PJ Green [6]

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Delores Davis was reported missing on January nineteenth, nineteen ninety one.

I remember my wife after the phone and I saw her come in. I can see her mouth the words, and I kind of waved her off and like, I don't have time for it. She said, it is just important. My name is Jeff Davis and I'm the son of Doloris Davis. So I picked up the phone and talked to my sister, and she's pretty ristals. She said that one of our cousins had called and they had been contacted by the Sriiff's office and had been told the mother's house had been broken into and the mother was missing.

The body of Dolores Davis was found on February first, at the intersection of West one hundred and seventeenth Street North and North Meridian Street in Park City by a teenager named Nelson Shank. Again, police failed to connect it with BTK. With this murder, there were multiple opportunities where Raider could have been caught.

With Deloris Davis. He wanted to do something different. He wanted to take her body and take it to a barn, but it was a foggy, snowy night, so he got lost and he had to finally just dump the body out under a bridge. So he comes back and he's in a change into the Boy Scout uniform stuff, and a cop comes along and they're checking people because they're looking for this missing woman. And the cop is supposed to check everybody. Had he checked Rader's car, he would

That night, someone killed four members of a family.

Hedge 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 going 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. It was May of nineteen ninety one. Dennis Raider had gotten away with his tenth murder just four months earlier. A Raider could have used this success to keep killing, but instead he pulled back and got a job as a compliance officer for the city of Park City, a small suburb just outside of Wichita. This was a job that would keep Raider very busy. Here are his words from the book Confession of a Serial Killer.

I revamped the program there instead of new animal control laws and enforced them and set up professional standards in training. I started code enforcement on junk cars, trashing the yard, unmowed grass, etc. The position became more professional throughout the years.

This job earned Raider some unwelcome notoriety in the neighborhood. Here's Carrie Rawson, daughter of Dennis Raider.

People in Park City, they knew him as a compliance officer, and there's stories of him getting a ruler and measuring their grass and being a hard knows about their animal being loose so that they didn't have the permit for their garage that they're building or their yard cell. I mean, he could be a total hard ass. We even had to change our phone number after you got that job because people were calling mad.

I mean, there are people been liking, including people sometimes myself, because he could be abrasive.

This is Bob Smiser, a Wichita native who personally knew Dennis Raider.

If Dennis was nothing else, he was very very by the book, there was no gray, it was black and white, and he was very precise in how things were doing and if you worked with Nis, that's the way you did it. I'm not saying it was bad. I'm just saying that that's how he saw things. Was ABC.

And Rader went to the same church, Christ Lutheran in Park City. Most of their interactions were normal, if not kurt, but there was one incident with Rader that had put Bob on edge.

One of my older daughters lived in Park City in the house that her grandparents had lived in then the street from Dennis. But my daughter came to me and said, Dad, you know Dennis has showed up in our backyard a coup foers. And I said, really, well, are your dogs getting out? Is there something? No, No, we didn't have any problem with the dogs. Get out. We got that fixed up, she says, just creepy. I said, okay, And I happened to catch Dennis at church. I said, hey,

A single woman, single, vulnerable women were Raiders bread and butter. From the middle of nineteen ninety one on, Raider used his compliance officer job as a way to stalk women.

There were other pjs, PJ Tube, PJ Webb, PJ twin Peaks, PG Music, PJ Clip, and PJ Spider. This last one was a bee where I entered and waited, but no one came home. Most of these were in Park City area or north of Wichita. I was always on the prowl.

It's a common thing in the true crime books that are written about Raider to say that he went dormant between nineteen ninety one and two thousand and four, and he says that's not true.

Author and professor of forensic psychology Catherine Ramsland.

He gave me a list of fifty five different projects of women he had seen and stalked, and he had named them, he had their address, he had described them. He just broke in their house and they didn't come home, or there wasn't a good opportunity, you know. During his college years he could say I'm writing a paper at the library and then goes stalk someone without anyone suspecting anything. But once he was a father and husband and really had to have a schedule, it was much harder to do.

