TEN

DENNIS RADER:
Computer Forensics and a Clever Lie

A man crept into Joseph Otero’s home in Wichita, Kansas. It was January 1974, the middle of winter. He took few pains to hide, yet no one saw him well enough to identify him later. Glancing around, he entered the backyard and cut the phone wire.

Joe and Julie Otero were in the kitchen, having taken three of their five children to school. Josie, eleven, and Joey, nine, were getting ready for the next run. The family had lived in this home for less than three months and had no idea that a man who had spotted Julie and Josie a month before had been stalking them. He had documented the family schedules and the number of children, calculating when he could move past his usual voyeurism and act out his fantasy of assault and murder. In the past, he had targeted others, but he’d always stopped short. He was seething for a chance to bind a woman, torture her, and then kill her.

Finally, the morning had arrived and he came equipped with rope, cord, tape, gags, and plastic bags. He also carried a .22 pistol and a knife. After severing the phone line, he spotted Joey outside and forced him back in. Ignoring the barking dog, purchased for protection, he prepared to tie up the boy and his sister and mother.

However, the intruder had miscalculated. Joe, usually gone by this time, was still at home, disabled by a recent car accident. The intruder drew his gun to show he meant business, quickly inventing a story that he was there to rob them. Joe thought it was a joke, but when he was forced to the floor, he realized it was not. The man tied the three family members up with rope, cord, and tape, Joe in the kitchen, Julie on her bed, and Joey in his room. He pulled two T-shirts and a plastic bag over the boy’s head, wrapping a cord around his neck and letting him slowly suffocate. But the intruder had saved his full lust and rage for the little girl, Josie.

After the other three were dead, he put a rope around Josie’s throat and a gag in her mouth, and then took her into the basement. He tied her feet together and her hands behind her back, lifting her up to hang her from a sewer pipe. As she struggled to free herself, he cut through her bra, pulled off her panties, and masturbated, finally ejaculating on her leg. She died by strangulation and he left her hanging.

Before he left the house and drove off in the family’s Vista Cruiser, it seems likely that the killer thought about the other three Otero children, who would be coming home from school later that day only to find their murdered parents and siblings, and that this image added one more fiendish layer to his sadistic pleasure. He had finally carried out a fantasy he had devised with care and it made him feel powerful. This would hit the city papers and make him famous, albeit anonymously. That, too, gratified him. But then he realized he’d left the knife behind, so he went back for it, entering the home as if he belonged there. When he had the knife in his possession, he went to the woods to burn some notes and sketches he’d made, along with remnants of cord and rope. He finished in time to greet his wife as she came home from work. He also recorded what he’d done that day in a journal, naming himself “BTK”—for bind, torture, kill.

When the three surviving Otero children discovered their murdered family, they were horrified, and alerted neighbors and the police. Even the homicide detectives were stunned, especially when they found Josie. They set out asking around to try to solve the crime quickly, but conflicting witness reports made leads difficult to develop. They had a tall man, a short man; a white man, a dark-complected man. No one had seen his face. The abandoned car was found and processed, but that led nowhere. It made no sense that a stranger would just enter a home at random and kill a family, so they theorized a drug connection. However, that conjecture, too, had no support.

The detectives did learn that the killer liked knots; he had used a number of different ones to tie up his victims, as if he were having fun. They thought he might have a naval background. He also liked to hurt people. Julie’s face showed bruises and she had several ligature marks, as if she had been choked more than once.

The Wichita Eagle and the Beacon both devoted priority space to the story, but no one was caught and leads dried up. The coverage stopped as well. Members of the homicide squad, having seen the family, were angry. They wanted this guy caught and punished. But they would be waiting for this for a long time.

BTK, otherwise known as Dennis Rader, was a churchgoing man with a job and family, who forbade people around him from telling offensive jokes in front of women. He was ordinary, polite, controlling, and sometimes nasty, but he was no one’s idea of a serial killer. The cops didn’t yet know they even had a serial killer on their hands. In the early 1970s, little was known about serial murder. Ted Bundy was not caught until 1978, and the Son of Sam would not terrorize New York for another two years. The decade before, Albert DeSalvo had been nailed as the Boston Strangler, while the Zodiac had terrorized San Francisco and Juan Corona had murdered twenty-five migrant workers in California, but such things were unheard of in Kansas. Even the FBI had barely begun to think about its Behavioral Sciences Unit, with its profilers. They would enter this case later, but for the time being, there was little that any investigator could do.

