Bright [3]

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We were trying to do our job as journalists, but then we became part of the story, and I think for a journalist, that's a terrible place to be as part of the story. But there was no way to get out of it. Because he enjoyed communicating with caketv KTV was his favorite station. He had watched it since he was a child. I have a postcard talking about the communications which he wrote to Keke and it says.

I write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer as well as your time. Those three dudes you have in custody are just talking to get publicity for the Otero murders. They know nothing at all. I did it by myself and with no one's help. Ps. Since sex criminals do not change their mo or by nature, cannot do so. I will not change mine. The code words for me will be bind them, torture them, kill them, b t K. They will be on the next victim.

Someone killed four members of the family.

Had you vanished from her home suddenly last weekend? Her phone lines had been cut, her door left open.

You see the victim playing there with plastic bags over their heads, strangled. You could tell it was a plan scenario.

Well, police have said no more about the contents of the letter. It does contain some sort of threat and implies the killer may strike again.

He's gonna play with these victims. He'd get him to the point of death and then bring them back and then brings them back to the point of death.

From My Heart podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters and this is Monster BTK. In episode one, we covered the brutal and tragic murders of the Otero family. On January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, BTK broke into the Otero home on Edgemore Drive in Wichita, can He tied up the parents, Joseph and Julie before strangling them. Then he strangled their young son Joey, and hanged their daughter Josephine. It was btk's first murder, and it hadn't gone smoothly.

I saw in a movie about a minotaur serial killer toughening up the hands. I had a sports ball at home, work in a vehicle to practice and exercise my hands. Exercise with a handball helps blood circulation and to keep the hands fit. There was excitement in trying something dangerous. Then it happens, and afterward you wish it hadn't. It's like playing in the quicksand there's fear and excitement, but then you're stuck.

Raider was hungry. He wanted to try again. He thought he could get it right. Next time. Shall be started to prowl for his next project.

I believe in February or March the hunt began again. I found it exciting to prowl a day or night. It was very easy for me to spend a little time after classes to prowl or day drive going to classes worked well for me as a cover. I could say I was at the library, or I could use that time to prowl or stalk.

After looking around the Wichita State campus for weeks, Raider finally found his next target.

So it was the day after classes or in between. I spotted Bride arriving home with a friend, another female, maybe a sister. She was at her mailbox. She fit my fantasy profile, a co ed, dishwasher, blonde, small. I saw her go in the house and I thought that's a possibility.

Her name was Catherine Bright. Raider eventually discovered that she lived nearby, at thirty two seventeen East thirteenth Street, less than two miles from the Otto home. He named her project Lights out Here again are Raider's words.

She became a true detective horror magazine hit Fantasy. Her bedroom appeared to be in the center east. I was planning on tying her up on the bed, either half naked or totally. Then I would strangle her or suffocate her. Her hands would be bound in front and tied to her neck, like a true detective model I had seen. I used to fantasize about women on the cover showing terror in their eyes, bound hand up near her neck, a man with a threatening knife overhead.

Just seventy nine days after the Otero murders, Dennis Rader approached Bright's.

Home April four of nineteen seventy four. This was a scene which isn't necessarily one that you would automatically assume that it was connected to the ottos. My name is Kevin O'Connor. I'm an assistant district attorney in Johnson County Now. I was the deputy district attorney in witch Daw Sedgwick County, Kansas during the Dennis Raider investigation. He was constantly trying to trip the police up, so he was trying to

Raider's plan was to force his way into Bright's home by acting as a Wichita State student needing a quiet place to study. But, as Kevin O'Connor says, there was just one problem.

He is not anticipating that Catherine's brother, Kevin, will be with her. Kevin Bright spent the night before with his sister and there was snow, so he didn't go home.

Raider panicked. He improvised a fake story about how he was a criminal on the run.

They will come back surprised by a and telling him that he is on the run. He needs money in a car, he needs a.

Little bit of food.

He will tell them they have the time to control them, that they're not going to be heard. This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. He loses control of the situation.

Raider thought Catherine would be alone and easy to control. For that reason, he brought no rope with him. He had been planning to tie her up using pantyhose from her dresser drawer. Pointing his gun at the siblings, he marched them into the bedroom. In a rare CNN interview from two thousand and five, Kevin Bright went into detail about what happened next.

