January 13, 2025 • 43 mins
The killer's face comes to light. This is not who we were expecting. How did this man become a ruthless murderer? And who else did he kill?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
New episodes of Monster BTK are released every Monday and
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on iHeart True Crime Plus. For more information, check out
the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
I think he would have eventually killed again. But what
really got him to finally surface, which was his downfall?
It was the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. A lawyer
in town was going to write a book. When he
read that, he says, no one's going to write this book.
(00:58):
What do they know about me? They don't know the
motive or anything. I'm going to be the one to
write this book. That's how he surfaced.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
This was definitely the opportunity that he was waiting for
to come forth. Here he is back in the news
and in his mind, you know, his hero status, and
now he's starting to show off the trophies. He's starting
to send his trophies. He wants to be back in
the news, he wants his fifteen minutes of fame, he
(01:30):
wants to be identified and I kind of set up
with tongue in cheek that if we hadn't figured out
who it was, he would have called it to a
news conference.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
He wanted to control the narrative. He thought about what
if he got caught, and he had kind of a
plan in place as to what he would do about that.
So he decided he was going to come back and
start doing this cat and mouse thing where he would
send these missives to the police to show that story
(02:00):
isn't over and that he's also looking.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
For the next victim.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
He used it on a church computer so that it
was traceable back to that computer. His name was there.
So finally the police watched his routine the way he
had been watching victim routines to figure out he goes
home for lunch every day. This is when to get him.
Speaker 7 (02:26):
Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members
of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Raider, fifty nine
in a white male in Park City, Kansas.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
And so they pulled him over and he acted like,
what took you so long? I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 8 (02:51):
Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 6 (02:54):
Had you vanished from her home?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Suddenly?
Speaker 6 (02:56):
Last weekend, her phone lines had been cut, her door
left open.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
You see the victim play in there with plastic bags
over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a
plan scenario.
Speaker 9 (03:08):
Well, police have said no more about the contents of
the letter.
Speaker 6 (03:11):
It does contain some sort of threat and implies the
killer may strike again.
Speaker 7 (03:15):
He's got to play with these victims.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
He'd get him to the point of death and then
bring them back and then brings them back to the
point of death.
Speaker 10 (03:25):
From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters
and this is Monster BTK.
Speaker 11 (03:40):
Moments ago a press conference in the City Council Chambers
at City Hall concluded, we finally came down to an
announcement of what a lot of Wichetan's have been waiting
for for well over thirty years.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
He actually named himself BTK, Bind, torture and kill. This
coward killed the father in the house that day, he
killed the mother, tied them both up and towards of them.
Speaker 11 (04:03):
And again the question that arises is in one of
the questions that is he had to be answered. Was
he trying to be caught?
Speaker 10 (04:12):
On February twenty fifth, two thousand and five, Dennis Raider
was revealed to be the BTK killer. To everyone's surprise,
he was a seemingly normal guy fifty nine years old,
worked a city job, owned a house with his wife,
two kids, wore glasses balding. As my former KTV anchor
(04:36):
Larry Hadeberg says, this is not the guy we were expecting.
Speaker 8 (04:42):
When people said BTK, you think of a wild eyed
Manson like character, just a crazy person. What we didn't
understand is he was the guy next door. He went
to a local church, he was in charge of the congregation.
(05:02):
He worked in an important job in Park City, Kansas.
He was going to the grocery store with us. He
was going to the movies with us. I would have
never ever guessed that.
Speaker 10 (05:16):
Hours after he was captured, I realized I had seen
this man before, and very recently. Only two weeks prior,
Dennis Rader, along with a tour group from Christ Lutheran,
had visited KKTV. In fact, he had personally requested the
tour for himself and six other members of his church.
Speaker 6 (05:40):
I remember I.
Speaker 10 (05:41):
First saw him sitting in a folding chair three feet
away from me as we reported the latest on the BTK.
In fact, he walked around the studio, chatting it up
with all of us. He then asked if he could
take pictures with his thirty five millimeter camera, and then,
to my surprise, without asking, he slung his arm around
(06:04):
my shoulder and snapped a photo with me looking back.
I am filled with dread realizing that he was in
fact the BTK killer. After he was caught, I was
just shocked by how brazen this was. One of the
first people to learn about btk's identity was his daughter,
(06:28):
Carrie Rawson.
Speaker 6 (06:30):
People are like, how did you not know these things?
But Dad was dad.
Speaker 9 (06:35):
I mean, he'd always had been short tempered at times,
short fused, controlling.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
I didn't know any difference.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
In the aftermath of his capture, everyone wanted to know
the details of this now famous killer named Dennis Rader,
But Carrie says her father's life was pretty normal, at
least on the outside.
Speaker 9 (06:59):
We were pretty much the classic Midwestern family, middle class,
three bedroom ranch, meticulous yard flowers, tulips, the grass mode.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
We go to church on Sundays religiously.
Speaker 9 (07:13):
He was like full suit tie. He would polish his
shoes the night before.
Speaker 10 (07:19):
Years later, Carrie was forced to come to terms with
who her father was, and she was plagued by the
obvious question, how how could an average joe like her
dad become such a monster?
Speaker 9 (07:36):
I mean, I think his three brothers turned out fine.
So if you're going to do nurturn nature debate, I mean,
all have the same genetics in the same home life
and they're fine. So what makes one person turn into
this a monster and other.
Speaker 6 (07:47):
People not be?
Speaker 9 (07:49):
I don't think anybody really knows, and I don't think
he knows. One of the keys to my dad is
figuring out what drives that. But also, like, is there
a way to like help somebody like that before it
turns into murder? Or give them an outlet it's safe
outlet where they're not hurting anybody.
Speaker 10 (08:08):
As to how a supposedly normal guy could murder innocent people,
Carrie says she is just as stumped as everyone else.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
There isn't just one answer to these guys.
Speaker 9 (08:22):
It's complicated, and you're relying on someone that's not a
reliable narrator to help you figure out what's wrong with them.
They hold their keys and they don't even know what's
wrong with them. And then he's over here reading trying
to figure out what's wrong with them.
Speaker 10 (08:35):
Throughout this podcast, Carrie will provide first hand insight on
her father, Dennis Raider. There is perhaps no better time
than right now to revisit the BTK story. According to
many sources, Raider's health is declining. He may not have
many years left to live. His victims are finally speaking up,
(09:00):
ready to tell their stories after all these years, and
most frightening of all, it might not be over.
Speaker 12 (09:10):
The Osage County, Oklahoma Sheriff's office says an old crossword
puzzle from Dennis Rader links the serial killer to the
disappearance of Cynthia don Kinney from Pahuska, Oklahoma.
Speaker 10 (09:23):
That's right. In twenty twenty three, police discovered new cases
in Oklahoma and Missouri that might be the work of
BTK cases we didn't know about until now. Raider refuses
to give straight answers from prison, but he's playing along.
(09:43):
It seems like he's enjoying the fame and publicity. It's
a level of sickness that's difficult to fathom.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
For any psychopathic offender who really doesn't have any remorse
for what they're doing. I don't think their values comport
with most of the world, and that's why they can
get away with. What they can get away with is
they don't feel any remorse about the things that they're doing.
And although Raider has never been given the psychopathy checklist evaluation,
(10:21):
I think it's pretty clear that he has psychopathic features.
My name is Katherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology,
the author of Confession of a serial Killer, about Dennis
Rader and written with Dennis Raider, and an assistant provost
of the Sales University.