What made it worse was that Rader was a thinking man. He watched and waited, and made notes to improve upon his work and avoid mistakes. He was what the FBI would one day label “organized.” Noting how much more difficult it had been to strangle a person than he’d realized, he started working out so he would be in top shape for dealing with victims who struggled. He wanted to kill more efficiently. In addition, he would find employment that allowed him to enter into people’s homes legitimately so he could scope out the layout and calculate the best moment for attack. This was not going to be an easy man to catch. BTK would prove to be a slick and calculating killer who baited police and kept them guessing. An arrest in this case would boil down to a combination of wits and opportunity.

Factor X

A few months went by before Rader planned and enacted another “project” in April 1974. He had been out looking for women, following some and only dreaming about others. He often peeped into windows and finally settled on a small home on East Thirteenth Street. A twenty-one-year-old college girl, Kathryn Bright, lived there by herself, and she did not have a dog. That was a plus. However, she did have a brother, and after Rader broke in, he found himself unprepared for dealing with a strong young man determined to fight. He shot Kevin Bright twice in the head and left him to die. He then bound Kathryn and stabbed her eleven times, using what he’d read in detective magazines to disable her, but she still fought harder than he’d expected.

Despite his terrible wounds, Kevin managed to get up and flee, alerting neighbors, and Rader quickly left. The police arrived, but they were unable to save Kathryn. She died at the hospital. Kevin described their attacker as being nearly six feet tall, around 180 pounds, in his late twenties, with dark hair and a mustache. While there was some discussion among detectives about the two deadly home invasions that year being related, they ultimately dismissed it. The MO had been too different.

While many men were questioned, no one was identified as the killer. Rader could hardly believe he’d escaped arrest. The entire episode had scared him and he was not sure he would risk it again. Twice he had made mistakes and, despite all his planning, had badly miscalculated. If he kept this up, he would be caught, and that was the last thing he wanted. Rader burned his clothing and wrote a detailed report in his BTK journal. When no one came for him, he began to feel bolder, even invincible. But one thing got his goat, and this personality flaw would ultimately betray him: someone else was taking credit for the Otero murders. He called a reporter at the Wichita Eagle and instructed him to go to the public library and look inside Applied Engineering Mechanics. There would be a letter detailing the Otero murders that would prove that the person currently bragging about it was not the killer.

The reporter called the police and they learned from the disjointed note, which described the exact positions of the Otero family members, that the offender, who named himself BTK, had studied the habits of other sexual criminals. He said he had a “monster” in his brain that compelled him to kill: “The pressure is great and somt-times he run the game to his liking.” The letter writer indicated that this monster had “already chosen his next victim.” It was a terrifying threat.

The unsolved murders inspired many Wichita residents to purchase security alarms and Dennis Rader got a job installing them. He watched for his next opportunity, certain that this time he would not make the same mistakes he had made in the Bright home. He also became a father and took classes at Wichita State University.

The Monster Acts Again

In 1977, more than three years after the Otero incident, Shirley Vian was murdered. She was not Rader’s first choice, but his intended victim had not been home, so he had walked down the street to another place. He entered Shirley’s home despite the presence of three children, all of whom could have identified him, and he locked them in a bathroom. He told Shirley she just needed to submit to what he wanted sexually and she would be all right. But then he bound her, put a plastic bag over her head, and strangled her. The children screamed at him the entire time, and after he left, they escaped to notify neighbors. However, they proved to be useless as witnesses.

Then Nancy Fox, a single woman living alone, drew BTK’s notice. He watched her for a while and was pleased to see that she had no dog and did not entertain men. This house, he decided, would be a safe hit and he designated December 8 as the day on which she would die. Rader arrived to an empty house, cut the phone line, and greeted Nancy when she came in. He handcuffed her and told her he was BTK and she was going to die. When she expired from asphyxiation, he relieved himself in her clothing and walked away with her driver’s license and other items. The next day, he called the police to report the homicide and send them to her address. He wanted to see this in the newspaper, because he felt elated. It was his way of “sharing” the feeling with others.

He then sent a poem to the press referring to Shirley Vian, but they failed to publish anything about it. Only in retrospect did they even understand what it was.

Suggestions for how best to handle this case were contradictory. Some investigators believed that downplaying it would prevent another murder, while others were sure the killer sought attention, and when he didn’t get it, he would be angry enough to kill again. At this time, the profiling unit at the FBI was in its infancy and a couple of agents got involved. They agreed that coverage was the offender’s goal, but wanted to see what he would do if he did not get what he wanted.

