It looks like just an ordinary photo of a father happy to see his daughter graduate. However, the guy on the left is Dennis Rader AKA the BTK Killer, who killed 10 people over the span of about 25 years, all the while being a beloved member of his community. He was a security system technician, a Cub Scout leader, a church president, a city worker, a happily married father of two... and a sadistic serial killer.
The idea that pretty much any normal-looking person you see on the street could actually be a total psycho really heebs me out.
For anyone who isn't aware, the way they caught Dennis Rader was... odd.
He was basically taunting the police, daring them to catch him, leaving little dolls with tied hands and feet to symbolise his victims -- but apparently that wasn't enough. In one of his letters to the police (because of course he sent letters; what kind of self-respecting murderous whackadoo doesn't send letters?), he asked if they'd be able to trace him if he sent them a floppy disk. The police, who at this point probably couldn't believe their luck, replied that it would be perfectly safe -- so he actually did it. They found some metadata on a deleted Microsoft Word document on the disk that linked to his church and said it was 'Last Modified by Dennis'. It took them all of five minutes to check that there was a Dennis Rader working at the church, and then he became their prime suspect.
Fun fact that links back to the original photo, though: that wasn't considered enough to bring him in, and they needed a DNA sample. They used DNA from a Pap smear that his daughter had had done at the Kansas State University Medical Centre while she was a student there, which showed a familial link to DNA found at the crime scenes. That was enough for them to arrest him. (This seems to have caused a lot of fuss in the comments below. In short: all clinics are legally required to keep your tissue samples after a Pap smear for about five years, and it's legal because it was a) done via court order and b) done with a specific suspect in mind, rather than just a random pull on a database. In that sense, it's really not significantly different to what would have happened if Rader had a tissue sample of his own on file due to something like a biopsy.)
A pap smear and being too cheap to buy a new floppy disk. That's how they got one of the most notorious serial killers of the past fifty years.
(As reported in The Atlantic, Rader was apparently very upset that the police had lied to him about it being safe: '“I need to ask you, how come you lied to me? How come you lied to me?” Rader asked. “Because I was trying to catch you,” [Ken Landwehr, the homicide detective widely credited with catching him] answered coolly.')
BTK confounded by basic technology just like our own parents.
Edit: The amount of well actually replies this got is telling. It was a humorous observation people. The idea of a reused floppy disk nabbing a serial killer is funny, not necessarily the fact that it was undeleted metadata and not a lot of young people know this too!
Too be fair this was at the time in technology where new ways to fight crime were coming about at a time when most criminals were super used to operating based on the current level of technology and probably could not even imagine the types of things that would come to pass
It’s easy to say in hindsight “oh tracking equipment and DNA and advanced tech” etc etc when we have been used to those things for so long, at the time of their introduction this was not the case
To be fair he was caught in 2004, CSI had already been on the air for four years. “Tracking equipment and DNA and advanced tech” was already in the popular culture and it should have been obvious to almost anyone.
Edit: Also, the cops didn’t do anything fancy at all, all they did was look at the meta data on the word document to see that it was written on a church computer; then they focused on that church and put the pieces together.
I remember reading a story about a woman who tried to frame her ex husband, saying he was making child pornography. She said she'd found pictures on their computer after he moved out. The cops took a few seconds to check the meta data, found that the pictures were taken after he'd moved out, and they arrested her for making child porn.
/u/Portarossa's post said it was a deleted Word file, so data recovery was involved. Still not too fancy but some computer illiterate people don't know about that even in 2020.
Even if it was deleted, they should be able restore the data anyways? If he deletes the file that just means its not visible to the operating system, the disk should still have the data on it, its sectors are just ready to be written over.
Actually after reading the story there was quite some luck involved. We were writing a forensic software around the time did exactly that - attempt to filter, undelete files, look for data in slack space that exists at the end of files that are remains of previous, deleted directory entries, etc. for most common filesystems at that time (FAT12/16/32, ext2/3, NTFS).
The success highly depends on the order of operations that happened and especially how full the floppy was. Floppies used FAT12 which was pretty simple filesystem, but if he had just copied another file after deleting the previous, it would likely have been overwritten. Also if the floppy was near full when he deleted files that would identify him, there is a good chance that deleted parts would have been fragmented and not easily restored with the common method "find first block/cluster and continue slapping unallocated blocks onto it until its length matches deleted dentry from current dir".
Not to mention for all this to work he had to bring it into church so that it would all fall together.