We don't know for sure if Rader killed again during this time period. It's possible, but nothing has ever been confirmed. If he did, in fact stop killing, it's the question why why would he stalk but never kill.

I don't think it was anything like some moral idea like maybe I should be attending to my soul now or I don't think it was anything like that. I think it was bad timing. I don't think he had any reason to stop. I think he just didn't have the opportunities that he had had earlier, and he was feeling much less agile. His body strength wasn't what it had been. That put him at risk for getting caught if he had to jump out a window or something

As the years passed, everyone in the Wichita area wondered what happened to BTK. Bob Smyser says that on more than one occasion he was with Raider when that very question was brought up.

Every Sunday, monks in the North Exa this group of guys that we went fishing and did those things. We all got together and talked and BTK came up. Dennis was always really quiet. One of the guys said, you know, BTK must have been pretty smart, you know, and Dennis said, yeah, yeah, he was. He thought, you know, I'm the smartest guy in the room and they're never going to catch me.

It's likely that Raider did think he was the smartest guy in the room because he'd miraculously gotten away with murder over and over again. Police at this point thought BTK had either died or been arrested on other charges, when in reality, Raider was walking through people's yards and collecting items from their homes.

He can't help himself. I guess sometimes my dad could be a dickhead or something growing up, but it's just It's like an iceberg, right, like you're only seeing the very tip of somebody with him, You're not seeing all this stuff underneath.

We're pressing. Those feelings turned Raider into a pressure cooker ready to explode at any moment, and his family usually paid the price when he did. Carrie recalls the time when Rader got violent with her older brother Brian.

In August of ninety six. It was a week before I was to go to Case statu as a freshman. My cousin, Michelle, she was killed in a g vaccinaw on my mom's side of the family. It was a really horrible accident. She was like a sister to me, and I was deeply grieving. All my family was and I come home after my first week of college. My mom had made manichotti for us after working all day and gone to all this trouble. My brother was still living at home in ninety six. For some reason, we

These sorts of violent outbursts were not uncommon, and they were typically directed at Brian. In fact, a similar incident happened again just a few years later.

Maybe around two thousand, two thousand and one. My dad went for my brother again, up against the utility closet in the kitchen where he stored everything. He pushed him against the same thing again with the hands, and after that my brother moved out. My Dad's done it twice, and we're not telling anybody. I don't know what do they tell domestic abuse victims. If they're strangling you, they're escalating and they're going to kill you eventually. There's literature

Then.

I literally had had conversations with my mom. We would read something in the news, and she's like, why are these women staying with these guys? Why are these battered women not leaving? And we talked about it that we would always leave and we wouldn't do that. We were that family. I mean, there's sort of like this whole Midwestern thing, like you don't talk about your problems and you look like you have it together or everybody has problems,

As time went by, Raider became less and less able to control his anger. As much as he tried to be a father at home, he was instead becoming more of a monster, and it only got worse as he got older. Raider's neuroses became more pronounced at home. Growing up, Carrie was made to feel paranoid and confused by her father.

My dad was so ocd, it's so weird. He murdered two children, right, He murdered Josephinotaro and Joey O'taro. In seventy four, he murdered an eleven year old and a nine year old. Yet he became so overly protective, especially if me and my mom. He had dead bolts on our front door and our back door in the kitchen. It was almost like he was protecting us from him. But it's because he knew how bad people could be. He had that keen ability to read bad people. I know to stay clear.

But Carrie knew none of that. To her, this was traumatizing.

When I'm little, he's teaching me these things. You're not supposed to be telling kids about home invasions, right, And he's telling me like, well, the kitchen door isn't that great because the windows too big, and somebody can just punch out the glass and then they can reach in. But if it's dead bolton and the key's not in, then they can't get in. They got a leg jam the door.

More.

He's telling me when I'm little, don't open the door to strangers. Question them, make them show you like they're badger. They're telling you they're a cop or a maintenance man. Check their uniform because he literally used it.

What he calls the roofs.

He has and will break into homes with women home during the day taking care of children and murder these women in front of their children, and yet he is obsessive fleet trying to keep me safe.