Speaker 10 (10:41):
Ramsland is one of the most knowledgeable people on the
planet when it comes to the inner workings of Dennis
Raider's mind. Following his capture, she spent years interviewing Raider
in person in prison. To her, Raider is one of
the most peculiar cases out there. First of all, he
didn't fit the typical image of a serial killer.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
Why didn't he look like Ted Bundy. They were pretty
disappointed that he wasn't this kind of sexy hotshot that
Bundy had presented himself to be. He's this kind of pudgy,
aging guy. That was a disappointment. He was not like
a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. What does
(11:27):
it say about what we think are formulas. I mean
the formulas came out of the FBI, they were not
correct about well the factors in the background of a
serial killer. So Raider was an opportunity, as an outlier
to the thinking of the FBI to find out how
did he become a serial killer? Why did he want
(11:49):
to do this?
Speaker 10 (11:51):
That's a really good question. When most people think of
a serial killer, they imagine this mysterious genius, some evil
celebrity type, someone who stands out. But to the naked eye,
Raider was none of those things, at least on the surface.
Raider had a fairly average Midwestern upbringing.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Nothing about his childhood stands out as something you would
expect for a person who grew up to become a
serial killer. He didn't have abuse, he didn't have neglect.
I mean, there really wasn't anything. He had an intact family.
They didn't have a lot, but they had a house,
they raised chickens and rabbits, and he had a dog.
(12:36):
So pretty normal.
Speaker 10 (12:39):
But what you see isn't always the truth. Dennis Raider
grew up in and around Wichita. Dennis was the eldest
of four boys.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
So as the oldest brother. He was kind of the leader.
They did a lot of cowboys in India, says kids
out in the Midwest do. He had friends. He did
a few pranky things, breaking into his school once. For
the most part, he was a pretty good kid.
Speaker 10 (13:12):
But as Ramsland and others have learned since, there were
peculiar and haunting signs in Raider's early life.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
He had some resentment towards his mother. Most of the
things he remembered about his mother were when she humiliated
him or made him feel powerless. That's important to his
development into a murderer, specifically of women.
Speaker 10 (13:38):
Apparently, Raider didn't think very highly of his mother, but
more than that, he almost seemed to hate her.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
His feeling was that she wasn't a very good Christian,
which I think is interesting. The memories that stood up
most of him are when she shamed him once when
he had an omission in his underwear and she was
horrified and said, you know, when your father gets home,
I'm going to tell him about this, and this is
(14:07):
not something good boys do. And she made him feel
awful about himself, powerless. The one memory had that he
kept saying over and over and over was so important.
It was one time she was moving furniture around got
her ring caught on a spring on a couch, and
(14:27):
she told him to go get help. And he said
that seeing her helpless and him in position to have
some power over her had been very arousing. He was
just a young boy, but it was really exciting to
him to see that look of helplessness on her face,
(14:48):
and that would become the image that he wanted to
replicate on the faces of his female victims. Was that
completely helpless woman who who needs him to do something,
and what he does is killed them.
Speaker 10 (15:05):
A Raider was also infatuated with TV and movies as
a kid. The media he consumed left a large and
lasting impression on him.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
One of the most formative things that happened to him
as a kid was watching a movie called The House
of Wax. And it was only when I watched it
that I realized how inappropriate this movie was for kids
to see. There is a guy who was taking live
people and covering them in wax for his museum.
Speaker 13 (15:38):
You shouldn't have done that, my dear.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
It is Kathy.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
It's Kathy's body under the wax.
Speaker 8 (15:45):
I knew it.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
But one scene that I think was very memorable to
young Dennis was a dark haired woman's whose mother was
dark haired, being bound and she's naked. You don't see
all of her, but you definitely know she doesn't have
clothes on, and she's struggling as she's about to get
(16:08):
the hot wax dripped on her, killing her. And I'm
sure that he was just fixated on that image of
a dark haired woman struggling and bound, because that became
central to his sexual fantasies later on.
Speaker 10 (16:27):
This was just the beginning of Raider's obsession with torture.
As a young boy, Dennis Raider's fascination with bondage took root.
As Catherine Ramsland says, he developed a love for garments.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
He would cozy up to his grandmother and the silkiness
of her ribbons in her hair, and then sometimes he'd
through the drawers of his mother and grandmother and the
slips and the underwear. He just loved the silkiness of that,
so that became part of it. But nothing was quite
as forceful for him as bondage. He got in the
(17:16):
barn and tie ropes around his waist, and eventually, as
he matured, he would have orgasms when he did this
without touching himself. According to him, just that pressure around
his waist would be enough, and so bondage became a
huge deal for him. And as he merged that with
(17:37):
the image of the struggling bound of woman, that became
the central figure of his erotic fantasies. Then he discovered
when he was fourteen, he discovered true Detective magazines that
his father was reading and hiding in the car, and
one of them was about Harvey Glatman. And Harvey Glatman
(18:01):
was a serial killer from the fifties who would persuade women,
beautiful women to come and model for him. He'd pretend
to be a photographer and then he'd say, well, he's
taken photographs for these True Detective magazines and he needs
to bind them because you have to have the bound,
terrified woman. And they would let him, and then once
(18:22):
he had them bound, he would tell them he was
going to kill them and then get these photos of
the utterly terrified, bound, trapped female. And they did end
up on the covers of a True Detective magazine, and
Raider saw this image of a totally helpless woman, which
is similar to that image of his mother. This totally helpless, bound,
(18:46):
scantily clad female and sealed itself. So he's fourteen and
he's looking at this and going that is the image
that he would always want to try to replicate, bondage,
which was erotic to him as self. Bondage became part
of what had to be in all of his murders.
(19:08):
He had to have the bondage thing always.
Speaker 10 (19:13):
Raider's daughter Carrie now even remembers her dad talking about
these detective magazines.
Speaker 9 (19:21):
Now, I thought maybe those were inappropriate, but somebody told
me they were pretty normal in a drugstore, bondage photos
of women. So my dad was influenced by this. When
he was seven or eight years old, he's reading these
detective magazines.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
He's influenced by these photos.
Speaker 9 (19:38):
If you talk to my dad, it sounds like he
probably had what nowadays we call a conduct disorder when
he was a young boy.
Speaker 6 (19:45):
There was no help. In the forties and fifties.
Speaker 10 (19:48):
It only got worse. Raiders' fantasies became more and more elaborate.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
He would imagine creating what he called girl traps where
they would be totally helpless. He would have complete control
and domination over them, and so that was a big
part of his fantasies. He would draw that on the
board in his classroom while other people are out at recess.
Speaker 10 (20:13):
On the farm. Raider tested out his ideas on animals.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
A very good precursor for crimes is animal cruelty. Animal
cruelty is a big, big one, and he got heavily
involved with that, killing cats, killing dogs. My name is
John Douglas. I was with the FBI for twenty five years.
Wrote a book about inside the Mind of the BTK Strangler.
I was one of the first people to analyze a
(20:42):
case and was pretty good analysis.
Speaker 10 (20:46):
You've probably heard about John Douglas before. He is the
famed FBI profiler who helped kickstart the agency's study on
serial killers in the nineteen seventies. He was also the
inspiration for the Netflix series mind Hunter. Like Catherine Ramsland,
he dedicated years of his life to trying to understand BTK.
Speaker 7 (21:09):
Now.