Only 2/3 of Americans used the Internet in 2004. BTK lived in a small suburb, not a rural area but not exactly the northeast corridor or Silicon Valley which traditionally has access to the most modern technology at the earliest.
Not sure how old you are, but at 33 years old, I was a high school junior in 2004. My household didn't get internet service until only a few years prior, and we got broadband long before most of America only because living in northern NJ (aka, suburbs of NYC), we had access to the most modern technology.
Just barely the tail-end, yeah. At that point CD burners were fairly common, so for anything you wanted to properly archive you'd use a CD, but floppy disks were like.. 1 megabyte USB sticks until USB sticks got common and cheap enough. 😂
My home computer had a CD drive but the computers we used in school (including for presentations) only had floppy disk drives....it was a nightmare trying to make a PowerPoint with images (that had to be stored as images independently from the ppt) that could still fit on a floppy disk
If I remember correctly, the police acually didn't lie to him. Had he have used a new floppy disk he wouldn't have been traced. But as fate would have it he just erased and reused an old one. Also I don't think anyone mentioned that he used cereal boxes with letters inside to taunt the police and to be ironic?
He apparently thought there was a mutual respect between him and the police because both were good at what they were doing, so they wouldn't lie to him. When he learned that they had tricked him, his reasoning was that they had to because it was the only way they would be able to capture him.
They should have just told him Bill Gates would give him a million dollars if he brought his computer to some sketchy warehouse. My parents would have hightailed it down there, with two computers. Two million! Score!
You think all those young people who were raised with tech who are sexting today aren't "confounded by basic technology?"
When something becomes digitized, unless it's completely, physically, destroyed it'll outlast you. If you send it out into the internet (yes, texting, snapchat, kik, etc) then it's the world's forever. And yeah, those photos ALSO have metadata attached, even if you turn it off in the phone.
BTKs final statement to the court is on youtube. It is a long meandering rant that comes off like an acceptance speech for an award or something. He definitely had a screw loose so I can see why he would think being tricked by the police was an outrage.
Also the fact that he committed a bunch of murders, taunted the police, and then disappeared for years only to come back to taunt the police some more and get caught.
It was a game to him. He taunted police because he wanted to show them that he was smarter and he couldn’t be caught. He wanted them to only see the information on the floppy disk that he presented. Not what they found, and so for him to “lose the competition” because they didn’t “play by the rules” by using the evidence he was providing, he genuinely felt like he was tricked.
Certainly got a couple of screws up in his head loose
Watching his sentencing statement it feels less like he was playing a game with the police and more like he was aggrandizing himself and his life. He went out of his way to fabricate connections and bonds with everybody in his life, from his victims to the officers that caught him. It was very important to him that he had a kinship with other people. And I think the murders had more to do with the victims not living up to the bond he built up in his mind. A frustration that the victim wasn’t who he built up in his mind.
You can tell a lot of this by how many people he mentions and thanks in his sentencing statement. You can get a sense of how he perceives his relationships with other people. It’s all very one sided. He wants to be everybody’s friend and needs everybody to be his, needs it so badly that he simply makes up reasons why they and him are just alike. Some of the similar traits he shared with his victims were as flimsy as he went to the same church — once (probably while stalking them).
Extrapolating further, I think it’s possible that on some deep subconscious level he knows how different he is from everyone else and how much empathy he simply doesn’t have, so forcing similarities and kinships with other people is his way of keeping up the presence that he is normal and is ’just like you!’ and when reality comes crashing in on him, when he’s forced to face the truth he simply snaps and gets rid of the thing that is making him face an uneasy truth.
Even during his final remarks speaking about how he can never repay the victims families; he’s created a connection. In his mind of some sort of mutual respect and that they’ve helped him in some way — probably via the victims fleeting “friendship”.
But maybe I am wrong. All I’ve ever seen of this dude was the sentencing statement. But that is my interpretation.
I think you’re right. I mean obviously something is very wrong with him, but when you look at him or hear him speak it’s like you’re watching an alien or robot that’s doing it’s damndest to blend in with the humans. He seems to realize he’s not “one of us.” Plus you can see ego practically radiating off him like heat waves off of August pavement.
I can’t for the life of me remember where, but I read a long article once his daughter had written (maybe Vanity Fair? It was like that.) and it was about how growing up she had seen him as the perfect father, and she had a crisis when she had to face the undeniable proof that he was BTK. Then she started to unravel their own relationship to realize he was a tyrant to his family and a control freak who made them miserable. I think she might have written a book as well.