Reader would continue to train Carrie as she got older about how to look out for bad guys and to defend herself.

This is mid nineties, around fifteen or sixteen. We're a twin Link shopping mall, not far from where Vicky Wurgily was murdered in eighty six. We're at Seers and he decides at that moment that there is a good time to teach me safety and security in a parking lot. He's physically showing me, Now, if a bad guy rushes you, you can knee him in the ball so you can poke their eyes out, or you can jab him with their elbow. He's literally showing me how to bite him off.

On the surface, there's nothing sinister about a father teaching his daughter self defense. For normal families, this wouldn't raise any red flags, and it didn't for raiders. But his self defense lessons weren't the only obscure clue to raiders dark secrets.

My dad never bowled, but nobody questioned, Like this maroon in my bowling bag that was kept by our door, And of course you never looked at anything of dad's because it wouldn't make your life really uncomfortable and awful.

Boys in there.

It was his hic hit. We camped a lot, so we had tubs with rope and canvas tarps because he would build two shelters when we're camping, and he would store this stuff, so it wasn't unusual to have these things in your house. And you don't go snooping in dad's stuff.

Carrie says it's when she thinks back to her father's hobbies, many of which were likely covers for his murderous activities.

I used to go to the hardware store with my dad when I was the kid. He built this massive treehouse that was one of his projects he threw himself into after gardening. I found out later he would get supplies for his hit kits while he was at the lumber store, probably with me. I used to share cryptograms with my dad. He taught me how to do him. That was another thing I shared with my dad.

As the years passed, Raider's children got fed up with his controlling behavior, they got older, and both eventually moved out, but Carrie says she never forgot about her father's defensive training or the paranoia that came with it.

In two thousand and one, I'm up at k State. I've been in the dorms for five years. I'm ready to have my own apartment. I call my dad. I said, I've I find this little apartment on the corner in Manhattan. It's a one bedroom. I want to live by myself. And I said, the problem is the only door is a patio door. Now I'm upstairs, but the door's pretty flimsy. The lock is really flimsy, and I don't have any way to get out if there's a fire somebody gets

This story really struck me. It sounded odd that Rader would tell his daughter that no one would mess with her on a busy corner when he himself had committed murders in broad daylight on busy streets. In my visits to the victims' homes, I was often shocked by how public the properties were. But yet again, Raider's mind doesn't work like the rest of us. When Carrie and Brian moved out of the house. Dennis invested more time and

I think that for him in the church that it may have been repentance. He was trying to figure it out. I've stood at the front of the church with him when we had communion and it was just him and I in front of Pastor Clark. You know, you say a little and I always had to wait for Dennis. I mean, he was always a little longer at it. Now was that show? I don't know.

Bob says that Dennis always seemed like a loner. They rarely talked about anything important.

Dennis and I were never best friends, but I don't nobody had one. He always felt like he was a little bit guarded. He did help my mother. I had a fire at ninety five out here on West Central in the apartment she was living in id bet Her had a fire. She had bunch smoke, damaged, water damage and called Dennis, and Dennis went out and helped halt her stuff open to my cousin's house.

Bob never imagined that this man had a twisted dark side.

I had not seen that component of Dennis. Yeah, I hadn't seen that component.

Neither did Pastor Michael Clark, who had a close relationship with Dennis. In fact, Clark relied on Dennis for chor around the church.

If when the acolytes hadn't got there and the candles didn't get lift, he always had always turn to Dennis and say Dennis, and Dennis would do that. Their relationship was good, and he was somebody kicked to Bendo.

Looking back, Bob never would have expected that raider was BTK, but he felt that something big was going to happen regarding the mysterious BTK killer.

And soon.

I just got this feelding, I want to know this guy.

In two thousand and four, Bob's premonition would begin to take shape. That year was the thirtieth anniversary of the Otaro killings, the first BTK murder. It's pretty common for news outlets to program anniversary retrospectives for big events. In the case of unsolved murders, where there's been no justice for the victims or their families, there's an added goal of potentially generating new leads, and that's what happened in Wichita.