He soon sent another poorly written letter to a local television station, KAKE-TV, angry that he was being ignored and explaining that he was among the “elite” serial killers. He included a list of other such offenders he considered his equals—H. H. Holmes, Jack the Ripper, “Ted of the West Coast”—and described how serial killers were motivated by “Factor X.” There was no cure for their illness and they could not stop. He whined that he had not gotten the amount of media attention that others had, and warned that he was already stalking victim number eight. “How many do I have to Kill,” he asked, “before I get my name in the paper or some national attention? Do the cop think that all those deaths are not related?” He was not amused, he said, that the paper was failing to provide details. He included a drawing of the Nancy Fox crime scene.

He claimed seven victims, naming the Oteros, Vian, and Fox, but not the fifth victim. There were several possible candidates, but detectives decided it was probably Kathryn Bright, despite the initial decision to exclude her from the circle.

Soon BTK got what he wanted. The story was publicized: Wichita had a local serial killer who had murdered seven people and threatened to kill more. The police wanted residents to lock their doors. This guy was a stalker; he was careful, crafty, and he passed as ordinary. He watched and entered homes. No one knew where he would strike next and the police did not know how to stop him.

Rader liked to send cryptic notes, puzzles, and leads that proved to be false. No one was quite sure which of the things BTK said were truthful and which were lies. He continued to communicate until 1979, offering a sexually graphic signature by which to authenticate his communications, but there were no new murders that anyone could link to him. Detectives who noticed that most of the communications had been photocopied tracked down all the area copying machines to try to identify the signature of the one the killer used. The Xerox Corporation assisted, helping to pinpoint a library and a machine at WSU.

At one point, a panel of psychiatrists evaluated the communications and decided that BTK viewed himself rather grandiosely as part of a larger scheme. With his references to “the monster,” he was possibly setting up an insanity defense, should he ever need it. A child psychologist thought he had an emotional problem or a learning disability.

The residents of Wichita felt terrorized, wondering who might become this man’s next victim. Profilers suggested planting a subliminal message into a news program, as well as placing a classified ad to “BTK,” but neither strategy hooked a response or goaded him to act out and make the hoped-for mistake. Rader was looking to his personal responsibilities, having become a father again. Now he had a son and a daughter.

Investigators had spent a lot of time and devoted a lot of resources to catching the BTK killer, but failed in their mission. Each and every officer directly involved was disappointed. As they marked the tenth anniversary of the Otero murders, they could only wonder if BTK had been arrested for something else, left the area, or died. The received wisdom on serial killers, especially given the way BTK had described himself, was that they did not just stop. In 1984, a new task force started going systematically through all the files to see if there was something they had missed.

People were asked for blood samples and suspects were summarily eliminated, one by one. The FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood offered a detailed portrait, albeit full of information that already seemed apparent: the killer was sadistic, controlling, and superficial. He read detective magazines and pornography, enjoyed S&M practices with a partner, and liked to drive around. Nothing Hazelwood said moved authorities closer to an identification.

A Change in the Wind

Rader had indeed stopped for a while. It was almost ten years from the last murder to the next, but in 1985, he attacked an elderly women, Marine Hedge, who lived on his own street. This time he dumped the body in a ditch in a wooded area, where it lay for nine days before it was found. No one on the task force could anticipate that Rader was trying to outsmart the FBI, with its stereotypical profiles. He had purposely stopped for a while, killed outside his victim type, and left a victim outside. He offered no communication and simply enjoyed in private the excitement of the hunt. In fact, he flouted his religion by taking the body to his church and abusing it there.

Soon thereafter, in 1986, he targeted Vicki Wegerle, who was married. Pretending to be a telephone repairman, he persuaded her to let him in. Once he dropped the disguise, she fought valiantly, but she was no match for him. He strangled her, took photographs for his collection, stole her driver’s license, and left. He sent no communications and was not publicly linked to the crime, so Wegerle’s husband became the chief suspect. He was never charged, but the police continued to believe he was a wife killer. Vicki’s murder went unsolved.

With the development of DNA analysis for crime investigation in the United States in 1987, investigators had a viable way to match semen samples with a suspect, if they ever developed one. It was much more precise than the blood tests they’d been using. However, the task force was disbanded and only one detective, Ken Landwehr, remained on the case.

But Rader stopped again, for five years. He was nearing fifty, but was still interested in trolling around to look for “projects.” He found Dolores Davis, who lived alone in Park City. Again, this was close to home, but so far neither the cops nor his wife suspected him of anything. It seemed to him he could do whatever he liked, without consequence. He broke into Dolores’s home, strangled her, took photos, and dumped her beneath a bridge. All the while he was assisting with a Boy Scout outing involving his son. Soon he became a compliance officer, helping to enforce Park City’s ordinances, and lived by the letter of the law. He also became president of the congregation at his church. Some people liked him, others did not.

