True Crime Vault: My Father BTK
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Newport Beach, California sits just south of Los Angeles. It's 2012, and the owner of a marijuana dispensary has been kidnapped, tortured, and left for dead in the Mojave Desert. It began a decade-long game of cat and mouse between investigators and a perpetrator, a mastermind of escape. He's a psychopath. Oh my God, they let Hannibal Lecter out? Devil in the Desert is out now. This is the 2020 True Crime Vault. ♪

He calls himself the BTK Strangler. BTK was a monster. He would see a woman walking and he would say, she's next. We were all scared to death to see if he was going to kill again. Nobody would have imagined this good husband as somebody that could even contemplate the murders that he committed. One minute, you had a loving father. The next minute, he's a serial killer. I mean, come on. The child of a serial killer actually talking about it?

That's something you almost never hear. I'm walking on the street I grew up on, Independence Street. I just remember riding my bike up and down the street and running around in my friend's yards and sleepovers and playing hopscotch and playing in the rain puddles on the streets. So you were safe. My parents would let me ride my bike all over.

This road really just reminds me of childhood. On February 25th, 2005, when I found out my father was arrested, this place became not my home and no one ever slept in my house again. Are we good? Everybody's rolling?

It's been more than a decade since your life as you knew it changed forever. What do you remember about that day? It was a normal day. I had slept in. I was substitute teaching and I just took the day off.

And then there's a knock on my door. So I'm already thinking, like, who's this person, you know, in my apartment building? And then he said he was the FBI. Is there any reason you should even expect the FBI to be your own? No, no. What does he say exactly? He asked, do you know who BTK is? I was like, you mean the person that's wanted for murders back in Kansas? And then he says, your dad has been arrested as BTK. And I was like, I think I'm going to pass out.

He calls himself the BTK Strangler and promises to kill again. BTK's brutal crimes shocked Wichita. The most infamous unsolved serial killing spree in Wichita history. BTK stood for Bind, Torture, Kill, and that was his M.O. Three letters which can touch off memories for anyone who lived in Wichita during the 1970s. BTK emerged in 1974. When BTK came forward...

Everybody's life changed. It was really part of Wichita's history. The BTK killings changed the way people lived in Wichita. It changed Wichita from a sleepy little friendly town into a place in a city where you now lock your door and you check your phone and make sure you have a dial tone. They're asking that anyone with information on this case please call our Crime Stoppers line. The body was discovered here. I think we'll solve the crime. The question is when will we solve the crime?

BTK was a monster who killed a total of 10 people, two of those children, in cold blood. This was a serial killer who got away with it for 30 years. That's very rare. There was somebody out there targeting women and children. BTK was the boogeyman made real. He would be driving down the street and he would see a woman walking or a woman on the front porch and he would look at her and he would say, "She's next."

So the killings were random. He would break into someone's home, hide in a closet, wait hours until they were fast asleep and then attack.

To this day, I still check inside the closets, under the bed, behind the shower curtain when I'm in unfamiliar territory. You never knew when he was going to show up and you never knew where he was going to be next. People were really frightened. This is one of the most challenging cases I've ever been involved with. None of the women were actually physically sexually assaulted. What he wanted was the image of a bound woman.

He killed in the 70s proficiently and then stopped, it seemed. It became almost mythology. This figure came, he killed a bunch of people and then he left. It was kind of slipping into history when in 2004 a mailing come and there was no question who it was from.

Police in Wichita, Kansas are investigating the possible return of a serial killer who calls himself BTK resurfaces after 25 years. This is Cape News.

And good evening. We have exclusive details. A new communication that could be from the serial killer. We were all scared to death to see if he was going to kill again. And was I going to be the next victim? It scares me to be out by myself anymore. For the second time in just more than a week, another possible communication from BTK arrives here at our studios. He thrived on the publicity, and I think he thrived on scrimmage.

scaring the heck out of everybody in the city. We begin tonight with breaking news in the case. BTK is arrested. His hunger for publicity seems to have drawn him in. We have learned that Rader has been charged with 10 counts now of first-degree murder.

He was living a double life here in Wichita. Residents are still trying to digest the fact that a possible serial killer lived among them. Nobody would have imagined this church leader, this father, this good husband, as somebody that could even contemplate the murders that he committed. BTK was literally the guy next door with a wife and two kids. Everybody wanted to talk to the family members. Everybody did. How do you process this earth-shattering

You don't. I said, can I call my husband? He needs to come home. All this stuff is running through my head where I'm like, did somebody get hurt? Or like, but why would it be the FBI? And so when I get home, I remember him saying, have you heard about the BTK, like the serial killer? We're pretty sure like he's the guy, like we got the guy.

I was trying to almost alibi my father. I was like, my father's a good guy. He's Boy Scout leader, president of the church. I'm like, you've got the wrong man because you don't believe it's true and you don't want it to be true and you know your father's not capable. The father you know is not capable of any of this. Were you worried at that point that your mom was somehow involved in this as well? No, I never imagined that my mom was involved in anything bad.

I was very worried about her and wanted to call her and let her know I was okay, and I wanted to know how my brother was doing. He was stationed in Connecticut with the Navy, and so, like, I wasn't able to talk to my mom or my brother until, like, six or seven hours after the arrest. When you first heard her voice on the phone? Just heartbreaking. Like, you could just hear her break, like, just utter grief and grief.

loss when paula rada found out she was shocked in complete disbelief how is mrs raider doing she's having a very difficult time with all of this uh in a shock just unbelievable totally in disbelief police are being very tight-lipped about the evidence against him but there are reports the suspect is confessing to many of the murders when did you type this

probably would help to have a calendar so you're trying to deny this and your father is confessing to being a serial killer right i was like what is he confessing to you know you're just so like not with it you're like what is he confessing to and he's like oh he's confessing to the crimes after your dad's arrest you actually started googling trying to see what you can find out about

this killer. I made a really huge mistake to go Google BTK. Wichita was a wonderful city back in the 1970s. Just a nice Midwestern city where people could raise their family without any fear. Very safe, very good schools, very wholesome, family-oriented town. If you want to freeze Americana and go back, then Wichita was very much like that.

No matter where you go in town, you will run into somebody you know. Everybody knows everybody. It's a nice town. It's a good place to live and a good place to be the district attorney. Another windy Kansas day. Hello, everybody. Never in a million years did Wichitans think that a serial killer would come from here. Kansas police now say Dennis Rader may be linked to 10 murders going back to 1974. Wichita, in many ways, simply grew up.

