Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
August 22, 2005 Monday
BTK letters never got through:
Starting in 1970s police kept information in killer's messages from public
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
WICHITA - Thirty-one years ago, a serial killer slipped a letter detailing some of his murders into a library book, then called a Wichita newspaper and told a columnist where to find it. In misspelled, rambling prose, the letter writer claimed responsibility for the ghastly murders nine months earlier of a couple and two of their children, and he warned that more killings were planned.
It would be four years before police, who persuaded the columnist not to report on the letter, would reveal that a man calling himself BTK - for Bind, Torture, Kill - was prowling Wichita's placid, shady streets.
By then, BTK had killed at least seven times.
It would be another 26 years, in February 2005, before Dennis L. Rader, an outwardly normal man with a family and a house in the suburbs, would be arrested and charged with the BTK slayings.
By then, he had killed at least 10 times.
Rader, 60, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 life terms in prison Thursday - there was no death penalty in Kansas when the murders were committed - but the case is far from closed. In his murderous wake lies a city stupefied by his ability to elude capture for three decades, and questioning whether police were right to withhold details from various BTK communiques - macabre sketches he did of his crime scenes, for example, and transcripts of his letters - that some say might have solved the case earlier.
"Had they released all of these things, you'd think someone would have gone, 'Oh my gosh!'" said Wichita attorney Charlie O'Hara.
Shortly before Rader's arrest, O'Hara was hired by a group of Wichitans who planned legal action to force police to release all their BTK information. The case became moot when Rader was arrested, but O'Hara hopes the issue will still be examined.
"Everyone got so wound up that the guy was caught and they got a confession that they couldn't or didn't have the objectivity to look at why it took so long," he said.
Police confident in decision
Law enforcement authorities have no second thoughts. Not only were they faced with their first serial killer, and taking advice from the FBI and experts across the country, they say they had to maintain communication with a human time bomb whose temper might explode at any time.
"We were trying so hard not to do something that would upset this man and get one of our citizens killed," police spokeswoman Janet Johnson said in July. "... Everything had to be read from a script."
Local cops and outside experts agree that releasing too much information could have unleashed a flood of copycats, making it harder to catch the real killer. In addition, they say Rader's communiques included bogus information that could have led to innocent people being suspected.
In short, police say Rader took so long to catch because he was so enigmatic, so unlikely a suspect. His name was not on any suspect list compiled by police over the years, and Rader's wife of 34 years and two grown children told police they had no inkling of his secret life.
Other serial killers have been more prolific. Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, each killed dozens. Others have been arguably more vile. Edward Gein skinned his victims. Jeffrey Dahmer ate his.
Few, though, have been as baffling as Rader, said Richard LaMunyon, Wichita's police chief from 1976 until his retirement in 1989.
"We could never find a tie between our victims. There just wasn't any commonality," said LaMunyon, comparing BTK to killers who target particular sectors of society such as prostitutes, women or young boys.
Rader's victims ranged in age from 9 to 63, and while he stalked women, he also killed two children and a man.
"It was truly random in the purest sense," LaMunyon said. "He just literally selected victims off the street."
Equally mystifying was Rader's outwardly normal, sociable lifestyle, which belied the nocturnal, lone-wolf behavior common among serial killers, said Vernon J. Geberth, the former Bronx homicide commander who helped briefly with the BTK case.
"If this guy had fit the profile of most serial killers, we would have been dealing with a non-social individual," said Geberth, whose book, "Practical Homicide Investigation," is used worldwide. "The fact was Rader was a city compliance officer, Boy Scout leader, church council member, and in all these social activities, he became invisible."
Geberth says it was Rader's "malignant narcissism" that finally did him in.
Killer got 'kind of bored'
After The Eagle's longtime cop reporter, Hurst Laviana, wrote in January 2004 about the 30th anniversary of BTK's first murder, BTK sent the Eagle his first confirmed communiqué since 1979 - photographs of an unsolved 1986 murder and the victim's driver's license. The Eagle published a picture of the license along with the dreaded news: BTK was back.
Rader, in an interview with a psychologist after his arrest, said he re-emerged because he wanted to control the telling of his story and because he was "kind of bored." Rader also said he enjoyed reading of his exploits in the paper and watching the police - Keystone Kops, he called them - scramble. Over the next year, Rader sent about a dozen notes and packages to local media and police, most of which were reported on but with few details disclosed.
