Childhood of a Killer [2]

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I think he would have eventually killed again. But what really got him to finally surface, which was his downfall? It was the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. A lawyer in town was going to write a book. When he read that, he says, no one's going to write this book. What do they know about me? They don't know the motive or anything. I'm going to be the one to write this book. That's how he surfaced.

This was definitely the opportunity that he was waiting for to come forth. Here he is back in the news and in his mind, you know, his hero status, and now he's starting to show off the trophies. He's starting to send his trophies. He wants to be back in the news, he wants his fifteen minutes of fame, he wants to be identified and I kind of set up with tongue in cheek that if we hadn't figured out who it was, he would have called it to a news conference.

He wanted to control the narrative. He thought about what if he got caught, and he had kind of a plan in place as to what he would do about that. So he decided he was going to come back and start doing this cat and mouse thing where he would send these missives to the police to show that story isn't over and that he's also looking.

For the next victim.

He used it on a church computer so that it was traceable back to that computer. His name was there. So finally the police watched his routine the way he had been watching victim routines to figure out he goes home for lunch every day. This is when to get him.

Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Raider, fifty nine in a white male in Park City, Kansas.

And so they pulled him over and he acted like, what took you so long? I've been waiting for you.

Someone killed four members of a family.

Had you vanished from her home?

Suddenly?

Last weekend, her phone lines had been cut, her door left open.

You see the victim play in 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 got to 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.

Moments ago a press conference in the City Council Chambers at City Hall concluded, we finally came down to an announcement of what a lot of Wichetan's have been waiting for for well over thirty years.

He actually named himself BTK, Bind, torture and kill. This coward killed the father in the house that day, he killed the mother, tied them both up and towards of them.

And again the question that arises is in one of the questions that is he had to be answered. Was he trying to be caught?

On February twenty fifth, two thousand and five, Dennis Raider was revealed to be the BTK killer. To everyone's surprise, he was a seemingly normal guy fifty nine years old, worked a city job, owned a house with his wife, two kids, wore glasses balding. As my former KTV anchor Larry Hadeberg says, this is not the guy we were expecting.

When people said BTK, you think of a wild eyed Manson like character, just a crazy person. What we didn't understand is he was the guy next door. He went to a local church, he was in charge of the congregation. He worked in an important job in Park City, Kansas. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was going to the movies with us. I would have never ever guessed that.

Hours after he was captured, I realized I had seen this man before, and very recently. Only two weeks prior, Dennis Rader, along with a tour group from Christ Lutheran, had visited KKTV. In fact, he had personally requested the tour for himself and six other members of his church.

I remember I.

First saw him sitting in a folding chair three feet away from me as we reported the latest on the BTK. In fact, he walked around the studio, chatting it up with all of us. He then asked if he could take pictures with his thirty five millimeter camera, and then, to my surprise, without asking, he slung his arm around my shoulder and snapped a photo with me looking back. I am filled with dread realizing that he was in fact the BTK killer. After he was caught, I was

People are like, how did you not know these things? But Dad was dad.

I mean, he'd always had been short tempered at times, short fused, controlling.

I didn't know any difference.

In the aftermath of his capture, everyone wanted to know the details of this now famous killer named Dennis Rader, But Carrie says her father's life was pretty normal, at least on the outside.

We were pretty much the classic Midwestern family, middle class, three bedroom ranch, meticulous yard flowers, tulips, the grass mode.

We go to church on Sundays religiously.

He was like full suit tie. He would polish his shoes the night before.

Years later, Carrie was forced to come to terms with who her father was, and she was plagued by the obvious question, how how could an average joe like her dad become such a monster?

I mean, I think his three brothers turned out fine. So if you're going to do nurturn nature debate, I mean, all have the same genetics in the same home life and they're fine. So what makes one person turn into this a monster and other.

People not be?

I don't think anybody really knows, and I don't think he knows. One of the keys to my dad is figuring out what drives that. But also, like, is there a way to like help somebody like that before it turns into murder? Or give them an outlet it's safe outlet where they're not hurting anybody.

As to how a supposedly normal guy could murder innocent people, Carrie says she is just as stumped as everyone else.

