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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, the Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky. Good evening to all appearances. Dennis Raider was a model citizen in the small town of Park City, Kansas. The self named BTK for Bind
Torture Kill, had terrorized Wichita for thirty one years. In nineteen seventy four, b t K committed his first murders, torturing and strangling four members of the Ortero family, and wrote the police on audacious letter declaring his responsibility for the Ortero's deaths and labeling himself b t K. Thus he established a patron stalking and killing a series of ten victims, then bragging and claiming ownership of his crimes that ended in nineteen ninety one, until that is, he
resurfaced in two thousand four with another string of letters
that would finally lead to his arrest. Drawing from extensive interviews with Raider's pastor, congregation, detectives, and psychologists who worked the case, and from his unnervingly detailed thirty two hour confession, best selling author Stephen Singular delves into the disturbing life and crimes of b t K to explore fully for the first time the most dangerous and complex serial killer of our generation and the men and the man who embodied.
At once astonishing extremes of normality and abnormality. In Unholy Messenger, Singular recounts the year prior to Raider's arrest in which the BTK killer re emerged and the aftermath. The result is a chilling story of a man considered a spiritual leader by his pastor and congregation who turned out to be the devil next door. The book they were featuring this evening is Unholy Messenger, The Life and Crimes of the bt K Serial Killer, with my special guest investigative
journalists and authors, Joyce and Stephen Singular. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for a greenness interview. Joyce and Stephen Singular, thanks.
For having us. Dan appreciate it.
Thank you very much for joining us on this incredible story, a credible book on Holy Messenger. Now, Steven, i'll start off right now with first with you that what happened in two thousand and five, specifically that puts you on course to write on Holy Messenger.
Well, Raider was arrested in late February of two thousand and five, and I was sort of aware of it, but wasn't paying that much attention to it. I grew up in eastern Kansas in a very small town similar to Raiders, so I sort of had that connection. And I had gone with Joyce and our son to my small hometown when school got out. We did this every year and we visited my parents, and my son and I were going down to this gym to shoot some
baskets for basketball. He was really into basketball at that time. And we were down there and my old basketball coach was there and we started talking. He said, you've got to write about this BTK case. And I said, well, lot of other people writing about it, you know, it's been covered. He said, no, I'm serious, and he took out a cell phone. He said, you've got to talk to my son in law Dan, and he dialed the number and he just handed me the phone. I said,
who's Dan. He said, well, he was on the task force that investigated BTK for a year and he was one of the people who arrested him on February twenty fifth, two thousand and five. And I thought, well, you know, maybe he's worth talking to. Handed me the phone, and the next day I drove to Wichita and I met with him with the detective, and I also had an appointment with Pastor Michael Clark. And both of these people,
the first one really isn't named in the book. That was sort of a back alla on background information, but Pastor Clark was the pastor in the Lutheran church where Dennis Raider was the president of the congregation. So when all of this happened, he was not only totally dumbfounded and startled that the guy he was working beside all the time was the BTK serial killer, but it sent him on this spiritual journey of his own, and I kind of wanted to have some light in the book.
I mean, obviously it's a very dark subject, but sort of chronicling Pastor Clark's life alongside Dennis Raiders, showing one guy who went really really bad, one guy another guy who had a very tough life in some ways, but sort of went through it, came out much better for it, and then went on this spiritual journey. After learning about BTK, I thought it added a dimension to the book that the book needed, and it added some fumor and some life and lightly. So that was really the starting point
for getting involved in the case. Knowing somebody who was on that task force gave me a lot of background information that filtered into the book.
Certainly. You opened the book with January seventeenth, two thousand and four, with the Wichita Eagle. Now what is published. You talk about the article that's published, and you talk about how old Raider is and the effect on him reading that article. Tell us what that article basically conveyed and expressed and what was Dennis Rader thinking at that time once he read that article.
Well, Dennis Rader had a lot of artistic bent and was very repressed in that regard. He was interested in photography and writing and drawing, and when he saw that this anniversary of the BTK murders, this cold case is coming out, he took offense because he heard that someone else was going to be writing a book about it, and he really wanted to write his own book about it,
his BTK Productions. You know, he had chapters outlined, and he really got quite angry about that, and that's what prompted him to start sending mementos of I believe it was Vicky Weggerly Steve, Is that correct?
That's crust to the Eagle, right, Yeah, he sent in he had taken her driver's license. He usually took something from a crime scene, but he took her driver's license and so he photo copied it, and he also had pictures of her during the crime. And so when he sent it in to the Witchita Eagle, they knew that this had to be the killer. No one else could have had these things, so that, you know, it motivated him to come out of hiding. Basically, since nineteen ninety one,
he hadn't really done much of anything. That's as far as we know. There are people who think he might have kept killing, but as far as we know, for those thirteen years, he was doing and he just thought, I'm going to show them one more time, you know that I'm alive, and that I'm active, And he really.
Took great pride in his quote unquote work. He didn't want anybody else taking credit for He was a very highly detailed, highly organized person in both his daily life, his home life, and in his murdering m o. So he wanted to get the credit for that.
You know.
He in one of his missives to the police, you know, he said, I think it was to the Eagle, he said, you know, what is it going to take to get the media to get some national attention about my crimes?
Right? And you had then alluded earlier to the Oto murders. The first crimes he committed were the killing of the four people in this family, the Oteos, and he had set off a huge investigation that got no near him. But six months went by, ers six or about eight or nine months went by, he killed somebody else in the interim, and then he someone came out and took credit or was trying to take credit for the Otero murders,
someone who was mentally disturbed, basically. So he wrote this very extensive letter, as Joy said, he was very detailed to and put it in the library, and the Eagle went over and got it, and he gave an absolute minute description of the murders and where the bodies were and how they were laid out to prove, you know, to everyone that he was actually the BTK killer.
And also by the time you know, that article came out in the Wichita Eagle about the anniversary, his two kids had grown and were out of the house. He was kind of he was just working as a compliance officer, sort of, you know, measuring people's to make sure they hadn't gone over the limit, measuring it with a ruler in some cases, you know, to make sure. That's how
detailed he was. And so he was sort of bored I think at that juncture of his life, and he thought he would stir in his own words, he wanted to stir up the hornet's nest again.
Right.
He had kind of a peculiar attachment to law enforcement. I mean, in a very low level. I guess you could say he was sort of an enforcement officer, but he liked this idea of communicating with the police and having some connection to them, and it's a very important part of his story, especially in that last year leading up to his arrest.
