February 10, 2025 • 46 mins
Rader faces justice. But his capture provides little solace or closure to his victims. Years later, Rader reveals that there are more murders that no one ever discovered.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Now, what's my night terror? Somebody in my room on
top of me in bed, trying to kill me?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Why is that?
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I mean I was scared. I was scared of the dark.
I was scared to go to the bathroom. This carried
over into college.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Why is that so?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I've talked to detectives, talked to trauma therapists. Nobody knows
how to fix this night terror of stuff, and nobody
knows why is it the bad guy in the room
try and kill me?
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Do you feel like the bad guy is your dad?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
My dad planned these things, premeditated these things. Was he
practicing that murder in our house? Was he practicing Cornerherston closets?
Speaker 6 (01:06):
You're wondering if that feeling you had was maybe him
actually in your room in the closet.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, some sort of suppressed memory where I was scared
shitless from my dad. Who's to say he wasn't doing
something in my bedroom. I just would rather know, Like
for me, I need to know, because once I know
that I can deal with it. You can divorce a spouse.
You can't divorce a father. You can't just divorce your dad.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
Did a part of you feel like you wanted to
make it better somehow.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I wanted to help him, Like I'm mad at you
when one second and I'm worried you're cold and dealing
with this blanket and this cold sell like I love you,
I still love you.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Do you still love him?
Speaker 7 (01:50):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, I mean I told him that, and the letters
early on like I love you and I don't know
what's wrong, and I don't know why you did this,
and I wrote it and I was like, I'm so sorry,
Like I'm so sorry. Something must have happened to you.
You're just thinking, something awful must have happened to you
to turn you into this, and I'm so sorry. You
(02:12):
know that you're alone and that we're not with you.
Speaker 8 (02:19):
Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone
lines had been cut, her door left open.
Speaker 8 (02:27):
You see the victim playing there with plastic bags over
their heads, strangled.
Speaker 9 (02:32):
You could tell it was a plan scenario.
Speaker 10 (02:35):
Well, police have said no more about the contents of
the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and
implies the killer may strike again.
Speaker 11 (02:43):
He's gonna play with these victims. 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 3 (02:53):
From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. I'm Susan Peters
and This is Monster BTK. On August eighteenth, two thousand
and five, Judge Gregory Waller sentenced Dennis Lynn Raider to
(03:15):
ten consecutive life terms. The sentence, a minimum of one
hundred and seventy five years without the chance for parole,
was the longest the judge could deliver. The next day,
August nineteenth, two thousand and five, Raider was taken from
the courthouse to the Eldedo Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas,
(03:39):
just thirty miles from Wichita. Our news station covered the
caravan from departure to arrival, and we were on scene
for the last sighting of Dennis Raider outside prison walls.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
He is getting out of car right now. He's in
his orange jumpsuit. It looks as if his feet may
be shackled. He's walking in the prison right now. They
knocked in the door and there he is there. He
is inside that's it.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Closure is difficult for the families of Raider's victims. It
may never come. But on that day in August, at
the very least, we reveled in the peace of mind
that came with the closing of his cell door.
Speaker 10 (04:27):
Unfortunately, through all of this and through the things that
he has done, everyone was willing to listen because everyone
wanted to hear from the man that committed these crimes.
Now I think everyone is sick of what he has
to say.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
The reason we know so much about Dennis Rader is
because of his narcissism, his intense desire for publicity. And
while US locals had had our fill, there were others
who saw immense academic potential in studying Raider's mind.
Speaker 12 (04:59):
When this opportunity came up, I had just completed a
book where I had looked back over the past century
of mental health experts who had taken extra time to
really learn about an extreme offender from the offender's point
of view. And I was in a prime position then
(05:19):
to do exactly the same thing. I had role models.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Throughout this season, we've heard the inside scoop on Rader
from forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland in twenty ten, she began
a professional relationship with him, which culminated in the book
Confession of a serial Killer. The Untold Story of Dennis Rader,
the BTK serial Killer.
Speaker 12 (05:45):
I did not approach Rader. What happened is when he
was arrested in two thousand and five, someone else had
approached him to write a book. She worked with him
for five years, corresponding thinking she was going to do this,
and I saw her on Facebook and said, whatever happened
to your book? And she begged me to take it over.
(06:07):
I had to go through a process of being vetted
by the victims' families and the attorney he had signed
his life rights over to them through this other writer.
That took some time, a couple of years, and in
the meantime I got to know Rader by playing chess.
We'd write some letters. He wanted me to solve some
(06:29):
codes because he wanted to communicate with codes. So I
began to just kind of follow his lead. He would
write very long, like twenty page letters, and embedded in
these letters would be these codes and their meaning, and
I had to try to figure it out. Also, he
(06:49):
wanted to communicate that way to keep the guards from
knowing what he was talking about. That's kind of the
gatekeeper if you're not going to do the code thing
or not.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Going any further.
Speaker 12 (07:01):
And then as all the legal stuff got into place,
we began to talk on the phone. The very first
time I spoke to on the phone an hour earlier,
my father died, so it was very numbing, but at
the same time it was a good weight into him
(07:22):
because he remembered his father dying. I think it invited
some warmth and compassion from him. As our first time
we're talking on the phone.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It feels jarring to hear ramseland talk about building compassion
between herself and Raider, but developing this relationship was integral
to her ability to study him.
Speaker 12 (07:46):
The third way we got to know each other was
watching TV shows, which began to serve as metaphors for
his experience. He wanted me to watch Bates Motel and
The Americans, and I wanted him to watch The Walking Dead,
and so between those shows we would talk about the
(08:06):
characters in ways that demonstrated some of the things he
was trying to tell me, like with the Americans its
Soviet spies embedded in American culture and raising a family
and acting as if they're completely like everybody else, exactly
as he was doing. And he even thought of himself
(08:26):
as a spy or Bates Motel, which is about the
making of a serial killer, so whenever something would happen
in one of the shows, he would use that to
talk about his experience.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Ramsland wrote about Rader before she began working on Confession.
For instance, she mentioned him in her book Inside the
Minds of serial Killers, but her coverage never went into
this much depth.
Speaker 12 (08:55):
Only when the opportunity came my way did I realize
what a unique opportunity it was, because he was not
like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. I
get a lot of questions from mostly high school students,
asking what motivates a serial killer, and it's hard for me.
I just say it's not a criminal type. They each
(09:15):
have their own motivational spectrum, and you have to look
at the factors in their development to understand why they're
doing what they're doing, because it's different from one to another.
Even if you categorize them as sexually compelled serial killers,
there's still a lot of differences among them. I think
looking at the raw ingredients of any extreme offender's developmental
(09:42):
trajectory helps us with trying to understand at what points
in their life did something change, did a trigger to
violence become part of their perspective? What were some of
the factors and elements involved. So RADA was an opportunity
as an outlier to the thinking of the FBI to
(10:04):
find out what's going on here, what do we need
to know about this guy?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
There were logistical challenges communicating with Radar in prison, As
Ramsland said earlier, their letters and phone calls were monitored.
Speaker 12 (10:20):
I told him we need to have a coherent set
of codes if we're going to talk about some of
these things. And so I created the codes that we're
going to use. And I used a cave metaphor because
he liked caves, and he had this whole thing about
three being a magical number. So everything I did, like
three layers of soil, three types of plants, three types
(10:44):
of gardening tools, things like that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
In the introduction to the book, she describes figuring out
the code as one of the most complicated aspects of
the project. What resulted is a symbolic alphabet with letters
A through W all representing different phrases.
Speaker 12 (11:06):
A Bleeding Heart was going to be the victims so
B one, B two, BH three that was going to
connote whoever he was talking about.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Of her work with Rader, Ramsland says this type of
research could be used to develop treatment programs for kids
who might be at risk of becoming one of these offenders,
and because of this potential, she emphasizes that its use
is more that of a textbook than entertainment.