That proved his undoing. "Every time he communicated, he had to drop the communication someplace, so slowly but surely the noose was tightening," said Geberth.
One day, BTK delivered a computer disk that police traced to a computer at Rader's church. He was arrested Feb. 25, 2005.
Since then, the public has learned a lot about BTK, including that he wrote a letter in 1988 that police never made public; that he did detailed sketches of some of his crime scenes; and that he was a terrible speller.
That information has angered some Wichitans, including one woman who is convinced Rader stalked her in 1991, the year of his last known murder. The woman, who did not want to be identified, said a mysterious man harassed her at her home in the area of at least two other BTK-related incidents, but police dismissed it as a peeping-tom case.
Because police had convinced the public BTK was dead or otherwise inactive, she said, she did not make the connection for years.
"I keep saying, 'Maybe if they would have ... followed me for a few weeks, they would have been able to nab the guy,'" she said.
The case has also led to second-guessing among journalists who covered the case.
"It was clear from that first [1974] letter that the police intended to squash more information than ... make public," said Cathy Henkel, now of Seattle, who wrote in a competing Wichita newspaper about the letter several months after the Wichita Eagle columnist learned of it. "That ... seems to have hindered a quicker solution."
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
August 19, 2005 Friday
Justice has its say:
After victims' kin sound off to BTK serial killer, judge sentences him to max - at least 175 years
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
WICHITA - The courtroom was silent as one minute ticked by. Everyone was waiting for Delores Davis to die.
After the 60-second mark, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston broke the long silence and reminded the room that it had actually taken Davis three times that long to die, as Dennis Rader strangled her with a pair of her own panty hose in January 1991.
Rader, Wichita's self-proclaimed BTK - Bind, Torture, and Kill - murderer, was sentenced yesterday to 175 years in prison for the 10 slayings he committed from 1974 to 1991. The sentencing came after prosecutors and victims' relatives were allowed to argue that his crimes were so heinous as to warrant the maximum possible time.
Judge Greg Waller, who couldn't sentence Rader to death because the crimes occurred when Kansas did not have capital punishment, agreed, guaranteeing that the 60-year-old former church leader will die behind bars.
"This man needs to be thrown in a deep, dark hole and left to rot," said Beverly Plapp, whose sister, Nancy Fox, was slain in 1977.
"This world would have been much better off had your mother aborted your demon soul," said Davis' son, Jeffrey.
Davis, 63, was Rader's last victim, and as Foulston hammered away at her brutal murder, photographs of the striking woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a bright smile flashed across a screen.
Rader has told police that, as with his other victims, he stalked Davis for weeks, then struck as she slept in her home in suburban Park City, about a mile and a half from the house where he lived with his wife.
"Too late, she realized his dreaded intention," Rader wrote later in a secret diary he kept of his murders, which reads like the screenplay of a horror film. "The end came in about two to three minutes, as the garrotte tightened and tightened."
In some of the most macabre details to emerge in the two-day sentencing hearing, police showed Polaroid pictures that Rader took of himself lying in a grave he dug for Davis, wearing a mask that he had also placed on her corpse and that he had embellished with red lips and fake eyelashes.
They were among thousands of pictures, obscene sketches, and writings Rader compiled and kept in stashes in his home, his office, and his camper, detailing his bondage fantasies and murders, and plotting future kills.
Rader has expressed pride in his stalking techniques and in his ability to elude capture for so long, but the hearing revealed him to be almost comically inept.
Once, while practicing a bondage fantasy on himself, he wrapped himself so tightly in plastic he feared he would have to call someone to untie him.
His plans to attack Davis one night were derailed when he was frightened off by her cat, who swatted the window with its paw after sensing something outside. He returned a few nights later.
Rader's last killing was in 1991, but he re-emerged in March 2004 with a series of letters and packages he sent to police and the press warning them he was on the prowl again. He was arrested in February after a computer disk he sent was traced to his church.
Rader appeared to shed some tears as relative after relative stood up to berate him. He then stood and delivered a rambling, 20-minute statement as illogical as his crimes.
He compared himself to an 18-wheeler, "able to switch gears back and forth," then did just that.
He recited positive qualities he said he shared with some of his victims.
He blew his nose and said he was sorry for his crimes.