Speaker 10 (21:09):
The best place to look, he says, is in early
childhood and pretty early on, Dennis Rader took interest in
some very troubling behavior. As he just mentioned, Raider took
joy in causing harm to animals.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
He went on a family grouping where they had a
chicken to cook. They bound the chicken up and he
tied him to a post before they killed the chicken,
and he liked that. He got excited about that as well.
Speaker 10 (21:42):
As Douglas says, this all came back to his bondage fetish.
He enjoyed being in control while something or someone was helpless.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
He liked the appearance of bondage and where someone is
stuck someone's control, someone can't get away, The chicken can't
get get away.
Speaker 10 (22:02):
Eventually, Raider became bored with the fantasies, the magazines, and
the chickens. As a young man, he escalated to finding
women and stalking them. At first, it started with just looking.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
He was certainly at peeping Tom, and he was already
beginning to be fetishistic where he wanted underwear clothing that
he was steel offul lines in the neighborhood. And then
he was involved in peeping tom, looking through the windows,
looking at people being undressed. He would not enter until
he got older, but when he was younger he was
(22:39):
just looking and fantasizing about what he could do. As
he began to age, he then began entering the houses.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
He thought of himself like a spy. He did do
some surveillance of people, some following women.
Speaker 10 (22:56):
This is Catherine Ramsland again. She says that after high school,
Raider joined the Air Force in nineteen sixty six. He
did basic training in Texas before being stationed in Okinawa
and eventually Tokyo, and his experiences there only deepened his
fanatical tendencies.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
He had sexual experiences when he was in the military
with sex workers that kind of sealed the fantasy, and
it was after he came back and had gotten married
that he began thinking about abducting women.
Speaker 10 (23:38):
Raider left the Air Force in nineteen seventy and moved
back to Wichita. There he met Pauladetz, whom he married
in nineteen seventy one. But, as Catherine Ramsland said, his
marriage did not stop him from pursuing his fantasies of abduction.
He started to pick women in the neighborhood and think
(23:58):
about ways to snatch them.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
He wanted to take them to an abandoned farm, so
he had scouted out farmsteads around Kansas, and he wanted
to abduct this bank teller.
Speaker 10 (24:13):
Ramselin elaborates on this incident in her book Confession of
a Serial Killer. Here is what Raider told her.
Speaker 13 (24:22):
I saw a bank teller at the Twin Lakes Bank.
I had seen her when Paula and I did business there.
I knew when she had a lunch hower. The bank
teller parked her car across the street of twenty first North.
Many cars there could shield me in hiding. I knew
her car.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
He didn't know what he was going to do. He
hadn't planned very far, except that he was going to
take this young woman out to the abandoned barn, find her,
do something with her.
Speaker 13 (24:52):
My main theme was to hang someone. The act of
hanging was sexually exciting to me. Of being bound or
straining with the rope or noose around the neck, legs bound,
and no escape. For self gratification, I had hanged myself
to the point of almost passing out. I had an
(25:13):
old barn in mind. We could be completely alone and
I could better control them. I loved old barnes, and
there were several located around Wichita that I could use
for hanging victims.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
That was the first time he really acted on the
fantasy is I'm going to grab somebody.
Speaker 13 (25:35):
Timed like a clock. She entered her car, I approached
and tried to force myself in. She screamed and fought back.
I finally gave up and told her I'm sorry. I
was trying to take a vehicle and leave the area.
It was a ruse that calmed her down. I told
(25:55):
her I was going to leave her alone, and I
quickly left.
Speaker 5 (26:00):
But that was the start, and the fact that he
crossed that line was important. The second line he crossed
was breaking into houses. As he began to break into houses,
he felt very powerful people were not there, but he
(26:20):
would stand in their home, and he felt that sense
of violation. That gave him a lot of courage because
he realized he could get into their home, take something,
and get out and not be caught. That empowered him
with the sense that now he could do this, He
could get into a home and abduct somebody, which was
(26:42):
the first plan.
Speaker 10 (26:46):
What follows is a sequence of events that eventually pushed
Raider into his first violent act. Not long after getting married,
Raider got a job at Cessna, the big aviation company
based in which Talk Kansas, Rader discussed this job. Here
are his words, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Cessna had been my ideal job, working in the electrical
tool and died part of a plant. It was a
challenging job, but one that I was learning to love.
Speaker 10 (27:20):
But Raider wasn't at Sessna for very long due to
rising gasoline prices. The aviation industry was in financial dress.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
And he got laid off. That's the job that he loved.
What he will say is that's what triggered the first
murder is he was angry. He did not like the
fact that his wife was now the bread winner. He
felt powerless. So again he's in this situation where a
woman has power over him.
Speaker 6 (27:48):
He isn't like this.
Speaker 13 (27:51):
I had low frustration tolerance in stressful situations. If criticized,
especially if I'm right, I literally blowed. Don't count to ten,
I get hot, break into a sweat, and seek mental revenge.
I believe I'm too smart to go postal, so if
I made a revenge attack, it would be with stealth
(28:13):
and planned. Loss of personal power can cause burning resentment.
Frustration seems to be a key either the system or
a person not understanding me on the issues surrounding the problem.
I believe job loss causes a lot of anger and frustration.
Ego is the key.
Speaker 10 (28:36):
Raider decided it was time, no more fantasies. This time
he was actually going to kill, and he found his
first victim or victims. The following excerpt comes from the
book bind Torture, Kill, The Inside story of BTK.
Speaker 14 (28:57):
Dennis Raider had seen the woman and the girl day
while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration.
His wife didn't like driving in the snow. On Edgemore Drive,
he saw two dark skinned females and his station wagon
backing onto Murdock Avenue. After that, he stalked them for
weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as
(29:19):
she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that
they left about eight forty five and that it took
Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the
husband left for work around eight am. He did not
want to confront the husband, so he timed his own
arrival for about eight twenty. The husband would be gone,
the boy would be there, but he was incidental to
(29:40):
the plan. He would kill the boy, but he didn't
want him. He wanted the girl.
Speaker 10 (29:47):
The girl was eleven year old Josie o'to. The mother
was thirty four year old Julia Otero. It was on
January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, that Dennis Raider took his
first visvictims. As you heard in episode one, he broke in,
tied up the family, and one by one he strangled
(30:08):
all of them. There was no going back. Denis Raider's
transformation into BTK was complete. After Dennis Rader escaped the
Otero crime scene, he slipped back into life at home.
(30:29):
He disguised himself as a regular family man in Wichita
once again. Raider and his wife Paula had been married
nearly three years. By this time. They attended church weekly
with their parents, and he helped out with the youth group,
and he decided to take classes at Wichita State nearby.
But in his time alone, he allowed himself to explore
(30:52):
his fantasies. The following is an excerpt from the book
Buying Torture Kill, The Inside Story of bt.
Speaker 14 (31:01):
He liked to study crime novels, detective magazines, and pornography.
He liked to masturbate while playing with handcuffs. In their
snug home only nine hundred and sixty square feet, he
hid small trophies on his wrist. He wore Joe o
Taro's watch. It ran well and got him to school
on time. Wichita State University had started spring classes, and
(31:24):
he had chosen a major administration of justice that let
him study police officers closely and learn more about his
new pursuit. He enjoyed the irony.
Speaker 10 (31:35):
The events of January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, where the
violent culmination of years spent fantasizing about bondage, torture, and murder.
Raider had mentally built himself into the murder he'd envision.
The Otero family was his first taste of success.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
What really pisses me off about my dad is that
he knew what he was or what he was capable of.