And then he forced me to tie my sister up in the front bedroom, and then he took me into the other bedroom and tied me up and laid me down on the floor on my stomaching nodded up stocking and started strangling me, and I fought and broke loose and jumped up on my feet. He pulled a gun from his waistband, and I knew he was gonna shoot me, and I grabbed hold of his hand and arm and pushed it back into his stomach and got my hand on the gun and the trigger pulled it twice, and

With Kevin Bright seemingly dead, Rader went back for Catherine, who was tied up in the other room. He tried to strangle her, but she fought back once again. Rader was losing control of the situation. Meanwhile, Kevin Bright had to listen as his sister was being strangled to death in the other room.

And then he came back and grabbed a hold of me, and he started strangling me again, and I fought again. He shot me in the second time. I played like I was dead, and he left again. And then I looked around the room to see if there was any kind of weapon that I could use against him, and there wasn't anything there, and I just decided to go

After Kevin escaped, Raider panicked. He started stabbing Catherine with a knife over and over to make sure she was dead. The police reports say she was stabbed eleven times. Here are raiders words from confession of a serial killer.

I had no intention of stabbing anyone. Happened because I lost control. That created a mess of blood everywhere on my hands, pants, shoes. I made a vow if I ever again had to confront to kill, there would be no knife. It was a total mess because I didn't have control over it.

Raider had to move quickly after stabbing Catherine.

Since Kevin could id me. It wouldn't make a difference if she was dead. I was afraid the police would catch me or stop me. On Holyoake, I recalled that I ran so hard and fast that my lungs hurt for a day or two. Afterward from breathing the cold air.

Raider ran back to his car parked by the Wichita State Campus. Catherine tried calling for help.

She's able to get to the phone. It's a wall unit and the phone will be.

Off the hook.

That police report describing her and how that police officer found her is heartbreaking as he describes her in trying to breathe begging the police officer to help her.

The police report states that Officer Dennis Landon arrived at the Bright home at two eight pm. Here's an excerpt read by a voice actor.

Officer Landon approached the address of twenty three seventeen East thirteenth Street and knocked at the screen door. The front door was open. After receiving no response, Officer Landon looked in through the open door and saw a female lying in a pool of blood. The young woman was found clutching a telephone in her hand. She was asked what happened, but was unable to respond. When asked if she was hurt, she pulled up a blouse, exposing her abdomen. The young

Both Kevin and Katherine were taken to Wesley Medical Center. Kevin survived his gunshot wounds. However, his sister Catherine didn't survive the attack. She died of her stab wounds just a few hours later. Catherine was yet another innocent victim of btk's malice. This one has always been difficult for me to wrap my head around. Catherine was just a college student looking forward to the next phase of her life.

Yeah, because well, sister shouldn't die Hamon. I was pry that she didn't suffer very much, you know, it was last hours, I don't know. And this prayer for all the families that you know they can have healing. God knows every movement you're making and knows that you're going to answer one day, and that he offers, you know, he offers every one of us salvation.

For Katherine Bright, it was a terrible and tragic end to a budding life, but for Rader, it was just the beginning. Following the murder of Katherine Bright, Rader planned his next move. Project lights Out had been a disaster. Dennis returned home and tried to resume his normal family life, but he couldn't shake the paranoia that his mistakes would cost him. Here again are his words from the book Confession of a Serial Killer.

When I saw the news releases about Bright, I knew Kevin was now a survivor and able to tell Catherine had died. Kevin had described me. I was worried about Kevin. He was Catherine's brother, I learned. I thought of maybe trying to hit on Kevin at some point. I never could come up with a perfect plan.

On April twenty third, nineteen seventy four, just three weeks after the attack on the Brites, police released a facial composite of the suspect based on Kevin's description. This is former Wichita Police Chief Richard Lamonian.

All he could tell us it was a male, a white male, but he could not describe the individual.

He was very cooperative.

We had professional psychiatrist psychologists work with him. But again, I really think he gave us all the information he had because I don't think he really had an opportunity to even see what was going on.

Raider, however, felt differently about Kevin's recollection.

He did give a fairly good description of me, and I thought the picture in the newspaper was uncomfortably close to me. But no one ever came for me.

According to Lemonion, police had a hard time connecting this crime to the Otero murders. Both were so messy and strange. The Bright killing was clearly so poorly planned that it was tough to make heads or tails of.

