita. Inside was the driver's license of Nancy Fox, killed on December 8, 1977, and a doll that had been bound.

Sam In January, police recovered a cereal box that had been left for them after a postcard pointed to a Home Depot parking lot. Inside was a question: could the writer send a floppy disk without it being traced to a computer? He told police to be honest with him, and to answer with a classified ad reading "Rex, it will be OK." The Wichita Eagle ran the ad. It was a lie.

Sam On February 16, a package with a purple floppy disk arrived at the television station KSAS in Wichita. Police computer examiner Randy Stone recovered a deleted Microsoft Word file from it. It was an agenda for the Christ Lutheran Church council, last saved by a user named Dennis. A web search showed the congregation's president was Dennis Rader of Park City. A black Jeep at his house matched a vehicle seen dropping off an earlier package. Pastor Michael Clark later told reporters that Rader had brought a disk to the church in January because his home printer was broken.

Sam A name was not yet an arrest. Investigators used a subpoena to obtain a Pap-smear sample from the medical records of Rader's daughter Kerri, without her knowledge. A familial match means the DNA is not the suspect's own but shares enough with a relative's to point to a family. This sample matched crime-scene evidence, and the Eagle reported that it told investigators her father was BTK. Britannica reports that Rader's own DNA was then matched to semen from the first crime scene. Kerri, later Kerri Rawson, has said she would have given a sample if asked.

Sam On February 25, police stopped Rader near his Park City home as he drove home for lunch, and arrested him. He was 59. Bond was set at $10 million. The arrest was announced the next day at Wichita City Hall. In the interview he confessed and, according to later accounts from investigators, was angry that police had lied about the disk. The American Bar Association Journal quoted Lieutenant Landwehr: "Him sending that disk is what cracked the case."

Sam He was charged with ten counts of first-degree murder: the four Oteros, Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox, Marine Hedge, Vicki Wegerle and Dolores Davis. Hedge and Davis had never been publicly attributed to BTK before his arrest.

Sam His first appearance, by video from jail, came on March 1 before Sedgwick County District Judge Greg Waller. On April 19 he waived a preliminary hearing. At arraignment on May 3 he stood silent, and the judge entered a not-guilty plea for him. District Attorney Nola Foulston gave notice she would seek the "hard 40", forty years before parole eligibility, for the Davis killing.

Sam Kansas had no death penalty when any of these murders were committed. It reinstated capital punishment in 1994, three years after Davis died. For the other nine counts, the minimum before parole was fifteen years each. Run back to back, that is nine times fifteen, plus forty: 175 years before any parole date.

Sam On June 27, the day set for trial, Rader pleaded guilty to all ten counts. There was no plea bargain. Public defender Steve Osburn said the evidence was overwhelming and that an insanity defense had no legal footing. Rader, he said, wanted to take responsibility.

Sam For about 45 minutes Rader answered Judge Waller's questions in a flat voice, calling him "sir." The Wichita Eagle quoted him: "I called them projects." The New York Times quoted him: "Potential hits, in my world, that's what I called them." He described trolling, then stalking, and carrying a "hit kit" of rope and other supplies. He said he talked his way in as a repairman or a detective. Asked whether he killed to satisfy a sexual fantasy, he said yes. He did not apologize that day.

Sam Sentencing ran August 17 and 18 and was carried live. Detectives walked through each killing, along with Rader's photographs and writings. Then family members spoke. Beverly Plapp, sister of Nancy Fox, said, "I want him to suffer as much as his victims suffered." Carmen Montoya, whose parents and two younger siblings were the Oteros, looked at him and said, "You are such a coward." Most relatives left before he spoke.

Sam On August 18, Judge Waller found no mitigating factors and imposed ten consecutive life terms, including the hard 40 on the Davis murder, which he found heinous, atrocious, or cruel. Foulston said Rader would die in prison. He was 60. In a long statement he quoted the Bible and thanked police, lawyers and family. The Associated Press quoted him: "Hopefully someday God will accept me."

Sam The next morning, August 19, he arrived at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kansas. Park City had already fired him for not showing up to work. His marriage to Paula Dietz, which began in 1971, ended that year.

Sam He is still at El Dorado. Britannica, updated this year, says he is alive there, serving the ten life sentences. He turned 81 on March 9, 2026. Kerri Rawson published her book, A Serial Killer's Daughter, in 2019. In 2023 she visited him in prison for the first time in 18 years, in connection with cold-case questions, and has described him as frail. Netflix released My Father, the BTK Killer in 2025, told largely from her perspective.

Sam Whether he killed anyone beyond the ten is contested. After the arrest, Landwehr told the Eagle he would not say never, but that investigators did not think there were more BTK murders. In 2023 the sheriff of Osage County, Oklahoma, named Rader a prime suspect in the June 23, 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old Cynthia Dawn Kinney from a laundromat in Pawhuska, and searched the site of his former Park City house.

Sam The Osage County district attorney, Mike Fisher, said the same year that there was not enough evidence to charge Rader. He asked the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to open its own inquiry, and said he did not regard Rader as a prime suspect on what he had seen. No charges have been filed. Rader has denied other murders. A separate theory linking him to the 1990 death of Shawna Beth Garber in Missouri was dropped by local authorities, who named a different, deceased suspect.

Sam The ten convictions stand, and the earliest parole date is 175 years from the start of the term. Kinney's disappearance remains unresolved. That's the story of the BTK case, and of the ten people he killed. This show is AI-generated, and the voice you are hearing is synthetic. The facts come from the reporting named in the closing note, whose authors are not affiliated with this show. The next episode arrives on the show's regular schedule.

Sam Everything today came from reporting by The Wichita Eagle, Britannica, Biography.com, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the American Bar Association Journal, CBS News, CNN, USA Today, the Associated Press, Poynter, the Deseret News, The Seattle Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, KWCH, Fox 25 in Oklahoma City, and Entertainment Weekly.