The Wichita Egle ran an anniversary piece and there was a show on the Otto murders on the thirtieth anniversary that ran in like January two thousand and four, and that's supposedly woke my dad up. He said that he was kind of bored. The kids were grown, we were safe, we were out of the house. He had raised us well. Nobody remembered BTK, and he wanted to terrorize the community again.

On January seventeenth, two thousand and four, the Wichita Eagle newspaper ran an article titled BTK Case Unsolved thirty years later. Here is an excerpt.

It was a routine followed by thousands of wichital women in the late nineteen seventies. Upon arriving home, checked the phone immediately. If the line is dead, get out. What made the case frightenedly different for city residents was the fact that the killer sent several taunting letters about the crimes to local media.

The article, written by reporter Herschelaviana, was a complete retrospective on Btk's many terrible deeds. Dennis saw the article. To him, it was a resume of his many accomplishments. Part of the article features Robert Beatty, who wrote a book about the hunt for BTK. In it, Baty said that he did not think BTK would ever return. Dennis took that as a challenge.

We went on a fishing trip every year the guys do and Dennison never went with us. In two thousand and four we asked him again. Dennis said nah, He said, I can't. I can't come along this year. I got some projects I'm working on.

Eight minutes past now. In decades after a serial killer terrorized Wichita, Kansas cops say the case that was once cold may be warm yet again. In his letters to media organizations, the killer used the initials BTK, standing for bind, torture and kill. They never caught that guy, and twenty five years of silence have followed, and today a Wichita paper says it received another letter claiming responsibility for an eighth victim who was killed in nineteen eighty six.

On March nineteenth, two thousand and four, the Wichita Eagle received a new letter from someone claiming to be BTK.

The newspaper received that letter including photographs of the dead woman's body as well as her driver's license as proof that this was in fact BTK. Now he is also claiming that she is victim number eight. He is not just responsible for killing seven people. Now, the victim number eight is Vicky Wagery. She was strangled back in nineteen eighty six, but her case had never been solved over

That letter was from Bill Thomas Killman, so BTK. It had three polaroids of Vicky Wagery and it had her driver's license. My name is Kevin O'Connor. I was the deputy District attorney in wich Daw Sedgwa County, Kansas during the Dennis Raider investigation. The experts on that say that

Before now, authorities had no idea that Vicky Weggerley was connected to BTK. In exchange for his name in the paper, Raider was willing to give up his trophies. He wanted to start up a new cap'n Mouse game, so along with the polaroids and driver's license, he sent along a cipher.

I had kept photos of missus Weggerley in my dark green box in my Heidi hole in the false bottom drawer of the cabinet. The code I placed on top was a German fractional. Very simple. You line up the alphabet in columns and put your code word in the first line. It was a message to the author lit beads for his book.

After years of hiding, BTK was back. Rayder loved the attention he was getting in the news, and he wanted more. He felt it was time to re emerge and claim his credit.

With thirty years of material and growing older each year, I knew I needed to get it out of the house. I had for many years wanted to take my secret murders, clippings, drawings, and stories and put them in a book or story format. My BTK years as a young serial killer were done.

The Eagle ran its story on btk's return on March twenty fifth, two thousand and four. Here is an excerpt.

A serial killer who terrorized Wichita during the nineteen seventies by committing a series of seven murders has claimed responsibility for an eighth slave and is now probably living in Wichita, police said Wednesday. The photographs appear to be authentic, said Lieutenant Ken Landware. I'm one hundred percent sure it's BTK.

Of course. At KKTV we also reported on this letter sent to the Eagle this morning.

We have more information on the letter sent to the Wichita Eagle by the BTK killer. Even thirty years after btk's first known murders, investigators are still working the case.

Now.

Police believe BTK is alive and living in Wichita. Btk's trademark writing letters to the paper and KKTV detailing his murders and taunting police.

The last known letter.

Linked to BTK was received in nineteen seventy nine.

