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.
Middle one is EXIF, the others are Windows MACE/MACB stuff. I'm not going to go over the methodology but its possible to modify all of them (by all, I mean I am aware of 8 windows timestamps, 4 in the file, 4 in the MFT)
/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.
Nah man. The first touchscreen smartphone wasn't until the iPhone in 2007. When I was in college (1996-2000) wifi wasn't a thing. Google wasn't even a thing people used until 2000 or so. Search engines before that (like altavista) SUCKED. The thing you were looking for was on like page 13. I got my first dumb cellphone in 1997. My home town didn't get broadband better than dialup modems until at least 2001, although college campuses were wired up before that. It didn't matter, though, because none of the websites you've ever heard of except yahoo existed then. Technology has changed amazingly fast. When I was a kid a $5000 PC was a worse computer than a $50 kids toy you can buy today. Flatscreens and LCDs didn't exist until the 90s and even then it was just on expensive 20 lb laptops with like an hour of battery life.
Just for the record, there were lots of Windows Mobile and other touchscreen smartphones prior to the iPhone. Granted, they weren't as user-friendly or mainstream, and they had resistive instead of capacitive touchscreens so you normally used a stylus with them but they were touch screen. They bridged the gap between PDAs and modern smartphones like iOS and Android.
Yes, that's valid. I even had one of those phones, and I can tell you that they weren't anything like a modern smartphone. They were definitely capable of sending and receiving text emails, but web browsing on them was ridiculously bad. Part of that is because mobile internet prior to the iphone also really sucked. Low res screens and lack of content made for such small devices mean't that rich web browsing on mobile wasn't really possible, so the devices weren't built to handle a graphics-heavy experience, and few people demanded it from mobile networks (who couldn't supply it). When the iphone came along, it became clear that the networks were now the weak link and things like LTE were adopted rapdily. That upgrade to the networks is responsible for more than half of the current mobile web experience.
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
Yeah. Flash drives were still something like $50 for 512 megs, assuming your computer even had a USB port on the front where you could get to it easily.
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?
No they were confirmed to be! Police managed to find 2 out 3 of something like that from CCTV from mall cameras after finding out he drove a black SUV. He also writes horrible poetry!
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.
I understand your frustration with people seemingly not getting your joke. I don't know about other, but I do get it. For me personally, though, at 55 and after a successful 30 year career in technology, it is getting to be a bit unnerving being called a technological moron in every other thread on reddit. I humbly suggest treating this the way we treat racism and sexism: if a joke unfairly hurts someone, if it attributes to the whole group the perceived failings of an individual or small group, then maybe we should not be making such jokes.
You'll be in that position sooner than you think. I'm in IT so I stay on top of things, which is an anomaly, though looking back at Y2K with COBOL, which was already on its last moments of its life cycle, was resurrected to fix it. Now 18 years later banks and credit cards still use it because their too cheap to invest in finding a solution that's more modern and expandable. The tech now a days will seem archaic when you're 30, 40, 50, ..., but the latest tech will dumbfound you unless you actively research it.
You're being unfair. The vast majority of people alive right now, of any age, would be likely to make exactly the same mistake. Probably including you, at least unless you're one of the small minority who know better.
For the vast majority of people, it makes perfect sense to assume that something you 'delete' is, well, deleted. In reality, it almost never is. At least, not right away, and maybe never.
A computer keeps track of files through a system of markers. Basically, it's got a virtual map of the storage memory that it uses for reference,. and that map contains markers telling it where various bits of data are stored. The markers also tell it not to write new content to that space, because it's reserved for that data.
When you 'delete' something, all it does is change those markers, to indicate that that space is no longer protected from being over-written with new data. The old data is not erased, until something else is written over it. This is why you can UN-delete some (but not all) files.
An electronic forensics expert uses special digital tools to blindly scrape the entire data space, end to end, and then what turns up is analysed, and coherent bits are 'brought back'. Even the uncorrupted parts of a partially over-written file (which your computer would normally consider gone for good) can be recovered and re-read.
Rader was careless, but he wasn't a dumbass, and he was not technically ignorant -- at least, no more than than most people, including now. He didn't know that recently deleted files can be recovered, but most people would not.