Speaker 12 (11:38):
Is that a true crime book? It's a book where
Dennis Rader and I explore his life story together with
clinical tools. I call it a guided autobiography because he's
not just blathering on about himself without any structure. It's
structured to benefit my field, criminology and law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Reader's narcissism does make it difficult to discern his fiction
from reality, but Ramsland's professional background and the relationships she
built with him before starting the book allowed her to
call him out on his lies.
Speaker 12 (12:19):
I had the complete transcript of the police interrogation. I
had five years of correspondence from the other writer. I
had the whole DA's file. So yes, I know he's
going to play me if I can, but I have
the objective background. He's obviously going to be able to
talk more about what was really going on at the
(12:41):
crime scenes in ways that no investigator will ever be
able to do. But at the same time, he's narcissistic.
He does want publicity, he does want to be known
in a certain way, and I have to keep that
in mind as well. But that's okay because that's data
for me. I didn't care if he told the truth
or he lied.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
All of that data.
Speaker 12 (13:03):
There are more layers than just what a killer says,
So it's not really about asking that person a whole
bunch of questions. To get into who they are. You
have to watch their behavior and the inconsistencies and the oddities.
For example, on a scene in The Americans, there was
(13:27):
a really brutal scene where they put a burning car
tire over the sky to get him to say something,
and Raita was furious, just furious if that was on TV, Like, Okay,
you're a serial killer, You've done terrible things to people,
(13:47):
and this is a fictional scenario. Why are you so angry?
When we started playing chess, he told me not to cheat.
Really in your whole scheme of morality, that's what matters
to you. That I'm not cheating at a chess game.
To me, that's all very interesting behavior, because what is
he showing me about what matters to him?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
On certain issues, Raider was more defensive than others.
Speaker 12 (14:14):
If it was something in which he had no real
investment in how he wanted to present himself, then he'd
sort of laugh it off. Yeah, you caught me, or
something like that. One time he was talking about how
much he loved his son. I said, well, you know,
you used your son's car during your cat and mouse game.
(14:35):
He was away in the navy, And I said, what
did you think your son would feel like when you
were arrested and they found out his car was the
one on the surveillance video. His first response was, well,
I was never going to get caught. I never even
thought of that. Then he got upset with me because
I was questioning the narrative that he loved his son.
(14:57):
I was basically saying, saying, that's not a very loving
thing to do to your son. What you did to
satisfy yourself is not a loving thing to do to
the family you say you love. And he got angry,
and his response was to write a very long letter
(15:18):
justifying everything I would tell you the members of his
family don't feel that loved because he destroyed them, destroyed them,
but he doesn't see it that way. He thinks they
should just get over it and reconnect with them. That's
how he views it. But that's again that notion of
(15:38):
a very shallow emotional processing of the world. He thinks
that what he's done does not have that much enormity
and shouldn't and that they're his family and they need
to forgive him and get back in a relationship with him.
That is how he thinks.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
It's hard to imagine a world where anyone could forgive Raider.
I think for the average person, it's common to wonder
whether these types of violent offenders experience remorse, And when
I think back to his court appearances, I know that
Raider doesn't.
Speaker 12 (16:16):
These days, when Raider looks back, he regrets, it's not
the same as remorse. He regrets hurting his family, He
regrets that he's in prison, that he missed out on
a lot of life. He sometimes thinks about religion, but
I think for the most part, he does not believe
(16:37):
that there's an afterlife, that he will have to face
some kind of judgment. The killer part is essentially well,
how he identifies that, he embraces.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
That there is a thread that ties everyone together. Who
is still to this day interested in Dennis Rader. It
(17:08):
is the desire to understand why he did it and
if we could stop something like this from happening again.
For Larry Hatteberg, his BTK days didn't end when we
covered the caravan to El Dodo.
Speaker 11 (17:25):
I wrote to him in two thousand and five, and
I did get three or four letters back from him.
When I got the first letter from Denis Rader, the
postman stopped out front, came up to my door, rang
the doorbell, and he's holding the letter by the edges
like it's a horrible thing, and he said, I just
want to tell you I'm delivering this to you and
(17:46):
I hate every moment of this. That is an appropriate
response to receiving a letter from Denis Raider.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
In one of the letters, Rader had an eerie request
for Larry.
Speaker 8 (18:00):
He said, look, Larry, I love your show. We used
to watch Haddiberg's People all the time when I wasn't incarcerated.
In here, he said, I want to be on Hadiberg's People.
Haddeberg's People was the series that I did of great
people in the community. So I wrote him back and
I said, Dennis, the fact that you've killed ten people
(18:22):
tends to negate any of the good that you've done
in the community. And he didn't write me back after that.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But in the last few years they've restarted their correspondence.
Larry's received letters from Rader as recently as the end
of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 11 (18:42):
The reason I stay kind of involved in it, and
the reason I will occasionally write to BTK is that
we still to this day do not know what caused
BTK to become a murderer. And there are a million
teachers there with kids in their classroom, and they know
(19:04):
something is wrong with a child, but they don't know
what to do. They don't know how to do it.
So the question becomes, how do we identify these children
who are going to grow up to become a BTK.
Until we have those answers, the BTK story will never
be dead, even if he dies tomorrow, and that's why
I stay involved in it.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
On the other side of things, there are those who've
decided it is better not to indulge their curiosity when
it comes to Denis Raider. Here's Bob Smiser, a member
of Raider's former church, Christ Lutheran.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
I really wanted to go see Dennis in prison, not
because of anything I could ask him, or anything because
he'd lie to you, but to see who he is
strip that facade of Denis Raider facade. I think in
prison you would have finally got to see him as
he really is, and that interested me. Ultimately decided against
(20:05):
it for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Do you think you if you went to prison, could
you talk to him as Bobby an old friend.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I don't know that we'd talk as old friends, but
we would talk about his mom and dad, those kind
of things. Those conversations would be fairly simple, they'd be
fairly easy, and they'd be natural. If there's anything left
of the dentist raider facade or is he just BTK?
One hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Bob poses a good question, is there anything left of
the dentist Raider? For sad? This is something Carrie Rawson's
been trying to figure out for the last two decades.
It took her years to sort through her complicated emotions
after her father's arrest.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
For like the first nine and a half years. I
was totally shut down. I was hiding who I was.
I'm in like this megachurch outside Detroit, Michigan, where we
moved in two thousand and three. I'm leading Bible study.
I'm in this mops group with young mothers of toddlers,
and I'm not telling people who I am. My picture
had never been out there in connection with my dad.
(21:20):
I didn't have social media at the time. I had
gone through the worst day of my life, the worst
thing I could imagine. I'm a trauma survivor, an abuse survivor,
and I'm not telling anybody about this. The most I
would say, well, this bad thing happened to me. It's
really hard to sit in Bible study on a Tuesday
morning and the woman next to you is saying like
(21:43):
her worst day of our life is a dishwasher broken
or kitchen flooded, and I'm literally having to leave the
room and cry in the bathroom because how do you
even drop dad into that. Like even with trusted friends
of mine, I would try and they would tell me
stop talking, you're giving me nightmares. I was so shut
down those first nine and a half years because I
(22:03):
was scared. I was scared of this man in their
arrest photo. I was scared of what he had done.
I was even scared of other family members or some
lacko coming after me.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
She learned to compartmentalize to separate the father she'd known
from the killer she'd been introduced to.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
With my father, I have to put Dad in BTK.
When I interviewed with doctor Phil, he was helpful. He
did a timeline and he put photos of my normal
life above the timeline, and then underneath he put crime
scene photos and photos of my dad after the arresting
things BTK things, And he said, stay above the line
as much as you can, because that's safe and sane.