Now you talk about this twenty five years BTK is back and the Wichita Police Department is ready to make its first pronouncement in twenty five years. Who is the face and the voice of the new investigation and tell us what his approach is in terms when making these public pronouncements and press conferences or press releases. What's the new approach?
Once that raider BTK had sent in that driver's license Vicky Wegerly, and they knew, and it went from the paper to the police department, and they knew that he was alive and out there and active. They had to put together a strategy, a task force, and they and the person to lead it was Lieutenant ken Land, where this sort of soft spoken, mild mannered, you know, gray haired guy who had a just a sort of a
calming presence about him. So when he came forward to make the announcement in March of two thousand and four, about three weeks after or a few days after Raider had sent in that that letter, they and the idea from the very beginning was that he wouldn't lendwear wouldn't just talking to the general public when he had a press conference, but that he would be speaking very directly
to the killer. He thought, if I can get this guy to pay attention to what I'm doing, if I can get him to feel a little bit connected to me. It was very soft. It wasn't threatening or anything like that. It was a very intelligent strategy because they knew that what BTK craved was some sort of attention and some sort of connection, and so he began basically speaking to him. I'd really be interested in talking with this the person
and finding out who he is. And it spurred Raider on to keep communicating with him, to keep sending in these letters and these mementos of his crimes, and that's that's really what led to his downfall.
Joyce. Let's talk about as you do in the book. You write about in the book about that he was born in nineteen forty five, Dennis Raider in Pittsburgh, Kansas, and he was back tis Lutheran, and we should talk about that Lutheran upbringing for all people that don't know, as you point out the differences in the Lutheran religion and Catholicism, and his mother Dorothea and his father William, what was his upbringing like in and what were some of the things that characterized that early childhood.
Well, all start out with that. He was the oldest of four brothers. He considered himself to be sort of the white sheep of the family, kind of prided himself on doing everything, you know, by the book, by the rules.
But he had.
He had this penchant at an early age, as many serial killers do, to start experimenting with killing animals, you know, birds and cats and dogs and finding secretive places to take them to. He particularly liked barns because, you know, they did live in a rural area and you could easily get to a barn, would know one around, and he could he could, you know, watch the life being
sucked out of these young, these these small creatures. And then he went to high school, where I believe he met Oh no, let me backtrack.
A little bit.
He started reading and getting a hold of his father's true detective magazines, and for people don't know what those were like around in the fifties in the early sixties, they were these sort of sensationalistic magazines with a woman with terror in her eyes, sort of looking off in the distance at some you know, shadowy figure, and he claims that those magazines aroused him. He also claimed that
being spanked by his mother he found arousing. But I always want I always have to take that with a grain of salt because a lot of the times, I mean, it's been proven that not everything that Dennis Raider said was the was the truth. So we always kind of, you know, ask was he really telling the truth about that or was he just trying to rationalize why he started developing this dark side. Then he went to high
school and he met his wife, Poladips. She was a couple of years younger than him, but also a little before that he began began to be a peeping tom.
Right, Yeah, And he had this this combination of sort of you know, being in this very conservative place again, a kind of town that I grew up in, about a thousand people in Kansas, and yet having this artistic bent that Jewish referred to earlier, where he liked to draw, he liked to try to write and do things like that not very necessarily very acceptable in the environment that he grew up in.
I'm sorry, Stee. And he also did follow in his father's footstep and went into the army.
So he had this sort of the drawings he made also, by the way, were he would draw lines over women's bodies as if they were bound up or mummies or something of that nature. But you know, sometimes, and I know for myself, you know, growing up in that kind of environment, if you sort of have an artistic bent, you have to sort of get out of that to pursue it. But he did the opposite. He followed exactly in his father's footsteps. He was in that church, he
graduated from high school, he went into the army. He kept thinking, you know, if I just sort of go down the straight and narrow path, these ideas I have, these thoughts, these impulses, these dark urges might leave me alone and go away. The army didn't help. Got married, you know, that didn't help, and by then he'd sort of graduated into stalking women.
He also claimed that while he was in the army and in Asia, in Japan, in other places, that he learned more about, you know, sexuality.
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I on her? Then in late seventy three, he lost his job and he was sort of at loose ends.
With a lot of time on his hands and feeling sort of ineffectual. I think too. Yeah, so what he mentioned to the.
Police later, right, So he began to establish this ritual, which he named everything. Uh, he would give it, you know, as Joyce said the BTK production so with trolling, and trolling would be you know, going up and down the streets looking for maybe a single target that would evolve into stocking.
And he started naming his projects.
Yeah, and then that would evolve into you know, what's the person's schedule, When did they come and go or are they always alone? How much resistance might Julia Otero, for example, put up And he noticed that she would the older kids would go to school, but she would come back home with her young daughter, Josie. So he settled in on this target, and he named the project Little mex He.
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So in his mind, finally, when he's actually ready to commit a big crime for the first time, he's going to go to the Otero house. The mother and the daughter will be there. He thinks he can fairly easily subdue them and then carry out what had really become an overwhelming fantasy to him, which was basically to bind them up, to torture them, and then ultimately to kill them.
That was the plan. So when he arrived on the morning of January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, thinking everything was set, he went into their garage and hid there, and he said, he soon realized that there was a dog, a fairly large dog in the house, and this wasn't something he was counting on. But he waited. He was sweating so hard that he swept through the gloves that were on his hands, and he waited until this little boy came out the back door, which.
Was their son, Yeah, Joey, he was nine years old.
Yeah, and he thought, you know, that's not part of the plan either, but he just decided to go into the house. So in all the history of crime, I mean, this is one of the most interesting situations you could sort of imagine. The family had all been trained in martial arts. The father had been in the military. The other three actually were being trained in martial arts, so they knew sort of how to handle themselves, even though the kids were young.
But do you have to remember at that time and in that place in America, people didn't know a lot about serial killers. It wasn't as you know, widely known as it is now. People didn't lock their doors. So when he got access to their house, he you know, he showed him a gun, pulled out a gun and
said that he was a fugitive from California. He just wanted to tie them up, you know, I think he had a loaded twenty two caliber pistol pistol, and they complied, you know, the father, everyone, and they just he just said, I just watch your car. So they allowed him to tie them up. Now today people would probably not allow that, well if.
There were four people present, two adults, but they did. They complied, and he just proceeded to strangle the father first and then and then the mother, and then he went to the boy and then he.
Ripped it off and he had to go back back, and you know, he had to do the same thing with the son. It was not any process, and he had to learn from his mistakes, as many serial killers do.