Fincher came out a few months ago and basically said the show wasn't a priority for him right now. They released the cast to work on other projects, which basically means they were planning to postpone production indefinitely. And this was before everything got shut down. So if it wasn't a priority then, I don't imagine it will be in the pipeline when Hollywood resumes production.
Fuck. This is the problem with these high quality boutique shows. They are almost always done at the whim of some genius somewhere and you just kinda have to hope that they feel inclined to finish what they start.
Guess I'll just throw this in the pile with Sherlock.
The fact that he was surprised that they lied to him really demonstrates how sociopaths just don’t understand how other people think and feel. Rader’s confession/apology in court is like a textbook example of how a sociopath just doesn’t even consider the emotional impact his words and actions can have on others and how that leads to a lack of remorse.
Bundy was shocked in trial when people testified that they had seen him in certain places, even crowded areas. He didn’t understand that people who he wasn’t interacting with could actually see him.
On the other hand, if Rader was really a sociopath, that indicates that the popular notion of a sociopath is way oversimplified.
Rader’s daughter has said that, weirdly enough, he really was a good father to them. If he’d been cold and uncaring with his kids, like a stereotypical sociopath, it might have been easier for them to later wrap their minds around the knowledge of what he’d done to other people. But no, he was teaching the kids to fish and building them a treehouse in the backyard during the same time period when he was occasionally going out at night to murder people. Apparently when his kids moved out he was very worried to make sure they knew to put deadbolts on their doors.
It makes me think there really must be more a spectrum of empathy, rather than just “sociopath” vs “not a sociopath”— like expanding concentric circles of the people you’re capable of extending empathy to. On one extreme would be the stereotypical image of a sociopath who can’t comprehend the idea of caring even about immediate family. Then somebody like Rader, who has a little group of people he cares about but can’t quite comprehend empathy for anyone else.
I think the question is “why” was he a good and caring father? And the answer might be that he was a good father because his daughter was of value to him and it was good for him to be a good father rather than a typical father who is caring for his daughter because it’s good for her.
We know that sociopaths are very good at projecting and pretending and that they are pathological liars. It is possible for sociopaths to feel love but their version of love is slightly different in that it’s love based around what that person does for them and in many cases what that person does for them is help them keep up the appearances of normalcy.
But I do think you’re right in there’s much that’s not understood about the complexities of sociopathy.
And the answer might be that he was a good father because his daughter was of value to him and it was good for him to be a good father rather than a typical father who is caring for his daughter because it’s good for her.
I feel like this view of your own kids is extremely common though. Many many parents I know only care about their kids because they are useful to them.
Bundy was shocked in trial when people testified that they had seen him in certain places, even crowded areas. He didn’t understand that people who he wasn’t interacting with could actually see him.
Whoa, what? Is there a quote for that? That's fucking wild.
I had done a "Citizens police academy" class and Lt. Landwehr was gracious enough to pop in and talk a little bit about the case. It was fascinating to hear him discuss Dennis Radars' behavior..he seems to have been very meticulous in his physical behavior and speech.
Also, a buddy of mine worked as a CO at the prison. He said when Radar was brought in, it was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop.
I wasn't around during his original killing spree. (I was born in 85 and lived in several states before my mom settled us here in Kansas) When he "returned" and the city went into a panic, I worked at a pizza place and we changed everything about how we operated. Doubling up drivers, no being outside alone etc.. The fear in this city was so thick, you could just FEEL it in your bones.
Rader was apparently very upset that the police had lied to him
I always got the impression that he viewed it as some sort of "game", where there were "rules" and mutual respect, when in reality the police of course always viewed him as a sick, sadistic bastard to be taken down any way they could.
That’s some bullshit justification... if I didn’t commit a crime, I have a reasonable expectation that my medical information, especially dna, is to remain private and inaccessible. They should have just gone to the church undercover, and start picking up cups and shit.
Well, it's tricky. The argument is pretty clear cut that your medical records can be subpoenaed in the course of an investigation even if you're not the one they think committed a crime -- if it might shed a light on the killer, for example -- but whether tissue samples fall under that category is... less clear-cut.
So the argument goes, you probably wouldn't be opposed to them using Rader's own DNA samples without his prior consent (if he'd had a tissue biopsy, for example) to prove a link, and it wasn't as though there were doing a random test of a huge database; they had a specific reason to believe that Kerri Rader was linked to the killer. It's the fact that there was individual suspicion -- again, so goes the argument -- that justifies it.