He even talks about that in Catherine Ramson's book, that
he could have walked into a mental health institution before
he murdered the Otaros and asked for help. And he
knew that, and he didn't do it anyway, because he
just wanted that thrill and that hit, and those are
(32:19):
words he uses, thrill and.
Speaker 10 (32:20):
Hit again Carrie Rawson. She mentions that how each opportunity
during the Otaro murders, her father chose to cross the
point of no return.
Speaker 9 (32:34):
I mean, everybody has those dark thoughts or the what ifs,
But I mean there's a big gap between reading something
or watching something on TV or thinking something versus when
you're premeditating and planning these things. If you're in the
store buying rope, that's when you need to stop. That point,
you probably don't have the ability to stop yourself, and
(32:55):
you're probably not wanting to. Now he had a choice.
This is where I get really pitied. He comes in,
he doesn't have a mask on, and he blames them.
He says, well, they saw my face, so I had
to put them down. He's literally talking like when he's
a compliance officer putting an animal down.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
Those are his words. I had to put them down
because they saw my face. No, you didn't. You could
have left.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
That's where you're not insane. You're in control. You're in
enough control to murder for people and not get caught
for thirty years.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
You totally could have left.
Speaker 9 (33:25):
But he's such a freaking narcissist. He puts it on them.
Speaker 10 (33:30):
Nothing about the Otero murders had gone his plan, But
as a testament to his delusion, Dennis Rader didn't believe
that it was his fault. Here's forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 5 (33:43):
He thought he had left nothing to chance. That was
in his head that he had stopped her and knew
everything about the house. He had done a terrible job.
They had a dog too that he didn't know about,
and also their car had no gas in it, so
he's going to abduct them in their car and that
wouldn't have worked out either. So none of the things
(34:04):
he had in mind for his first act actually happened
the way he had imagined it, and he was terrified
that he was going to be caught. He dropped his
knife sheet out in the yard, had to go back
for it. It's the middle of the day, neighbors could
have seen it. It's a house in a neighborhood. Many
(34:26):
mistakes made, but still he did not get caught. So
that empowered him to think that, wow, I can kill
almost an entire family and nobody came for me.
Speaker 10 (34:39):
The Otero murders would only be the beginning of raiders
murderous career. Despite all the mistakes he made, he felt unstoppable.
In confession of a serial killer, he had this to
say about his first killing spree.
Speaker 13 (34:57):
My green was on fire, cut out and collected the
newspaper clippings on the oteros and started my first Heidi
hole file using those college colored folders for turn papers
with three holes, I had cut and taped the clippings inside.
I stored this in the attached shed in the back,
an area that my wife would not find. I also
(35:19):
listened and watched for any information on the radio or TV.
One thing for sure, that area was now off limits forever,
except for maybe just to drive by.
Speaker 10 (35:32):
After the Otaro murders, Raider recognized he had crossed over
to what he called the dark path. He considered chalking
it up to a bad day and moving on with
his life, but his killer instincts overrode that sense. He
now saw himself as a serial killer, and he liked it.
Speaker 13 (35:54):
I thought I could control it. I soon realized I
was in over my head, and I was too embarrassed
to ask for help. I quickly was into sexual fantasies
beyond my control. I had set my goals to be
a white hat high, but the lifeboat drifted away from
my reach until the deep water became my coping. I
(36:16):
had trusted myself to steer the right course, but when
I studied books about past serial killers. The more I learned,
the closer I came to believe I could someday become one.
I was on a powerful train and could not get off.
The track was set. Superman could stop it, but I
(36:37):
was not Superman. To cope with what I was doing,
I cubed like I would do as a kid.
Speaker 10 (36:46):
Cubing is a concept Raider came up with. It's similar
to compartmentalization. Here's Catherine Ramsland again.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
He is all the different bases of the cube. Family man,
church leader, thief, boy, scout, volunteer, all of that kind
of stuff. But each face doesn't see any of the others.
So when he's a family man, he's a family man
in his mind because it's only a present moment truth.
(37:18):
When he sees the opportunity to be a thief or
a killer or a liar, he can turn that face out,
so it's all integrated as a whole, but none of
the faces see each other.
Speaker 6 (37:32):
And he came up with that concept.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Psychologists call this compartmentalizing, but that conveys the idea that
they're all distinct compartments. When you think of it as
a cube, a unified entity with multiple faces. That can
be switched around to meet the circumstances. That's a much
more powerful concept, and that's his concept. He had ways
(37:57):
to keep it all hidden, but he didn't think but
as pretending. It was. That's what I do then, But
I also have social obligations. I also am a good dad.
I'm also a good churchgoer. I'm also a good employee.
All of those things worked for him, and I think
(38:18):
it's difficult for people to look at such strongly contrasting
morality in the same person. That's the mystery. How does
that happen? But it does happen. It happens then for
anyone who's having an affair. It happens with con artists,
it happens with a lot of different people who live
(38:40):
double lives of some kind. I don't think they think
about it as pretending. I think they just think they
have developed alternate life frames, and those alternate life frames
are in motion when they're in specific situations. Raider could
have been out driving around with his and he spots
(39:01):
a young woman and decides he's going to come back
to that neighborhood to see if he can figure out
where she lives.
Speaker 10 (39:09):
That's exactly what Rader did next. In the weeks following
the Otero murders, he decided he wanted to kill again
and soon. Here are his words from Confession of a
serial Killer, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13 (39:25):
I believe that by February or March the hunt begin again.
I found it exciting to prowl at day or night.
He was very easy for me to spend a little
time after classes to prowl or day drive that area.
Going to class worked well for me as a cover.
I could say I was at the library or use
(39:46):
that time to prowl or stalk.
Speaker 10 (39:50):
Rader was becoming restless. He started to pick out new projects.
Projects are what he called the women he would Each
of his projects following the Otaros were younger women spotted
alone in the wild. Some of them had a family,
(40:11):
but Raider had already proven he wasn't averse to taking
the lives of children. Raider zeroed in on a young
woman named Catherine Bright. She was a fellow student at
Wichita State.
Speaker 13 (40:26):
So it was one day after classes or in between.
I spotted Bright arriving home with a friend, another female,
maybe a sister. She was at her mailbox. She fit
my fantasy profile a co ed dishwasher, blonde small. I
saw her go into the house, and I thought, that's
(40:48):
a possibility. My heart raced as the hit came into focus.
From that moment on, I locked in on that house.
Speaker 10 (41:05):
Next time on Monster BTK, he.
Speaker 6 (41:09):
Was constantly trying to trip the police up.
Speaker 13 (41:12):
I was planning on tying her up on the bed,
either half naked or totally.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly.
He loses control of the situation. We had arrested a
couple of brothers who admitted that they had killed the oteos.
Speaker 13 (41:28):
If I was doing the Otero's, this is how I
would have done it.
Speaker 5 (41:32):
He considered himself to be among the elite serial killers,
and so he named himself BTK.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
He enjoyed communicating with KKTV. KKTV was his favorite station.
He had watched it since he was a child.
Speaker 13 (41:47):
I'd write this letter to you for the sake of
the taxpayer as well as your time.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and
Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on
behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay
alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of
(42:24):
iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising Producerrima Ilkali. Marketing
support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright at iHeart Podcasts
and Caroline Origemma at tenderfoot TV. Auditional research by Claudia Daffrico.