So to sort of get the dichotomy of his this needed to be stronger. So when he would go home to his house in Park City above Wichita, sat on the couch with his wife and watch television, he would squeeze these rubber balls to make his hand stronger for the next kill. And that's kind of says a lot about his life. And he would also hide souvenirs or other things about the crimes in this house. This house was nine hundred square feet, that's quite small if you
can envision that. And he's living with this woman and he's hiding souvenirs and written material about his serial killing. And she has absolutely no clue.
But the family was in some ways. They were and they do whatever he said because he could be very angry. He had a temper, and they knew that his private spots were off limits. He just didn't go into dad's closet or into dad's boxes.
Right. This set off the Terramers set up one of the largest investigations ever in that area. They set up roadblocks to stop people and interview them. They interrogated a thousand people, They alerted five hundred other police surrounding police departments and looked everywhere. It was just a massive investigation, but they were looking in what you taught proper, not where Raider was living. Oh they also swabbed a lot
of people for DNA, and that didn't go anywhere. Because Joseph Otero had been stationed in Panama and they were from Puerto Rico. They looked down there. They did a very extensive investigation and came up with absolutely nothing. However, through the process of masturbation, Rader did leave behind DNA, and as we all know, DNA can be preserved, and that piece of evidence preserved would be very critical in the coming years and decades.
You talk about this endeavor from law enforcement unprecedented. But less than ninety days later, you write, Catherine Bright and her brother Kevin is visiting from nearby town and Raider had been watching her when driving past her house.
Right, he was driving past her home on his way to lunch with his wife Paula in the car, began seeing her and he named that one lights out project. And this time he didn't cut the phone lines because
he wanted to trick the police. You know, he had been studying other serial killers throughout the years, HH Holmes, who was you know, one of the first known American serial killers in the late eighteen hundreds, Jack the Ripper of course in England late eighteen hundreds, Harvey Glatman in the late nineteen fifties who also liked to tie up women, the Boston Strangler in the early sixties, and then Ted
Bundy in the seventies. So he was learning from other serial killers, and he didn't he wanted to try to play this cat and mouse game with the Katherine Bright murder so that you know, the police wouldn't necessarily know that it was the same killer.
Right, so again he has this master plan, stalking, trolling, stocking, name it. You figure out a way to get in the house by breaking in, and he's got it all laid out, but he doesn't factor in that she's going to come home with her brother. So she does with Kevin and Kevin and he ties up Catherine and then they get in Kevin and get into a huge fight. Kevin gets his gun and sticks it into Raider's stomach and pulls the trigger and for some reason, it doesn't fire.
I mean, if that gun had fired, we wouldn't be talking about this today. But it misfires. Raider shoots him in the face and he eventually sort of staggers out of the apartment.
Raider thought he was dead at that point, but then he goes into the other room to start killing Catherine, and Kevin, you know, manages to get out of the.
House to go get help, but he'd been shot. So later on, even though Rader was not in disguise or anything, his testimony was not considered very valid. But Rader goes back to Catherine and this time uses a knife and stabs her multiple times and she will soon die. So he was consciously trying to make it a different crime from the otaros.
And it's interesting that, you know, he mangled this and so badly, he wasn't proud of it like he would be of the others, and he didn't appear to keep any mementos from that one. He wanted him to be meet organized, just like he was.
There would be this kind of myth build up around him as time went on, and as he named himself, btk that he was somehow this master criminal, this very sophisticated, slick person. The opposite was true, as you can see from these crimes. Nothing went the way he planned it, but it did end up with five victims, five dead victims. So these two sets of crimes are basically what prompted him then in October of seventy four to write this letter and to start to take credit or want the credit,
or to demand the credit for committing these crimes. It's one of the most striking things about him that he he was just craving some sort of recognition, and yet he didn't obviously want people to know his identity.
You write about the letter that he sends them about buying them, torture them, kill them. But the Wichita police department felt that they shouldn't publicize that letter. Why was that? What was that decision? How'd they come to that?
Well, they didn't want to alarm the public, right Steve, I mean, and instead didn't they put an ad in the paper saying b K Help is available, call this number before ten pm. They just didn't want the public to panic.
Yet.
I think it goes back, maybe a little bit to what Joyce was saying that as a culture, we didn't have that much experience with serial killing at that point, or at least we didn't know about it. And you have to remember that the Behavioral Science unit of the
FBI and Quantico was just about to get started. I mean that came about in the seventies when these crimes were being committed, So it wasn't a science yet, and they made a judgment call and it turned out, you know, not to be the right call, because in seventy seven, as time went on, he decided to, as he would put it, set another kill. And he just was walking up and down the street. Is a Wichita He had a tweed code.
Oh. He sort of like James Bond. He kind of envisioned himself as now like a James Bond type of character.
And he goes to this house where he thinks he's picked out some victims, but nobody's home. So he sees this little boy walking down the street and talks to him a little bit and then just follows him. It's totally random. Back to his house where there's a woman named Shirley Vian and she has three young kids, and he just sort of barges in with his gun again and says, I just want to tie you up to the mother and you know, have sex and I'll leave.
And she said, but I'm sick, and he said, well I know, but this is how it's going to be. So, you know, he put the kids in the bathroom and locked them in while he tied him up, and while he tied the mother up and starts strangling her. But one of the sons I believe his name is Steve Wright. Steve he saw what Raider was joined to his mother and it affected him deeply, of course, you know, for the rest of his life.
So he just goes in kills this is the sixth victim, and then goes back to his house. He is about he's either now or about to be working for a d T, which, for those who don't know, is a security company, which is pretty ironic in itself. But if you're working then that field, you know how to get into people's houses, or set up security systems or dismantled
security systems, or do all of those things. So he's leading this perfectly normal life in this small town north of Wichita, steadfast Church member, good father by most accounts, I think, and.
By now his first son, Brian, was old enough to be involved in the Cub Scouts, and so he became a troop leader and got him and he got a son involved in the Cub Scouts, and he taught them his special skill, which was not time right.
So he's leading two entirely separate lives at this point, and he does. Then he sends in another communication about killing Shirley Vann and it gets lost for a while and eventually makes its way to the authorities and to one of the television stations there, and by now he's really angry because they're not giving him any attention. He said, I've put seven people in the ground and you're not even paying attention to me. How many do I have
to kill to get a little recognition around here. I mean, it's an extraordinary isn't that way?
He actually named himself to BTK.
Yeah. So, now three years later and these victims later, the authorities decide that now we need to publicize this. This strategy isn't working, so we will tell Wichitah that there is a serial killer among us. And it set off a lot of panic.