We assumed at that particular moment that that's probably just boyfriend love triangle. Who knows what it is. But it was interrupted, so it was not connected at the time to the Otero murders. In those days, we probably had a homicide rate forty forty five a year, so no homicides were not unusual, and we would clear ninety percent of them, so a homicide like this would not have drawn a serial killer type mentality back to it.

While police were struggling, Rader was relishing. In the chaos and confusion.

As I gathered the news clippings on Catherine Bright, I taped a picture from a detective magazine to one of my Heidi Hole folders, the one that showed the girl with her hands in front, the way I had wanted to do with Bright. I kept Bright's clippings inside and even wrote a story I believe, possibly of a fantasy of her. The months slipped away, and I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be caught for a lineup.

Rader had all sorts of these heidie holes in his home, where he would keep tokens from his victims or store his crew drawings and newspaper clippings. In July, six months after the Otero murders, four people in their early twenties were killed following a small dispute. It was the second quadruple homicide that year. All of Wichita was shaken up. Nineteen seventy four had thus far been a hard year for violent crime. Police were scrambling to piece it all together.

We had arrested a couple of brothers named Seabring who admitted that they had killed the Otos.

Gary Seabring was arrested on charges for an unrelated sexual offense. While being questioned, Seabrings started spewing about the Oto murders. According to the book Inside the Mind of BTK by John Douglas, Seabring would go on to tell police.

If I was doing the Otos, this is how I would have done it. It would have been with my brother and we would have tied them all up, and my buddy Thomas Myers would have been with us.

This raised a few eyebrows, and the two brothers were brought in his suspects in the Otero case.

Of course, the news media picks upon it, and we've arrested the Otaro murderers and all things like that.

The people of which tah were ecstatic. They believed the Otto murderer had been brought to justice. Seabring had a criminal history involving the sexual assault of a minor. On the surface, it seemed very plausible that he was the killer, but police were skeptical of Sebring's knowledge of the case. Investigators had Gary and his brother Ernest go through intense psychological evaluations, and they determined both men were mentally unstable,

The Seabring brothers were just pedophiles. It's what they were, and they had other problems that they had. They weren't murders.

Raiders saw the false confession on the news and he was not happy about this development.

Once the media picked up on it, and then they started putting information out that we had a suspect in custody for it, that's what prompted it all. He didn't want someone else taking credit for his job.

Since I was in the mood of highness and attention as the newspaper ran the story on the three men, I added it to my Heidi Hole folder on the oteros. I wanted credit, not someone else. I also wanted taxpayers not to spend endless dollars on false leads.

A few days after the Wichita Eagle published its story about the Seabring brothers, Dennis Rader called the front desk and asked to speak to Eagle columnist Don Granger. Here's what Granger remembers hearing over the phone.

Listen and listen good. I'm only going to say this once. There is a letter about the Oteo case in a book in the public library.

Granger was freaked out. He immediately called the Wichita Police. He told them that the caller had the voice of a timid Midwestern man, but he couldn't make out anything else. Wichita PD Officer Bernie Drowaski went to the library that very day. He discovered up a duel your letter stuped into a book titled Applied Engineering Mechanics. The letter was riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors. Here is what it said, edited for clarity.

Those three dudes you have in custody are just talking to get publicity. They know nothing at all. I did it by myself, with no one's help. I'm sorry this happened to the society. It's hard to control myself. You probably call me psychotic with sexual perversion. Hang up. Where this monster entered my brain? I will never know, but it's here to stay. How does one cure himself? If you ask for help that you've killed four people, they will laugh or hit the panic button and call the cops.

It was in this letter that the name BTK was born, a three letter moniker that came to haunt which a tall police.

Yours truly guilty ps. Since sex criminals do not change their mo or by nature, cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be bind them, torture them, kill them, BTK. They will be on the next victim.

He considered himself to be among the elite serial killers, and so he named himself BTK.

This is Catherine Ramsland, the forensic psychologist who wrote a book with and about Dennis Rader.

He did not want to leave his name to chance and get something stupid. He wanted a powerful name, and it wasn't the only one. He gave them a few ideas, but because he had created an image for the BTK name as well, he stuck with that. He's one of the few who told police and journalists, here's what you should call me, and he enjoyed that. He enjoyed that kind of cat and mouse game.