(42:47):
Original artwork by Kevin Mister soul Harp, original music by
Makeup and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and
the team at UTA and the Nord Group. Podcasts from
iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
New episodes of Monster BTK are released every Monday and
brought to you absolutely free. But if you want to
hear the whole season right now, it's available ad free
on iHeart True Crime Plus. For more information, check out
the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
I think he would have eventually killed again. But what
really got him to finally surface, which was his downfall?
It was the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. A lawyer
in town was going to write a book. When he
read that, he says, no one's going to write this book.
(00:58):
What do they know about me? They don't know the
motive or anything. I'm going to be the one to
write this book. That's how he surfaced.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
This was definitely the opportunity that he was waiting for
to come forth. Here he is back in the news
and in his mind, you know, his hero status, and
now he's starting to show off the trophies. He's starting
to send his trophies. He wants to be back in
the news, he wants his fifteen minutes of fame, he
(01:30):
wants to be identified and I kind of set up
with tongue in cheek that if we hadn't figured out
who it was, he would have called it to a
news conference.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
He wanted to control the narrative. He thought about what
if he got caught, and he had kind of a
plan in place as to what he would do about that.
So he decided he was going to come back and
start doing this cat and mouse thing where he would
send these missives to the police to show that story
(02:00):
isn't over and that he's also looking.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
For the next victim.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
He used it on a church computer so that it
was traceable back to that computer. His name was there.
So finally the police watched his routine the way he
had been watching victim routines to figure out he goes
home for lunch every day. This is when to get him.
Speaker 7 (02:26):
Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members
of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Raider, fifty nine
in a white male in Park City, Kansas.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
And so they pulled him over and he acted like,
what took you so long? I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 8 (02:51):
Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 6 (02:54):
Had you vanished from her home?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Suddenly?
Speaker 6 (02:56):
Last weekend, her phone lines had been cut, her door
left open.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
You see the victim play in there with plastic bags
over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a
plan scenario.
Speaker 9 (03:08):
Well, police have said no more about the contents of
the letter.
Speaker 6 (03:11):
It does contain some sort of threat and implies the
killer may strike again.
Speaker 7 (03:15):
He's got to play with these victims.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
He'd get him to the point of death and then
bring them back and then brings them back to the
point of death.
Speaker 10 (03:25):
From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters
and this is Monster BTK.
Speaker 11 (03:40):
Moments ago a press conference in the City Council Chambers
at City Hall concluded, we finally came down to an
announcement of what a lot of Wichetan's have been waiting
for for well over thirty years.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
He actually named himself BTK, Bind, torture and kill. This
coward killed the father in the house that day, he
killed the mother, tied them both up and towards of them.
Speaker 11 (04:03):
And again the question that arises is in one of
the questions that is he had to be answered. Was
he trying to be caught?
Speaker 10 (04:12):
On February twenty fifth, two thousand and five, Dennis Raider
was revealed to be the BTK killer. To everyone's surprise,
he was a seemingly normal guy fifty nine years old,
worked a city job, owned a house with his wife,
two kids, wore glasses balding. As my former KTV anchor
(04:36):
Larry Hadeberg says, this is not the guy we were expecting.
Speaker 8 (04:42):
When people said BTK, you think of a wild eyed
Manson like character, just a crazy person. What we didn't
understand is he was the guy next door. He went
to a local church, he was in charge of the congregation.
(05:02):
He worked in an important job in Park City, Kansas.
He was going to the grocery store with us. He
was going to the movies with us. I would have
never ever guessed that.
Speaker 10 (05:16):
Hours after he was captured, I realized I had seen
this man before, and very recently. Only two weeks prior,
Dennis Rader, along with a tour group from Christ Lutheran,
had visited KKTV. In fact, he had personally requested the
tour for himself and six other members of his church.
Speaker 6 (05:40):
I remember I.
Speaker 10 (05:41):
First saw him sitting in a folding chair three feet
away from me as we reported the latest on the BTK.
In fact, he walked around the studio, chatting it up
with all of us. He then asked if he could
take pictures with his thirty five millimeter camera, and then,
to my surprise, without asking, he slung his arm around
(06:04):
my shoulder and snapped a photo with me looking back.
I am filled with dread realizing that he was in
fact the BTK killer. After he was caught, I was
just shocked by how brazen this was. One of the
first people to learn about btk's identity was his daughter,
(06:28):
Carrie Rawson.
Speaker 6 (06:30):
People are like, how did you not know these things?
But Dad was dad.
Speaker 9 (06:35):
I mean, he'd always had been short tempered at times,
short fused, controlling.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
I didn't know any difference.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
In the aftermath of his capture, everyone wanted to know
the details of this now famous killer named Dennis Rader,
But Carrie says her father's life was pretty normal, at
least on the outside.
Speaker 9 (06:59):
We were pretty much the classic Midwestern family, middle class,
three bedroom ranch, meticulous yard flowers, tulips, the grass mode.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
We go to church on Sundays religiously.
Speaker 9 (07:13):
He was like full suit tie. He would polish his
shoes the night before.
Speaker 10 (07:19):
Years later, Carrie was forced to come to terms with
who her father was, and she was plagued by the
obvious question, how how could an average joe like her
dad become such a monster?
Speaker 9 (07:36):
I mean, I think his three brothers turned out fine.
So if you're going to do nurturn nature debate, I mean,
all have the same genetics in the same home life
and they're fine. So what makes one person turn into
this a monster and other.
Speaker 6 (07:47):
People not be?
Speaker 9 (07:49):
I don't think anybody really knows, and I don't think
he knows. One of the keys to my dad is
figuring out what drives that. But also, like, is there
a way to like help somebody like that before it
turns into murder? Or give them an outlet it's safe
outlet where they're not hurting anybody.
Speaker 10 (08:08):
As to how a supposedly normal guy could murder innocent people,
Carrie says she is just as stumped as everyone else.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
There isn't just one answer to these guys.
Speaker 9 (08:22):
It's complicated, and you're relying on someone that's not a
reliable narrator to help you figure out what's wrong with them.
They hold their keys and they don't even know what's
wrong with them. And then he's over here reading trying
to figure out what's wrong with them.
Speaker 10 (08:35):
Throughout this podcast, Carrie will provide first hand insight on
her father, Dennis Raider. There is perhaps no better time
than right now to revisit the BTK story. According to
many sources, Raider's health is declining. He may not have
many years left to live. His victims are finally speaking up,
(09:00):
ready to tell their stories after all these years, and
most frightening of all, it might not be over.
Speaker 12 (09:10):
The Osage County, Oklahoma Sheriff's office says an old crossword
puzzle from Dennis Rader links the serial killer to the
disappearance of Cynthia don Kinney from Pahuska, Oklahoma.
Speaker 10 (09:23):
That's right. In twenty twenty three, police discovered new cases
in Oklahoma and Missouri that might be the work of
BTK cases we didn't know about until now. Raider refuses
to give straight answers from prison, but he's playing along.
(09:43):
It seems like he's enjoying the fame and publicity. It's
a level of sickness that's difficult to fathom.
Speaker 5 (09:54):
For any psychopathic offender who really doesn't have any remorse
for what they're doing. I don't think their values comport
with most of the world, and that's why they can
get away with. What they can get away with is
they don't feel any remorse about the things that they're doing.
And although Raider has never been given the psychopathy checklist evaluation,
(10:21):
I think it's pretty clear that he has psychopathic features.
My name is Katherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology,
the author of Confession of a serial Killer, about Dennis
Rader and written with Dennis Raider, and an assistant provost
of the Sales University.