(22:49):
When I was talking about unleashing all the BTK stuff,
I didn't do it in a healthy way. I just
pulled it all out. And so when I went back
into therapy, she goes, okay. Now, for the first time,
I got to go put it in order. So we
took the Wichita Eagle book by Winslow and three other journalists,
and I took it into trauma therapy for months. My
(23:09):
paperback was like dogyard covered marked up in pen. I
had to go line by line through that thing in
therapy and I couldn't even do it in order. I
couldn't handle the seventies, and so I started with hedge
and I worked up through in the ninety one, and
then I went back to the seventies. And so when
I was done with therapy, Dad was strictly BTK to write,
(23:30):
and I had to go back and then separate that
and go back and find Dad and then find me.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Once Carrie had found herself again, she realized her story
might be able to help others, so she took a
chance at sharing it.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
I started talking to the media in fourteen. I mean,
it's rare to get somebody like me, a family member
of these guys to talk. It sets off your PTSD.
You know, there's shame in it too, because we've been
beat up in the media. We've been beat up by
people commenting and social media, some of us going to hiding,
change our names. I thought the answer was to hide,
(24:11):
but hiding meant tearing more insight. It's like when you
band each a wound two tide. It's festering and rotting
underneath because you're not letting it.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Get air or light.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
When I started speaking up, I realized not only was
it healing, me to talk about it. I was getting
an inbox full of people saying I was reaching them
because I was talking about something in forgiveness, or they
were a soldier that had come home with PTSD and
they had identified with me in my night terrors or
my fears, my anger, or family members of criminals that
(24:45):
were going back and forth between they still love this person,
but they were angry at them, and how do they
deal with the media. Something I was sharing, something I
was saying people were identifying with and it was helping them.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
While Carrie was working through her trauma in therapy, she
kept her distance from her father. Their communication ebbed and flowed,
and there were several years where she had no contact
with him.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
We stayed in touch with letters off and on. I
had forgiven him in twenty twelve. I had wrote him
that night after five years of no communication, and we
had been talking back and forth in letters.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
More.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
He read in the witch Tight Eagle article in fifteen
called for kipnesses and tidy, and he said, when he
read that article in the Eagle, he realized at that
moment more the impact is what he had done to
our family, and he did fill it and he said
it caused him to shed a tear. But in that
same letter or in the next letter to me, he's
(25:47):
back being a narcissist, trying to control whatever he has.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Left, and the only thing he has left in this
world is his physical body.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
He's very scared of his own death, ironically, and we
told him after he died, we would have him be
cremated and we would scatter his ashes out in the
floothills because we can't have a gravestone for him, and
we wouldn't want one anyway, would just get to face.
And we've had to tell him over and over and
over and over again in letters. So now Harry is
(26:19):
in fifteen telling me in this letter he knows he's
had this massive impact on my family. And in the
same letter he's saying, well, you guys aren't really communicating enough,
and you're not sending me money. And there's this woman
in Arkansas, she's in my fan club. I think maybe
I'll just sign my papers over and she can have
my body and give me a gravestone, because that's all
(26:42):
he has left right is his dead body. So he's
literally holding it over my family.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Raider isn't the first serial killer to have a fan club.
Black market memorabilia has been popular for killers like Ted Bundy,
Richard Ramiers and Jeffrey Dahmer. Here's Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 12 (27:03):
Even when he was doing the cat and mouse with
police and he would see this stuff being covered by
the local TV station or the newspaper, he imagined that
he had a band club that he had to please.
And I think he still feels that way today. I
mean he's slowing down, he's tired.
Speaker 9 (27:20):
We talk about that.
Speaker 12 (27:21):
He wants to cut back on all the correspondence, and
yet if he gets new correspondents who feed into this
need that he has, he keeps them.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
No one person, of course, can reverse the horrific damage
done by Raider. A genuine apology from the killer would
even fail to do so. But unfortunately that doesn't stop
us from wishing it could all be undone.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I want my dad back. I want the seven families
to have their families back. I don't want the generational impacts,
community impacts, the thousands of people he's impacted, the detective's live,
Sea's run. If you could wipe all of that out
and just have the ten living people back and have life,
that would be ideal. But you can't do that right.
(28:13):
There's no time machine, there's no time loop, marble whatever.
This is reality. I can't change anything. I can't help
who I am. But I can do something good with
what I've got, and this is what I have, so
I do it.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
January fifteenth, twenty twenty four, marked fifty years since the
tragic O Taro murders.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
I can't believe it's been that long. Yet it feels
like yesterday.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Charlie O Tarum the eldest O Taro Ship.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
The pain is still there, the intensity of the anguish
and the grief is still there, but I've learned to
push it aside when it gets overwhelming and embrace the
good knowing that I am where I'm at today is
because of the full turnaround of all of this. I
(29:22):
got my life back when he got caught.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Over the last few years, Charlie's turned his pain into
a platform, giving speeches at prisons throughout the country.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
I'm doing well, and I only hope to do more
good work in the future, and I'm gonna use this
fiftieth anniversary as a catalyst. If I can to do
the work that I started doing, it makes me feel better,
It makes me feel good to take all the stupid
stuff I've done in my life spin it into a
(29:56):
lesson for the guys to learn from my mistakes. I've
always believed it's cheaper to learn from other people's mistakes,
and if talking to other people about what I've experienced
helps them deal with whatever trauma or victimization they've had
in their lives, then I'll continue. I don't live for
(30:17):
the poor Charlie thing. I live to honor my promise
to the Lord given my life. So you know, I'm
not a great Christian, but I try to be a
good one. And if I can keep one criminal from
getting out and hurting another family, then I will continue
to go to jails in prisons and reach out to
the guys who are getting out.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
And he tries not to dwell on the trauma of
his past.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
I live with the memories of my family in a
good place. I don't like to think of them the
day they died anymore. I like to think of what
we had before, going to the beach, being together, going
to church, all those goods. And for me, the past
is good for two things and two things only in
that's fond memories and lessons learned.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Jeff Davis, son of Dolores Davis. I go to a
similar sentiment when we're calling his own mother.
Speaker 7 (31:16):
I know I'll see her again, so that in itself
brings a lot of hope. I'm not getting a younger
and there'll come a time where I won't be here,
but where will be We'll be with her. We had
a lot of good, little, average everyday kind of time
(31:40):
that we spent before she killed her. We just talked
and laughed and shared the stories and made fun of
show and stuff. She used to say, Are you comfort
from that? She knowing that I know, I know what
the future holds, and I know what the past was,
(32:01):
and those are all positive and that helps. After thirty
two years, even the worst wounds start to score over.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
As for his thoughts on Raider, I'd.
Speaker 7 (32:16):
Like to say I've forgiven him and all that kind
of stuff that I'm supposed to do. I haven't. It's
just something that I think about. I just haven't got
there the way I justified this. I don't think about
him at all. He's a little insect, just skitterers around
in his eight by twelve style, still thinking everybody thinks
(32:38):
he's cool. He thinks all the guards like him. That's
how delusionaling is. He's not worth my time thinking about.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
In the years I've known Steve Raulford, son of Shirley
I am, I've watched him have a rougher go at it.
Have you been able to forgive yourself?
Speaker 13 (32:59):
Forgive? No, to deal with myself? Yeah? I don't think.
Oh I forgive myself. I tried. I get drunk, I
get fucked up trying to forgive myself.
Speaker 9 (33:18):
It.
Speaker 13 (33:18):
Don't worry. Nothing works. It's all right. That ain't working.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
You know, you were six years old. You had no idea.
There's no reason to feel any amount of guilt or anything.
Speaker 13 (33:35):
Yeah, that's what people say. But I can't help I feel.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Did BT k ruin your life forever?
Speaker 7 (33:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 13 (33:48):
He he fucked me for life.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
In twenty seventeen, Steve himself was serving time in elderat
the very prison that holds his mother's killer. How did
that feel? What did that do?
Speaker 13 (34:10):
I could know that I was in the shame fucking
provent of him and couldn't get to him. I think
I ride in my bait and cried every fucking not
not I do sometimes now, but I'm a strong moved.