Suddenly the life you thought you had has just sort of vaporized. Oh, yeah, like every moment of your whole life was a lie, even back to before you were born. Dennis Rader was born on March 9th, 1945. He grew up an all-American boy playing cowboys and Indians. He was the first of four brothers, a very ordinary life.

His childhood was very normal. He was raised in the rural area with good parents. Had he come from a happy home? Yeah, I would say he came from a really solid home. I was very close to his parents, my grandparents, Bill and Dorothea. Did you ever get any sense that he had experienced anything abusive or physically? No. There was nothing ever to hint at that something could be amiss with my father.

Paula was a member of Dennis Rader's parents' church. My dad and my mom met in the fall of 1970. Rader's mother knew her and knew that Dennis was coming home from the military, and she wanted Paula to meet him.

He had just got back from the Air Force and they started dating. They got married nine months later in May of '71. I think he fell in love and they were two good Christian kids who wanted to get married in the right way. So there was nothing unusual about it. When Dennis Marries Paula.

She obviously has no idea that Dennis has already been having fantasies and maybe even obsessions about harming other people, killing other people, tying them up, etc. He's already looking inside people's houses. He's stalking people. He's already breaking into people's homes. He's already living a double life. He knew before he met my mom what he was probably capable of. You think he knew then?

Well, yeah, I mean, why did he get married? Was it because he didn't want to be that other person or did he just want both lives? People who knew my parents before February 25th, 2005 would have told you this. Dennis cherished Paula. My dad would tell you the same still to this day, but he should have known it wasn't going to be forever. Your book is called A Serial Killer's Daughter. Is that how you see yourself? It's taken me a long time to even be able to say that out loud, but that's the truth.

This whole odyssey starts on January 15th of 1974 in a little house on North Edgemoor. It was the home of Joseph Otero and his wife and his five children. He saw it was a corner house. Just kind of everything about it attracted him. He says now that he spotted Mrs. Otero and one of her daughters when he was driving my mom to work and then stalked their family. The Oteros were a relatively new family to Wichita. They're a family of seven, five kids.

And the older kids had gone off to school that day, leaving the two younger ones at home with their parents. My name is Charlie Otero, and I am the son of Joseph and Julie Otero. My father was a really outgoing, jovial kind of guy, and my mom was a very caring, loving, Catholic woman. She was a mother first. Dennis Rader went to the house. He cut the phone line, and then he entered the house.

Dennis Rader believed that the mother and the daughter would be the only ones home. He was not expecting Mr. Otero to be there. He was really taken by surprise that four people were there that he now had to deal with. He pulled a gun on them, he tied up Mrs. Otero, and then he started to strangle Mr. Otero. He wanted that very close personal engagement where their life was literally in his hands. So he wanted to strangle them.

When the older children came back from school that day, they couldn't get into their house, so they forced entry into it. They discovered their parents. I ran down the hall, went in their bedroom, and saw my mother on the bed, my father on the floor. My heart just got ripped out of my chest. My life changed instantly. Charlie Otero ran to a neighbor's house, called the police.

It was the police who discovered his little brother in another room and then found their sister. They went down into the basement and found Josephine. An 11-year-old Josephine Otero will be bound with rope and she's hanging just off the floor. He hangs her, probably has a fantasy about that, leaves his DNA at the scene and leaves.

I thank God every day that I didn't find Joey and Josie because I don't know how I could have handled it. There's a lot of evidence collection that you don't know what you're going to do with. You want to collect everything because you get one shot at a crime scene.

law enforcement will collect DNA on the floor. They didn't collect it for analysis. They just did not have the technology. In 1974, who would think that DNA testing was going to be this criminal investigative tool? Myself and another reporter were on the scene of the Otero murder. And that murder was a little different because the police weren't saying anything. So we knew that something really terrible had happened in that house.

The Otero murders rocked this city. It was unheard of in Wichita, Kansas to have a family of four murdered. Why would someone want to kill this wonderful family? Unknown to Wichita, they had just been visited by someone who was killing for sport. What he does next will make it perfectly clear that Dennis Rader is after much more than just murder. He really wants the spotlight. He wanted to be the most famous serial killer in the country.

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The bodies of Joseph Otero, his wife Julie, their daughter Josephine, and their son Joseph II were discovered in their East Wichita home. The victims had been bound, gagged, and strangled with a cord.

We have a quadruple homicide in a family neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas, in the middle of America. That just doesn't happen. People in Wichita didn't know who it was. We didn't know what kind of person would do that. We just wanted him behind bars. I don't understand how somebody that could be so protective of his own children could murder other children. He had just an incredible ability to compartmentalize.

Rader called it cubing. The way the cubing works is you have multiple sides to a cube. When he's on the face of it, those sides are all part of him, but he's not aware of them. He doesn't see them. He only is able to look out from one face, but he can switch it very fluidly to the next side of the cube if he needs to, whatever the situation calls for.

He could leave a crime scene, come home, clean up, go to bed, get up and start another day. Even when he wasn't killing, he was still looking for the possibility. Killers like Dennis Rader, they're called power control killers. And they love the power, they love the control, and they want the attention. What's a natural way to get attention without power?

identifying yourself is to interact, call the media. On October 22nd, 1974, Don Granger, who was a columnist for the Wichita Eagle, received a phone call from somebody who's claiming to be BTK. This guy tells him to look in the city library, tells him a very specific place, goes to the engineering section, in fact, tells him the shelf and the book to look for.

The police go find the book and there is a letter that describes the Otero murders in detail. The police did pick up somebody, three guys, for the Otero murders. This was in the newspaper and Rader was upset. He didn't want someone else to get credit for his murders. He's somebody who really seeks attention and so when he's not getting it, it upsets him because his identity

and life is committing these crimes. He wanted to show that he knew who killed the Oteros. He had done it alone. He knew all the details. He proved that by writing the details out. He goes point for point where each one of the Oteros were found in the house, what they were wearing. They knew it had to be him because nobody had that level of detail. So it's kind of like, I'm your guy, but you're not going to figure out who I am.

In the letter, he suggests the moniker BTK, which would stand for "Bind, Torture, Kill." It was his nom de plume. That's what he wanted to be called because that's what he did. He said, "I like to bind them, I like to torture them, and I like to kill them." In July of 1975, Rader became a father for the first time.

My brother's three years older than me. And suddenly he's now a real family. He and his wife are overjoyed to have a child. He was working for ADT, the security company. He got to be in people's homes. To my dad, like the person that committed breaking and enterings and stalked people, I would imagine that sort of gave him, that side of him like a thrill. But then he starts getting a little bit restless.