By using BTK, torture, fantasy, writing, drawing, and what I had planned to do. I wrote my own criminal epithet. If cocked, those words would hang me.

Carrie Rawson, Dennis Raider's daughter, talks about her father's lust for notoriety.

He feeds off the fair because he wanted to be remembered and known for what he had done. And he talks about Ted and California and he's talking about son of Sam. Well, He's in a smaller media market, so he wasn't getting the coverage that Bundy or Sam was. He wanted to be known and he didn't like that these guys were taking credit and making it sound one way when he knew the truth. So he writes into

Later on, Dennis Raider had the authority's attention. His plan was working.

So he literally it's like giving them evidence because he's such a narcissist and he's enjoying that game.

For Raider, the game was just getting started. The news was settling on the police department. For the first time in history, Wichita was dealing with a bona fide serial killer.

In the first phase of this, I'm thinking to myself, what kind of a screwball is this? The fact is he's hurting people. He's actually killing innocent people in our community. Our job is to put him away, get him off the street. And as you read these things, this is like a movie script. Kept it's not a movie. It's real people are dying. How can we resolve this? This is going to be a long process and it's going to take a lot of help.

Police were initially unsure about what to do with btk's letter. They thought if they went public with it, the city might go into a frenzy and then it might embolt in BTK to kill again.

None of us had ever dealt with this. We reached out to departments that had dealt with serial killers. We reached out to the FBI, getting advice suggestions as to how we might proceed. We reached out to professionals here in Wichita and in the region, psychologists, psychiatrists to get advice, to get direction as to what they had done, what worked best for them, and what we might do in the future.

It wasn't until a few days later that police came up with a plan to respond to BTK. The response came in the form of a personal ad in the Wichita Eagle on October twenty seventh, calling on BTK to reach out.

BTK Help is available call six four six six three one two one before ten pm.

But the hotline never rang. On October thirty, First Eagle columnist Don Granger ran his own article trying to get btk's attention.

For the past week, which Ada police have tried to get in touch with a man who has important information on the Otero murdered case, A man who needs help badly. You may have noticed the classified ad that ran at the top of our personal column Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It read BTK help is available. There really is a BTK. Police cannot say how they know, but they are convinced BTK has information about the murder of

Granger's phone never rang either. On December eleventh, Wichita Sun reporter Kathy Hinkle published the BTK letter after getting her hands on it from an unnamed source. Finally, the words of this bizarre killer, we're out there for everyone to see. Police Chief Lloyd Hannen had this to say, you know, Wichita beaconn article about btk's letter going.

Public, I think we've taken one hell of a risk with the release of this letter.

He might have to go out and commit this offense again to prove he committed this offense.

He's a sick man who needs help.

When this hit the news and it started picking up. The whole community is afraid. I personally even had a sister in law who was a single female. She's an adult, but she's single, and she came out and lived with us. She would not stay at her own home.

In fact, it was like this all across Wichita. People were installing heavy locks on their doors, women stopped going out alone. Everyone was scared.

I mean, it was a scary time for the community and of course the department. I mean, you're getting all kinds of heat. What are they trying to do to resolve this? And we're doing everything that we possibly can, but it's a fear factor. How do you reconcile that if you're afraid of something you perceive you're afraid of it. I can't give you enough reassurance that you're okay, because you're not gonna believe it. The city actually came together,

Police were under a ton of pressure. They knew they had to catch the sky and fast, and the fact that he had communicated was a good thing, albeit terrifying. The letter meant they had a avenue to finding him.

The theory that we had was that if we can communicate with him, he communicated with us. Obviously he's searching for identification. He wants to be identified. The idea was that if we can keep him communicating, because we know he's fantasizing about what he's already done, and if we can keep him occupied with that, perhaps there won't be another victim.

But Rader was starting to realize he had put himself at serious risk. He saw the newspaper article where the BTK letter went public, He saw the law enforcement were actively pursuing him, and he got spooked. So at the end of nineteen seventy four, he cut off all communication and he decided to lay low. Here are his words from Confession of a Serial Killer.

I acted normal when Paul was present. I watched the news with interest, but not overly. I read the paper, but I did not cut out the articles until later. I also became overly defensive. I watched the road outside and had a loaded gun ready. I made sure our locked windows were secure, probably like everyone else in Wichita.