Speaker 10 (10:41):
Ramsland is one of the most knowledgeable people on the
planet when it comes to the inner workings of Dennis
Raider's mind. Following his capture, she spent years interviewing Raider
in person in prison. To her, Raider is one of
the most peculiar cases out there. First of all, he
didn't fit the typical image of a serial killer.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
Why didn't he look like Ted Bundy. They were pretty
disappointed that he wasn't this kind of sexy hotshot that
Bundy had presented himself to be. He's this kind of pudgy,
aging guy. That was a disappointment. He was not like
a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. What does
(11:27):
it say about what we think are formulas. I mean
the formulas came out of the FBI, they were not
correct about well the factors in the background of a
serial killer. So Raider was an opportunity, as an outlier
to the thinking of the FBI to find out how
did he become a serial killer? Why did he want
(11:49):
to do this?
Speaker 10 (11:51):
That's a really good question. When most people think of
a serial killer, they imagine this mysterious genius, some evil
celebrity type, someone who stands out. But to the naked eye,
Raider was none of those things, at least on the surface.
Raider had a fairly average Midwestern upbringing.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Nothing about his childhood stands out as something you would
expect for a person who grew up to become a
serial killer. He didn't have abuse, he didn't have neglect.
I mean, there really wasn't anything. He had an intact family.
They didn't have a lot, but they had a house,
they raised chickens and rabbits, and he had a dog.
(12:36):
So pretty normal.
Speaker 10 (12:39):
But what you see isn't always the truth. Dennis Raider
grew up in and around Wichita. Dennis was the eldest
of four boys.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
So as the oldest brother. He was kind of the leader.
They did a lot of cowboys in India, says kids
out in the Midwest do. He had friends. He did
a few pranky things, breaking into his school once. For
the most part, he was a pretty good kid.
Speaker 10 (13:12):
But as Ramsland and others have learned since, there were
peculiar and haunting signs in Raider's early life.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
He had some resentment towards his mother. Most of the
things he remembered about his mother were when she humiliated
him or made him feel powerless. That's important to his
development into a murderer, specifically of women.
Speaker 10 (13:38):
Apparently, Raider didn't think very highly of his mother, but
more than that, he almost seemed to hate her.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
His feeling was that she wasn't a very good Christian,
which I think is interesting. The memories that stood up
most of him are when she shamed him once when
he had an omission in his underwear and she was
horrified and said, you know, when your father gets home,
I'm going to tell him about this, and this is
(14:07):
not something good boys do. And she made him feel
awful about himself, powerless. The one memory had that he
kept saying over and over and over was so important.
It was one time she was moving furniture around got
her ring caught on a spring on a couch, and
(14:27):
she told him to go get help. And he said
that seeing her helpless and him in position to have
some power over her had been very arousing. He was
just a young boy, but it was really exciting to
him to see that look of helplessness on her face,
(14:48):
and that would become the image that he wanted to
replicate on the faces of his female victims. Was that
completely helpless woman who who needs him to do something,
and what he does is killed them.
Speaker 10 (15:05):
A Raider was also infatuated with TV and movies as
a kid. The media he consumed left a large and
lasting impression on him.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
One of the most formative things that happened to him
as a kid was watching a movie called The House
of Wax. And it was only when I watched it
that I realized how inappropriate this movie was for kids
to see. There is a guy who was taking live
people and covering them in wax for his museum.
Speaker 13 (15:38):
You shouldn't have done that, my dear.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
It is Kathy.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
It's Kathy's body under the wax.
Speaker 8 (15:45):
I knew it.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
But one scene that I think was very memorable to
young Dennis was a dark haired woman's whose mother was
dark haired, being bound and she's naked. You don't see
all of her, but you definitely know she doesn't have
clothes on, and she's struggling as she's about to get
(16:08):
the hot wax dripped on her, killing her. And I'm
sure that he was just fixated on that image of
a dark haired woman struggling and bound, because that became
central to his sexual fantasies later on.
Speaker 10 (16:27):
This was just the beginning of Raider's obsession with torture.
As a young boy, Dennis Raider's fascination with bondage took root.
As Catherine Ramsland says, he developed a love for garments.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
He would cozy up to his grandmother and the silkiness
of her ribbons in her hair, and then sometimes he'd
through the drawers of his mother and grandmother and the
slips and the underwear. He just loved the silkiness of that,
so that became part of it. But nothing was quite
as forceful for him as bondage. He got in the
(17:16):
barn and tie ropes around his waist, and eventually, as
he matured, he would have orgasms when he did this
without touching himself. According to him, just that pressure around
his waist would be enough, and so bondage became a
huge deal for him. And as he merged that with
(17:37):
the image of the struggling bound of woman, that became
the central figure of his erotic fantasies. Then he discovered
when he was fourteen, he discovered true Detective magazines that
his father was reading and hiding in the car, and
one of them was about Harvey Glatman. And Harvey Glatman
(18:01):
was a serial killer from the fifties who would persuade women,
beautiful women to come and model for him. He'd pretend
to be a photographer and then he'd say, well, he's
taken photographs for these True Detective magazines and he needs
to bind them because you have to have the bound,
terrified woman. And they would let him, and then once
(18:22):
he had them bound, he would tell them he was
going to kill them and then get these photos of
the utterly terrified, bound, trapped female. And they did end
up on the covers of a True Detective magazine, and
Raider saw this image of a totally helpless woman, which
is similar to that image of his mother. This totally helpless, bound,
(18:46):
scantily clad female and sealed itself. So he's fourteen and
he's looking at this and going that is the image
that he would always want to try to replicate, bondage,
which was erotic to him as self. Bondage became part
of what had to be in all of his murders.
(19:08):
He had to have the bondage thing always.
Speaker 10 (19:13):
Raider's daughter Carrie now even remembers her dad talking about
these detective magazines.
Speaker 9 (19:21):
Now, I thought maybe those were inappropriate, but somebody told
me they were pretty normal in a drugstore, bondage photos
of women. So my dad was influenced by this. When
he was seven or eight years old, he's reading these
detective magazines.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
He's influenced by these photos.
Speaker 9 (19:38):
If you talk to my dad, it sounds like he
probably had what nowadays we call a conduct disorder when
he was a young boy.
Speaker 6 (19:45):
There was no help. In the forties and fifties.
Speaker 10 (19:48):
It only got worse. Raiders' fantasies became more and more elaborate.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
He would imagine creating what he called girl traps where
they would be totally helpless. He would have complete control
and domination over them, and so that was a big
part of his fantasies. He would draw that on the
board in his classroom while other people are out at recess.
Speaker 10 (20:13):
On the farm. Raider tested out his ideas on animals.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
A very good precursor for crimes is animal cruelty. Animal
cruelty is a big, big one, and he got heavily
involved with that, killing cats, killing dogs. My name is
John Douglas. I was with the FBI for twenty five years.
Wrote a book about inside the Mind of the BTK Strangler.
I was one of the first people to analyze a
(20:42):
case and was pretty good analysis.
Speaker 10 (20:46):
You've probably heard about John Douglas before. He is the
famed FBI profiler who helped kickstart the agency's study on
serial killers in the nineteen seventies. He was also the
inspiration for the Netflix series mind Hunter. Like Catherine Ramsland,
he dedicated years of his life to trying to understand BTK.
Speaker 7 (21:09):
Now.
Speaker 10 (21:09):
The best place to look, he says, is in early
childhood and pretty early on, Dennis Rader took interest in
some very troubling behavior. As he just mentioned, Raider took
joy in causing harm to animals.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
He went on a family grouping where they had a
chicken to cook. They bound the chicken up and he
tied him to a post before they killed the chicken,
and he liked that. He got excited about that as well.