And people were buying guns and getting installing home security systems and you can imagine, you know, the terror in that town at that time.
Yeah, and then at the end of seventy seven, he stalks this other woman that he sees in a mall.
She worked at a jewelry store, right, and.
Her name is Nancy Fox. He strolled, he stocked. He called this project foxtail, and he broke into her home one evening and he would like to he would sit in the closet. He did this several times and wait for women to come home. And when she came home, he sort of came bursting out of the closet told her again the same thing. I just want to tie you up have sex.
And she tried to stall for time. She said, well, I need to have a cigarette. So he let her have a cigarette and sit in the kitchen and she kind of gave him some pushback, but he told her that he had cut her phone lines and he just wanted to tie her up and have sex and take pictures. And so then he handcuffed her, but before he killed her, and this is where I think, this is where the torture part comes in. He told the police later that he whispered to her right before he died. She died
that he was a serial killer known as BTK. He also took jewelry and a keychain and mementos.
From her, and he also left behind more seamen. So this is the second collection that the police will make of his DNA, which becomes important.
And then he also was strangely enough, as he's leaving that scene of the crime, he goes to a phone booth and calls the police and says, you have a homicide at eight forty three South Pershing Street, Nancy Fox.
So now they have his voice, you know, recorded, And the person who came out, he didn't hang up the phone, he just dropped it. The operators were still on nine one one and all of that dispatcher and the guy who comes out is the head of the fire department in Wichard. Tony picks up the phone and he starts talking to them, and he said, I sort of was able to make this guy, as you know, Caucasian, about five foot ten to six foot, light colored hair, worked in a had a van that had some writing on it,
which was probably a DT. So they sort of get a sense of who he is, but the investigation doesn't go anywhere.
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We're not necessarily dad where everybody lost the terms of conditions eighteen plus So this.
Is nineteen seventy seven, and in seventy eight he writes in this angry letter, and then there's sort of a pause in his criminal activities as far as we know, because and it's possible because he was raising his kids then and busy with other things. It's possible that they did start to give him his attention at that time and that sort of backed him off. But the next crime will be truly spectacular, you know, even for him.
There are now seven victims in nineteen eighty five. All of the victims had been in Wichita, the Wichita proper. So again he lives in this small town north of Wichita, and now he picks out a victim in his small town.
But right before that, if I could just backtrack a bit, it's kind of an interesting detail because in January of nineteen seventy eight, his wife found some lines from a bizarre poem that Raider had written, and she asked him what is this And he had to quickly make up this story that they had been studying BTK at Wichita State because he was I think he was taking class is at that point in criminal administration something, some sort
of criminology class, and she believed him. So in January of January thirty, first he mailed some index cards inside an envelope to the Wichita Eagle, parrotying this old nursery rhyme called curly locks curly locks, will that be Mine? But instead it read Shirley Lock, Shirley locks, Wilt that be Mine? A reference to the nineteen seventy seven murder of Shirley Vyan. The Eagle employees turned it over to the police, and again the media and the police department
didn't respond to it. And then that's when he wrote an angry letter in February to k tv KA k E television in Wichita, included with another poem o death to Nancy with a drawing of her on a bed tied up. So he said, you know how many how many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper, some national attention.
Right, And again it's just ongoing theme of needing to reach out and communicate with either the meteor law enforcement and to get some feedback from them and some credibility as a serial killer. So in nineteen eighty five he picks out a woman living not far from him in Park City, and he goes her home, breaks in again hides she had brought home a male visitor, but he ultimately left. Then he ties up. Her name is Marine Head.
She ties her up and he kills her, and he puts her in the trunk of I believe it's her car, and he drives her to his church. She's dead. He takes her out of the trunk, he goes into the church. He puts her in the basement.
Well before Steve earlier, he had actually gone to the church basement and taped the windows with black you know, sheeting and duct tape, so that when he was joined this work of his, any passing cars wouldn't see the light filtering out of the church basement.
And the one detail we left out of that is that he was this He was on a weekend camping cub Scout trip, camping with his son, and he slipped away from the cub Scout event to go do all of these things. So again the dichotomy of his life. He takes Marine Hedge into the basement and spends hours photographing her in bondage positions, the sort of the S and M type of things. And I mean, this is about as sacrilegious as you could get.
So he took a ring off her finger and then he dumps body and a drainage ditch, and then he returns to the cub Scouts, but he remembered that he had left a piece of cord, so he had to go back and pick up the chord and then returned.
But again it's this very peculiar mixture of killing and then making some sort of artistic statement about it. It goes right back to when he was a boy and was looking at those pictures in True Detective and then making drawings of women. But now he's got actual, you know, physical bodies that he has killed, and he's doing something similar now. So he he kills Marine Hedge. No connection is made with BTK at all. That investigation is cooled
down over the last seven or eight years. The following year, he again picks out a victim that we alluded to earlier, Vicki wagerly Jack piano he killed. She plays the piano. He had walked by her house numerous I'm stalking and hearing her play the piano. So in September of eighty six he goes into their house. She has a two year old son who's there with her, and again tells his story.
Well, this time he had a fake Southwest Belle hardhat On and a fake ID, and he said he needed to check her phone line because they had some sort of static problem. So she, you know, she lets him into their home. She pulls out a gun and he says, let's go to the bedrooms. And she's saying, well, what about my son. My husband's going to be home soon.
But he tied her up, and now this worried him, of course, because again there's this unknown factor of a male going to be involved, so he had to hurry up, strangle her, take pictures of her. But what's interesting is that when her husband came home, her body was wedged in between the bed and the wall, and he didn't see her, and he just saw that the sun was there alone. So for many years, the husband was under the umbrella of suspicion, right right.
He was the primary suspect, and the key picked out another victim, Delores Davis, who lived nearby Park City, and again he used a cub Scout or a boy Scout event to go to and he slipped away in the middle of the night, but this.
Time he actually threw a cinder block through her back sliding glass door. She awoke, startled, and see now at
this point in his life, he's getting older. He realizes he has to pick ups that are older than him that can't fight back, as you know, and Catherine Bright, these women were fifteen sixteen years older than him, and they were easier to strangle and like And when he killed her, she was dead within three minutes, as opposed to the length of time that it took to kill the o'tarrell's when he first started.
Right, So he again put her in a car and took her out into the countryside, and he was going to do some things with her, photography or other things. But he left her in the on the ground and it would come back at a later time.
With her.