Motherfucker you are.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
You're still around, and you're still surviving, and you're still trying.
You're still trying, Steve.
Speaker 13 (34:33):
Well, I can't succeed. I'll go back to our game.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
It is nearly impossible to find silver linings in the
wake of these tragedies. But I take a little comfort
knowing that through all of this, Charlie and Steve were
able to develop a brotherly relationship.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
I met Steve at the Monteu Williams show. We're giggling
to each other. He gave me a two dollar bill
and I gave him an eighteen ninety something silver dollar
for friendship. Because I went one way, he went the other.
He's like my little brother.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
Now.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
I worry for him, and I pray for him, and
I'm happy when he's happy. I care about him because
I know what he went through. He didn't have the
opportunities I had. He was a lot younger when stuff
happened to him. I was blessed to have been raised
with a solid childhood. Steve didn't have that.
Speaker 13 (35:26):
After I heard my backbones said, I've been here, Susan Peters, Charlie,
he number two. We have a bond and I'm wacom back.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
You share something in common, you and Charlie. What is that?
Speaker 13 (35:40):
Both have lost? He lost more than dude, but chilled
lost and we connect.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
In twenty twenty three, it had been a long time
since Dennis Raider's name made the news, but seemingly out
of nowhere, a cold case in Oklahoma got new legs.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Just confirmed within the last two hours. A sheriff's office
out of Oklahoma in Park City today searching the former
property of BTK serial killer Dennis Raider.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
In a breaking news alert. None of us were expecting
BTK was back again.
Speaker 9 (36:25):
Our case close to home is in Pahusco, Oklahoma, which
is Osage County. We had a young female cheerleader sixteen
years of age that came up missing from a laundromat
in downtown Pahusca in nineteen seventy six. Her name was
Cynthia don Kenney. I'm the under Sheriff of Osage County,
(36:46):
Gary Upton. In December late December of twenty twenty two,
Sheriff Verdin couldn't sleep one particular night, and he woke
up at three thirty in the morning and decided, if
I can't sleep, I'm going to watch some TV, and
so he tuned into Netflix and he watched a episode
of Catching Killers, and it was the episode titled Bind
(37:11):
Torture Kill BTK. After having watched it, the wheels in
his head started to turn and he started to think
about the distance between Pahaska and Wichita and Park City
and determined that two hours away was close enough that
this might be a guy that he should at least
(37:32):
look at.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Sheriff Verndon took a trip to visit Raider at Eldaredo.
Speaker 9 (37:39):
He spent three hours talking to Dennis Rader in late January,
but did not reveal the reason for his visit. At
the tail end of that interview, Dennis Rader, unsolicited seemed
to offer up a tidbit of information. Rader said, you know,
I have a fantasy that I wish I could have
(38:00):
lived out, and he asked Sheriff Verdon if he wanted
to hear it, and he goes, I've always wanted to
kidnap a female from a launder maat. I'd sit outside
the laundromat and I'd wait and watch until she was
in there alone, and then I would go in and
I would grab her and just take her. After that,
(38:21):
Sheriff Verdon went to Wichita Police got copies of evidence
and journals, and we used that intervening time to meticulously
pour over those journals page by page, taking notes, connecting dots,
seeing how something from one page related to another page.
(38:42):
In a spiderweb kind of passion.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
What they found in those journals was big.
Speaker 9 (38:50):
We see a lot that points him towards Bahuska. The
particular journal entry that we saw in nineteen seventy six
called bad wash Day, and that particular journal entry indicated
that he was going to try to do a breaking
an entering someplace on seventeenth Street. Pahusca has a seventeenth Street.
(39:12):
He indicated in that same journal entry that that was
unsuccessful due to too much noise, and he moved on
down to a laundermap. He has a notation called C nine,
the letter C and the numeral nine that indicates a
chapter in his unpublished manuscript, and chapter nine was dedicated
(39:35):
to all his successful kills, and those were his personal notes.
That was nothing that was meant for the eyes of
the police or the media, so it wasn't a brag
or a taunt.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
From there, they got in contact with Kerrie Rawson.
Speaker 9 (39:54):
To get her on board was a little bit of
a uphill climb. We started revealing little tidbits of information
here and there to her, and she started communicating with
the media about her skepticism in regards to us. After
a visit where we flew her here, we gave her
(40:15):
a peek inside of Pandora's box and we showed her
the information that we had. We showed her journal entries
that related to what we believed it was. Then I
think that she became a real believer and the idea
that her father had killed more than ten people.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
The Sheriff's department then went digging in raiders backyard for evidence.
This was the impetus for the new surge in media attention.
Speaker 9 (40:45):
You can look behind me and you can see the
sidewalk here that it has been dug up, and neighbors
tell me that law enforcement have been sifting through there
like they were going through gold. This latest news surge
is something that we as a sheriff's office didn't want.
It was somewhere in Park City in this second visit
(41:06):
to his property that we were outed. Since the cat
was out of the bag, We've decided we just have
to take our shot.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
The Osage County Sheriff's Department had already made a trip
out to Raiders property. The house and Raiders tools shed,
though were raised back in two thousand and six to
deter tours and media attention. Investigators went to the lot
to look for personal effects and potentially a driver's license.
Speaker 9 (41:35):
When we went there in April, we discovered that the
city owned the property. It was still flat and devoid
of any construction, with the exception of a sidewalk that
had been poured from the street all the way through
the property around behind the houses to a playground. It
(41:55):
was a brand new sidewalk that was poured in twenty twenty.
So in April we did not have permission to tear
up the sidewalk, but Park City police stood by while
we dug on the edges of it, and it was
then that we discovered the pantyhose. It was tied in
a knot that would be suitable for a bondage of
(42:17):
either wrists or angles.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
They had to get under the sidewalk.
Speaker 9 (42:24):
So fast forward and when we have gotten permission to
remove the concrete sidewalk once again, we had Park City
on hand. They removed the concrete and we discovered the
Heidi hole. It was lined with shingles and the inside
of the hole had a lot of gravel. We cleared
(42:45):
all that out, discovered personal items that looked like trophies
that would belong to a female, and we also found
bondage material, chain clips, and a small length of chain.
It looked like what Dennis's talked about it as writing before.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Not everyone has been on board with this new series
of events. Not only was Kerry skeptical, but so was
the Wichita Police Department.
Speaker 9 (43:12):
At first, everyone kind of starts out wondering what our
motives are. Obviously, you know, even KBI, even OSBI. Our
next hurdle is our approach to the FBI, and obviously
the ultimate goal is closure for the victims' families.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
BTK still has not been confirmed as the killer of
Osage County Cynthia don Kenney. In twenty twenty four, Raider
was absolved of the nineteen ninety killing of a Missouri
woman named Shauna Garber. This case had been reopened in
response to the Oklahoma investigation. The last updates police had
(43:51):
on Kenny's case, we're in September of twenty twenty three.
To me, this case in Oklahoma confirms something I believed
for years, that Denis Rader is one of the most
evil killers in American history. I've called Wichita home for
(44:14):
over thirty years, and in my time here, we've been
through so many phases of the BTK story, and every
single time we think we've made it to the end
of btk's reign of terror, it all comes spiraling back.
Over the course of this podcast, I've spoken with multiple
(44:34):
people whose lives were upended by Denis Raider, but none
of them are victims. All of them are survivors. Their
example strengthens my result to keep telling their stories, their
stories not of lives ended by BTK, but stories of
(44:55):
redemption and hope things Denis Rader will ever have. It
is my hope that we can continue to build a
compassionate community in spite of a seemingly never ending saga
of darkness.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
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
(45:45):
iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising producer Rima Ilkali.
Marketing support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright iHeart Podcasts
and Caroline Origemma at Tenderfoot TV. Additional research by Claudia Dafrico,
(46:08):
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. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(46:30):
Thanks for listening.