From 1974 to 1977, he will kill three more women: a college student named Katherine Bright, a mother of three named Shirley Vian, and a 25-year-old named Nancy Fox. I was born in '78, and my dad murdered a young woman when my mom was three months pregnant with me.

That kind of stuff happens to somebody else, but not to someone in your family. My name's Beverly Fox and Nancy and I were sisters. Nancy Fox was a hard-working young lady, worked two jobs. She lived by herself in a duplex. What she wanted was to get married, to have kids, you know, to have a family.

She loved kids. How did he find her? How did he pick her out? Why Nancy? Dennis Rader will describe that he saw and noticed Nancy Fox when she was getting mail one day.

This was what he called his perfect crime. This case, Nancy's case, went exactly how he planned it. Nobody else was in the house. She wasn't expecting anybody else. He was not going to get interrupted. This one worked out the way his fantasies happened in his head. The next day, Rader did something unusual. He found a phone booth, and he called in the murder of Nancy Foxx.

The caller said, reporting a homicide. Police went to that address and found Nancy Fox dead, bound and strangled on her bed. So when you heard this, did it sound like your father? You can hear like that clip, the way my father could talk.

I like, I, that was another, like these things just start clicking. Oh my God, it really is my father. - Rader has now struck a number of times in a way that can be connected

And yet he's not getting the press that he's seeing other serial killers getting. Ted Bundy has been in the news. Ted Bundy is charged with the murder of two Florida State University coeds and is suspected in 19 other murders in western states. He wants to know why they're not recognizing that he is among the elite serial killers. He sent a letter to Cake TV, which was an ABC affiliate here in Wichita.

This morning, Cake TV was contacted by the person who police say they believe murdered four members of the Joseph Otero family. The letter in 78 to Cake TV came in through the mail just as a normal letter from a viewer, it appeared. And once it was opened, we knew we had something unusual. BTK began today's letter with a question. How many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention?

The letter indicated on no uncertain terms when was he going to get some national attention, that there were seven in the ground, there were many more to go. He says he is compelled to kill by what he calls Factor X. In this letter, he describes a Factor X and he describes as to what drives him. He lets them know that he can't stop, that the Factor X makes him want to kill and he's going to keep killing.

The early communications were more about exerting control and terrorizing Wichita. With us right now is Chief of Police Richard Lemunyan. Chief Lemunyan had to give an announcement to the public to give them a warning that there was a serial killer in our community. What kind of leads do you have? Well, very honestly, we have...

No solid leads at all. We didn't know that all of the murders were related. When he announced that now, you definitely know that there's a serial killer on the prowl. It was overwhelming horror at who is this person. After the Fox murder, he...

didn't kill anyone again for eight years. Right. The chief does want people to be aware that BTK is probably still around, so people should be careful. I have no reason to doubt that the individual will strike again, assuming that he's still free and walking around. I was born in '78. He has said himself that he just got busy, like, raising kids and having a family.

How would you describe your childhood with your father? I pretty much had the American dream, you know, like the three-bedroom ranch with the big backyard and the springer spaniel dog. And then when I was four, he built a massive tree house for my brother and I. Gentle, loving, stern? Kind of a mix. Most of the time he was...

even kill and kind and warm. At times he could be very firm or have flashes of anger or outbursts that you weren't expecting. Was he physically abusive ever? We only saw physical abuse twice. It was a Friday night. My mom had worked all day. She had gone to a lot of work to make manicotti for us, which was like a special meal.

I don't know who started an argument, but our family got into an argument. Somebody pounded on at our old rickety kitchen table and all of a sudden my dad just sprung up out of the chair and lunged for my brother.

facing him front, like his hands around his neck like this. - Like choking him? - Yeah, like trying to strangle my brother. My brother was the color of a white sheet. He was just petrified. - Had you ever seen that side of your dad before? - No, I had never. So it was extremely out of the characteristic of my father to be physically abusive. - April 27th, it's 1985.

And Maureen Hedge, who just happened to be his neighbor about six doors down, becomes victim number eight. He'll describe to us that it took a lot of guts to kill Maureen Hedge because it was bringing the police close to home, literally a few houses away. I was six years old. The night she went missing,

there was a thunderstorm. I still can recall that night because I crawled into bed with my mom. So I knew my dad was gone that night because I wouldn't have ever crawled into bed with my mom if my dad had been there. Why was he gone? He was on a Cub Scout camp out with my brother, who was nine. The crime was planned with the alibi in mind. We had to find ways to get opportunities. One of those ways was these overnights. He was a volunteer for the Boy Scouts when his son was involved.

and had a good space of time where he could go murder Maureen. He will leave that Boy Scout event. He will drive to Wichita. He cuts through even the backyard of his own residence and goes to Maureen Hedges' house, cuts the phone line, breaks into her house. He kills her at her home and then transports her body over to the church. What he has done is he has prepared his church

the church that he was a member of. He was the congregational president and he wanted to take pictures of her posed. Dressed her in underwear he had stolen from other houses, took Polaroid photos of her, and then dumped her body in ditch. He drives right back to the Boy Scout event and picks up right where he left off. Back to being Dennis Rader, the husband, the father.

Somehow I knew at six that her body had been found and that she had been murdered and she had been strangled. The body was nude and police say badly decomposed. A pair of knotted pantyhose were found lying in the ditch beside it. How did that affect you? It scared me. Like, I started having night terrors around that time. I would wake up screaming sitting up in bed. My mom is always the one that would come comfort. I would say, "There's a bad man in my house." And she's like, "No, there's no bad man in your house."

Over the next five years, he kills two more women, Vicki Waggerly in September 1986 and Dolores Davis. My mother was a loving person and for that reason had lots of friends and really no enemies. Dolores' house has obvious signs of an intruder making entry into the back of the house.

They'd use a cinder block and threw it through a sliding glass door. She's of course going to be immediately up running out there. That's when she sees him, the monster standing there. He'll kill her in the residence and he will remove her body. He ends up dumping Dolores Davis out in sort of a culvert by a bridge. My mother had been a beautiful person inside and out and she's disregarded like a bag of garbage.

Several days later, she's found by a boy walking a dog. The dog breaks loose, runs under the bridge and finds Dolores. His last three victims are not initially connected by the police to BTK. And that's because they're different. The bodies are in a different location. And he's not really attracted to one particular type of person. They're in the right place, the right location for him.

then he acts. Whether they're young, whether they're old, it's more important to commit the crime than it is what the person may look like or what their age might be. Dennis Rader, after he murdered Dolores Davis, went silent. He went silent for a very long time. Most people believe that he was either incarcerated for another crime or killed himself or whatever because serial killers don't quit killing until they're caught.