Remember Me

Nearly two decades passed before BTK was heard from again. In March 2004, a reporter for the Wichita Eagle decided to write a thirty-year retrospective of the Otero slaughter and other murders associated with BTK. The story mentioned that few people were even aware of the old BTK cases and said that a local author was writing a book about the unsolved murders. Rader did not like being forgotten or having his story in someone else’s hands, and he went through his private files.

The newsroom received a letter on March 19 from “Bill Thomas Killman” that contained three photographs of a woman who was clearly dead. She had been posed in a variety of ways and a photocopy of her driver’s license was included: it was Vicki Wegerle. Now her husband was finally off the hook. Clearly, BTK had killed her and taken trophies that he’d kept all these years.

The police had run a DNA test the year before on skin under Vicki’s fingernails, and they used it to compare to thousands of suspects via an offender database, as well as to people who volunteered samples, but they’d failed to link it to anyone. A geographical profile indicated that BTK probably lived or worked not far from the crime scenes, which were only four miles apart, and that he had some association with Wichita State University. The Kansas Bureau of Identification’s cold-case unit got busy on the old file—more than three dozen boxes of papers and items. Despite this renewed flurry of activity, it amounted to nothing.

In May 2004, a package was found that contained a partial manuscript with thirteen chapters entitled The BTK Story (which actually plagiarized an online site). Later, another package surfaced that detailed the Otero slaughter, and another that took credit for a murder that was more likely a suicide. The cops tried to bait this person, but he didn’t respond until he was good and ready, which was late in October.

Dennis Rader was now fifty-nine. He went looking for another victim, but was thwarted in his effort. In December, he called KAKE-TV but could not get through, so he left another package in a park. It contained the driver’s license of one of the 1977 victims, Nancy Fox, along with a doll, bound with string. BTK had reported this murder to police dispatchers. He also used the right signature, which had never been publicized. Although they could not necessarily trust his “autobiography,” the task force believed they knew his age and some of his interests. They thought he was familiar in some capacity with law enforcement and soon had a blurred photo of someone they believed was him driving a dark vehicle and dropping off a package at Home Depot. They began to consider that BTK was linked to the two murders in Park City. Yet despite more than 5,600 tips, they still could not identify him.

While many profiles were offered, one was actually generated via a computer program. A Virginia-based company called EagleForce Associates gathered the evidence and weighted it for significance. The data analysts then cross-correlated all the data, showing that BTK was likely a white male around sixty, with military experience and a connection to the local university. EagleForce saw from the video that he drove a black Jeep Cherokee. Now the pool of suspects was further narrowed, but not by much.

Then the police got a break. BTK had left a message in an empty box of Special K cereal, and the note opened an interesting door. He asked if he could communicate with police via a computer disk without being traced, urging them to “be honest” and to run an ad in the Eagle to assure him. The detectives wondered if he could really be so stupid, but they had nothing to lose by telling him he could send them a floppy disk, so they ran the ad. Then they tested X-rays on floppy disks to make sure they would not ruin one by checking for a bomb, just in case.

Bait

Rader thought using a computer would save him a lot of time, because he would not have to photocopy anything. He asked his minister at the Christ Lutheran Church how to use it. He then prepared the disk with a “test” in rich text format that directed police to read the three-by-five card included for details on how to communicate with him in the newspaper. It said that all future communications would be assigned a number and he instructed officers to leave another ad.

They hardly cared about his orders. They had him. While they struggled with reporters who wanted to publish this development, the department’s computer expert got to work on the disk. They did not want any “TV experts” letting BTK know that the disk could be traced. He might burn all evidence and run for the hills.

Computer forensics has become an important addition to investigations. It helps to organize evidence, link one piece of evidence to other crimes, identify offenders, and reveal offender communications. Officials can remove three types of data: archival, active, and latent. Active information is stored in files and programs, detectable on the hard drive. Archival data has been backed up and placed in storage. Latent data is the kind that computer users believe has been deleted but a trace remains that can be recovered

On BTK’s floppy disk, the police found the name Dennis, and by re-creating data on it that had been overwritten were able to trace it back to a computer at Christ Lutheran Church. (Some reports indicated that there was a hidden electronic code on it that tied it to the church computer.) They learned on a Google search that the president of the congregation was Dennis Rader, and it was easy enough to use another program to get his address. Officers went to the church to question the pastor, who admitted that he had shown Rader how to use the computer to print out notes from a meeting. Digital footprints were found on the hard drive that indicated that this computer had been used to write one of the BTK messages to a local television station. But there was more: Rader had graduated from Wichita State University and in his driveway was a black Jeep Cherokee. A DNA sample subpoenaed from Rader’s daughter’s medical files clinched it. Rader, a family man, security specialist, and seemingly stable citizen, had bound, tortured, and killed from six to eight people.