You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts
and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Now, what's my night terror? Somebody in my room on
top of me in bed, trying to kill me?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Why is that?
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I mean I was scared. I was scared of the dark.
I was scared to go to the bathroom. This carried
over into college.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Why is that so?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I've talked to detectives, talked to trauma therapists. Nobody knows
how to fix this night terror of stuff, and nobody
knows why is it the bad guy in the room
try and kill me?
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Do you feel like the bad guy is your dad?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
My dad planned these things, premeditated these things. Was he
practicing that murder in our house? Was he practicing Cornerherston closets?
Speaker 6 (01:06):
You're wondering if that feeling you had was maybe him
actually in your room in the closet.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, some sort of suppressed memory where I was scared
shitless from my dad. Who's to say he wasn't doing
something in my bedroom. I just would rather know, Like
for me, I need to know, because once I know
that I can deal with it. You can divorce a spouse.
You can't divorce a father. You can't just divorce your dad.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
Did a part of you feel like you wanted to
make it better somehow.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I wanted to help him, Like I'm mad at you
when one second and I'm worried you're cold and dealing
with this blanket and this cold sell like I love you,
I still love you.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Do you still love him?
Speaker 7 (01:50):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, I mean I told him that, and the letters
early on like I love you and I don't know
what's wrong, and I don't know why you did this,
and I wrote it and I was like, I'm so sorry,
Like I'm so sorry. Something must have happened to you.
You're just thinking, something awful must have happened to you
to turn you into this, and I'm so sorry. You
(02:12):
know that you're alone and that we're not with you.
Speaker 8 (02:19):
Someone killed four members of a family.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone
lines had been cut, her door left open.
Speaker 8 (02:27):
You see the victim playing there with plastic bags over
their heads, strangled.
Speaker 9 (02:32):
You could tell it was a plan scenario.
Speaker 10 (02:35):
Well, police have said no more about the contents of
the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and
implies the killer may strike again.
Speaker 11 (02:43):
He's gonna play with these victims. 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 3 (02:53):
From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. I'm Susan Peters
and This is Monster BTK. On August eighteenth, two thousand
and five, Judge Gregory Waller sentenced Dennis Lynn Raider to
(03:15):
ten consecutive life terms. The sentence, a minimum of one
hundred and seventy five years without the chance for parole,
was the longest the judge could deliver. The next day,
August nineteenth, two thousand and five, Raider was taken from
the courthouse to the Eldedo Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas,
(03:39):
just thirty miles from Wichita. Our news station covered the
caravan from departure to arrival, and we were on scene
for the last sighting of Dennis Raider outside prison walls.
Speaker 6 (03:56):
He is getting out of car right now. He's in
his orange jumpsuit. It looks as if his feet may
be shackled. He's walking in the prison right now. They
knocked in the door and there he is there. He
is inside that's it.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Closure is difficult for the families of Raider's victims. It
may never come. But on that day in August, at
the very least, we reveled in the peace of mind
that came with the closing of his cell door.
Speaker 10 (04:27):
Unfortunately, through all of this and through the things that
he has done, everyone was willing to listen because everyone
wanted to hear from the man that committed these crimes.
Now I think everyone is sick of what he has
to say.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
The reason we know so much about Dennis Rader is
because of his narcissism, his intense desire for publicity. And
while US locals had had our fill, there were others
who saw immense academic potential in studying Raider's mind.
Speaker 12 (04:59):
When this opportunity came up, I had just completed a
book where I had looked back over the past century
of mental health experts who had taken extra time to
really learn about an extreme offender from the offender's point
of view. And I was in a prime position then
(05:19):
to do exactly the same thing. I had role models.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Throughout this season, we've heard the inside scoop on Rader
from forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland in twenty ten, she began
a professional relationship with him, which culminated in the book
Confession of a serial Killer. The Untold Story of Dennis Rader,
the BTK serial Killer.
Speaker 12 (05:45):
I did not approach Rader. What happened is when he
was arrested in two thousand and five, someone else had
approached him to write a book. She worked with him
for five years, corresponding thinking she was going to do this,
and I saw her on Facebook and said, whatever happened
to your book? And she begged me to take it over.
(06:07):
I had to go through a process of being vetted
by the victims' families and the attorney he had signed
his life rights over to them through this other writer.
That took some time, a couple of years, and in
the meantime I got to know Rader by playing chess.
We'd write some letters. He wanted me to solve some
(06:29):
codes because he wanted to communicate with codes. So I
began to just kind of follow his lead. He would
write very long, like twenty page letters, and embedded in
these letters would be these codes and their meaning, and
I had to try to figure it out. Also, he
(06:49):
wanted to communicate that way to keep the guards from
knowing what he was talking about. That's kind of the
gatekeeper if you're not going to do the code thing
or not.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Going any further.
Speaker 12 (07:01):
And then as all the legal stuff got into place,
we began to talk on the phone. The very first
time I spoke to on the phone an hour earlier,
my father died, so it was very numbing, but at
the same time it was a good weight into him
(07:22):
because he remembered his father dying. I think it invited
some warmth and compassion from him. As our first time
we're talking on the phone.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It feels jarring to hear ramseland talk about building compassion
between herself and Raider, but developing this relationship was integral
to her ability to study him.
Speaker 12 (07:46):
The third way we got to know each other was
watching TV shows, which began to serve as metaphors for
his experience. He wanted me to watch Bates Motel and
The Americans, and I wanted him to watch The Walking Dead,
and so between those shows we would talk about the
(08:06):
characters in ways that demonstrated some of the things he
was trying to tell me, like with the Americans its
Soviet spies embedded in American culture and raising a family
and acting as if they're completely like everybody else, exactly
as he was doing. And he even thought of himself
(08:26):
as a spy or Bates Motel, which is about the
making of a serial killer, so whenever something would happen
in one of the shows, he would use that to
talk about his experience.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Ramsland wrote about Rader before she began working on Confession.
For instance, she mentioned him in her book Inside the
Minds of serial Killers, but her coverage never went into
this much depth.
Speaker 12 (08:55):
Only when the opportunity came my way did I realize
what a unique opportunity it was, because he was not
like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. I
get a lot of questions from mostly high school students,
asking what motivates a serial killer, and it's hard for me.
I just say it's not a criminal type. They each
(09:15):
have their own motivational spectrum, and you have to look
at the factors in their development to understand why they're
doing what they're doing, because it's different from one to another.
Even if you categorize them as sexually compelled serial killers,
there's still a lot of differences among them. I think
looking at the raw ingredients of any extreme offender's developmental
(09:42):
trajectory helps us with trying to understand at what points
in their life did something change, did a trigger to
violence become part of their perspective? What were some of
the factors and elements involved. So RADA was an opportunity
as an outlier to the thinking of the FBI to
(10:04):
find out what's going on here, what do we need
to know about this guy?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
There were logistical challenges communicating with Radar in prison, As
Ramsland said earlier, their letters and phone calls were monitored.
Speaker 12 (10:20):
I told him we need to have a coherent set
of codes if we're going to talk about some of
these things. And so I created the codes that we're
going to use. And I used a cave metaphor because
he liked caves, and he had this whole thing about
three being a magical number. So everything I did, like
three layers of soil, three types of plants, three types
(10:44):
of gardening tools, things like that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
In the introduction to the book, she describes figuring out
the code as one of the most complicated aspects of
the project. What resulted is a symbolic alphabet with letters
A through W all representing different phrases.
Speaker 12 (11:06):
A Bleeding Heart was going to be the victims so
B one, B two, BH three that was going to
connote whoever he was talking about.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Of her work with Rader, Ramsland says this type of
research could be used to develop treatment programs for kids
who might be at risk of becoming one of these offenders,
and because of this potential, she emphasizes that its use
is more that of a textbook than entertainment.