Speaker 10 (21:42):
As Douglas says, this all came back to his bondage fetish.
He enjoyed being in control while something or someone was helpless.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
He liked the appearance of bondage and where someone is
stuck someone's control, someone can't get away, The chicken can't
get get away.
Speaker 10 (22:02):
Eventually, Raider became bored with the fantasies, the magazines, and
the chickens. As a young man, he escalated to finding
women and stalking them. At first, it started with just looking.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
He was certainly at peeping Tom, and he was already
beginning to be fetishistic where he wanted underwear clothing that
he was steel offul lines in the neighborhood. And then
he was involved in peeping tom, looking through the windows,
looking at people being undressed. He would not enter until
he got older, but when he was younger he was
(22:39):
just looking and fantasizing about what he could do. As
he began to age, he then began entering the houses.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
He thought of himself like a spy. He did do
some surveillance of people, some following women.
Speaker 10 (22:56):
This is Catherine Ramsland again. She says that after high school,
Raider joined the Air Force in nineteen sixty six. He
did basic training in Texas before being stationed in Okinawa
and eventually Tokyo, and his experiences there only deepened his
fanatical tendencies.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
He had sexual experiences when he was in the military
with sex workers that kind of sealed the fantasy, and
it was after he came back and had gotten married
that he began thinking about abducting women.
Speaker 10 (23:38):
Raider left the Air Force in nineteen seventy and moved
back to Wichita. There he met Pauladetz, whom he married
in nineteen seventy one. But, as Catherine Ramsland said, his
marriage did not stop him from pursuing his fantasies of abduction.
He started to pick women in the neighborhood and think
(23:58):
about ways to snatch them.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
He wanted to take them to an abandoned farm, so
he had scouted out farmsteads around Kansas, and he wanted
to abduct this bank teller.
Speaker 10 (24:13):
Ramselin elaborates on this incident in her book Confession of
a Serial Killer. Here is what Raider told her.
Speaker 13 (24:22):
I saw a bank teller at the Twin Lakes Bank.
I had seen her when Paula and I did business there.
I knew when she had a lunch hower. The bank
teller parked her car across the street of twenty first North.
Many cars there could shield me in hiding. I knew
her car.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
He didn't know what he was going to do. He
hadn't planned very far, except that he was going to
take this young woman out to the abandoned barn, find her,
do something with her.
Speaker 13 (24:52):
My main theme was to hang someone. The act of
hanging was sexually exciting to me. Of being bound or
straining with the rope or noose around the neck, legs bound,
and no escape. For self gratification, I had hanged myself
to the point of almost passing out. I had an
(25:13):
old barn in mind. We could be completely alone and
I could better control them. I loved old barnes, and
there were several located around Wichita that I could use
for hanging victims.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
That was the first time he really acted on the
fantasy is I'm going to grab somebody.
Speaker 13 (25:35):
Timed like a clock. She entered her car, I approached
and tried to force myself in. She screamed and fought back.
I finally gave up and told her I'm sorry. I
was trying to take a vehicle and leave the area.
It was a ruse that calmed her down. I told
(25:55):
her I was going to leave her alone, and I
quickly left.
Speaker 5 (26:00):
But that was the start, and the fact that he
crossed that line was important. The second line he crossed
was breaking into houses. As he began to break into houses,
he felt very powerful people were not there, but he
(26:20):
would stand in their home, and he felt that sense
of violation. That gave him a lot of courage because
he realized he could get into their home, take something,
and get out and not be caught. That empowered him
with the sense that now he could do this, He
could get into a home and abduct somebody, which was
(26:42):
the first plan.
Speaker 10 (26:46):
What follows is a sequence of events that eventually pushed
Raider into his first violent act. Not long after getting married,
Raider got a job at Cessna, the big aviation company
based in which Talk Kansas, Rader discussed this job. Here
are his words, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Cessna had been my ideal job, working in the electrical
tool and died part of a plant. It was a
challenging job, but one that I was learning to love.
Speaker 10 (27:20):
But Raider wasn't at Sessna for very long due to
rising gasoline prices. The aviation industry was in financial dress.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
And he got laid off. That's the job that he loved.
What he will say is that's what triggered the first
murder is he was angry. He did not like the
fact that his wife was now the bread winner. He
felt powerless. So again he's in this situation where a
woman has power over him.
Speaker 6 (27:48):
He isn't like this.
Speaker 13 (27:51):
I had low frustration tolerance in stressful situations. If criticized,
especially if I'm right, I literally blowed. Don't count to ten,
I get hot, break into a sweat, and seek mental revenge.
I believe I'm too smart to go postal, so if
I made a revenge attack, it would be with stealth
(28:13):
and planned. Loss of personal power can cause burning resentment.
Frustration seems to be a key either the system or
a person not understanding me on the issues surrounding the problem.
I believe job loss causes a lot of anger and frustration.
Ego is the key.
Speaker 10 (28:36):
Raider decided it was time, no more fantasies. This time
he was actually going to kill, and he found his
first victim or victims. The following excerpt comes from the
book bind Torture, Kill, The Inside story of BTK.
Speaker 14 (28:57):
Dennis Raider had seen the woman and the girl day
while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration.
His wife didn't like driving in the snow. On Edgemore Drive,
he saw two dark skinned females and his station wagon
backing onto Murdock Avenue. After that, he stalked them for
weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as
(29:19):
she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that
they left about eight forty five and that it took
Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the
husband left for work around eight am. He did not
want to confront the husband, so he timed his own
arrival for about eight twenty. The husband would be gone,
the boy would be there, but he was incidental to
(29:40):
the plan. He would kill the boy, but he didn't
want him. He wanted the girl.
Speaker 10 (29:47):
The girl was eleven year old Josie o'to. The mother
was thirty four year old Julia Otero. It was on
January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, that Dennis Raider took his
first visvictims. As you heard in episode one, he broke in,
tied up the family, and one by one he strangled
(30:08):
all of them. There was no going back. Denis Raider's
transformation into BTK was complete. After Dennis Rader escaped the
Otero crime scene, he slipped back into life at home.
(30:29):
He disguised himself as a regular family man in Wichita
once again. Raider and his wife Paula had been married
nearly three years. By this time. They attended church weekly
with their parents, and he helped out with the youth group,
and he decided to take classes at Wichita State nearby.
But in his time alone, he allowed himself to explore
(30:52):
his fantasies. The following is an excerpt from the book
Buying Torture Kill, The Inside Story of bt.
Speaker 14 (31:01):
He liked to study crime novels, detective magazines, and pornography.
He liked to masturbate while playing with handcuffs. In their
snug home only nine hundred and sixty square feet, he
hid small trophies on his wrist. He wore Joe o
Taro's watch. It ran well and got him to school
on time. Wichita State University had started spring classes, and
(31:24):
he had chosen a major administration of justice that let
him study police officers closely and learn more about his
new pursuit. He enjoyed the irony.
Speaker 10 (31:35):
The events of January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, where the
violent culmination of years spent fantasizing about bondage, torture, and murder.
Raider had mentally built himself into the murder he'd envision.
The Otero family was his first taste of success.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
What really pisses me off about my dad is that
he knew what he was or what he was capable of.