So by the time he got back there, this is a gross tesque detail. But you know, animals are predators, especially in the dead of winter and the dead of winter, and you know, they had attacked her and she no longer you know, looked the way he wanted her to look when he got back there. But again, no one was looking in this part of Kansas around Park City
or making a connection to the BTK case. So in the early nineties, that period there that we've just covered from about seventy four to ninety one, Kansas did not have the death penalty. Raider played close attention to these things, and then Kansas reinstated the death penalty, which he obviously did not want any part of. So we we think that he stopped killing at that time. That's the general consensus.
He traveled around Kansas a lot. He said he never stopped stalking women, but we don't know of any other merder.
But I think during his time is when he was taking photographs of himself that are actually quite disturbing and quite startling. He would dress up, he would put this this mask on himself and put a blonde wig, and he would, you know'd string himself up in his parents' basement or up in a tree out in the countryside, hanging upside down, putting himself like in a grave with a you know, with that disguise on. And I think that's sort of how he was, you know, carrying on
what he wanted to do without killing. He was it's just fantasy, and he was getting older. He lived an incredible fantasy life, this person, and.
He was making himself the victims in each case. I mean, he's hung up in his parents' basement just like when he killed the Otero girl. I mean, it's a very similar type of visual thing now, but he's doing it to himself. He would dig a grave out in the countryside, become nude, wrap himself in plastic, set up a camera twenty feet away with remote control, take pictures of himself
as if he were dead in the grave. Again, this incredibly entangled mixture sort of you know, sensuality or sexuality and death, and he would swing in these trees with this elaborate system he'd set up naked swinging from limb to limb, utterly disturbing and bizarre images that would later
come out. So from ninety one until two thousand and then four, when the Ego prints that article in January two thousand and four, it's the thirtieth anniversary of their terror murders, and the general speculation in there is it will Btk's probably dead or moved away or one of those things, And of course as he reads it, he goes, well, none of that's true, and I need to tell my story for myself. And that's where the narrative really picks up. Over the next year.
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Honey dot com slash murder. Now we were talking about January two thousand and five, and he makes a mistake, Dennis Rader makes a mistake, and when he drops off his latest package at home depot, tell us what happens at that time and what is his response and what is the police response.
Well, first of all, he started sending in these communications in the spring of two thousand and four after he decides to come out of hiding and communicate with the police, and there from time to time having a press conference. And again said earlier, Lieutenant Lander, who's in charge of the investigation, is sort of speaking to him him. His strategy is working. He's connecting with with Rader on sort
of subtle levels. Raider continues to communicate with them, and then to go to January of two thousand and five, he makes two mistakes, actually, and he goes down on a very snowy night and he goes to the parking lot of home depots.
But he's writing in his son's pickup, not his but yeah.
But he so there are cameras, you know, security cameras that are in many of these places, and for the first time ever, they they get a shot of the truck. Uh, And then they get sort of an image of him because he takes a communication.
He put a serial box. He thought that was real, you know, funny, you know, serial killer serial box and he and he puts it in the bed of another truck with the words BTK and bomb you know. So, but it's one of his first misakes. And this and number seven of those communicates, he describes his home as his lair with three stories in an elevator, and it had a bondage room and it was booby trapped in
case the police came in. So again there's this self aggrandizement of who he is as opposed to who he wants to be, as opposed to who he really is living in this nine hundred square foot wood frame home.
Right, And to show that Lieutenant land Wher's strategy is working. They're they're sort of communicating back and forth. Raider BTK goes so far as to ask the lieutenant or the police, if I were to use a diskett, a computer diskette to communicate with you, it wouldn't, you know, have any other information on it that might reveal So yeah, he said it couldn't be traced.
To a computer, be honest.
Those are his words. Beyond So he's actually asking the police to tell him that truth when they spent the last three decades trying to catch him. So they write back, you know, don't you know, don't worry about it, no problem, And so eventually he leaves these packages and this diskette reaches the police department. They are assuming again that this is a very sophisticated killer, very intelligent, probably about the
computer world. And as they get the diskette and are about to do a search, they think, you know, this could take forever, maybe it's encrypted, buried whatever, this could take a long time. They put it in and ten minutes later they hit the properties thing on your computer and it comes up Dennis Lutheran Church essentially in part outside of part Christ Christ Lutheran. So within ten minutes they know that somehow this Diskett is connected to christ
Luthor in church and somebody named Dennis. And within ten more minutes they figure out that the president of the congregation is Dennis Raider, and they think we've got him. But it's not quite that simple. So they they they now they have to come up with a with a
DNA match from him. He also left semen at the Weggerly nineteen eighty six crime scenes, so there are three preserved samples of DNA in his semen that they now have, and now they're trying to figure out, without alerting him that they're onto him, how did they get that sample. So they kick it around for you know, a week.
Or so, and they decide that he well no, remember one of them said, well maybe because now by now they knew where his grown children were and where his wife worked and everything about him. And they're kind of detectives. They're joking around, well, g you know, how are we going to get the DNA from his daughter?
You know, do I have to do?
Does one of us has to pose as like a potential suitor or something and go up to Michigan where she lives, and you know, get something that way. But then they come up with getting her her DNA from a gynecological test from like a papsmerror that she had done when she was at the University of Wichita.
Or was it Wichita State Kansas State University, which is an hour two away.
So they didn't they get a you know, to do that.
They get a search warrant essentially, and they get the sample of hers and they conclude from after studying it that we we don't know if if Dennis Raider is BTK, but we know that this woman's father is BTK, and and that's that's good enough for them essentially, and they decide the very next day after they get the test results to move in on him. So it's Friday, It's it's February twenty fifth, two thousand and five. He gets up, he goes to work as he does every day.
And he wants his lunch. He wants his wife to have his lunch ready for him every day at twelve seventeen. He'll get there at twelve fifteen, and he wants the lunch ready by twelve seventeen. And so they're following him now.
They're tracking his every movement.
And just like he tracked all of his victims.
He goes to work. He has a truck. He has a shotgun in his truck. He's also carrying a knife, probably as part of his job. He's fiddling with the radio, the police scanner radio, and he hears it something about the FBI is in the area and might be doing something. But you know, he kind of shrugs it off.
Like, well, well, and it's too late to run now where it's god.