Speaker 12 (11:38):
Is that a true crime book? It's a book where
Dennis Rader and I explore his life story together with
clinical tools. I call it a guided autobiography because he's
not just blathering on about himself without any structure. It's
structured to benefit my field, criminology and law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Reader's narcissism does make it difficult to discern his fiction
from reality, but Ramsland's professional background and the relationships she
built with him before starting the book allowed her to
call him out on his lies.
Speaker 12 (12:19):
I had the complete transcript of the police interrogation. I
had five years of correspondence from the other writer. I
had the whole DA's file. So yes, I know he's
going to play me if I can, but I have
the objective background. He's obviously going to be able to
talk more about what was really going on at the
(12:41):
crime scenes in ways that no investigator will ever be
able to do. But at the same time, he's narcissistic.
He does want publicity, he does want to be known
in a certain way, and I have to keep that
in mind as well. But that's okay because that's data
for me. I didn't care if he told the truth
or he lied.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
All of that data.
Speaker 12 (13:03):
There are more layers than just what a killer says,
So it's not really about asking that person a whole
bunch of questions. To get into who they are. You
have to watch their behavior and the inconsistencies and the oddities.
For example, on a scene in The Americans, there was
(13:27):
a really brutal scene where they put a burning car
tire over the sky to get him to say something,
and Raita was furious, just furious if that was on TV, Like, Okay,
you're a serial killer, You've done terrible things to people,
(13:47):
and this is a fictional scenario. Why are you so angry?
When we started playing chess, he told me not to cheat.
Really in your whole scheme of morality, that's what matters
to you. That I'm not cheating at a chess game.
To me, that's all very interesting behavior, because what is
he showing me about what matters to him?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
On certain issues, Raider was more defensive than others.
Speaker 12 (14:14):
If it was something in which he had no real
investment in how he wanted to present himself, then he'd
sort of laugh it off. Yeah, you caught me, or
something like that. One time he was talking about how
much he loved his son. I said, well, you know,
you used your son's car during your cat and mouse game.
(14:35):
He was away in the navy, And I said, what
did you think your son would feel like when you
were arrested and they found out his car was the
one on the surveillance video. His first response was, well,
I was never going to get caught. I never even
thought of that. Then he got upset with me because
I was questioning the narrative that he loved his son.
(14:57):
I was basically saying, saying, that's not a very loving
thing to do to your son. What you did to
satisfy yourself is not a loving thing to do to
the family you say you love. And he got angry,
and his response was to write a very long letter
(15:18):
justifying everything I would tell you the members of his
family don't feel that loved because he destroyed them, destroyed them,
but he doesn't see it that way. He thinks they
should just get over it and reconnect with them. That's
how he views it. But that's again that notion of
(15:38):
a very shallow emotional processing of the world. He thinks
that what he's done does not have that much enormity
and shouldn't and that they're his family and they need
to forgive him and get back in a relationship with him.
That is how he thinks.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
It's hard to imagine a world where anyone could forgive Raider.
I think for the average person, it's common to wonder
whether these types of violent offenders experience remorse, And when
I think back to his court appearances, I know that
Raider doesn't.
Speaker 12 (16:16):
These days, when Raider looks back, he regrets, it's not
the same as remorse. He regrets hurting his family, He
regrets that he's in prison, that he missed out on
a lot of life. He sometimes thinks about religion, but
I think for the most part, he does not believe
(16:37):
that there's an afterlife, that he will have to face
some kind of judgment. The killer part is essentially well,
how he identifies that, he embraces.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
That there is a thread that ties everyone together. Who
is still to this day interested in Dennis Rader. It
(17:08):
is the desire to understand why he did it and
if we could stop something like this from happening again.
For Larry Hatteberg, his BTK days didn't end when we
covered the caravan to El Dodo.
Speaker 11 (17:25):
I wrote to him in two thousand and five, and
I did get three or four letters back from him.
When I got the first letter from Denis Rader, the
postman stopped out front, came up to my door, rang
the doorbell, and he's holding the letter by the edges
like it's a horrible thing, and he said, I just
want to tell you I'm delivering this to you and
(17:46):
I hate every moment of this. That is an appropriate
response to receiving a letter from Denis Raider.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
In one of the letters, Rader had an eerie request
for Larry.
Speaker 8 (18:00):
He said, look, Larry, I love your show. We used
to watch Haddiberg's People all the time when I wasn't incarcerated.
In here, he said, I want to be on Hadiberg's People.
Haddeberg's People was the series that I did of great
people in the community. So I wrote him back and
I said, Dennis, the fact that you've killed ten people
(18:22):
tends to negate any of the good that you've done
in the community. And he didn't write me back after that.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But in the last few years they've restarted their correspondence.
Larry's received letters from Rader as recently as the end
of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 11 (18:42):
The reason I stay kind of involved in it, and
the reason I will occasionally write to BTK is that
we still to this day do not know what caused
BTK to become a murderer. And there are a million
teachers there with kids in their classroom, and they know
(19:04):
something is wrong with a child, but they don't know
what to do. They don't know how to do it.
So the question becomes, how do we identify these children
who are going to grow up to become a BTK.
Until we have those answers, the BTK story will never
be dead, even if he dies tomorrow, and that's why
I stay involved in it.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
On the other side of things, there are those who've
decided it is better not to indulge their curiosity when
it comes to Denis Raider. Here's Bob Smiser, a member
of Raider's former church, Christ Lutheran.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
I really wanted to go see Dennis in prison, not
because of anything I could ask him, or anything because
he'd lie to you, but to see who he is
strip that facade of Denis Raider facade. I think in
prison you would have finally got to see him as
he really is, and that interested me. Ultimately decided against
(20:05):
it for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Do you think you if you went to prison, could
you talk to him as Bobby an old friend.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I don't know that we'd talk as old friends, but
we would talk about his mom and dad, those kind
of things. Those conversations would be fairly simple, they'd be
fairly easy, and they'd be natural. If there's anything left
of the dentist raider facade or is he just BTK?
One hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Bob poses a good question, is there anything left of
the dentist Raider? For sad? This is something Carrie Rawson's
been trying to figure out for the last two decades.
It took her years to sort through her complicated emotions
after her father's arrest.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
For like the first nine and a half years. I
was totally shut down. I was hiding who I was.
I'm in like this megachurch outside Detroit, Michigan, where we
moved in two thousand and three. I'm leading Bible study.
I'm in this mops group with young mothers of toddlers,
and I'm not telling people who I am. My picture
had never been out there in connection with my dad.
(21:20):
I didn't have social media at the time. I had
gone through the worst day of my life, the worst
thing I could imagine. I'm a trauma survivor, an abuse survivor,
and I'm not telling anybody about this. The most I
would say, well, this bad thing happened to me. It's
really hard to sit in Bible study on a Tuesday
morning and the woman next to you is saying like
(21:43):
her worst day of our life is a dishwasher broken
or kitchen flooded, and I'm literally having to leave the
room and cry in the bathroom because how do you
even drop dad into that. Like even with trusted friends
of mine, I would try and they would tell me
stop talking, you're giving me nightmares. I was so shut
down those first nine and a half years because I
(22:03):
was scared. I was scared of this man in their
arrest photo. I was scared of what he had done.
I was even scared of other family members or some
lacko coming after me.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
She learned to compartmentalize to separate the father she'd known
from the killer she'd been introduced to.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
With my father, I have to put Dad in BTK.
When I interviewed with doctor Phil, he was helpful. He
did a timeline and he put photos of my normal
life above the timeline, and then underneath he put crime
scene photos and photos of my dad after the arresting
things BTK things, And he said, stay above the line
as much as you can, because that's safe and sane.