He brightened up and, like an actor accepting an Oscar, thanked police, his court-appointed lawyers, his pastor, and virtually anyone it seemed he had encountered since his arrest.
He even lectured the police a bit on minor inaccuracies he said he had noted in their statements.
"That was vintage Dennis Rader," his public defender, Steven Osburn, said of Rader's final bow. Asked what he had told Rader, Osburn said: "I told him good luck. I tell that to all my clients."
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
August 17, 2005 Wednesday
Reliving the pain once more:
Three-day sentencing for BTK to reveal even more details
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
WICHITA, Kan. - Wichitans know that for 30 years, Dennis L. Rader prowled their streets as the BTK killer, stalking victims he called "projects," hiding in their closets, then binding, torturing and slowly killing them when they arrived home. They know he got his sexual kicks watching people die, including an 11-year-old girl he dangled from a pipe in her basement after murdering her parents and brother.
They know this because Rader admitted it on June 26, when he pleaded guilty to 10 murders that had haunted the city since January 1974, when the girl, Josephine Otero, was found hanged in her house.
Nevertheless, prosecutors plan to present even more gruesome evidence today at an elaborate sentencing hearing that, depending on one's view, will be a catharsis for the city and the victims' families, or an ego-fest for the district attorney and for Rader, 60, who admits to loving the limelight.
Georgia Cole, spokeswoman for the Sedgwick County district attorney's office, said people should hear more than Rader's "extremely sanitized" version of events, and that families deserve the chance to confront him. In addition, since the death penalty was not in place during Rader's 1974 to 1991 murders, prosecutors want to ensure the worst details come out so Rader gets the harshest sentence: life in prison with no chance of parole for 40 years.
"When Dennis Rader stood up and gave his recitation of the facts, no one was allowed to question anything he said. None of the statements he made were contested," Cole said. For instance, Rader, in a prideful, matter-of-fact tone, said he tried to make some victims comfortable by placing pillows under their heads before strangling them, or by giving toys to two children before murdering their mother.
"This is a man who has admitted murdering 10 people. Why does everyone assume he would not lie?" Cole said.
Three days have been set aside for the sentencing. It will start with prosecutors' presentations and family members' statements. Rader's court-appointed attorneys and possibly Rader himself will speak. Two seats are reserved for Rader's relatives, but there is no indication any will attend.
His wife of 34 years, Paula, divorced Rader after his February arrest. She and their two adult children say they had no idea of Rader's activities, which he carried out while living a seemingly law-abiding life as a church leader, Boy Scout leader, and code-compliance officer for a Wichita suburb.
Rader, who over the years taunted police with messages signed with his chosen moniker - BTK for Bind, Torture, Kill - was caught when one of those messages led to a computer at his church. In a prison interview that aired Friday on NBC's "Dateline," he admitted he enjoyed reading about himself in the paper and felt "like a star" because of the attention since his arrest.
It is that pride in his crimes, and the agony they caused Wichita, that has left some people, including police who worked the case, uncomfortable about giving Rader the spotlight again.
"He's going to jail forever. I question whether it's necessary to put the community through this," said Richard LaMunyon, Wichita's police chief from 1976 to 1989. "Let's just close the door and end it."
Retired Bronx homicide commander Vernon Geberth, who helped Wichita investigators in the 1980s, called the hearing "despicable," saying it would give Rader the publicity he craves while forcing families to relive the painful past. "Every time these people try to get some peace, bang, it'll pop up as a movie of the week," he said.
Cole, though, said that family members have expressed eagerness to attend and that representatives of each of Rader's 10 victims plans to speak.
The differences show the hold Rader's crimes have on a city that for years thought BTK had gone away, only to have him resurface last year with a series of taunting messages.
"It would be very difficult to articulate the amount of fear and trauma this guy caused," said Paul Morrison, the district attorney of Johnson County in suburban Kansas City, who is of two minds about the hearing. In his experience, he said, some victims' relatives want to know everything, while others find the details too painful.
"It's hard to make a call on this case," Morrison said.
Not so for one woman who suspects she was stalked by Rader in 1991 when she says a man using BTK's methods harassed her. The hearing might ensure other killers get caught more quickly, she said.
"There is some value to the public to realize that this is what a serial killer looks like, and acts like," said the woman, who said she still fears for her safety. "It could be somebody you know. It could be somebody you're married to."