There isn't just one answer to these guys.

It's complicated, and you're relying on someone that's not a reliable narrator to help you figure out what's wrong with them. They hold their keys and they don't even know what's wrong with them. And then he's over here reading trying to figure out what's wrong with them.

Throughout this podcast, Carrie will provide first hand insight on her father, Dennis Raider. There is perhaps no better time than right now to revisit the BTK story. According to many sources, Raider's health is declining. He may not have many years left to live. His victims are finally speaking up, ready to tell their stories after all these years, and most frightening of all, it might not be over.

The Osage County, Oklahoma Sheriff's office says an old crossword puzzle from Dennis Rader links the serial killer to the disappearance of Cynthia don Kinney from Pahuska, Oklahoma.

That's right. In twenty twenty three, police discovered new cases in Oklahoma and Missouri that might be the work of BTK cases we didn't know about until now. Raider refuses to give straight answers from prison, but he's playing along. It seems like he's enjoying the fame and publicity. It's a level of sickness that's difficult to fathom.

For any psychopathic offender who really doesn't have any remorse for what they're doing. I don't think their values comport with most of the world, and that's why they can get away with. What they can get away with is they don't feel any remorse about the things that they're doing. And although Raider has never been given the psychopathy checklist evaluation, I think it's pretty clear that he has psychopathic features.

Ramsland is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to the inner workings of Dennis Raider's mind. Following his capture, she spent years interviewing Raider in person in prison. To her, Raider is one of the most peculiar cases out there. First of all, he didn't fit the typical image of a serial killer.

Why didn't he look like Ted Bundy. They were pretty disappointed that he wasn't this kind of sexy hotshot that Bundy had presented himself to be. He's this kind of pudgy, aging guy. That was a disappointment. He was not like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. What does it say about what we think are formulas. I mean the formulas came out of the FBI, they were not correct about well the factors in the background of a

That's a really good question. When most people think of a serial killer, they imagine this mysterious genius, some evil celebrity type, someone who stands out. But to the naked eye, Raider was none of those things, at least on the surface. Raider had a fairly average Midwestern upbringing.

Nothing about his childhood stands out as something you would expect for a person who grew up to become a serial killer. He didn't have abuse, he didn't have neglect. I mean, there really wasn't anything. He had an intact family. They didn't have a lot, but they had a house, they raised chickens and rabbits, and he had a dog. So pretty normal.

But what you see isn't always the truth. Dennis Raider grew up in and around Wichita. Dennis was the eldest of four boys.

So as the oldest brother. He was kind of the leader. They did a lot of cowboys in India, says kids out in the Midwest do. He had friends. He did a few pranky things, breaking into his school once. For the most part, he was a pretty good kid.

But as Ramsland and others have learned since, there were peculiar and haunting signs in Raider's early life.

He had some resentment towards his mother. Most of the things he remembered about his mother were when she humiliated him or made him feel powerless. That's important to his development into a murderer, specifically of women.

Apparently, Raider didn't think very highly of his mother, but more than that, he almost seemed to hate her.

His feeling was that she wasn't a very good Christian, which I think is interesting. The memories that stood up most of him are when she shamed him once when he had an omission in his underwear and she was horrified and said, you know, when your father gets home, I'm going to tell him about this, and this is not something good boys do. And she made him feel awful about himself, powerless. The one memory had that he kept saying over and over and over was so important.

A Raider was also infatuated with TV and movies as a kid. The media he consumed left a large and lasting impression on him.

One of the most formative things that happened to him as a kid was watching a movie called The House of Wax. And it was only when I watched it that I realized how inappropriate this movie was for kids to see. There is a guy who was taking live people and covering them in wax for his museum.

You shouldn't have done that, my dear.

It is Kathy.

It's Kathy's body under the wax.

I knew it.

But one scene that I think was very memorable to young Dennis was a dark haired woman's whose mother was dark haired, being bound and she's naked. You don't see all of her, but you definitely know she doesn't have clothes on, and she's struggling as she's about to get the hot wax dripped on her, killing her. And I'm sure that he was just fixated on that image of a dark haired woman struggling and bound, because that became central to his sexual fantasies later on.