What we didn't anticipate was that very soon we'd be roped into it ourselves again. Less than two months later, on May fourth, two thousand and four, another letter appeared, this time at k TV and in an envelope from a Thomas B. Kingman.

It read the BTK story One, A serial Killer is Born, two Dawn three, Fetish four, Fantasy World five, The Search Begins, six, Btk's Haunts, seven PJS, eight, mo id Ruse, nine Hits, ten, Treasured Memories, eleven, Final Curtain Call, twelve, Dusk thirteen Will there be More?

This was an outline for a thirteen chapter book about BTK, told by him and him alone. The letter also included a word puzzle, a blacked out ID card, and a special office first badge for Rader. Sending the letter to KKE was an obvious choice.

KKE TV was my favorite media spot for me. They seemed to cover the BTK case very well.

It's a very odd feeling to go to work every day and know that you have to feed the national media, you have to feed the local media.

This is Larry Hadiberg, my dear friend and former colleague at CAKE. Larry and I would lead every single newscast with the latest information on BTK. We felt like it was our responsibility to tell people everything we could about BTK.

This was an odd time in my journalism history. Susan and I were in it together and Jeff and several of the other reporters who worked very hard on this, and we had to cover each other's But because we didn't know where it was going, we didn't know how it was going to end.

Deep down, everyone at CAKE was scared. It was a time when we had to look out for each other. We had no idea if BTK would one day just walk through the station doors.

One night when we were walking out of CAKE, it was quarter eleven or so, and we get just past the concrete stepping into the thing, and a bicyclist is down at the end of our driveway and he comes at us seemed like one hundred miles an hour, and I thought we're in trouble. I didn't know who that guy was, and he's coming at us one hundred miles an hour on that bicycle pulls up in front of us, and I thought we're going to shot stab something, and he was just a viewer.

Fear was a dominant emotion for us all the line will there be More at the end of Btk's letter, in particular, would haunt everyone at k TV and across Wichita.

I would go to the.

Grocery store and BTK was all that people would talk about. Enrollment and self defense classes went way up, and people started locking their doors again. We all reverted back to the habits of the seventies. After over twenty years of peace, Wichita was once again in a panic. Here's Bob Smeiser.

When that first letter came out, some of our neighbors, some of the kids were just petrified. A lot of people didn't know about the seventies. There's a lot of younger people just didn't know. I think that most people thought he was dead. To be real honest with.

You, the day after we received btk's letter at Cake News, the police went on air to ask for tip.

Based on the information contained in this letter. We're again asking for help from the public. We want to talk to any citizen who he calls a man seeking access to their resident by presenting identification as the employee of a school or a utility company.

Kevin O'Connor says it became an all hands on deck effort to find BTK. Everyone from local police, to state police to federal authorities were called in. O'Connor was one of them.

It was very strange and difficult time for my family. I couldn't tell my wife. I mean it was news, there was reporting on it now. But my particular role is I couldn't tell anybody, so I might be having dinner or something and get a call and go, I gotta go. We had Witchtop Police, we had the Sheriff's apartment, we had FBI personnel, we had Kansas Bureau Investigation that helped out. We even had law enforcement from the United

None of us knew how long this would go on. As it turns out, this was just the beginning.

This was my fantasy. The cat and mouse game gave me an adrenaline rush or a high. It also set a stage for the police to know that a serious minotaur was in their midst. I've spotted a female that I think lives alone. Just got to work out the details. I'm back.

Next time on Monster BTK.

This is the strongest warning and yet police have issued for widgetants to watch out and take extra precautions after a letter was found at the widgeta public library early Saturday morning.

They opened it up and it was a doll purported to be Nancy Fox and a description of the Nancy Fox murder.

We had one instance in which a news director started to withhold one of the postcards and try to trade it for an interview with the police chief.

They got a subpoena and they got a warrant without my knowledge, and they went to case date.

And so the plans were made, search warrants were drawn in advance, and then that was the time to make an arrest.

Monster BTK is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts. The show is written by Noames Griffin, Trevor Young, and Jesse Funk 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