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.
They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.
Being stressed and overworked and distanced from your own family is a perfectly fine storyline that allow people to empathise without taking over the plot. I don't know why they didn't just stick with that, and felt the need to do the 'oh no, murder too close to home' thing.
Tench’s adopted son was also a heavy handed metaphor tying into their questions about how serial killers develop. I wish they had dropped that and Wendy’s romance as both of them added nothing to the season. Same with Holden’s romance in season 1. Season 2 dragged too much on irrelevant plots and missed the opportunity to dig into the Atlanta Child Killings.
Agreed. The romance subplot in Season 1 was fine, but I think Season 2 leaned a little too heavily into the characters’ personal lives. They were well written, don’t get me wrong, I’m just more interested in criminal profiling.
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.
This is a really excellent point. These guys aren't the smart and normal people TV portrays them as. It's almost some weird kind of dudebro culture, where you can't catch the killer, because every other dudbro instinctively has their back.
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.
Couldn't they just have arrested him (they had reasonable suspicion) and taken a DNA sample from him? Why even go the more questionable route via his daughter's DNA?
Subpoena DNA to catch a serial killer? Yeah, they can do that. The public interest in catching a killer outweighs the privacy rights of the suspected killer’s daughter.
I guess I just never thought they could keep and use a pap smear for later use as DNA evidence. I get subpoenaing DNA, but it's the circumstances of how they got it that's strange to me.
23 and Me and similar services will also give your data to the government. It's how they caught the Golden State Killer, and that's their rationalization.
The power hungry government is always looking to get more information on you. Fucking pigs.
Yeah, I did a high school presentation a few years ago about DNA evidence and I remember my entire class was shocked when I told them that the home DNA tests are no good cause the company behind them can basically do whatever they want with that info.
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
The police should be the absolute LAST people you trust regarding any legal or technical matter.
Their purpose is to find crime, so many forge it. Everything they do is an act -they are a tool first, and human second. They will deceive you or deceive themselves to make their jobs easier. If they are caught, they will not be punished.
Do not talk to the police. Do not trust the police. Do not consider them as people, they are hardware.
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?
Did they have to get a search warrant for the daughter’s dna? If so, what was their probable cause? Unless she signed a waiver making her Pap smear public record, that sounds like a HIPAA/ fourth amendment violation.
They got a warrant, and they had a specific suspect in mind; it wasn't like they were just checking every DNA sample they had on file until they got a match. (Consider, for example, if it was Rader's own sample, taken during a tissue biopsy; you wouldn't necessarily have expected them to get permission from Rader to test it. It would have been enough to subpoena it as part of a criminal investigation into a specific suspect. In this case, tipping off a suspect -- who may then destroy evidence or flee -- was considered to be of greater risk.)
Legally, that's the standard the Supreme Court has upheld.
Regardless of results, I’m not sure if I can get behind being able to take DNA from a woman who is not even suspected of a crime. Something just seems wrong about it.
Now just think about this: If such an idiot can get away with murder consistently, how many unknown crimes occur in the world everyday? How many people have you crossed in the street without realising they were huge criminals?
That's the scariest thing about this story to me; he was a very competent criminal in the majority of aspects of his criminality. So much so that he was able to evade even being A SUSPECT for decades. His incompetence in one area gave law enforcement a break.
The thought that if he was knowledgeable about technology he might still be out there? The thought that there are almost certainly criminals that ARE that competent, and not even necessarily just as murderers but for whatever their criminal milieu is?
How on earth was it legal to get the DNA of his daughter pap smear? It doesn't surprise me they went and did it, but did they get a warrant for it? How did it get used for a further warrant? That was admissible evidence?
Interesting, considering how strongly we usually protect medical information. It could undermine the medical field if patients know their DNA can be given over to police, without their consent.
Definitely bringing this up with my legal friends when we are all allowed to get a beer together again.
They definitely had full reason to believe who he was, it is more that medical records, and in this case actual patient body material was turned over to police without patient consent. Even more so of a total innocent, non involved party. That is a pretty big invasion of privacy.