It became generational. People did forget about BTK and there was a lot of speculation where is he? BTK was actually living among us. He was going to the movies with us. He was going to the grocery store with us. It was inevitable that he was going to reach out. This is the greatest accomplishment of his life. He felt it necessary to say, no, I'm still here and I'll be the one that will write the story. ♪

BTK, it was thought he had disappeared. There's this long hiatus where he doesn't call the police, he doesn't talk to the newspaper. There's no more killings during that period of time. Nobody in a thousand years thought that this story was going to come back. We thought it was basically over. What we would learn later is that he was...

raising children. In 1991, your father got a job as a Park City compliance officer. I was 12, and he sort of settled back down again because he had a steady job, and...

almost had an outlet again for that psychopathic behavior. He enjoys it, but mainly because it provides a certain amount of authority. Walks around with this big old dart gun and he's in uniform and is telling people to cut their grass, get a permit. The compliance office that Dennis Rader worked in was right next door to the Park City Police Department. It wasn't as if he was hiding at all. Dennis Rader granted

Kansas Station KSN an interview about his job as a dog catcher. We've been trying to round him up and corral him as best we can. In the years after the last killing back in 1991, his family was just moving along in their normal pace. His daughter went to Kansas State University.

I met my husband Darien at Kansas State in '98. So he lived in the dorm across from mine. Did your parents like him? You kind of get that pushback like all fathers do against like their girl's boyfriends. He's like, "Well, I don't really like his leather jacket." And he just seemed like another regular Wichita dad to me. And then in 2003, my dad walked me down the aisle at our wedding.

For those who were here, he was in the back of their mind, but people, their lives went on. There was an article in the paper in 2004 about the 30-year anniversary of the BTK killings. And we included there that nobody remembered him, which invoked his ire.

He saw this in the newspaper and decided he didn't want someone else to tell his story. He wanted to control it. That again goes back to, I want attention. These are my murders. Identify with them. And I want you to know that I did them. After the article's published, he sends a letter to the Wichita Eagle. The address on it is Bill Thomas Killman, which is BTK. I'll never forget that day. We open it up.

and it was pictures of Vicki Wiggerly. In the Vicki Wiggerly case, he had taken pictures of her, and he gave the police basically photocopies of those pictures that clearly only the killer would have. And so they knew now he's back in the game. He wanted to enter the arena and clash swords with law enforcement again. He enjoyed that and then thought that he was up to the task again.

This morning we have more information on the letter sent to the Wichita Eagle by the BTK killer. After the reports that BTK is back, there was an explosion of interest. In the nation's heartland, a serial killer resurfaces. Why BTK remains silent for 25 years remains a mystery. This was a local story for many years, but once...

BTK reemerged. It became a huge national story. Reporters just descended on Wichita. Police say they want help finding a man who calls himself BTK. The killer is linked to eight unsolved murders. Police revealed that they received more letters from BTK. We were on the front page of the paper for 69 days in a row. It is the only thing that people talked about because, you know, the monster's back. Fear fell over every woman in Wichita.

This guy's back, and am I going to be next? We went into stores where things like pepper spray were selling off the shelves. Self-defense classes were full. I had pepper spray and a stun gun, and as soon as I get those little laser guns, I'm going to get one of those. We went to a playground, and there were moms there with their kids, and...

These moms were scared. One of them, when we talked to her, she pulled a hunting knife out of her front pocket. I'm going to start carrying it in my pocket just in case anybody wants to mess with me. I came across an article on ABC News and it said that there had been an active serial killer in Wichita in the 70s and that he had become active again. And I was shocked like that there was a serial killer in Wichita. What are you thinking a serial killer in Wichita would be like?

I figured he was a loner, somebody that probably had been in trouble with the law before and kept to himself. Good morning. Ken Landwehr was the lead homicide detective when BTK reappeared. We are again asking for help from the public. There was a strategy from the very beginning

to have Kenny Landwehr be the face of the investigation. We truly feel that he is trying to communicate with us. And the experts believe that would help to keep Dennis Rader talking. You have to provide him an adversary, an adversary that he can identify with. And so it was decided very early on that any communications to the public were going to come from Kenny Landwehr.

The tip that was received by the Wichita Television Station indicated that another possible BTK communication was dropped.

on January 8th. Between 2004 and 2005 there were a series of communications both to the Wichita Eagle and to Cake TV and the communications came in many ways. Sometimes they were a postcard, sometimes they were a letter. In one instance he left a cereal box on a county road. Cereal boxes because serial killer or cereal boxes, he thought this was a great joke. He got these dolls, dressed them

to look like his victims put them into the boxes with some of the victims items he started really having fun this is what he called his cat mouse game it was kind of like a treasure hunt for him for people we know he is watching and we know he is listening and to him we say the message has been received and passed on every communication we got and that we relayed out we knew as a media

If we kept him communicating, he was going to slip up. That's what was going to get him caught. There's probably one really true thing about restaurants.

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Your father is confessing to being a serial killer. That's not the man I knew and loved. I don't know that man.

BTK stood for Bind, Torture, Kill. That's what he wanted to be called because that's what he did. How many do I have to kill before I get some national attention? It became a huge national story. Made its way into pop culture. Made for TV movies. It's been 30 years since the first BTK killings. We expected a Charles Manson looking guy.

It wasn't. He was the guy in the line next to us at the grocery store. He got these dolls, dressed them to look like his victims. Is your dad mentally ill or is he evil? Let me think now. ♪ Bottom of the river ♪ BTK started sending packages with mementos from his crimes. One that was part of what Ledge was undoing was dropping a package in the back of a truck at a local Home Depot.

The police were able to recover that package. In this box is a piece of paper entitled "Communication" and he actually spells communication wrong and asks about whether or not he can send a floppy disk without being traced. And he tells law enforcement to be honest.

He says, "Let me know in the one ads, in the classified ads of the Wichita Eagle, that it's okay. And if I see it, give me a couple weeks to send you something." We put a little ad in the paper, Rex said it'll be okay. And Rader fell for it. He believed Landwehr enjoyed the game as much as he did, so he would be honest.

Eventually the disc arrives and it is taken directly to a forensic software detective. Anybody who had any connection to the investigation in this case was in that room.

We got into the metadata and it showed that it had been typed on by a computer at a church in Park City. The name of the computer was registered to the name of Dennis. There's another detective who Googles the Christ Lutheran Church and on their webpage is the president of the church, Dennis. And that's when it sunk in. This was his greatest mistake.

