Preview: Resolved #24

This is a preview for the 24th episode of the Patreon-exclusive show Resolved. To access the rest of this episode - as well as the other bonus material available to supporters of Unresolved Productions - head on over to Patreon and help support this show. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
By day, Dennis Raider was a balding, bespectacled family man,
loading his kids into the car for school and kissing
his wife paula goodbye on his way to work. Neighbors
saw him as a normal church going father, a cub
Scout leader, and president of the local Lutheran Church council,
always ready with a friendly wave. At city hall in
Park City, Raider donned his uniform as a complaints officer,

(00:23):
zealously patrolling for stray dogs and unkempt lawns. He took
his job seriously. Residents often spotted him pacing off property
lines with measuring tape, checking grass height, and writing up
code violations. To some, he seemed helpful and diligent. To others,
his badge came with a bullying streak. He wore a
badge and would swagger around the street like he was

(00:45):
above the law. I always considered him a bully, recalled
one neighbor who bristled a Raider's stern enforcement of city rules. Still,
nothing about Dennis Raider stood out as necessarily alarming. He
blended in perfectly amid church potluck and Scout camping trips,
doting on his wife and children, in public. Women at
church even admired how attentive he was, always holding the

(01:08):
door for Paula and helping her with her coat. In
all respects, Dennis Raider projected the image of a polite, reliable,
middle class father. Each week followed a comfortable routine. Sunday mornings,
the Raider family filled a pew at Christ Lutheran Church.
Dennis sang hymns, passed the collection plate, and chatted easily
with fellow parishioners over coffee after the service. Weekday evenings,

(01:31):
he was home by dinner time, grilling Burghers in the
backyard were helping his son with his Boy Scout merit badges.
He volunteered at Scout meetings and led camping excursions, teaching
knots and survival skills to wide eyed boys around neighbors.
He spoke warmly of family values and community safety. By
the mid nineteen nineties, Raider's two children were growing up,

(01:53):
and he delighted in ordinary milestones, school plays, birthdays, church
youth events. Nothing else outwardly indicated that this devoted father
and husband had a monstrous secret inside the Raider household.
Paula and the children noticed only some small eccentricities, Dennis's fussiness,
he insisted on tidying up any mess, and his need

(02:15):
for alone time in the evenings down in the basement
or garage. They thought little of it. After all, he
worked hard if he needed a solitary hobby, like kinkering
with his tools or writing in a journal that seemed harmless.
Yet beneath the bland smile and civic responsibility, Rader led
a double life in the shadows of his home. After
the family fell asleep, he indulged his dark compulsions that

(02:38):
no one suspected. He kept a secret stash hidden the way,
a locked box tucked in a corner of the basement
or garage rafters, containing what he called his projects. In
that box were mementos that would have horrified his fellow
church members, stolen jewelry, driver's licenses, and polaroid photographs. Raider
had been quietly fo pographing himself for years, staging elaborate

(03:03):
self bondage sessions when alone. In these disturbing images, he
posed tied up in ropes or leather straps, sometimes wearing
women's clothing or a grotesque mask, even dawning. Items taken
from murder scenes. His camera's flash captured him in contorted positions,
sometimes gagged and bound, as if he were re enacting

(03:23):
the torture of an unseen victim. These secret polaroids were
the outlet for his twisted fantasies. Raiter cataloged them meticulously
and hid them where no one would find them. Late
at night, the seemingly ordinary man would gaze at the
images of himself, trust up or flip through scrap book
clippings of old, unsolved murders with a rush of illicit excitement.

(03:44):
No one in his family or community had any idea
Dennis Rader, the genial father, the scout leader, the church usher,
was living a lie. The same men who liked to
help little old ladies with their groceries was also a
sexual sadist, stealthily feeding an enter deemon he called b
t K, short for bind torture kill. The facade was perfect,

(04:08):
As one investigator later remarked, he was exactly ordinary. He
went to work, he went to church, he went to
boy Scouts, he did family things, just an ordinary guy.
Dennis Rader's relative normalcy was his camouflage. It allowed him
to hide in plain sight while nurturing unspeakable desires in secret,
desires that had gone dormant but never fully disappeared. What

(04:36):
you just heard was a preview of Resolved, the cases
that did not fade into mystery. The killers were caught,
the truth came out, but the stories they're just as wild.
Here the full episode and more like it, only on Patreon.
Go to patreon dot com, slash Unresolved pod and subscribe now,
or click on the link in the show notes.