(22:49):
When I was talking about unleashing all the BTK stuff,
I didn't do it in a healthy way. I just
pulled it all out. And so when I went back
into therapy, she goes, okay. Now, for the first time,
I got to go put it in order. So we
took the Wichita Eagle book by Winslow and three other journalists,
and I took it into trauma therapy for months. My
(23:09):
paperback was like dogyard covered marked up in pen. I
had to go line by line through that thing in
therapy and I couldn't even do it in order. I
couldn't handle the seventies, and so I started with hedge
and I worked up through in the ninety one, and
then I went back to the seventies. And so when
I was done with therapy, Dad was strictly BTK to write,
(23:30):
and I had to go back and then separate that
and go back and find Dad and then find me.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Once Carrie had found herself again, she realized her story
might be able to help others, so she took a
chance at sharing it.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
I started talking to the media in fourteen. I mean,
it's rare to get somebody like me, a family member
of these guys to talk. It sets off your PTSD.
You know, there's shame in it too, because we've been
beat up in the media. We've been beat up by
people commenting and social media, some of us going to hiding,
change our names. I thought the answer was to hide,
(24:11):
but hiding meant tearing more insight. It's like when you
band each a wound two tide. It's festering and rotting
underneath because you're not letting it.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Get air or light.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
When I started speaking up, I realized not only was
it healing, me to talk about it. I was getting
an inbox full of people saying I was reaching them
because I was talking about something in forgiveness, or they
were a soldier that had come home with PTSD and
they had identified with me in my night terrors or
my fears, my anger, or family members of criminals that
(24:45):
were going back and forth between they still love this person,
but they were angry at them, and how do they
deal with the media. Something I was sharing, something I
was saying people were identifying with and it was helping them.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
While Carrie was working through her trauma in therapy, she
kept her distance from her father. Their communication ebbed and flowed,
and there were several years where she had no contact
with him.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
We stayed in touch with letters off and on. I
had forgiven him in twenty twelve. I had wrote him
that night after five years of no communication, and we
had been talking back and forth in letters.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
More.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
He read in the witch Tight Eagle article in fifteen
called for kipnesses and tidy, and he said, when he
read that article in the Eagle, he realized at that
moment more the impact is what he had done to
our family, and he did fill it and he said
it caused him to shed a tear. But in that
same letter or in the next letter to me, he's
(25:47):
back being a narcissist, trying to control whatever he has.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Left, and the only thing he has left in this
world is his physical body.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
He's very scared of his own death, ironically, and we
told him after he died, we would have him be
cremated and we would scatter his ashes out in the
floothills because we can't have a gravestone for him, and
we wouldn't want one anyway, would just get to face.
And we've had to tell him over and over and
over and over again in letters. So now Harry is
(26:19):
in fifteen telling me in this letter he knows he's
had this massive impact on my family. And in the
same letter he's saying, well, you guys aren't really communicating enough,
and you're not sending me money. And there's this woman
in Arkansas, she's in my fan club. I think maybe
I'll just sign my papers over and she can have
my body and give me a gravestone, because that's all
(26:42):
he has left right is his dead body. So he's
literally holding it over my family.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Raider isn't the first serial killer to have a fan club.
Black market memorabilia has been popular for killers like Ted Bundy,
Richard Ramiers and Jeffrey Dahmer. Here's Catherine Ramsland.
Speaker 12 (27:03):
Even when he was doing the cat and mouse with
police and he would see this stuff being covered by
the local TV station or the newspaper, he imagined that
he had a band club that he had to please.
And I think he still feels that way today. I
mean he's slowing down, he's tired.
Speaker 9 (27:20):
We talk about that.
Speaker 12 (27:21):
He wants to cut back on all the correspondence, and
yet if he gets new correspondents who feed into this
need that he has, he keeps them.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
No one person, of course, can reverse the horrific damage
done by Raider. A genuine apology from the killer would
even fail to do so. But unfortunately that doesn't stop
us from wishing it could all be undone.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I want my dad back. I want the seven families
to have their families back. I don't want the generational impacts,
community impacts, the thousands of people he's impacted, the detective's live,
Sea's run. If you could wipe all of that out
and just have the ten living people back and have life,
that would be ideal. But you can't do that right.
(28:13):
There's no time machine, there's no time loop, marble whatever.
This is reality. I can't change anything. I can't help
who I am. But I can do something good with
what I've got, and this is what I have, so
I do it.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
January fifteenth, twenty twenty four, marked fifty years since the
tragic O Taro murders.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
I can't believe it's been that long. Yet it feels
like yesterday.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Charlie O Tarum the eldest O Taro Ship.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
The pain is still there, the intensity of the anguish
and the grief is still there, but I've learned to
push it aside when it gets overwhelming and embrace the
good knowing that I am where I'm at today is
because of the full turnaround of all of this. I
(29:22):
got my life back when he got caught.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Over the last few years, Charlie's turned his pain into
a platform, giving speeches at prisons throughout the country.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
I'm doing well, and I only hope to do more
good work in the future, and I'm gonna use this
fiftieth anniversary as a catalyst. If I can to do
the work that I started doing, it makes me feel better,
It makes me feel good to take all the stupid
stuff I've done in my life spin it into a
(29:56):
lesson for the guys to learn from my mistakes. I've
always believed it's cheaper to learn from other people's mistakes,
and if talking to other people about what I've experienced
helps them deal with whatever trauma or victimization they've had
in their lives, then I'll continue. I don't live for
(30:17):
the poor Charlie thing. I live to honor my promise
to the Lord given my life. So you know, I'm
not a great Christian, but I try to be a
good one. And if I can keep one criminal from
getting out and hurting another family, then I will continue
to go to jails in prisons and reach out to
the guys who are getting out.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
And he tries not to dwell on the trauma of
his past.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
I live with the memories of my family in a
good place. I don't like to think of them the
day they died anymore. I like to think of what
we had before, going to the beach, being together, going
to church, all those goods. And for me, the past
is good for two things and two things only in
that's fond memories and lessons learned.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Jeff Davis, son of Dolores Davis. I go to a
similar sentiment when we're calling his own mother.
Speaker 7 (31:16):
I know I'll see her again, so that in itself
brings a lot of hope. I'm not getting a younger
and there'll come a time where I won't be here,
but where will be We'll be with her. We had
a lot of good, little, average everyday kind of time
(31:40):
that we spent before she killed her. We just talked
and laughed and shared the stories and made fun of
show and stuff. She used to say, Are you comfort
from that? She knowing that I know, I know what
the future holds, and I know what the past was,
(32:01):
and those are all positive and that helps. After thirty
two years, even the worst wounds start to score over.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
As for his thoughts on Raider, I'd.
Speaker 7 (32:16):
Like to say I've forgiven him and all that kind
of stuff that I'm supposed to do. I haven't. It's
just something that I think about. I just haven't got
there the way I justified this. I don't think about
him at all. He's a little insect, just skitterers around
in his eight by twelve style, still thinking everybody thinks
(32:38):
he's cool. He thinks all the guards like him. That's
how delusionaling is. He's not worth my time thinking about.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
In the years I've known Steve Raulford, son of Shirley
I am, I've watched him have a rougher go at it.
Have you been able to forgive yourself?
Speaker 13 (32:59):
Forgive? No, to deal with myself? Yeah? I don't think.
Oh I forgive myself. I tried. I get drunk, I
get fucked up trying to forgive myself.
Speaker 9 (33:18):
It.
Speaker 13 (33:18):
Don't worry. Nothing works. It's all right. That ain't working.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
You know, you were six years old. You had no idea.
There's no reason to feel any amount of guilt or anything.
Speaker 13 (33:35):
Yeah, that's what people say. But I can't help I feel.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Did BT k ruin your life forever?
Speaker 7 (33:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 13 (33:48):
He he fucked me for life.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
In twenty seventeen, Steve himself was serving time in elderat
the very prison that holds his mother's killer. How did
that feel? What did that do?
Speaker 13 (34:10):
I could know that I was in the shame fucking
provent of him and couldn't get to him. I think
I ride in my bait and cried every fucking not
not I do sometimes now, but I'm a strong moved.