Police still had that DNA that they collected back in 1974 at the Otero murders, and they knew that Dennis Rader had a daughter. They got a warrant for my medical records at the college health center. And you had no idea? I had no idea. They found out I had had, like, annual pap smears. They got a sample of my DNA. In some ways, your DNA sealed your dad's fate. It did, but nobody told me this. It would have been nice if someone had asked me.

For my DNA, I would have willingly given it. It felt like an invasion of my privacy. We matched that DNA to the Otero DNA on the little girl. We knew we had our guy. The night that Landwehr called me and said the DNA matches to Dennis Rader, I laid on the bed and cried because it was done. You know, I went to an office myself and knelt down and thanked the Lord.

On February 25th, 2005, we knew something was up because none of our sources in the police department would call us back. So overnight, we called 200 policemen. We had helicopters. We had resources from off. We had a tank. We were the arrest team. We had eyes on him. We knew he was leaving work, and we were going to catch him right before he got to his house.

We pulled him over and before he can hardly get in and park, we're yanking him out of the car. We put him down and he looked at the detective that had handcuffed him and said, "Would you let my wife know I won't be home for lunch? I assume you know where I live." And I got chills. She always met my dad for lunch. The police knocked on her door and said that she needed to leave the house quickly. Dennis Rader's arrested. He was taken back to a car that Kenny Landwehr was in.

and he leaned in and said, "Hello, Mr. Landwehr." Dennis Rader, in my estimation, was just totally enamored with Kenny Landwehr. He was kind of like, "Oh, we're buddies, you know, and I'm from the dark side and you're on the light." My boss calls and says, "Susan, you have to get to work right away. We're almost sure BTK was caught." I got to tell you, at that moment, I literally felt

this huge weight being lifted off my shoulders, and I started crying. I never knew how afraid I was.

till the day he was caught. This is a breaking news alert from Cake on Your Side. Quarter century search for Wichita's worst serial killer is over. Police confirming today they have made an arrest of BTK. I got the phone call from my sister. She said they got him. I said, yeah, right. She goes, no, they really got him. They swear it's him. Then the news blitz came on and it was all over everywhere. BTK is arrested.

Police say this man, 59-year-old Dennis Radar, is the BTK strangler. And you were still at that point convinced that they had the wrong man? I think reality was starting to creep in because I knew that BTK had strangled women. Like, that's what I had known. I knew from the news.

And it hit me that our neighbor down the street, Marine Hedge, had been strangled. And I felt my stomach just twist, realizing it could be true. I think the surprise for all of us is we expected a Charles Manson-looking guy. It wasn't.

Dennis Rader is literally the least likely suspect. He is a pillar of the community. He's the president of his Lutheran Church congregation. He is a compliance officer. He wore a badge. People at Meeker's would see him there all the time. "Hey, hey, how you doing?" He was the guy in the line next to us at the grocery store.

Everything was set to go so they could start the interrogation. We had moved him to a room that we had prepared and he started talking and kind of danced around for a while. He didn't think that they had kept the biological specimens from the crimes that he had committed all these years. And then they brought up the DNA and they could nail him. Anyway, you can get out the DNA, right?

And it was at almost the exact three hour mark of them being in the room. And he said, you got me. I'm BTK. Yes, you guys know. Say who you are.

They're talking to Rader and Lieutenant Landwehr pulls up in a Ziploc evidence baggie with the purple floppy disk in it. He slides it in front of Rader and says, "Know what this is?" Dennis Rader starts poking his finger forcefully on this floppy disk and he says, "I got a question." I'm going to ask you this question. I need to ask you this question. I need to ask you. Sure. I'll give you a light. I'll give you a light. Because I was trying to catch you.

And Lieutenant Lamb says, "I was trying to catch you." It took a while for Dennis Rader to start talking, but once he did, he told police more than they bargained for. The list of BTK's victims is growing. Two unsolved murders from the 80s and 90s now tied to the serial killer. The murders of Maureen Hedge and Dolores Davis. He spills everything in detail. A lot of times, I catch a fit scouting. We would camp out at night. It's a good cover for a guy like me. You go out and camp out, man.

He becomes so comfortable that during a break, when he's asked to put his name on a cup of the drink that he has, he writes BTK on the cup as his name. While I don't admire him, his memory was admirable. I mean, that guy remembered those scenes. He spoke for over 30 hours.

And he showed no remorse, no regret. The only regret he showed during this was that there weren't more victims, that if he wouldn't have had a family that held him back, he would have been able to do and kill more people. Did you ever think there was anything scary about your father all this time growing up? Not scary, no. I mean...

unsettling at times, like you might get spanked or you get yelled at or barked at for something small. Like as a parent now I realize... That happens in a lot of families. Right. There's no foreshadowing. I spent a lot of time at her house. It still doesn't even really creep me out knowing, you know, like I was like sleeping on the couch and you know he was there like because there's nothing about him that really put me off.

One minute you had a man in your life who you thought was a loving father. The next minute he's a serial killer. Right. I had to learn how to grieve the loss of somebody I loved very much that no one else loved anymore. He told us that we would discover what he termed his mother love. What did you make of all that?

I'm Dr. Katherine Ramsland. My area of expertise is primarily serial killers. When Dennis Rader was arrested in 2005, I saw this as a very unique opportunity for me to use what I knew about serial killers to structure a book by a serial killer.

I wrote letters to him. He wrote multiple letters, long letters back to me. We talked on the phone every single week, and I visited him in the prison. Dennis Rader was arrested on Friday in Wichita, and he has confessed.

He knew he was caught. There was no question. We had, you know, not only DNA, we had all the evidence we were getting at his house. He told us that we would discover what he termed his mother load, information that covered from the Otero murders all the way through Dolores Davis.

There were journals and drawings. He had materials that he collected from each of his victims, clothing, car keys. He had compartments everywhere. He had false bottoms in a closet. He had stuff in the crawl space. He had stuff in a tree house he had made for his kids.

And also there were Polaroids of himself in his autoerotic activities that the police initially thought were male victims that they didn't know about. What we would discover is photographs of himself where he would be dressed up as a female. Sometimes he would have a mask on and a wig and he would be tied up. He was dressing himself up in bras and underwear, torturing himself, hanging from trees.

Taking photographs of himself half buried with a Polaroid camera that he'd hook up to his foot and pull the trigger. They took thousands of pictures with that Polaroid. He took the photos of himself to relive the experiences. That was part of what he needed to be aroused. What did you make of all that? Horrified. To have somebody that seemed so prim and proper to find out that was his other side. Like, that's just weird.

