BTK Killer: The Life and Crimes of Dennis Rader, Lecture notes of Engineering

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Dennis Rader - “BTK Strangler”

Kiara Alo-Racadio

Period 2

Childhood - Adulthood

● Born on March 9, 1945, in Pittsburg, Kansas. He was the eldest of four children ● Joined the Boy Scouts as a youth and participated in church youth group activities ● Developed fantasies about bondage, control and torture from an early age, while still in grade school. Kept his fantasies hidden ● Killed cats and dogs by hanging them ● Polite, quiet, and kept to himself. He wasn’t very socially active with others ● Graduated from Wichita Heights High School, class of 1963 ● Joined the U.S. Air Force in the summer of 1966 at the age of 21 ● Got married to Paula Dietz on May 22, 1971. They eventually had two children ● Earned his bachelor’s degree in Administration of Justice from Wichita State University in 1979

Desire For Fame

● October 1974: A letter was placed in an engineering book at Wichita

Public Library, where the Otero murders were described in great detail

● Dennis requested to be called the “BTK Strangler”, explaining that it

stood for “bind them, torture them, kill them”

● Contactted the local police and media repeatedly, sending letters

containing anagrams and poems of the crimes he committed over the

years

● His desire was to terrorize the people of Wichita and make sure his

greatest accomplishments were credited to him

Investigation (continued)

● 1979: Dennis stopped communicating and remained silent for 25 years which caused the case to run cold ● 2004: An envelope was mailed to The Wichita Eagle from a B ill T homas K illman. It contained three photocopied pictures of Vicki Wegerle taken in 1986 during her murder. It also had a photocopy of her missing driver's license ● DNA evidence was taken from Vicki’s fingernails and over 1300 samples were taken in hopes to tie someone to the murders ● It is still unknown as to why Dennis stopped killing

Trial

● Dennis originally pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of murder, but then later changed his plea to guilty ● Rader’s defense team had psychologist, Robert Mendoza, conduct a psych eval of Dennis to determine if an insanity plea could be viable ● August 19, 2005: Rader was sentenced to 175 years of imprisonment in El Dorado Correctional Facility ● Rader escaped execution only because his murders were committed before Kansas voted to restore the death penalty

DNA Profiling Computer Forensics

April 4, 1974: Kathryn Bright

March 17, 1977: Shirley Vian

December 8, 1977 Nancy Fox

April 27, 1985 Marine Hedge

January 19, 1991 Dolores Davis

Remaining Victims

Works Cited

● http://dennisraderbtk.blogspot.co.uk/2005/10/childhood-adolescence-adulthood-pre_30.html ● http://murderpedia.org/male.R/r/rader-dennis.htm ● http://www.biography.com/people/dennis-rader-241487#arrest-and-imprisonment ● http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/6/66/BTK_timeline.gif/revision/latest?cb= ● http://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/dennis-rader-the-btk-killer/crimes ● http://dennisraderbtk.blogspot.com/2005/10/btk-is-back_30.html ● http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/BTK-serial-killer-caught/2005/02/27/1109439444107.html ● http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/27/rader.transcript/ ● https://precisioncomputerinvestigations.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/how-computer-forensics-solved-the-btk-killer-case/ ● http://www.freewebs.com/thebtksite/btkbondage.htm ● http://www.freewebs.com/thebtksite/btkvictim.htm ● http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/02/26/raw-data-btk-timeline.html ● http://www.wibw.com/home/headlines/7446541.html ● Wenzl, Roy, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, and Hurst Laviana. Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.