To go, right, So he does his morning rounds. He always leaves the offs at twelve fifteen for his lunch at twelve seventeen, and as he gets about halfway home, the police cruisers pull in, pull in in and around him, tell him to get out, you know, tell him to get on the ground, Say do you have any weapons. He gives them his knife, and you know, they take him. There's another police car there and it's Lieutenant Land where is sitting in the back seat. Now, this is thirty
one years after the savage murders of the Terras. He's not only terrorized Wichita when they named him as a serial killer in the late seventies, but when Land we're announced in March at two thousand and four of the BTK serial killer is back. He terrorized the city all over again. They swabbed forty five hundred people to try and find a DNA match and they couldn't. They set off another and huge investigation. So they take radio over.
They put him in the backseat with Lieutenant Land where they both say to each other and Land versus, do you know why we're here? And Raider says, I think I have a pretty good idea. So they they've decided to interrogate him in the most the biggest and most impressive looking building in Wichita, which is where the FBI is located, and they sort of sneak him in there before the media gets wind of this of what's going on,
and they they sit down. There's a special FBI agent, Bob Morton, and there's Lieutenant Land where and for three and a half hours they sort of dance around things. Not too much comes out, and then they pull out the diskette, the thing that he had sent them, and they place it in front of him and he sort of looks at the diskett looks at them and then makes the connection in right right, and so he's it.
He says something to the effect of you know, this is going to be hard to get out of and so well, no, and.
Then he said to land where you know I trusted you. You know, he said I couldn't be chased. And you know, they're all in astonishment that he's actually saying this to them, and Landmer says, well, I was trying to catch.
You, right right, And so Morton presses him. He says, who are you? You know, who are you? Who are you? And finally he says, I'm the BTK serial killer. And they had made an arrest earlier and they had blown
up in their face and been a big embarrassment. So there was a lot of tension around whether this was really going to work out, and that has So you have to understand that in those three decades plus he had never talked to anybody at all about anything he'd ever done, except when killing Nancy Fox and saying I'm the BTK serial killer. Now he will sit down with the authorities, both FBI and police, and he will speak about his crimes in great detail for hours, thirty two hours.
For the next thirty two hours, just this volcanic eruption of information. So that's where you know a lot of the information it's in the book it came from, because you truly get a blow by blow account of his crimes.
What we missed though, too, in passing was what was his status at the christ Lutheran Church right before this? What was he preparing for? Again, just this dichotomy, incredible dichotomy between these two realities. And yeah, tell us a little bit about what was happening at that time.
Well, we'll Steve all start out, but I believe it was a year before he was arrested. He had been elected the president.
He was actually ascended to the presidency in January t two thousand and five, so it's about seven to eight weeks before he will be arrested. He has become, by total consensus, you know, the next president, and his pastor, clerk says, the spiritual leader of his church. So the ironies basically couldn't get any thicker. He chaired the January and February meetings for the officials in the church.
And he was great people and he'd you know, he was very involved in that church community. You know, would they would help people that were in need, and he was a big part of that church. So you can only imagine how they felt betrayed. When they started coming to the church to start questioning Pastor Clark.
Yeah, about an hour or so after his arrest, four police officers showed up at the church and Pastor Clark it was just, you know, obviously just completely stunned that here he thought his most trusted person in the church was just being named the BTK serial killer.
In the communication that BTK had for police and media, he spoke of again a rationalization for his urges, and it was and you write about a rex or a factor X, and that he was different than other people when they do the thirty two hour questioning, tell us more about some of the things that he said, and does he include that again, otherworldly rationalization for his urges and his crimes.
I don't recall him specifically talking about that with the police. He did say something to the effect of, you know, I'm generally speaking, I'm a pretty nice guy, but I you know, have some bad moods or something.
Well, and one of those in one of those earlier letters to the police, he had said that, you know, that there was a monster living inside of him. So he was aware that there was something going on, you know. I think eventually he wanted to make it sound like he was possessed by this demon, this Rex, this factor X. You know, it's funny. He said, well, Rex doesn't like dogs, you know, he didn't. Rex didn't like when there was a dog in a home that he was going to be,
you know, entering. But yet he had his own dog that he loved very much. He had several dogs, and you.
Know, I think he he spoke more about that demonic possession with Pastor Clark after the arrest. He you know, there are sort of three interpretations of Raiders' behavior that are explored in the book. One is the standard psychological interpretation, which doctor Arbrotski is excellent at laying that out in the book. They basically he was he was just incredibly repressed his sexuality, his creativity, all that, and it came out in this horrific way.
And then Tony Ruark, who was a psychologist that Steve interviewed for the book, said his sexual fantasies dominated his life and affected his decision making, which is basically the definition of mental illness. So, you know, as we were working on this book, we we always try to go for you know, the larger, the bigger picture, rather than just chronicling these crimes and the sensationalistic, you know, grizzly factor. We want to try to get to the psychological underpinnings.
And what we have found in working on so many true crime books throughout the years is that there are you know, there are grad dations of mental illness. There are people that can function in society. And he did it to the extreme to be able to comport mentalize one part of your life and live like a boy Scout troop leader and a president of your church and a family man and a father, and then be able
to have this totally other identity. I mean, you know, that's the kind of questions we were trying to explore rather than just labeling something that's very simplistic. Oh, he's evil, you know, he's evil.
And then the second interpretation is, you know, this demonic possession I mean, and Pastor Clark represents that in the book because he sort of went on this journey the search to see, well is that a real thing? Are people actually possessed by demons? And so that's that's sort of his journey and interpretation. And then the third is what might be called you know, just bad brains, a bad a genetic or chemical problem inside the brain that leads to crime. That's a whole other study of criminology.
Now doctor A. And Rain is one of the leaders of that study, So that gets explored a little bit too. Is there are there genetic components or brain components that simply bend one toward criminal behavior?
Yeah? Like, well, the sociologists that we talked to, the clinical social worker, she said, you know, how how can a person kill ten people and be considered legally?
Saying it's a good question, right, So you know, you sort of have those three choices in front of you. I myself sort of coming from that environment, you know, some of the same influences extreme religion, Not not that the religion was extreme, but you're sort of saturated with it, you know, sort of clashing with artistic desires, you know,
maybe unconventional sexuality, all of those things. I mean, he just shoved it down as far as he could until it would just explode over and over again in these horrible acts.
What I found incredible too, is that despite not being having a low IQ, he seemed to be naive about a great many things. And many people commented it. But even in this thirty two hour interview. He saw it as that he was really really impressing these law enforcement people that he was impressed by. He really did have an effect on society, he wrote, He really his artistic ambitions, his writing, that he always wanted to be a writer.
Now people, now, society was affected by this guy, and he could see it in those officers' eyes.