This was just the beginning of Raider's obsession with torture. As a young boy, Dennis Raider's fascination with bondage took root. As Catherine Ramsland says, he developed a love for garments.

He would cozy up to his grandmother and the silkiness of her ribbons in her hair, and then sometimes he'd through the drawers of his mother and grandmother and the slips and the underwear. He just loved the silkiness of that, so that became part of it. But nothing was quite as forceful for him as bondage. He got in the barn and tie ropes around his waist, and eventually, as he matured, he would have orgasms when he did this

Raider's daughter Carrie now even remembers her dad talking about these detective magazines.

Now, I thought maybe those were inappropriate, but somebody told me they were pretty normal in a drugstore, bondage photos of women. So my dad was influenced by this. When he was seven or eight years old, he's reading these detective magazines.

He's influenced by these photos.

If you talk to my dad, it sounds like he probably had what nowadays we call a conduct disorder when he was a young boy.

There was no help. In the forties and fifties.

It only got worse. Raiders' fantasies became more and more elaborate.

He would imagine creating what he called girl traps where they would be totally helpless. He would have complete control and domination over them, and so that was a big part of his fantasies. He would draw that on the board in his classroom while other people are out at recess.

On the farm. Raider tested out his ideas on animals.

A very good precursor for crimes is animal cruelty. Animal cruelty is a big, big one, and he got heavily involved with that, killing cats, killing dogs. My name is John Douglas. I was with the FBI for twenty five years. Wrote a book about inside the Mind of the BTK Strangler. I was one of the first people to analyze a case and was pretty good analysis.

You've probably heard about John Douglas before. He is the famed FBI profiler who helped kickstart the agency's study on serial killers in the nineteen seventies. He was also the inspiration for the Netflix series mind Hunter. Like Catherine Ramsland, he dedicated years of his life to trying to understand BTK.

Now.

The best place to look, he says, is in early childhood and pretty early on, Dennis Rader took interest in some very troubling behavior. As he just mentioned, Raider took joy in causing harm to animals.

He went on a family grouping where they had a chicken to cook. They bound the chicken up and he tied him to a post before they killed the chicken, and he liked that. He got excited about that as well.

As Douglas says, this all came back to his bondage fetish. He enjoyed being in control while something or someone was helpless.

He liked the appearance of bondage and where someone is stuck someone's control, someone can't get away, The chicken can't get get away.

Eventually, Raider became bored with the fantasies, the magazines, and the chickens. As a young man, he escalated to finding women and stalking them. At first, it started with just looking.

He was certainly at peeping Tom, and he was already beginning to be fetishistic where he wanted underwear clothing that he was steel offul lines in the neighborhood. And then he was involved in peeping tom, looking through the windows, looking at people being undressed. He would not enter until he got older, but when he was younger he was just looking and fantasizing about what he could do. As he began to age, he then began entering the houses.

He thought of himself like a spy. He did do some surveillance of people, some following women.

This is Catherine Ramsland again. She says that after high school, Raider joined the Air Force in nineteen sixty six. He did basic training in Texas before being stationed in Okinawa and eventually Tokyo, and his experiences there only deepened his fanatical tendencies.

He had sexual experiences when he was in the military with sex workers that kind of sealed the fantasy, and it was after he came back and had gotten married that he began thinking about abducting women.

Raider left the Air Force in nineteen seventy and moved back to Wichita. There he met Pauladetz, whom he married in nineteen seventy one. But, as Catherine Ramsland said, his marriage did not stop him from pursuing his fantasies of abduction. He started to pick women in the neighborhood and think about ways to snatch them.

He wanted to take them to an abandoned farm, so he had scouted out farmsteads around Kansas, and he wanted to abduct this bank teller.

Ramselin elaborates on this incident in her book Confession of a Serial Killer. Here is what Raider told her.

I saw a bank teller at the Twin Lakes Bank. I had seen her when Paula and I did business there. I knew when she had a lunch hower. The bank teller parked her car across the street of twenty first North. Many cars there could shield me in hiding. I knew her car.