Like, remove all the crimes, just that is like, shocking. Serial killers have a pattern. Usually they're abused as children. He flatly denied any physical abuse, sexual abuse. All of the hallmarks of a person that turns into a serial killer, he claimed he didn't have. He always had a very, very healthy fantasy life. Rader had, at a very young age, connected sexual excitement with violence.

In November 1959, about 200 miles west of Wichita, in a town called Holcomb, Kansas, a family of four was murdered, tied with ropes first. Dennis Rader, at the age of 14,

was in a car with a girl he had a crush on. He heard this on the radio. The murders of four members of the Herbert Clutter family near Holcomb, Kansas. This alarming story of the Clutter family being murdered in their homes. And he immediately wanted to kill the girl that was in the car. The in cold blood case in Kansas is so shocking, they make a movie out of it. Make one move, how I want.

and will cut their throats. To Dennis, it really taps into his fantasy and obsessions. His reaction was not horror, as most people's were. It was arousal, attraction. He wanted to do that too.

Were there things in Catherine Ramesson's book that angered you? Yeah, the book was very personally difficult to read. Rader said that his wife one time came home unexpectedly and witnessed him in her slip hanging himself or at least

preparing to do so. He tried to explain it and he says she went to a counselor and was reassured this is sort of a man thing and it wasn't necessarily dangerous or terrible, but she wanted him to keep it out of the house, just don't do it in front of me. So I called my mom. I said, "Look, he's claiming this thing in this book that's about to come out." And I'm like, "Did that happen?" She's like, "No, no, no, no." She said like, "No," like five or six times. So then it becomes this issue

Who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe the sane, normal woman, which is my mother? Or are you going to believe the narcissistic psychopath that you know lies all the time? Rader does have a lot of psychopathic behaviors. And we know from brain research that they have very shallow emotional roots. So he doesn't have a conscience about lying or deceiving or manipulating or pretending to be somebody he's not.

When you try to sort this out, is your dad mentally ill or is he evil? He's definitely mentally ill, but he's not insane. He very much knows what he's doing and what he did. He's just a sick, sadistic murderer is what it comes down to, not some fascinating criminal. I think to dismiss Dennis Rader or any other

serial killer or mass murderer as a one-dimensional being is to make yourself unsafe because you will not spot the real monsters if you think they're so easy to see. Early on when my father wrote me in 2005, he said like he's so sorry things got away from him, like cat and mouse caught up with him. You will always be my baby girl I raised right proud independent. Hopefully someday your heart will mend and you can forgive me.

Life before the arrest was a good time, and the dark side took me away. How could you even correspond with him? I mean, people would wonder, like, why wouldn't you just cut him? I wasn't corresponding with BTK. I'm never corresponding with BTK. I'm talking to my father. I'm talking to the man that I lived with and loved for 26 years. I still love my dad today.

because i still love him today because i love the man that i knew so you know clinically there's perfect like criminologists or psychologists that would say your father's a psychopath and he's incapable of feeling but i don't know i don't know a psychopath that's not the man i knew and loved so

Like, I have a tendency to want to compartmentalize and disassociate and say, over here for 26 years, this man that I adored and loved that could sometimes be gruff and a couple times was abusive, and that's not okay. And then over here is this insane, torturous, violent, horrific man. I don't know that man. So if I'm going to get up every morning and live my life, I better come to learn how to get back here.

This is Cape News Station of the Year. Larry Hatterberg joins us with more on that. I was with Cape Television, the studio that we're in now for 51 years from 1963. What the escapees have done between the time they left here and when they were caught.

to 2014. Oh, I'm sure somebody will be discovered in that. I was just looking at the video. You were trying to discover someone. Dennis Rader grew up watching cake. He watched cake every single night. We were his favorite station. And good evening, everyone. We begin tonight with breaking news in the case. We have learned that Rader has been charged with 10 counts now of first-degree murder. The day he was caught, the weekend weather guy walks into the newsroom. Name is Jeff. He goes...

Susan, I have to apologize. I said, "Apologize for what?" He goes, "I'm a member of Christ Lutheran." Dennis Rader asked me, "Hey, can we take a tour of the Cake Studios?" And Jeff, our weekend weather guy, saying, "I brought him into the Cake Studios as a tour group." And I'm looking, that was him. That was him taking the pictures. Dennis Rader was right there.

five feet from us, watching the newscast two months before he was caught. And the weird part about it was,

You know during the two newscasts, we were BTK, BTK, BTK, because we were that whole year. Can you imagine how that thrilled him? It was nearly a year ago when Wichita got a chilling reminder. Okay, we know he's charged with 10 murders. Everybody wanted to talk to Dennis, from the national media and international media on down to those of us in the local media. Of course I wanted to talk to Dennis Rader.

I wrote him a number of letters and I had included my phone number. Then on one Saturday morning, I get a call. The operator says, "Will you accept a collect call from the Sedgwick County Detention Facility?" I had BTK on the phone. I have a recorder going if that's all right with you. Okay. I said, "There are questions that I want to ask you." And he said, "Go ahead." When did you first know that you had a problem?

I was always curious when he knew that he was going to become something very bad in life. This was a building thing that started many, many, many years ago. Can you pinpoint when you knew that there was a problem coming?

He said, "By the time I was in junior high, I knew who I was and I knew what I was." The first thing that set BTK apart

was even before he started to kill, was his desire to be a serial killer at a time when that phrase wasn't even in use. There's very little media coverage of these people, but he was reading true detective magazines that showed him a couple of serial killers that then became role models for him. So he incorporated serial murder into his fantasy life. He talked about the hunt.

He told me he got a high from it. Finding the woman and then killing her, that was what turned him on. Dennis Rader told me that he felt sorry for the victims. Well, no one believes that. The families certainly don't believe that. Police department doesn't believe it, the FBI.

doesn't believe it. It was just him trying to be human. It was more like he was sorry that he got captured. Or it's more like he's really sorry that he's in prison, that he's cold and he doesn't have my mom's cooking. Honestly, I don't ever really have saw it where he said he's sorry for murdering 10 people.

When you add in for Rader the narcissism, it's always going to be about him. Narcissists have a strong buffer around themselves that is only about them, and they'll always act first in their own interests. Always. Virtually everything involving Dennis Rader in the media can be traced back to his arrogance. He wanted attention. Attention drove him. His hunger for publicity seems to have drawn him in.

Would he have been caught had he not reemerged in 2004? Had he not sent out those envelopes to the paper and to the TV station? If he faded into the night, would he still be out there in Wichita, living as a married man and a father and a dog catcher? I think bottom line is I want the people of Central County

After I hung up the phone, I remember thinking, I've just talked to a man who has no soul. Now Dennis Rader was headed to court. All right, Mr. Rader.