Motherfucker you are.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
You're still around, and you're still surviving, and you're still trying.
You're still trying, Steve.
Speaker 13 (34:33):
Well, I can't succeed. I'll go back to our game.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
It is nearly impossible to find silver linings in the
wake of these tragedies. But I take a little comfort
knowing that through all of this, Charlie and Steve were
able to develop a brotherly relationship.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
I met Steve at the Monteu Williams show. We're giggling
to each other. He gave me a two dollar bill
and I gave him an eighteen ninety something silver dollar
for friendship. Because I went one way, he went the other.
He's like my little brother.
Speaker 8 (35:08):
Now.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
I worry for him, and I pray for him, and
I'm happy when he's happy. I care about him because
I know what he went through. He didn't have the
opportunities I had. He was a lot younger when stuff
happened to him. I was blessed to have been raised
with a solid childhood. Steve didn't have that.
Speaker 13 (35:26):
After I heard my backbones said, I've been here, Susan Peters, Charlie,
he number two. We have a bond and I'm wacom back.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
You share something in common, you and Charlie. What is that?
Speaker 13 (35:40):
Both have lost? He lost more than dude, but chilled
lost and we connect.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
In twenty twenty three, it had been a long time
since Dennis Raider's name made the news, but seemingly out
of nowhere, a cold case in Oklahoma got new legs.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Just confirmed within the last two hours. A sheriff's office
out of Oklahoma in Park City today searching the former
property of BTK serial killer Dennis Raider.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
In a breaking news alert. None of us were expecting
BTK was back again.
Speaker 9 (36:25):
Our case close to home is in Pahusco, Oklahoma, which
is Osage County. We had a young female cheerleader sixteen
years of age that came up missing from a laundromat
in downtown Pahusca in nineteen seventy six. Her name was
Cynthia don Kenney. I'm the under Sheriff of Osage County,
(36:46):
Gary Upton. In December late December of twenty twenty two,
Sheriff Verdin couldn't sleep one particular night, and he woke
up at three thirty in the morning and decided, if
I can't sleep, I'm going to watch some TV, and
so he tuned into Netflix and he watched a episode
of Catching Killers, and it was the episode titled Bind
(37:11):
Torture Kill BTK. After having watched it, the wheels in
his head started to turn and he started to think
about the distance between Pahaska and Wichita and Park City
and determined that two hours away was close enough that
this might be a guy that he should at least
(37:32):
look at.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Sheriff Verndon took a trip to visit Raider at Eldaredo.
Speaker 9 (37:39):
He spent three hours talking to Dennis Rader in late January,
but did not reveal the reason for his visit. At
the tail end of that interview, Dennis Rader, unsolicited seemed
to offer up a tidbit of information. Rader said, you know,
I have a fantasy that I wish I could have
(38:00):
lived out, and he asked Sheriff Verdon if he wanted
to hear it, and he goes, I've always wanted to
kidnap a female from a launder maat. I'd sit outside
the laundromat and I'd wait and watch until she was
in there alone, and then I would go in and
I would grab her and just take her. After that,
(38:21):
Sheriff Verdon went to Wichita Police got copies of evidence
and journals, and we used that intervening time to meticulously
pour over those journals page by page, taking notes, connecting dots,
seeing how something from one page related to another page.
(38:42):
In a spiderweb kind of passion.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
What they found in those journals was big.
Speaker 9 (38:50):
We see a lot that points him towards Bahuska. The
particular journal entry that we saw in nineteen seventy six
called bad wash Day, and that particular journal entry indicated
that he was going to try to do a breaking
an entering someplace on seventeenth Street. Pahusca has a seventeenth Street.
(39:12):
He indicated in that same journal entry that that was
unsuccessful due to too much noise, and he moved on
down to a laundermap. He has a notation called C nine,
the letter C and the numeral nine that indicates a
chapter in his unpublished manuscript, and chapter nine was dedicated
(39:35):
to all his successful kills, and those were his personal notes.
That was nothing that was meant for the eyes of
the police or the media, so it wasn't a brag
or a taunt.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
From there, they got in contact with Kerrie Rawson.
Speaker 9 (39:54):
To get her on board was a little bit of
a uphill climb. We started revealing little tidbits of information
here and there to her, and she started communicating with
the media about her skepticism in regards to us. After
a visit where we flew her here, we gave her
(40:15):
a peek inside of Pandora's box and we showed her
the information that we had. We showed her journal entries
that related to what we believed it was. Then I
think that she became a real believer and the idea
that her father had killed more than ten people.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
The Sheriff's department then went digging in raiders backyard for evidence.
This was the impetus for the new surge in media attention.
Speaker 9 (40:45):
You can look behind me and you can see the
sidewalk here that it has been dug up, and neighbors
tell me that law enforcement have been sifting through there
like they were going through gold. This latest news surge
is something that we as a sheriff's office didn't want.
It was somewhere in Park City in this second visit
(41:06):
to his property that we were outed. Since the cat
was out of the bag, We've decided we just have
to take our shot.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
The Osage County Sheriff's Department had already made a trip
out to Raiders property. The house and Raiders tools shed,
though were raised back in two thousand and six to
deter tours and media attention. Investigators went to the lot
to look for personal effects and potentially a driver's license.
Speaker 9 (41:35):
When we went there in April, we discovered that the
city owned the property. It was still flat and devoid
of any construction, with the exception of a sidewalk that
had been poured from the street all the way through
the property around behind the houses to a playground. It
(41:55):
was a brand new sidewalk that was poured in twenty twenty.
So in April we did not have permission to tear
up the sidewalk, but Park City police stood by while
we dug on the edges of it, and it was
then that we discovered the pantyhose. It was tied in
a knot that would be suitable for a bondage of
(42:17):
either wrists or angles.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
They had to get under the sidewalk.
Speaker 9 (42:24):
So fast forward and when we have gotten permission to
remove the concrete sidewalk once again, we had Park City
on hand. They removed the concrete and we discovered the
Heidi hole. It was lined with shingles and the inside
of the hole had a lot of gravel. We cleared
(42:45):
all that out, discovered personal items that looked like trophies
that would belong to a female, and we also found
bondage material, chain clips, and a small length of chain.
It looked like what Dennis's talked about it as writing before.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Not everyone has been on board with this new series
of events. Not only was Kerry skeptical, but so was
the Wichita Police Department.
Speaker 9 (43:12):
At first, everyone kind of starts out wondering what our
motives are. Obviously, you know, even KBI, even OSBI. Our
next hurdle is our approach to the FBI, and obviously
the ultimate goal is closure for the victims' families.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
BTK still has not been confirmed as the killer of
Osage County Cynthia don Kenney. In twenty twenty four, Raider
was absolved of the nineteen ninety killing of a Missouri
woman named Shauna Garber. This case had been reopened in
response to the Oklahoma investigation. The last updates police had
(43:51):
on Kenny's case, we're in September of twenty twenty three.
To me, this case in Oklahoma confirms something I believed
for years, that Denis Rader is one of the most
evil killers in American history. I've called Wichita home for
(44:14):
over thirty years, and in my time here, we've been
through so many phases of the BTK story, and every
single time we think we've made it to the end
of btk's reign of terror, it all comes spiraling back.
Over the course of this podcast, I've spoken with multiple
(44:34):
people whose lives were upended by Denis Raider, but none
of them are victims. All of them are survivors. Their
example strengthens my result to keep telling their stories, their
stories not of lives ended by BTK, but stories of
(44:55):
redemption and hope things Denis Rader will ever have. It
is my hope that we can continue to build a
compassionate community in spite of a seemingly never ending saga
of darkness.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
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
(45:45):
iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers
Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising producer Rima Ilkali.
Marketing support by David Wasserman and Alison Wright iHeart Podcasts
and Caroline Origemma at Tenderfoot TV. Additional research by Claudia Dafrico,
(46:08):
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. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(46:30):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Susan Peters
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