In the summer of nineteen seventy five, with the BTK paranoia still a buzz, Wichita police found a strange note left at a crime scene. An elderly couple, John and Emma Foster, were found stabbed to death in their home. The mystery note left behind set off alarm bells. Police Chief Floyd Hannon held a press conference just twenty four hours later. The following excerpt comes from a Wichita Eagle article dated July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five.

Hannin said that the note was left at the scene. The police don't know who wrote it. He emphasized there was no reason to believe there was any connection between the notes writer and the person who wrote a letter to the Eagle Beacons secret Witness program.

In other words, this murder had nothing to do with BTK, but it shows that everyone in Wichita was on edge about the next BTK murder. They feared that any similar incident might be his handiwork. Every new murder or sexual assault was met with the question could this have been BTK? But in truth Raider had started a new line of work, becoming a father. His first child, a boy, was named Brian Raider. But for Dennis, being a normal dad seemed impossible.

I love to hunt, prowling the streets looking for fair game. The cat and mouse game gave me an adrenaline rush or hi.

As he built one identity, the other started to fester underneath, almost like juckal and Hyde. This was Dennis Raider, the so called normal suburban dad versus BTK, the serial killer.

BTK is really more just another mask, using that to power into rage and anger and controlling that into murder, than to release that because it makes him feel better about who he is.

Carrie Rawson, daughter of Dennis Raider, She says the two versions of her dad are just sides up the same coin, and one side comes out when it needs to, not like.

A bipolar thing. He's always this, he's always Dennis Raider, he's always Dad, he's always BTK, and then he just cubes and flips to show you what he wants you to see.

Forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland explains this phenomenon.

That is that whole cubing thing. It's a way to not be completely connected in your sense of morality. I think each situation in which he found himself was real to him, and he could easily live this double life because the more intense, exciting experience was murdering people. But he also had what he called social obligations family church, he was president of his church, congregation, his job, he had things that he had to look to as well,

In these early days of nineteen seventy seven, Rader was still learning how to balance all of these conflicting emotions. According to Carrie, he had trouble holding it all together. Little things like chores and hobbies just weren't enough to keep his mind off his fantasies.

Later on we learn he was literally throwing himself into stuff to distract him from murder. He needed to be outside he could get uptid and angry and difficult and controlling inside.

While Rader was struggling with his identity crisis, the people of Wichita were wondering what happened to be tk newly appointed police chief. Richard Lemonion was one of them.

In nineteen seventy six, I was appointed as police chief. I was thirty six years old. I was the youngest police chief in the history of the department on major cases like this. Here, the investigators briefed me on everything that we had, and then I had a much better understanding of what evidence we did have, what was available to us, and where they were in their investigation. And at that particular time, they were pretty much at a

It took him years, years of waiting, planning, thinking of ways to do it better. But finally, in nineteen seventy seven, three years since his last murder, someone caught his eye.

She was completely random. There was actually someone across from Dylan's who might have been the potential. It was called Project green or Greenwood. I had met this girl, I think at WSU. I knew where she lived.

Dylan's was a nearby supermarket. He spotted her and followed her home multiple times. He decided he was ready she was the one. On March seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven, he approached her door and something unexpected happened.

I know, but nobody answered. While I was walking away from the intended house, I saw a young boy coming back from Dylan's. I figured he had a mother in the house. I watched where he went, and then I went to the door and knocked. The boy opened the door with his brother.

My name is Steve Ralford.

I'm gonna be k K Shurbiv Danish writer Right my mom knocking Kevin seven?

Next time on Monster bet K, there's a.

Crack any door whare look out him?

A mom Pleton. She told the kids to do whatever I said. I tied the door shut, but the kids were still yelling.

The big thing that weighs on you is the fact that this is gonna happen again.

He's going to determine whether or not you're gonna live, when.

You're gonna die.

He's gonna play with these victims. There's no manuel written on how to react when you become part of the story.

When we announced the fact that we did as serial killer, we had a hundred tips.

He's making your life uncomfortable. Night later we said it was like walking on inkshells at times with him.

Oh Anna, why didn't you appear?

Monster bt K is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts. The show is written by Nomes Griffin, Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk and supervising producer