He didn't know what he was going to do. He hadn't planned very far, except that he was going to take this young woman out to the abandoned barn, find her, do something with her.

My main theme was to hang someone. The act of hanging was sexually exciting to me. Of being bound or straining with the rope or noose around the neck, legs bound, and no escape. For self gratification, I had hanged myself to the point of almost passing out. I had an old barn in mind. We could be completely alone and I could better control them. I loved old barnes, and there were several located around Wichita that I could use for hanging victims.

That was the first time he really acted on the fantasy is I'm going to grab somebody.

Timed like a clock. She entered her car, I approached and tried to force myself in. She screamed and fought back. I finally gave up and told her I'm sorry. I was trying to take a vehicle and leave the area. It was a ruse that calmed her down. I told her I was going to leave her alone, and I quickly left.

But that was the start, and the fact that he crossed that line was important. The second line he crossed was breaking into houses. As he began to break into houses, he felt very powerful people were not there, but he would stand in their home, and he felt that sense of violation. That gave him a lot of courage because he realized he could get into their home, take something,

What follows is a sequence of events that eventually pushed Raider into his first violent act. Not long after getting married, Raider got a job at Cessna, the big aviation company based in which Talk Kansas, Rader discussed this job. Here are his words, again read by a voice actor.

Cessna had been my ideal job, working in the electrical tool and died part of a plant. It was a challenging job, but one that I was learning to love.

But Raider wasn't at Sessna for very long due to rising gasoline prices. The aviation industry was in financial dress.

And he got laid off. That's the job that he loved. What he will say is that's what triggered the first murder is he was angry. He did not like the fact that his wife was now the bread winner. He felt powerless. So again he's in this situation where a woman has power over him.

He isn't like this.

I had low frustration tolerance in stressful situations. If criticized, especially if I'm right, I literally blowed. Don't count to ten, I get hot, break into a sweat, and seek mental revenge. I believe I'm too smart to go postal, so if I made a revenge attack, it would be with stealth and planned. Loss of personal power can cause burning resentment. Frustration seems to be a key either the system or a person not understanding me on the issues surrounding the problem.

Raider decided it was time, no more fantasies. This time he was actually going to kill, and he found his first victim or victims. The following excerpt comes from the book bind Torture, Kill, The Inside story of BTK.

Dennis Raider had seen the woman and the girl day while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration. His wife didn't like driving in the snow. On Edgemore Drive, he saw two dark skinned females and his station wagon backing onto Murdock Avenue. After that, he stalked them for weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that they left about eight forty five and that it took Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the

The girl was eleven year old Josie o'to. The mother was thirty four year old Julia Otero. It was on January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, that Dennis Raider took his first visvictims. As you heard in episode one, he broke in, tied up the family, and one by one he strangled all of them. There was no going back. Denis Raider's transformation into BTK was complete. After Dennis Rader escaped the Otero crime scene, he slipped back into life at home.

He liked to study crime novels, detective magazines, and pornography. He liked to masturbate while playing with handcuffs. In their snug home only nine hundred and sixty square feet, he hid small trophies on his wrist. He wore Joe o Taro's watch. It ran well and got him to school on time. Wichita State University had started spring classes, and he had chosen a major administration of justice that let him study police officers closely and learn more about his new pursuit. He enjoyed the irony.

The events of January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, where the violent culmination of years spent fantasizing about bondage, torture, and murder. Raider had mentally built himself into the murder he'd envision. The Otero family was his first taste of success.

What really pisses me off about my dad is that he knew what he was or what he was capable of. He even talks about that in Catherine Ramson's book, that he could have walked into a mental health institution before he murdered the Otaros and asked for help. And he knew that, and he didn't do it anyway, because he just wanted that thrill and that hit, and those are words he uses, thrill and.

Hit again Carrie Rawson. She mentions that how each opportunity during the Otaro murders, her father chose to cross the point of no return.

I mean, everybody has those dark thoughts or the what ifs, But I mean there's a big gap between reading something or watching something on TV or thinking something versus when you're premeditating and planning these things. If you're in the store buying rope, that's when you need to stop. That point, you probably don't have the ability to stop yourself, and you're probably not wanting to. Now he had a choice.

