Module 5 - Criminal Profiling

The City of Wichita

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Dennis Lynn Rader murdered at least 10 people in and near the city of Wichita, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. He became known as the BTK Strangler, which stood for ‘Bind, Torture, and Kill’, a name that he had originally passed to the media and police through a wide variety of written correspondence.

First Killings: 1970s

Rader’s first victims were four members of one family (Joseph Otero, his wife, and their two children) who were murdered in their home in January 1974. In April 1974, Rader struck again, using his preferred method of attack by gaining entry to the victim’s home. He tied Kathryn Bright and her brother Kevin, and then strangled her to death. Rader then shot Kathryn Bright’s brother several times as they fought, but Kevin Bright survived the attack. The police were unable to locate the killer from the description he provided.

In 1977, in a period of nine months, Rader murdered Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox in their own homes. He used the same method of binding and torturing to kill these two victims.

Possibly, he had other intended victims, but the murders stopped for a time. Then, two years later in 1979, Anna Williams narrowly escaped death when she returned home from work much later than expected. Rader had broken into her home, but apparently he gave up on her return that evening. He later sent an angry note to her stating "…be glad you weren't here, because I was." He included one of her scarves with the letter.

Letters to Police and Media

Rader seemed to derive perverse pleasure from sending taunting letters to both police and various news outlets. He sent notes and letters from 1974 to 1979. For example, in October 1974, a letter describing in detail the murder of the Otero family had been left in an engineering book in the Wichita Public Library. In early 1978, he sent a letter to a Wichita TV station in which he claimed responsibility for the murders he had committed. This letter identified the BTK Strangler name, announcing that a serial killer was loose in Wichita. A poem was also enclosed, written as a form of macabre tribute to the murder of Nancy Fox. However, nothing was heard from BTK for the next several years. During that time, local police created a Task Force and spent thousands of hours searching for the identity of the BTK Strangler. They used various principles from science and followed up on the realization that all murders had occurred within a radius of approximately 8 km.

By 1988, the trail had gone cold. However, police received a letter from someone claiming to be the BTK Strangler. The author referred to a recent murder but denied responsibility while noting that it had been performed admirably.

Criminal Profiling Involvement

In 1997, Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent, helped outline a profile of the BTK Strangler. Ressler thought the man may have been a graduate student or a professor in the criminal justice field at the local university, was most likely in his mid-to-late-20s at the time of the killings, and was an avid reader of books and newspaper stories concerning serial murders. Additionally, because his pattern of killings had not been seen in Wichita since the '70s, it was assumed that he had likely left the area or had died.

In August 2000, Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, President of the Violent Crimes Institute, created a partial profile of the killer based on limited information. Among her insights was a chilling statement about the mindset of BTK Strangler:

This is not a person who would stop killing on his own. There are only three reasons he would stop: death, prison, or he is too disabled or sick to kill. This is a compulsive psychopath who enjoys killing and will not give it up.

Schurman-Kauflin’s profile of BTK was updated in 2005 (just prior to the BTK Strangler‘s arrest) to provide a more detailed description of his character traits and behaviours:

Letters and Packages from the BTK Strangler

In March 2004, BTK Strangler began a series of communications that ultimately led to his arrest in February 2005. The Wichita Eagle newspaper received a letter written by a person believed to be BTK Strangler who claimed responsibility for the murder of Vicki Wegerle in September 1986. This murder had not been attributed previously to BTK Strangler, but several photographs of the crime scene and a photocopy of the driver's licence of Vicki Wegerle’s were included with the letter, indicating that whoever had sent it had intimate knowledge of the crime. Subsequent letters, notes, and packages were sent throughout 2004 while police encouraged BTK to continue to communicate, hoping that he would make a mistake to identify himself.

In December 2004, Wichita police received another package from the BTK Strangler; it contained the driver's licence of Nancy Fox. It had been stolen from her residence at the time of her murder in 1977. In February 2005, postcards were received by a local TV station and were followed by further writings related to the 1974 murders of a certain member of the Otero family.

Then the BTK Strangler made an error. In February of 2005, he sent a padded envelope containing a computer disc to a TV station in Wichita. On this disc, police found metadata embedded in a Microsoft Word document that identified the Christ Lutheran Church and that showed the document was last modified by "Dennis". Investigators then discovered that the president of the Christ Lutheran Church council was Dennis Rader.

Arrest and Confession

Police immediately began surveillance of Rader and obtained a warrant for the medical records of Rader's daughter. Subsequently, a tissue sample was obtained from her and tested for DNA. It provided a familial match with semen found at an earlier BTK Strangler crime scene. This evidence, combined with other pieces of information gathered prior to and during the surveillance, gave police the grounds to arrest Rader in February 2005. He was taken into custody without incident. He talked to the police for several hours, confessing almost immediately. His confession and subsequent interviews with police filled almost a dozen DVDs.

During his lengthy interviews with police, Rader appeared to detach himself from his victims, describing them as his "projects”, discussing in detail how he had “put them down”. Rader also described the contents of his "hit kit”: a briefcase or bowling bag containing handguns, tape, rope, and handcuffs. He also carried extra clothing that he could change into after committing a murder.

Rader also provided insight into how he chose his victims. He would first wander the city until he found potential victims; he would then stalk them for some time. Then, he would break into the victim’s home when no one was home, cut the phone line, and hide until his victim came home. Rader then bound, tortured, and killed his victims. Usually he strangled them until they lost consciousness, but he would revive them just to strangle them again. He would repeat the pattern, becoming sexually aroused at the sight of their struggles. Finally, Rader would strangle them to death and ejaculate into an article of their clothing, usually underwear.

All victims except one lived in and around central Wichita. Rader lived on the same street as one of his victims.

Conclusion

Rader pleaded guilty in 2005, giving a graphic account of his crimes in court. By this time, Rader had openly admitted to two other murders that the BTK Strangler had not originally been suspected of committing: Marine Hedge in 1985 and Dolores David in 1991.

In August of 2005, Rader was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences (one life sentence per victim) without possibility of parole for 175 years. The police investigation concluded with the statement that Rader was not responsible for any other murders.

Although criminal profiling played a minor role in the search for the BTK Strangler, this story demonstrates the need for an objective, balanced approach to serial crime investigation based on the ease with which a serial killer can blend into conventional society.