He said, yeah, but again, I mean, think of it, you know, from sort of an emotional point of view. He said something to the effect of, you know, I didn't know that I was necessarily arising, you know, the city of Wichita or all these things. I mean, his wife was terrified as he sat on the couch with her and that last year and they would watch these increasing media reports night after night about the hunt for
the BTK serial killer. You know, she talked about, you know, being safe or locking the doors, and he'd say, well, don't worry too much about it.
And his own his daughter would even say that that's how they grew up. He always told them not you know, never opened the door to strangers. You know, here the monster is right in the house with you, telling you not to open the door to strangers.
Yeah. So no, he again he felt this odd connection with law enforcement. I mean asking Lieutenant Lander, why did you lie to me about the disket? Well, we were trying to catch you know, you've killed people. And it was this very bizarre naivety in certain.
Ways emotional like kind of an emotional arrested emotional development.
Yeah, and he would say, I mean, his phrase was, you know, I'm basically a good person, you know, I just have bad habits or something. Mean, it's a very sallow you know, just the extreme level of denial.
And part of the reason that I don't and I don't necessarily believe everything that came out of his mouth is you know, he had said in the police confession that he had intended to put on a CDs you know, his whole life story, and he was going to put it into a safety deposit box so that one day after he was dead, you know, people would know who the real bt K serial killer was. Well, in court he cried about, you know, hurting his family and this
and that. But who would have been the people who would have opened the safety deposit box in the end after he was dead? His family, So his family it was a victim to this man. Also.
Yeah, and again something about the thirty two hour confession is. You know, he did a shortened version of that in court on June twenty seventh, two thousand and five, roughly four months after the arrest. He had to go into court and plead guilty or whatever he was going to do legally. He did plead guilty, and the judge then basically had him walk through the crimes. So we as the public sort of felt like, well, he's telling us everything about what he's done and who he is, and
he can't get enough attention for this, et cetera. The book came out, The un Holy Messenger came out in early April of two thousand and six, about a year later. And so I was on CNN Anderson Cooper three sixty one evening for an hour with him. Joyce was in Denver, and as I was on the shore got off, we got an email from someone who lived Whichita.
Well, because on the screen on the CNN program they were flashing our website, which is Stephensiguiler dot com. And we continue to get tips and information not only about this crime, but other true crimes we've written about. So somebody saw that lived in Wichita from a from a prominent family and wrote us these emails.
And he said, you know, when I was young, he was roughly Raiders age. There used to be a place in Wichita where gay people would gather. And he said, once I saw Raider's pictures as an older person, and then he put up his pictures when he was young. He said, I realized this is the same person. And he would go down there, Raider and have these encounters with men. And he was deeply, deeply conflicted about his sexuality. And he went out with this fellow who contacted us.
On one occasion. He had him dress up like a woman and then they went out and then Raiders started tie him up. He hit him over the head with an ash tray, but he tied him up very effectively, just like he would do later on in his crimes. And this guy was just basically what he was saying was, if you think you know everything about Raider, you think Raiders told you everything about himself. He hasn't, you know. This is the other part of his life that he's
never talked about. And this fellow also told us, and this may or may not be true, we don't know, but there was a murder of a gay man in the late sixties, and through one thing and another, people thought that Raider was likely responsible for that because he was attracted them in and yet he would become violent in these situations, as he had done with this man
who contacted us. So here we are thinking, well, we know, you know pretty much everything about Dennis Raider now, and this guy opened up an entirely new, you know, area for us. So again, as Joy says, you can't take at face value that everything he's telling you is the truth or the whole truth.
I'd like to just say a couple of things though. You know, we in having to do a CNN interview last month in which toap they're going to be doing a program on this in I think in March and twenty twenty. But anybody that wants more information on that type of information can go to our website. We had to really, you know, study the book again, take copious notes, because you know, we've written so many books you have to go back and you can't keep all that data
in your head all the time. And so we reread the book. We took all these notes. We you know,
we did the CNN interview. Then I got a copy of Dennis Raider's daughter's book, Carrie Ross and a Serial Killer's Daughter, And it was fascinating and I would read committed anybody interested in this subject to read Unholy Messenger and then read Carrie Rawson's book because the perspective and the point of view as she goes through what they're her family and what they were doing as he was, you know, committing each one of those crimes is absolutely riveting.
And and it's really unfortunate that she had to suffer from PTSD from you know, having to find out about her father. It deeply affected her family. And it was a very moving story and a very honest, you know and heartfelt. And one thing during the sentencing or when Denis Rader was committed was confessing the court in front of Judge Greg Waller. We thought it was very interesting.
You know, people were saying, why are they letting the judge let him recount all these crimes, you know, like as if he's at the Academy Awards or something, getting all this attention. But in effect, Judge Waller was doing sort of like what Lieutenant Landweer was doing. He was letting him. He was doing the public of Wichita a favor by demystifying the urban legend that the BPK had become.
The public could now see this monster for who he really was, this average looking, inarticulate, bumbling, balding, sat eyed sixty year old man, and the mask had fallen off. And I think that was a really great service that he did to the community.
Yeah, he definitely became demystified in that moment. It was kind of like a purging, Like Wichita had been so traumatized by this for so long that they needed some public, you know, event that would sort of let them get over it. So we both thought that was very effective.
Despite the heinous nature. It's again surprising he did get fan mail and lots of it, didn't.
He Well, the strange thing is is that, you know, his whole life was I can't share with anybody who I am. I mean, and maybe it was you know, parts of the sexuality or personality or think I have to repress this, I have to shove it down. It's unacceptable, blah blah blah. You know, once he actually came out of the closet and told the world who he was, he did he got a lot of attention from media. Psychologists wanted to interview him and you know, find out
who he really was and how he functioned. He got fan mail. There was a woman from Topeka who who sort of shared his religious views and wanted to write about him or help him. I mean, you know, begging the entire question, what if he had sought therapy when he was twenty two years old rather than stalking women or you know, stealing things out of their house. One of the best psycho theiatric hospitals in the United States
is in Kansas. People were sent there, you know, to get help for all kinds of things, the Manager Clinic. You know, I don't know if it would have derailed him, maybe it wouldn't. But his, as doctor Brodsky says, his absolute failure to take any responsibility for his life, you know, is very likely at the source of these crimes, to shove it down until you can't do it anymore. What if he'd taken one step. I mean, we've written about a lot of criminals, and they're people who are you know,
to me, they're just inevitable criminals. They're gonna they're going to kill people for gain, They're going to get money, They're going to do all kinds of things we wrote about someone else like that in Kansas. These crimes are so peculiarly psychological, you know that you can't help. But think if he had just you know, tried to help himself in any way at all, some of this might have been prevented.