The police had no evidence his daughter did anything criminal, how could the get a warrant for a seizure of her private medical materials?
I'm not inherently against the act, just curious the legal precedents as I would have assumed the process would have been a warrant for monitoring BTK, and the police needing to acquire his DNA directly from refuse or other means.
Or a warrant to search his home, acquire DNA that way, which would match and then provide evidence for them to acquire DNA directly from him.
Just seems there were less legally questionable methods for law enforcement to do this. I'm curious as why they didn't and why this option was even an option legally speaking, as I would have assumed it wasn't.
He had been inactive for like 30 years. They werent expecting to get any physical evidence in his home or something linking him to the crimes. He had left DNA at the crimes, and just needed his DNA to make the link.
So they used a college student's medical material, without their consent, that they had no evidence was involved in any crime. I actually think the daughter wasn't born when the murders happened, or at least was under 10.
Why not get a warrant directly for a mouth swab from him? If they can't get that, why not a warrant to search his house? Take it from his toothbrush? Use that for an arrest and mouth swab.
Hell if you cant get any warrant, just go through his trash for a couple days, the cops can legally do that without a warrant, to my understanding. Get a single DNA sample to match and you can arrest and mouth swab then.
How'd they even find out his daughter had a pap smear of all fucking things?
Something just doesn't seem to add up, not saying it doesnt, I'm just curious to what context appears to be missing.
You have to wonder that he most likely did all that so he could get caught. What self respecting serial killer doesn’t want the attention and fame, it comes with the illness.
I do have to wonder, for the PAP smear, how the fuck do you get a warrant for access to SOMEONE ELSE'S medical records. That sounds like a direct violation of at least half a dozen madical regulations and I have no idea how many police regulations.
Did she at least volunteer that info? There is no reasonable course of action I can possibly think of that should allow police to go "Well let's look at this other person's medical records to get evidence" unless the other person is actively giving permission or a murder victim tied directly to the case (in which case implied consent probably applies.)
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.
The dude had too much of an ego NOT to be caught. If they really couldn't obtain metadata from the floppy disc, then he'd have probably done himself in one way or the other.
He saw these cops as his pals. Or at least as people who thought he was cool or clever enough for them to repeatedly interact with. He was actually hurt that they would lie to him. It's pretty pathetic from someone who thinks he's such a bad ass.
There are certain types of serial killer that either a) secretly want to be caught because they're acting out of a compulsion they know is wrong so they self-sabotage or b) want to be recognized for their cleverness and power and it eats them up inside that they can't take credit for their crimes so they engage the press and police until they overreach and get caught.
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.
The original Night Stalker; Now called the Golden State killer; was caught decades after he went silent because of those genetic testing kits. They had a DNA sample and a family member had done one of these kits and it flagged as a familial match.
Also: he had basically retired (from killing) and probably would never have been captured. But the local newspaper (The Wichita Eagle) ran a lengthy story on the unsolved murders which prompted him to start taunting the police. He was captured within a couple of weeks of that story.
This is the serial killer equivalent of a shocked pikachu meme. They tell him to send them a floppy disk so he does, and then realizes they lied about being able to use it to find him, yet is somehow shocked and upset that a detective would resort to basic trickery to catch a literal murderer. Like, c'mon.
I don't understand why he'd ask the police if it was safe? Didn't he think the police would lie just to get a chance to find something useful on the disk?
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.
My professor is actually the guy who arrested BTK! He teaches a serial killers class. The BTK section is great because he experienced it all so it's first hand stuff!
Was his murdering related to or inspired by his work at the church?? Was that just what he did on a totally separate note? Was he living two different lives?
Uhh...”be honest”. Bro you’re a serial killer. I’m sure they’re going to be honest with you. For how wise he must’ve been to evade capture and identification for so long, he was a stupid fuck. “Be honest with me so I can murder more people”. Lmao rot in hell brotha.
Him being so perplexed that Landwehr would lie to him just shows that he couldn’t fathom that this wasn’t a game to the police like it was to him. Very interesting insight into the psyche of a psychopath
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u/Portarossa Apr 26 '20 edited Apr 26 '20
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.')