Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered at least 10 people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita), Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. He was known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler), which stands for "Bind, Torture and Kill," which describes his modus operandi. Letters were written soon after the killings to police and to local news outlets, boasting of the crimes and knowledge of details. After a long hiatus, these letters resumed in 2004, leading to his arrest in 2005 and subsequent conviction.
Rader is the eldest of four brothers. He is the son of William Elvin and Dorothea Mae (née Cook) Rader. He grew up in Wichita and graduated from Riverview School and later Wichita Heights High School. According to several reports, including his own confessions, as a child he was cruel to animals, one of the warning signs in the MacDonald triad. Rader attended Kansas Wesleyan University in 1965–1966 and then spent four years from 1966 to 1970 in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in Texas, Alabama, Okinawa, South Korea, Greece and Turkey.
When he returned to the United States, he moved to Park City, a suburb located seven miles north of Wichita. He worked for a time in the meat department of Leekers IGA supermarket in Park City where his mother also worked as a bookkeeper.
Rader attended Butler County Community College in El Dorado, earning an associate's degree in Electronics in 1973. He enrolled at Wichita State University that same fall. He graduated from there in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in Administration of Justice. He married Paula Dietz, a German-American, on May 22, 1971, and they had two children.
From 1972 to 1973, Rader worked as an assembler for the Coleman Company, a camping gear firm, as had two of his early victims. He then worked for a short time for Cessna, in 1973. From November 1974 until being fired in July 1988, Rader worked at a Wichita-based office of ADT Security Services, a company that sold and installed alarm systems for commercial businesses during Rader's years there. He held several positions, including installation manager. It was believed that he learned how to carefully defeat home security systems while there.
Rader was a census field operations supervisor for the Wichita area in 1989, prior to the 1990 federal census.
In 1991 Rader was hired to be supervisor of the Compliance Department at Park City, a two-employee, multi-functional department in charge of "animal control, housing problems, zoning, general permit enforcement and a variety of nuisance cases." In this position, neighbors recalled him as sometimes overzealous and extremely strict; one neighbor complained that he euthanized her dog for no reason. On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader's employment for failure to report to work or to call in; he had been arrested for the murders seven days earlier.
Rader served on both the Sedgwick County's Board of Zoning Appeals and the Animal Control Advisory Board (appointed in 1996 and resigned in 1998). He was also a member of Christ Lutheran Church, a Lutheran congregation of about 200 people, near his former high school. He had been a member for about 30 years and had been elected president[7] of the Congregation Council. He was also a Cub Scout leader. On July 27, 2005, after Rader's arrest, Sedgwick County District Judge Eric Yost waived the usual 60-day waiting period and granted an immediate divorce for his wife, agreeing that her mental health was in danger. Rader did not contest the divorce, and the 33-year marriage was ended. Paula Rader said in her divorce petition that her mental and physical condition has been adversely affected by the marriage.
By 2004, the trail of the BTK killer had gone cold. Then, Rader sent a letter to the police, claiming responsibility for a killing that had previously not been attributed to him. DNA collected from under the fingernails of that victim provided police with previously unknown evidence. They then began DNA testing hundreds of men in an effort to find the serial killer. Altogether, some 1100 DNA samples would be taken.
The police corresponded with Rader in an effort to gain his confidence. Then, in one of his communications with police, Rader asked them if it were possible to trace information from floppy disks. The police department replied that there was no way of knowing what computer such a disk had been used on, when in fact there was. Rader then sent his message and floppy to the police department, which quickly checked the metadata of the Microsoft Word document. In the metadata, they found that the document had been made by a man who called himself Dennis. They also found a link to the Lutheran Church. When the police searched on the internet for 'Lutheran Church Wichita Dennis', they found his family name, and were able to identify a suspect: Dennis Rader, a Lutheran Deacon.
The police knew that BTK owned a black Jeep Cherokee. When investigators drove by Rader's house they noticed a black Jeep Cherokee parked outside. Unfortunately, this was indirect evidence, so they still had to find something direct before they could bring him in. They were able to obtain his daughter's DNA and compared it with the DNA samples found at the crime scenes. There was a familial match.
On February 25, 2005, Rader was detained near his home at 6220 North Independence in Park City and accused of the BTK killings. At a press conference the next morning, Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams flatly asserted, "the bottom line… BTK is arrested. " Rader pleaded guilty to the BTK murders on June 27, 2005, giving a graphic account of his crimes in court. On August 18, 2005, he was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences i.e. one life sentence per murder victim. This included nine life sentences that each had the possibility of parole after 15 years, and one life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years. It meant that, in total, Rader would be eligible for parole after 175 years of imprisonment i.e. in 2180. This result guaranteed that Rader would spend the rest of his life in prison, without any possibility of parole.
Rader was ineligible for the death penalty, because Kansas did not have a death penalty during the period of time in which he committed his crimes. Kansas reinstituted the penalty in 1994.