He even talks about that in Catherine Ramson's book, that
he could have walked into a mental health institution before
he murdered the Otaros and asked for help. And he
knew that, and he didn't do it anyway, because he
just wanted that thrill and that hit, and those are
(32:19):
words he uses, thrill and.
Speaker 10 (32:20):
Hit again Carrie Rawson. She mentions that how each opportunity
during the Otaro murders, her father chose to cross the
point of no return.
Speaker 9 (32:34):
I mean, everybody has those dark thoughts or the what ifs,
But I mean there's a big gap between reading something
or watching something on TV or thinking something versus when
you're premeditating and planning these things. If you're in the
store buying rope, that's when you need to stop. That point,
you probably don't have the ability to stop yourself, and
(32:55):
you're probably not wanting to. Now he had a choice.
This is where I get really pitied. He comes in,
he doesn't have a mask on, and he blames them.
He says, well, they saw my face, so I had
to put them down. He's literally talking like when he's
a compliance officer putting an animal down.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
Those are his words. I had to put them down
because they saw my face. No, you didn't. You could
have left.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
That's where you're not insane. You're in control. You're in
enough control to murder for people and not get caught
for thirty years.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
You totally could have left.
Speaker 9 (33:25):
But he's such a freaking narcissist. He puts it on them.
Speaker 10 (33:30):
Nothing about the Otero murders had gone his plan, But
as a testament to his delusion, Dennis Rader didn't believe
that it was his fault. Here's forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 5 (33:43):
He thought he had left nothing to chance. That was
in his head that he had stopped her and knew
everything about the house. He had done a terrible job.
They had a dog too that he didn't know about,
and also their car had no gas in it, so
he's going to abduct them in their car and that
wouldn't have worked out either. So none of the things
(34:04):
he had in mind for his first act actually happened
the way he had imagined it, and he was terrified
that he was going to be caught. He dropped his
knife sheet out in the yard, had to go back
for it. It's the middle of the day, neighbors could
have seen it. It's a house in a neighborhood. Many
(34:26):
mistakes made, but still he did not get caught. So
that empowered him to think that, wow, I can kill
almost an entire family and nobody came for me.
Speaker 10 (34:39):
The Otero murders would only be the beginning of raiders
murderous career. Despite all the mistakes he made, he felt unstoppable.
In confession of a serial killer, he had this to
say about his first killing spree.
Speaker 13 (34:57):
My green was on fire, cut out and collected the
newspaper clippings on the oteros and started my first Heidi
hole file using those college colored folders for turn papers
with three holes, I had cut and taped the clippings inside.
I stored this in the attached shed in the back,
an area that my wife would not find. I also
(35:19):
listened and watched for any information on the radio or TV.
One thing for sure, that area was now off limits forever,
except for maybe just to drive by.
Speaker 10 (35:32):
After the Otaro murders, Raider recognized he had crossed over
to what he called the dark path. He considered chalking
it up to a bad day and moving on with
his life, but his killer instincts overrode that sense. He
now saw himself as a serial killer, and he liked it.
Speaker 13 (35:54):
I thought I could control it. I soon realized I
was in over my head, and I was too embarrassed
to ask for help. I quickly was into sexual fantasies
beyond my control. I had set my goals to be
a white hat high, but the lifeboat drifted away from
my reach until the deep water became my coping. I
(36:16):
had trusted myself to steer the right course, but when
I studied books about past serial killers. The more I learned,
the closer I came to believe I could someday become one.
I was on a powerful train and could not get off.
The track was set. Superman could stop it, but I
(36:37):
was not Superman. To cope with what I was doing,
I cubed like I would do as a kid.
Speaker 10 (36:46):
Cubing is a concept Raider came up with. It's similar
to compartmentalization. Here's Catherine Ramsland again.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
He is all the different bases of the cube. Family man,
church leader, thief, boy, scout, volunteer, all of that kind
of stuff. But each face doesn't see any of the others.
So when he's a family man, he's a family man
in his mind because it's only a present moment truth.
(37:18):
When he sees the opportunity to be a thief or
a killer or a liar, he can turn that face out,
so it's all integrated as a whole, but none of
the faces see each other.
Speaker 6 (37:32):
And he came up with that concept.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Psychologists call this compartmentalizing, but that conveys the idea that
they're all distinct compartments. When you think of it as
a cube, a unified entity with multiple faces. That can
be switched around to meet the circumstances. That's a much
more powerful concept, and that's his concept. He had ways
(37:57):
to keep it all hidden, but he didn't think but
as pretending. It was. That's what I do then, But
I also have social obligations. I also am a good dad.
I'm also a good churchgoer. I'm also a good employee.
All of those things worked for him, and I think
(38:18):
it's difficult for people to look at such strongly contrasting
morality in the same person. That's the mystery. How does
that happen? But it does happen. It happens then for
anyone who's having an affair. It happens with con artists,
it happens with a lot of different people who live
(38:40):
double lives of some kind. I don't think they think
about it as pretending. I think they just think they
have developed alternate life frames, and those alternate life frames
are in motion when they're in specific situations. Raider could
have been out driving around with his and he spots
(39:01):
a young woman and decides he's going to come back
to that neighborhood to see if he can figure out
where she lives.
Speaker 10 (39:09):
That's exactly what Rader did next. In the weeks following
the Otero murders, he decided he wanted to kill again
and soon. Here are his words from Confession of a
serial Killer, again read by a voice actor.
Speaker 13 (39:25):
I believe that by February or March the hunt begin again.
I found it exciting to prowl at day or night.
He was very easy for me to spend a little
time after classes to prowl or day drive that area.
Going to class worked well for me as a cover.
I could say I was at the library or use
(39:46):
that time to prowl or stalk.
Speaker 10 (39:50):
Rader was becoming restless. He started to pick out new projects.
Projects are what he called the women he would Each
of his projects following the Otaros were younger women spotted
alone in the wild. Some of them had a family,
(40:11):
but Raider had already proven he wasn't averse to taking
the lives of children. Raider zeroed in on a young
woman named Catherine Bright. She was a fellow student at
Wichita State.
Speaker 13 (40:26):
So it was one day after classes or in between.
I spotted Bright arriving home with a friend, another female,
maybe a sister. She was at her mailbox. She fit
my fantasy profile a co ed dishwasher, blonde small. I
saw her go into the house, and I thought, that's
(40:48):
a possibility. My heart raced as the hit came into focus.
From that moment on, I locked in on that house.
Speaker 10 (41:05):
Next time on Monster BTK, he.
Speaker 6 (41:09):
Was constantly trying to trip the police up.
Speaker 13 (41:12):
I was planning on tying her up on the bed,
either half naked or totally.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly.
He loses control of the situation. We had arrested a
couple of brothers who admitted that they had killed the oteos.
Speaker 13 (41:28):
If I was doing the Otero's, this is how I
would have done it.
Speaker 5 (41:32):
He considered himself to be among the elite serial killers,
and so he named himself BTK.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
He enjoyed communicating with KKTV. KKTV was his favorite station.
He had watched it since he was a child.
Speaker 13 (41:47):
I'd write this letter to you for the sake of
the taxpayer as well as your time.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and
Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on
behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay
alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of
(42:24):
iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising Producerrima Ilkali. Marketing
support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright at iHeart Podcasts
and Caroline Origemma at tenderfoot TV. Auditional research by Claudia Daffrico.
(42:47):
Original artwork by Kevin Mister soul Harp, original music by
Makeup and Vanity Set. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and
the team at UTA and the Nord Group. Podcasts from
iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Host
Susan Peters
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