Dennis Rader
Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945 in Pittsburg , Kansas ) is an American serial killer who became known as the BTK killer .
Life
Dennis Rader lived in Park City, a suburb of Wichita , approximately seven miles north of the city until his imprisonment .
Rader grew up with three brothers in Wichita and graduated from Wichita Heights High School. He attended Wichita State University in 1964 and worked as a mechanic in the US Air Force from 1966 to 1970 . During this time he was used in South Korea , Turkey , Greece and Japan . Upon his return, he attended Butler County Community College in El Dorado and Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina , before returning to Wichita State University in the fall of 1973 , where he graduated in 1979 with a degree in the administration of justice. While in college, he worked in the meat department of a Park City supermarket.
From 1970 to 1973 he worked as a fitter at the Coleman Company , a camping equipment company that also worked for two of the first victims of the BTK killer. From November 1974 to July 1988 he worked for a home security company, which gave him access to some of his clients' homes. Due to the general fear of the serial offender, the company recorded a good order book. In 1976 he moved to Park City.
In 1989 he helped with the Wichita State Census . From 1990 he worked for the city of Park City. Many neighbors found him stern, harassing and adamant in this role.
He had also been a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for 30 years and was elected president of the ward.
The BTK case
The police of Kansas believes that himself BTK killer killed calling serial killers between 1974 and 1977 at least seven people and committed three more murders from 1985 to 1991.
The abbreviation BTK stands for B ind, T orture, K ill ( shackle, torture, kill) - that was the way in which the BTK killer treated his victims. Most of the victims were women. It was noticeable that written messages were leaked to various media representatives during the period mentioned above. After a long break, this started again in March 2004, which enabled the police to track down the alleged perpetrator.
Victim
Among the victims of the BTK killer are four members of a family (Joseph Otero, his wife Julie Otero and two of their children); Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox and Vicky Wegerle. Two other murder victims, Marine Hedge and Delores Davis, were only later linked to the serial killer. In total, he killed at least eight people between 1974 and 1991.
Traces of semen found near or on his victims served as evidence of Rader's perpetration.
Letters
The BTK killer went public again in March 2004 after a long break when the Wichita Eagle received a letter from a B ill T homas K illman. In the letter, the writer stated that he murdered Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986. With the letter, he sent a photo of the crime scene and the victim's driver's license . In December 2004 the police found another piece of news; A package was found in Wichita Murdock Park containing, among other things, Nancy Fox's driver's license.
It is believed that the killer decided to reappear in 2004, as the thirtieth anniversary of the start of his series of murders. Some experts mistakenly suspected that the killer was in jail for other crimes while he was away.
In his letters, the murderer claimed to have been born in 1939, he claimed to have grown up near railway lines . His father allegedly died during World War II and he was raised by his mother as a result.
arrest
The last package from the BTK killer, which was received by KSAS-TV in Wichita on February 16, 2005 , was apparently the last information the police needed. In the package was a computer floppy disk that FBI analysis found could be traced back to Rader. A deleted Word document was on the floppy disk , which could be restored. In the metadata of the document, a certain "Dennis" was noted as the last person to edit the file; the software was registered with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America . On the church website, investigators found that a certain Dennis Rader was the president of the local church. Also in the package was a photocopy of a book about serial killers and a gold-colored chain with a medallion.
Before police arrested Dennis Rader, they compared an existing DNA sample from the murderer with medical records from one of Dennis Rader's daughter. This revealed that the BTK killer must be a blood relative.
On the afternoon of February 25, 2005, Dennis Rader was arrested in Park City , Kansas, as the prime suspect in the BTK case . At a police press conference on February 26th, it was confirmed that Rader was the BTK killer. On March 1, 2005, Rader was charged with ten murder charges. When the trial began on June 27, 2005, Rader pleaded guilty and, as a confession, provided a sober description of the murders committed. On August 18, 2005 Dennis Rader was sentenced to ten times life imprisonment. He is serving at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.
Connections to the victims
Rader lived on the same street as the Marine Hedge victim, just five houses away. The Coleman Company is only a few blocks from a phone booth where the BTK killer reported a murder; two of the victims also worked in the company. Rader and Joseph Otero, one of the first victims, both worked as mechanics for the Air Force.
Subliminal message
In the 1970s an attempt was made to get the BTK killer to surrender by means of a subliminal ( subliminal ) message. In a television program about him, upside down glasses were shown for about a tenth of a second - a motif that BTK had used in a letter regarding his murder of Nancy Fox - as well as the text NOW CALL THE CHIEF ("Call the police chief now" ) appears. The hoped-for effect did not materialize.
Media utilization
The story of the BTK killer was filmed in 2005 in Hunt for the BTK Killer with Gregg Henry and in 2008 in BTK with Kane Hodder . There are also several low-budget horror films such as "BTK" (2005) by Micheal Feifer or "I Survived BTK" (2010) by Marc D. Levitz. The Belgian Aggrotech project Suicide Commando released an album called Bind, Torture, Kill , which deals with Rader's story more or less precisely. In addition, the American death metal band Suffocation features a song called Bind, Torture, Kill on the album Suffocation . The American thrash metal band Exodus released the song BTK on their album Blood In, Blood Out in 2014 .
Stephen King was inspired by the fall of the story A Good Marriage , which appeared in the collection of novels Between Night and Dark .
In the crime series Criminal Minds , the case of the BTK killer is mentioned several times, but never dealt with directly.
In the documentary series America's Most Dangerous Killers , GB 2009, this case is shown in an episode. (Season 1, Episode 2)
In the first and second seasons of the Netflix series Mindhunter , a character based on Rader is shown in short sequences.
literature
- John E. Douglas , Johnny Dodd: A Murderer's Profile: The Long Hunt for the BTK Serial Killer . Wiley-VCH Verlag , Weinheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-527-50358-2 .
- Katherine Ramsland: Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the Btk Killer , FOREEDGE 2016, ISBN 978-1512601527
Web links
- Article at Welt.de , February 28, 2005
- Suspect in BTK killings arrested after 25 years in hiding , wikinews.org (engl.)
- Bind Torture Kill Strangler - The Crime Library ( February 13, 2015 memento in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ A double life. (PDF; 266 kB) In: media.kansas.com. Retrieved June 10, 2013 .
- ↑ Two single pictures of approx. 30 single pictures per second with NTSC color television = 0.067 seconds = rounded 0.1 seconds.
- ↑ Subliminal advertising: Psychologists research the secret seducers. In: Spiegel Online , accessed December 14, 2011
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rader, Dennis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Rader, Dennis Lynn (full name); BTK killer |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American serial killer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 9, 1945 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pittsburg , Kansas |