And it would be interesting if someone studied his brain.
Yeah, you know, it would be.
To see if there's some sort of abnormality between that kind of a brain and a normal brain.
That's true. I mean, you can blame it on a demon, but you know, that's like saying, you know, in that twenty or thirty minutes when I was killing somebody, a demon took over. But what about you know, stocking, trolling, following people. I mean, this took hours, This took days and weeks. Right.
We talked to a woman in prison who committed murder wrote a book about her. When we asked her about the moment of killing, it was like she couldn't she never could quite wrap her head around it. And she also said, in effect that the devil made.
Her do it, right, it's convenient and you know, anyway, and to me, this guy is the ultimate example of sort of you know, not not being able to come to terms with yourself and taking it out on other people.
And there's so many I mean, there's so much interest in this in this story about the BTK now, I think particularly because of the Netflix series mind Hunter, which is on and you know, see was recently interviewed by the equivalent of People magazine in Australia about this book BTK. They want to know more about him.
Yeah, it is. It is a fascinating case study. And you know, as I reread it, I mean what jumped out of me was this this profound need for attention. You know, he just it's there right from the beginning, and it's what got him caught. You know, he could be, you know, living quietly in Park City today, minding his own business, but he just couldn't, you know, not, he couldn't live without that recognition.
What also struck me, Joyce and Stephen, is that it seems just another killer well before the imitators thinking that this was an artistic expression. Very much of this wasn't his artistic expression. What do you think about that?
I think it's absolutely true. Absolutely, you know, he had to make the biblical phrase graven images of his work. He had to memorialize it in some way. So not only is he stashing these drawings writings around the house with his wife and kids when they're there, but in his office at work, locked in this foul cabinet is his mother load. He's collected all these articles, he's done
all this writing, He's got chapters for his book. He wants to write a book, but he writes a chapter and sends it in, but the handwriting is so small that nobody can read it. So again it's this contradiction. He wants to reveal himself, but he can't himself.
One of the psychologists in the book said, I thought it was very astute that he couldn't show himself who he really was to people. He could only show who he really was to the people that he killed.
Yeah, yeah, so no, I think it's it's one of the more fascinating cases certainly we've ever worked on, and just stumbled in it sort of inadvertently, just by being in the right place at the right time, is just, you know, adds to the story. So it's very fortunate that he was caught. He was planning another killing, another sort of spectacular.
The finale of his movies atk.
Productions in October two thousand and four. As he was communicating with the police, he wanted to find a victim and sort of string them.
Up in the silence of the lambs, right right, But.
He couldn't quite you know, bring it off. So we're all better off with him in prison for life.
Yes, it was fascinating too with the court case where the judge made that decision to have him recount his crimes because it didn't look like that was going to happen. It looked like he was just going to plead guilty and he was going to avoid all the shame and humiliation for himself and for his family. But the judge made this unprecedented decision to.
Have to do this and not to live national television. So yes, it's true, we were both very.
Everybody was shocked. But that when as that was happening in real time.
Yeah, yeah, And you talk about the sentencing. He was asked if he wanted it, if he wanted to say anything, tell us basically what he had to say.
Well, he again, this peculiar naivety or some piece of his personality. He gets up and he starts making a speech that many people compared to again the Academy Awards or something. He starts thanking the people who were incarcerated him, you know, talking about how he has certain connections with the victims, like he and Joseph Otero had served in the military. I mean, just utterly and totally inappropriate if he and Joseph Otero were somehow equal parts of this drama.
And just you know, I remember that the fellow who contacted us in Wichita, who talked about raiders gay experience as a young man, his phrase was he had all the social graces of an angry skunk. I think was the way he put it. He just couldn't he just it was excruciating to sort of watch him.
Just go on and on, and it infuriated the DA Nola Boston.
Well, the victims and the victims' families got up and walked down. I mean, just no empathetic connection to the lives you've taken, the people you've hurt beyond measure. You know that that's what you did, and they're not really interested in being your friend.
So now, right after this, of course, there are were people that you talk about Pastor Clark visiting with Raider in prison, and I guess the congregation coming to terms with this, this unholy messenger, this whole case. You talk about Pastor Clark its effect, What was the what was his conclusion about evil and the nature of evil after all of.
This, Well, I think I think it just shook him to his foundations. To begin with, the book begins just a bit of a sidelight with him writing his sermon for the weekend the raider's arrest. And he's been a practicing minister for twenty years and he knows what he thinks, and he understands good and evil and all that. And then the police come to the church and they arrest rate her, and they tell him what's going on. And one of the first things that he does is tear
up his sermon and say, I don't know anything. I've got to start over. We need a new definition of evil. What will be my response to this? And he literally at the end of the book is going on on a journey to meet people who do exorcism in Minnesota.
Right.
Yeah, he wouldn't tell me very much about this. That was interesting because he was very open about many other things. But at the end of the book, you know, I interviewed him again and what I think he came to believe, and I think it was more comfortable for him to believe that there was something to this demonic possession. I think it was very difficult for him to think that contained in one person is my right hand man at the church.
Well, you know, and for anybody, for his wife or his kids, for anybody that knew it. I imagine how your perception of reality would be altered if you thought you couldn't trust your judgment. Most people feel that they can, you know, trust their good about someone. But if all of a sudden that is totally taken away, it's like the rug being pulled out from you.
Yeah, very true. And so he would allow that much that he when he came back from that trip, that he thought, you know, there was something too demonic possession.
But he didn't say if he went to like a Catholic place, right, because generally speaking, I think if the Catholics, having been brought up Catholic myself, that believe in exorcisms or you know, I don't know if the Protestant congregations believe in.
That, well, I think he was disturbed enough to go in whatever direction he could get.
Some answers he just wasn't real specific.
No, he wasn't, and it was somewhat closed off.
So yeah, this is an incredible book. I want to thank you both Joyce and Stephen Singular for coming on and talking about Unholy Messenger the Life and Crimes of the BTK serial Killer mention. Again, you mentioned about the CNN interview that should about VTK should be out in March, you.
Say, and maybe March twenty twenty, but well, you know when that comes out. As soon as we know from the producers when that's going to be airing, because I think they're doing a series on serial killers from what I understand, then we will put that on our website Stevensingular dot com. As to when the interview will.
Air, well, that's great. Again, I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Unholy Messenger. It has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thank you.
You have a great evening.
Thank you to do the same. Bye, good night,