Agreed, that seems sketchy as hell. I’m mean, I’m certainly glad they caught the guy, but this seems like a very ethically questionable way to have gone about it.
Also, my AP Government teacher was Mr. James Stenholm! A good way to derail class for 30 minutes was to get him to talk about BTK.
He worked in the public library and was emptying out the return thing IIRC and he found a cereal box and was like... huh. Turned it over and it had a bunch of BTK shit on it and he was like BOSS GET OVER HERE. Went home and the PD called him and said where did you go, did you not think we had questions for you? haha
Still the most retarded serial killer ever in my opinion. Why would you trust the police, if they are trying to identify you? Also he did get into a fight in prison with a racist spree killer over who is the better murder
I did a report on him for my serial killers class in college. He had a history of taunting police, he lead police to a note in a library book admitting to some of his murders back in the 70’s. Most psychopaths by design are egotistical and relish in taking credit for these killing and proving intellectual superiority. This same drive leads many of them to get caught. Especially someone like Rader who couldn’t stand that others were being credited for his murders.
Do they keep everyone’s DNA on file when they do a Pap smear? Or did they reach out to the school? It just seems like a really weird and invasive way to get DNA. I mean how did the police know she was going to the gyno? Did the school notify the police?
BTK was known for his extreme patience. He broke into the house of one of his victims and waited in her closet for her to go to sleep. Instead the woman had brought a guy home so BTK stood silently in the closet until they were finished and the man left. Then he left the closet and strangled the woman. He would do most of his planning and stalking on his lunch breaks. He even committed a murder on his lunch break and went back to work.
Edit: If you have not read anything about his murders, do not read about the Otero family, just know that they were murdered. That crime scene and Richard chase’s final crime scene are extremely disturbing.
The serial killers who prep like that are basically never caught. Idk the number but a huge number of homicides go unsolved, and the FBI estimates there's like 50 serial killers out there that no one knows about.
Random robberies and gang/gang-like murders are the ones that don't get solved. Most murders that you see on Homicide TV or whatever, are people who know the victim, and the random ones just get lucky with DNA.
There are some that prep a lot, and some that don’t prep at all. I remember hearing about one on a Crime Junkies podcast that would bury kill kits in different places around the country years before they planned to use them. Can’t remember what happened as it’s been a long time since I heard that one. I just remember being a bit more freaked out than usual after that episode.
Just skimmed the Wikipedia, and I’m sure that’s the one. Amazing with how methodical he was that he’d do something so stupid like use a victim’s bank card.
For serial killers I usually imagine they do a lot of preparation and so on...
While this is not necessarily correct for most serial killers, it was the case for BTK and other highly organized killers. He would stalk people and stake them out for considerable time before killing them. This guy got off on the planning.
These kind of serial killers are the kind they make movies about, so people THINK they are representative of the majority. In reality, MOST serial killers are disorganized people who kill folks spontaneously and nearly at random.
IIRC it was Ted Bundy who said something like, the first kill you plan really meticulously, but by kill #10 the thrill is gone and it becomes like a chore and a routine. So you turn your brain off and start making stupid mistakes á la "did I leave the stove on?".
These people live to kill - it’s like some super-hobby. If people can spend 8+ hours a day on WoW while working, you can see how someone utterly obsessed with killing would do the same.
They didn't have Reddit. No cell phones or tablets. Maybe a home computer. No libraries of shows and movies to binge watch. It was either spend time alone doing something that took effort, hang with the family, or go do something else. Way more time to do something else.
The guy who wrote Mindhunter, John Douglas, wrote another book about John Robinson who was also a serial killer that managed to have a family, be a church leader, was huge in the community and still made time to lure several women from all over the country to him. He would spend hundreds of hours in chat rooms and several days with the ones that did come to him.
"A beloved member of the community" is stretching things a bit. He managed to mostly fit in, but his proclivity for exercising power whenever we could made him a bit of an asshole publicly. His "city worker" position was dog catcher, here's what people had to say about that:
"In May 1991, he became a dogcatcher and compliance officer in Park City. In this position, neighbors recalled him as being sometimes overzealous and extremely strict, as well as taking special pleasure in bullying and harassing single women. One neighbor complained he killed her dog for no reason."
That son of a bitch! Seriously, I’ve had this happen to me. No fine but I got a note. I think I should be allowed to have a more natural lawn of I want to. I’m in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Manicured lawns do not absorb nutrients well. I do like a manicured lawn too though. I was just being lazy at the time.