Those are his words. I had to put them down because they saw my face. No, you didn't. You could have left.

That's where you're not insane. You're in control. You're in enough control to murder for people and not get caught for thirty years.

You totally could have left.

But he's such a freaking narcissist. He puts it on them.

Nothing about the Otero murders had gone his plan, But as a testament to his delusion, Dennis Rader didn't believe that it was his fault. Here's forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland.

He thought he had left nothing to chance. That was in his head that he had stopped her and knew everything about the house. He had done a terrible job. They had a dog too that he didn't know about, and also their car had no gas in it, so he's going to abduct them in their car and that wouldn't have worked out either. So none of the things he had in mind for his first act actually happened the way he had imagined it, and he was terrified

The Otero murders would only be the beginning of raiders murderous career. Despite all the mistakes he made, he felt unstoppable. In confession of a serial killer, he had this to say about his first killing spree.

My green was on fire, cut out and collected the newspaper clippings on the oteros and started my first Heidi hole file using those college colored folders for turn papers with three holes, I had cut and taped the clippings inside. I stored this in the attached shed in the back, an area that my wife would not find. I also listened and watched for any information on the radio or TV. One thing for sure, that area was now off limits forever, except for maybe just to drive by.

After the Otaro murders, Raider recognized he had crossed over to what he called the dark path. He considered chalking it up to a bad day and moving on with his life, but his killer instincts overrode that sense. He now saw himself as a serial killer, and he liked it.

I thought I could control it. I soon realized I was in over my head, and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. I quickly was into sexual fantasies beyond my control. I had set my goals to be a white hat high, but the lifeboat drifted away from my reach until the deep water became my coping. I had trusted myself to steer the right course, but when I studied books about past serial killers. The more I learned, the closer I came to believe I could someday become one.

Cubing is a concept Raider came up with. It's similar to compartmentalization. Here's Catherine Ramsland again.

He is all the different bases of the cube. Family man, church leader, thief, boy, scout, volunteer, all of that kind of stuff. But each face doesn't see any of the others. So when he's a family man, he's a family man in his mind because it's only a present moment truth. When he sees the opportunity to be a thief or a killer or a liar, he can turn that face out, so it's all integrated as a whole, but none of the faces see each other.

And he came up with that concept.

Psychologists call this compartmentalizing, but that conveys the idea that they're all distinct compartments. When you think of it as a cube, a unified entity with multiple faces. That can be switched around to meet the circumstances. That's a much more powerful concept, and that's his concept. He had ways to keep it all hidden, but he didn't think but as pretending. It was. That's what I do then, But I also have social obligations. I also am a good dad.

That's exactly what Rader did next. In the weeks following the Otero murders, he decided he wanted to kill again and soon. Here are his words from Confession of a serial Killer, again read by a voice actor.

I believe that by February or March the hunt begin again. I found it exciting to prowl at day or night. He was very easy for me to spend a little time after classes to prowl or day drive that area. Going to class worked well for me as a cover. I could say I was at the library or use that time to prowl or stalk.

Rader was becoming restless. He started to pick out new projects. Projects are what he called the women he would Each of his projects following the Otaros were younger women spotted alone in the wild. Some of them had a family, but Raider had already proven he wasn't averse to taking the lives of children. Raider zeroed in on a young woman named Catherine Bright. She was a fellow student at Wichita State.

So it was one day after classes or in between. I spotted Bright 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 into the house, and I thought, that's a possibility. My heart raced as the hit came into focus. From that moment on, I locked in on that house.

Next time on Monster BTK, he.

Was constantly trying to trip the police up.

I was planning on tying her up on the bed, either half naked or totally.

This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. He loses control of the situation. We had arrested a couple of brothers who admitted that they had killed the oteos.

If I was doing the Otero's, this is how I would have done it.

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

He enjoyed communicating with KKTV. KKTV was his favorite station. He had watched it since he was a child.

I'd write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer as well as your time.

Monster BTK 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