Landwehr instructed the task force on how to approach the suspect. At this point, they had kept him under surveillance and knew his every move. Landwehr also called retired members of the force to be present. On February 25, everyone got into place, staving off calls from reporters who had heard rumors. Then they waited for the designated lunch hour. Two detectives pulled Rader over as if they were making a traffic stop, and detectives and FBI agents swarmed in to subdue and cuff him. On his face, they saw panic. They forced him to the ground, under the threat of shot-guns, Glocks, and submachine guns. He didn’t have a chance. A hint of his guilt was clear when he failed to ask why they were treating him like this; clearly he knew. He merely asked them to call his wife to tell her he would not be home for lunch.

During the postarrest interview, Rader danced around the point, but they told him they could match his DNA to the crimes and that they had him dead to rights with the computer disk. This seemed to finish him. He finally told them he was BTK. He seemed disappointed that the cops had lied to him, tricking him and trapping him, acting as if he’d deserved more respect. This amused them, but they were quickly unsettled when Rader began mimicking what some of his victims had cried out as they were tortured. He went on to confess for many hours.

The police persuaded him to give up his hiding place, so he drew a map. The search produced photos of some of the victims, as well as photos of Rader himself in bondage. It was no surprise that he kept newspaper clippings about the incidents and copies of all his communications, but his gruesome drawings of torture turned stomachs. Detectives were alarmed to see the number of victims that Rader had stalked over the years, many of whom could easily have ended up dead. They wondered if there might be more victims in other places that he wasn’t mentioning.

He was about to be charged with the known eight murders, but BTK had news for the police: he confessed to ten and said he’d already targeted his next victim. Had they not caught him, there would have been one more. In retrospect, it was clear when police reexamined his communications that in one of his enigmatic puzzles he’d actually provided his name and home address.

When Rader went to court to confess to his crimes as part of his plea deal, he obviously relished the attention. In a monotone voice, he went meticulously over the details of his “projects,” describing them as if each murder had just been business. He appeared to revel in the national limelight, although many reporters were disappointed that a killer once deemed so cunning was such an ordinary, even boring man. He said he had killed to satisfy his sexual fantasies, but tried to minimize his actions by claiming that a demon had possessed and driven him to perform torture and murder.

In several interviews, Rader was adamant in asserting that his decision to resurface in 2004 had not been a way of trying to get caught. He’d made a mistake, which embarrassed him, but he certainly did not wish to spend the rest of his life in prison or embarrass his wife and children. He claimed to feel bad for them. As punishment, Rader received ten consecutive life sentences, to be served at the El Dorado Correctional Facility, for a minimum of 175 years before there was any possibility of parole. His wife divorced him.

The investigators realized that capturing BTK had relied on a carefully controlled media strategy, knowing that the person they sought paid attention to the newspapers. In fact, what had lured him back out in the open was the mention of someone else daring to undertake to write his story. His personality was such that he needed to control the way others viewed him. The police had also had to resist media pressure to provide more details, and stick to their plan. The whole investigation had been a difficult balancing act, and it was the cyber-forensics personnel who had made the difference. Knowing how to trace a disk, do an Internet search, and find files on a hard drive had all played a role, adding an extra layer of expertise to what many teams of detectives had accomplished over the years.

Other types of technology are also growing in prominence in criminal investigations, especially methods and protocols that appear to read minds. What could be better than discovering what offenders really know, whether they like it or not?

 

 

Sources

“BTK Killer: Demon Got Me Early in Life.” Associated Press, July 8, 2005.

Chu, Jeff. “Who Was the Killer Next Door?” Time, March 7, 2005.

Cohen, Sharon. “Computer Fisk and DNA Led to BTK Suspect.” Associated Press, March 3, 2005.

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Gibson, Dirk C. Clues from Killers: Serial Murder and Crime Scene Messages. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Grinberg, Emanuella. “Prosecutors Reveal Nightmarish Details of BTK Serial Killer Methods,” CourtTV.com, August 20, 2005.

Jones, K. C. “Surveillance Technology Helps Catch Serial Killer.” Information Week, January 5, 2007.

“Magazine Highlights BTK Search,” kbsd6.com, retrieved January 6, 2007.

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Shiflett, Dave. “BTK Killer: A Monster Tripped up by His Ego.” Newsday, November 18, 2007.

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Singular, Stephen. Unholy Messenger: The Life and Times of the BTK Serial Killer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Wenzl, Roy, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, and Hurst Laviana. Bind, Torture, Kill. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.