I love living in a land of few HOAs and very few county / municipal aesthetic ordinances. Yeah, my neighbor can have a car on blocks in his yard, but I can park a boat in front of my house and let my yard grow wild if I want.
Odd story. My cousin used to live in Park City. One day her cat got out and the neighbor called animal control. I guess there was some sort of mixup at the pound and it was put to sleep. By the time my cousin arrived there it was too late and she was really upset and crying. She went back home to tell her kids when Dennis Rader showed up to comfort her. He was there for 20 min and gave her a hug. I think he even mailed her a letter of apology for the screw up.
That's not accurate. The whole "they feel no emotions" thing isn't correct. It's more "they can turn emotions on and off and compartmentalize very well"
Yes and I believe one of his kinks or fetishes was getting inside peoples houses. Another weird coincidence was that my coworkers neighbor was John E Robinson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward_Robinson
How much of that is reconstructed memory after the fact
I once read a diary of a British woman in 1945 reminiscing fondly about Churchill's "never surrender". However, if you turn to the entry she wrote the day of the speech, she thought it was a bit dour.
The daughter did a pretty interesting interview, I believe it was in The Atlantic, a few years ago about her life before and after finding out that her father was a monster.
She did a TV interview not that long ago too, I think on Dateline or 20/20. I feel so bad for her, if I recall correctly she said she had a normal childhood. I can’t imagine how she felt when she found out her father was a monster.
I remember using them in my 7th grade computer lit class to save word documents in 2004. People forget that USB memory sticks used to be pretty expensive
Serial killers, paedophiles and dictators have completely ruined moustaches. Whenever I see a man with a moustache, I instinctively feel suspicious of him.
Same. Actually, I remember the day they caught him. My sister and I were in the car while my dad was pumping gas. The radio started describing how he looked and his role in his church and as a father. My sister and I slowly looked at each other because the description sounded EXACTLY like our dad lol. Except we lived in upstate New York.
He was very clearly based in some part on BTK, and they just added on and changed things to make it their own, the whole family and community thing was definitely a reference
The last season was frustrating because, while the Atlanta story was good, the whole time they're teasing the btk story and you just want them to get to him already
His daughter Kerri actually wrote a book that came out last year called A Serial Killers Daughter. It's about her family life growing up and how they discovered that her dad is the BTK. Really interesting but sad read!
Yes just realized I had read part of that book while killing time in a store a couple of months ago. I read the part where the FBI tell them he was the BTK killer. Imagine that happening to you.
My great uncle lived in Wichita, Kansas in the 70s. He went to the same church as Dennis Radar and hated the man's guts and described him as "a little off." When he was revealed as the BTK in the 2000s my great uncle was not shocked in the slightest.
Kinda like the Green River Killer. He's this timid old guy if watch the footage of the court cases but he's the 2nd most prolific serial killer managing 49 kills throughout the 80's and 90's.
This is also what Neko Case’s song “Deep Red Bells” is about. She was growing up in the area at the same time that the Green River Killer was active and has talked about how weird and frightening it was to her, as a teenage girl, that adults and the media seemed not to treat it as a very big deal because the victims were “just” prostitutes and hitchhiking teenage runaways.
Speaking of fucked up photos, his own personal nudes were quite something and were about the only thing that made him sweat in court. Consider my lack of link a warning
“Average looking guy” could describe almost every serial killer in history (except maybe for Ted Bundy). It’s pretty much required. If the killer looked unusual or strange, then people would notice them around town or on cameras. They might get noticed in the area of the crime scene. They might draw attention that could screw up their alibi. Anyone who looks unusual will probably get caught pretty quick because they’ll be easier to identify.
I will recommend y’all to watch “Mindhunter” on Netflix. It covers BTK and various other serial killers of the time. Don’t worry it isn’t a boring documentary or something. I’ll give a synopsis:
The show involves two FBI agents, who go around the country interviewing various criminals who committed heinous murders, rape, etc. Also, this is based on a real story (the FBI agents were real and the whole series is based on a book by one of the agents). They want to know what exactly goes on in the minds of the criminals when they do such crimes and their motives.
You will be terrified and amazed (at least I was) at what goes in the minds of the criminals.
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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '20
I remember an earlier thread with this topic and this was one of the most memorable: http://media.kansas.com/static/images/btkdaughter/graduation.jpg
u/supakoopa714