I need to find out more information. We've never heard a serial killer like this. The kids were really banging on the door, hollering, screaming. It was shocking. This gets complicated, we think now. Our mouths dropped.

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♪

It became clear early on that he was going to plead because the case was simply overwhelming. As much evidence as I'd ever seen against someone. And Nola Fulster was going to make very clear that he's going to be exposed for what he was. This guy is one very, very perverted individual. He's not a master criminal. He's not some piece of mythology. He's a child killing piece of s***. I told the court, I said, you know, that's all fine and well if they want him to plead guilty.

But we want to put on evidence of all of the crimes so people know exactly what happened. Public was going to hear and see who Dennis Rader really was, not who he wanted the public to think he was. Did you attend any of his court appearances? Did you see him? No. I just, I wouldn't have been able to do it. I was torn because you want to be there supporting for your father.

But the media presence was massively heavy. And we were not keen on being anywhere near the media. Those plea hearings are usually 10, 12 minutes, but this one turned into about an hour and a half. Judge Waller, rightfully so, asked Dennis Rader to describe what he did. All right, Mr. Rader.

I need to find out more information. The judge took him through every victim. I did Mrs. Otero. I had never strangled anyone before, so I really didn't know how much pressure you had to put on a person or how long it would take. The whole family just went, they went panicked on me, so I worked pretty quick. Mrs. Bland, I went ahead and tied her up and then put a bag over her head and strangled her.

After she was down and not moving anymore, I rearranged her clothes a little bit and took some quick photos. Here is this man standing up in court in what I imagine was his church suit, recounting the murders of his neighbors one by one by one. I had a commitment I needed to go to, so I moved her to one spot, took her out of her car. This gets complicated, we think now. OK. In the interim,

I took her car back to her house. Our mouths dropped. And the national audience too. This guy's explaining every single murder in detail like he's explaining a trip to the grocery store. He's giving the judge a lesson in Serial Killer 101. That's his arrogance. If you read much about serial killers, they go through what they call the different phases.

That's one of the phases they go through as a trolling stage. Basically, you're looking for a victim at that time. It was hard to stomach. He makes himself sound like he's Mr. Good Guy. You know, like he says, "I got Mr. Otero a pillow." Like, before I strangled Mr. Otero. I tried to make Mr. Otero as comfortable as I could. Apparently, he had a cracked rib from a car accident.

So I had him put a pillow down before his head. I was kind to him before I killed him. That's where that massive disconnect comes in and you realize, my God, my father's a psychopath. When Rader described in court how he killed my family, it was the first time I'd ever heard how they died.

When he said that some of my mom's last words were, "May God forgive you for that," it was like breaking my heart again. I just, I could not believe that my mom was so beautiful and gracious in such a traumatic moment. The detectives had tried to prepare us for what we might hear in the courtroom, and I couldn't keep it together. I just broke down, and Lieutenant Landwehr came over. He just hugged me and let me cry.

I was sitting at this desk and I'm listening behind me to all the families crying when he's thumbing through all these murders he committed and how much he liked them. I had some sexual fantasies, but that was after she was hung. It was horrible. I will accept these pleas of guilty and I judge you Dennis L. Rader, guilty of murder in the first degree.

The case was over except for the sentencing. Now the DA had her day in court. She put together very elaborate PowerPoints to show his deviancy, his aberrancy, you know, how bad he was. It was part of his modus operandi to enjoy them expiring before his eyes with their knowledge that he was killing him. There was nothing normal about Mr. Rader's existence.

Nancy's death is like a deep wound that will never ever heal. The pain and suffering that he's caused our family. Their lost lives are missed yet to this day. At the end of the sentencing hearing, there is a chance for victim impacts. Shirley Vian, my mother. If you want to watch six minutes of the best written impact statement, you watch that of Jeff Davis. For the last 5,326 days, I have wondered what it would be like to confront the walking cesspool

that took my mother's precious life. I spent months working on that victim impact statement. Months. I just couldn't wait. If my focus were hatred, I would stare you down and call you a demon from hell who defiles this court at the very sight of its cancerous presence.

"If I embraced bitterness, I would remind you that you are nothing but a despicable, child-murdering, cowardly, impotent eunuch and pervert masquerading as a human being." I stared at him the whole time. He didn't have the guts to look at me. After that, he was allowed to make a statement in what they call mitigation. So he gets up and I don't know if he misunderstood the wording or what because I think he thought he was getting on a ward. Thanks.

I can't believe the people that have helped me on this. You have to appreciate the police department. They've done a lot of work. I hope I pronounce these people's last names right, and if I leave somebody else, I apologize for that. All the families walked out. They all got up, turned around, and walked out the door. There's many, many, many more beyond those.

He's thanking everybody, like the police. He was thanking people? Yeah. It's really surreal. And then he basically said, like, my family were pawns in his game and social contacts. He called you social contacts. Right. He leaves us all with a quote from the Bible. This is John 8, 12. In the light of the world...

He who follow me shall not walk in darkness, but have life of light. What I always tell people is in law enforcement, we can quote the Bible too. If you do evil, be afraid, for we do not bear the sword in vain. The judge sentenced Dennis Rader to 10 life sentences. He wasn't eligible for the death penalty because at the time he committed the crimes, the death penalty did not exist in Kansas. There's one person that's going to judge him. When he has to meet his maker, then he'll get his true judgment.

They both have a locking mechanism in the back. Lieutenant Landwehr was a towering figure in this case. No one worked harder, no one worked longer hours than Detective Landwehr to bring BTK to justice. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Landwehr passed away a few years ago. He was stricken with cancer. I was at his home with other detectives that worked for him, and we were right there by his bedside when he took his last breath, and, man, he was a hell of a man.

Kenny Landward did die knowing that he caught BTK. That is the card that Dennis Rader is in. I know Wichita will never forget the day that he was transferred to the El Dorado Correctional Facility. He'll never walk out of that prison, and that's where he needs to stay until the day he dies. Dennis Rader freely admitted that he wasn't done yet.

that there was an 11th victim. The terror of this case really makes it unforgettable and it's kind of made its way into pop culture. It's been 30 years since the first BTK killings. All of a sudden you've got made for TV movies. Dennis Rader.

What on earth are you up to now? I did watch the TV movie. It's odd when you see your community displayed on the national TV. It's just an odd feeling. But I understand the interest.

It was so fascinating. Every aspect of the story was fascinating. Do you know why you're being arrested? I have suspicions why. Dennis Rader. He was the prototype for the guy in my story. Stephen King even wrote a novella called A Good Marriage that was made into a film that mirrors this theme. Now it's on this show called Mindhunter. There's a reference to a killer in Wichita, Kansas.

My Netflix notifies me on my phone, Mindhunter is just coming out. You're like a 97% match for Mindhunter, and you probably would really like it. Oh, I didn't realize you were still in the house. I got into like 30 seconds of it. They opened with a scene of the guy playing my dad. He's close enough match that it messed me up in my head really bad, and I haven't made it through anymore Mindhunter. My kids have watched it, but I have not. I know what happened. I don't have to be reminded about it.

Dennis Rader freely admitted that he wasn't done yet, that there was an 11th victim, that he had chosen her. He had an 11th project on his list. I asked him if he had another victim in mind. Were you going to kill again? Well, yes and no. There was probably one more. I was really thinking about it. Had you picked the person at that point?

Number 11 was going to be sort of his swan song. He tells us her name. He tells us her address. He tells us he's been stalking her over a year. He tells us what kind of vehicle she drove. He told us how he approached her home one night and actually got to the front porch.

This was going to be the most elaborate of all. He was going to tie her up, I think, upside down. He was going to burn the house down. There were a lot of things that he was going to do to this victim that he had not done before. But when he went to her house, there was a construction crew outside the house on the day. Law enforcement did reach out to this person. She was shocked.

They go to that victim who's never been publicly identified to tell her, look, this guy wanted to have harmed you, but now that will not occur. I would never bet my life on it because you don't know, but I truly believe that he told us everything he did to the fullest. I don't think we have any more victims out there. Just months after your dad had confessed, your mom was granted an emergency divorce. I think partly to, like,

remove her finances from him because she was trying to sell our home. But she needed to break off from my father, not just for financial reasons, she needed to emotionally make that disconnect and move on with her life. Has she contacted him? She wrote my father early on in the beginning months, but as far as I know, she has not contacted him since the summer of 2005.

The biggest question was, didn't his family know? Didn't his wife know? Everyone suspected that the family must have had some sort of inkling. He kept his kill kit in his closet. People have always wondered, why didn't she go in the closet and see it?

The police asked her about it. The FBI asked her about it. And she said he was always a very neat man. I saw no reason to go into his closet. I'm not sure how many wives would do that, never go into their husband's closet. Do you think your mom had any clue that your dad was doing anything criminal? No. Mom and I both said if we had had an inkling that my father had harmed anyone, let alone murdered anyone,

anyone, let alone 10, we would have gone screaming out that door to the police station. We were living our normal life. We looked like a normal American family because we were a normal family. And then everything upended on us. There's no reason she should have known anything. He was very good at what he was doing. His duplicity was very, very skilled and polished. People ask me, do you know where his wife is? Do you know where BTK's wife is? She just...

disappeared, never wanted any part of anything. I can't imagine what her mom and her and her brother went through finding out who their dad was and what he really did. That must have been almost as bad as what he did to us. I believe that the Rader family has been victimized by him, and I also have compassion for the pain they must be going through, but it's not the same kind of a deal, you know what I mean?

It's one thing to be hurt by someone you love. It's another thing to see someone that you love hurt. If his family had no idea what he was up to or even saw any evidence of this over 30 years, it really makes you question how well do you know anyone? Some people would want to stay in the shadows. They would not want to step out publicly and say, "I'm the daughter of a serial killer." Why tell people?

I tried for nine and a half years not to tell people. I mean, I prayed over and over to God, "I want a peaceful, quiet life." I live with depression, anxiety of suffering from PTSD. The problem is if you live such a quiet, private life, it sits inside you and eats at you because it's like something you have to hide or you're something you have to be ashamed of. So you're taking control of your own story. I'm starting to take control of my own story and change the dialogue.

and trying to say, "I've gone through hell. I'm still here. You too can overcome things." Like, don't ever give up, no matter what you're going through. You can get through it. When will you tell your children who their grandfather is and what their grandfather did? This place represents loss and grief.

In 2007, two years after my father was arrested, the house was demolished. The city decided to demolish it because of what it represented. And they didn't want anybody to have a memory of this guy or where he lived. My childhood home's gone. Where my family was is gone. Where I spent all this time with my father is gone. My dad had it all landscaped. There were flowers, trees, tulips, daffodils.

That's actually the sled that my brother and I played with in the winter and went sledding down hills. And I guess it just was never picked up when everything else was cleaned up. I brought my dad in the summer of '07 because I wanted to let him know I was pregnant. Anybody would want their dad to know you're having a grandkid.

But not long after that, I grew really protective of my growing baby and myself. And so I actually shut off contact with my dad for five years, from 2007 to 2012. In the book you say in the foreword, to Darian for loving me without fail, to Emily and Ian, when you're old enough, I will hand you this story to tell you my story. No, you're not old enough yet, so stop asking. When will you tell your children...

who their grandfather is and what their grandfather did. When my daughter was around five, she started noticing that she only had one grandfather. She was kind of like, "Well, where's the other grandfather?" So I said, "You know, I have a father, but he's in jail." And she's just this little thing. She's like, "Well, what is jail?" You know, and I was like, "Well, it's like a really long time out."

We have to be flexible. What we're doing now works and then when it stops working, we'll adjust. Now they both know Grandpa's in prison and they both know that Grandpa hurt people but they don't know the word murder. They know his name's Dennis but I don't even think they know Raider. We're very careful with BTK.

Dennis Rader is 73 years old today and he's in the El Dorado Correctional Facility just about 30 minutes up the road from Wichita in El Dorado, Kansas. And that's the place where he'll die. Dennis Rader is in a single cell in maximum security. He watches TV, sleeps, watches the stock market, is interested in politics, is very interested when he hears about another serial killer, always wants details.

And he reads. You write to him now? I do because in 2012 I was able to forgive my father. How do you forgive him for what he did? He took lives. He ruined your life. How do you forgive that? It was a very long journey. There was a lot of heart work in me with faith. I had gone back to church.

I was working on my relationship with God, working on my own heart. And how did you feel finally letting that go? It was just a massive release. I realized I was rotting within. I didn't just forgive my father for him. I had to do it for myself. I hope to see him in heaven someday because he could be forgiven for his sins too.

Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes. See you then. From Marvel Television, I'm executive producer Ryan Coogler. I want to build something iconic. Experience the sixth episode of that. That eye suit is the ultimate display of power. I'm going to take it. Ha ha.

Absolutely not. Now streaming on Disney+. Really, this is serious. This power does not come without risk. Might be a hero in there after all. Marvel Televisions. Ironheart. Now streaming only on Disney+.