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del.icio.usSerial killer's big mistake
For 31 years, the BTK serial killer toyed with Wichita, Kan., sending macabre clues and puzzles to police and media about the 10 people he murdered to fulfill his sexual fantasies.
Yet it was the murderer's surprising naivete that ultimately led to his capture, said Sedgwick County, Kan., District Attorney Nola Foulston, the lead prosecutor of BTK killer Dennis Rader.
Foulston spoke yesterday in Lexington at the Kentucky Commonwealth's Attorneys Association's winter conference. She gave Kentucky prosecutors the play-by-play of how authorities ultimately cracked the case.
The BTK killer -- his own nickname, standing for bind, torture, kill -- was long suspected of a pattern of murders from 1974 to the mid-1980s where eight victims, mostly women, were tied and strangled.
Only after Rader was arrested this February was he linked to two other slayings, including one in 1991.
On Aug. 18, Rader was sentenced to a 175-year prison term without the chance of parole. The maximum penalty prosecutors could seek was life in prison since Kansas did not have the death penalty until 1994.
"I hungered for a death penalty in that case," Foulston said. "He deserved it."
Rader began to terrorize Wichita anew last year, after 20 years of silence, by sending police and media a new series of messages. Some suspected he wanted to be captured to gain notoriety.
Among the clues he methodically sent to the press: a cereal box containing a doll dressed in clothing similar to that worn by a victim; the driver's license of 1986 victim Vicky Wegerle, including polaroids of her lifeless body. Until then, the BTK killer was not suspected of killing Wegerle.
"We then got a piece of information that will go down in history as one of the Darwin Awards," Foulston told the crowd yesterday, referring to an award for people who do stupid things.
Inside one cereal box, Rader left a note asking police whether he could send them a diskette without its being traced to his computer. He asked police to place a classified ad in the local newspaper that said, "It'll be OK, Rex" and left a P.O. Box number and code number.
(Undercover police had a tough time convincing the newspaper to run the ad, Foulston said. Sales representatives thought it was advertising prostitution, and refused to accept it from an undercover female police officer. It was published only after an undercover male officer submitted it.)
Police received a computer disk shortly after the ad ran that was traced to Park City Public Library and Christ Lutheran Church, and a user named Dennis, Foulston said.
Then police turned to the Internet search engine, Google.
A search turned up Dennis Rader, the church's congregation president. Investigators were flabbergasted.
Investigators acted quickly. They soon learned Rader had a wife, two children, was a Boy Scout leader and a municipal dog catcher for the tiny Wichita suburb of Park City. They subpoenaed a pap smear of Rader's daughter and compared it to semen left at the very first crime scene in 1974. DNA tests showed she was the daughter of the BTK killer.
The notorious killer's arrest was anti-climactic: On Feb. 25, he was pulled over while he was driving home for lunch.
Not long after his arrest, Rader sat in an interrogation room with Lt. Ken Landwehr, the police detective who had spent much of his career trying to find him. Foulston played a portion of the police interview yesterday.
"Why did you lie to me, Ken?" Rader asked Landwehr, referring to the floppy disk.
"Because I was trying to catch you," Landwehr replied. Rader felt a strange bond to Landwehr, even commenting that they were both "law enforcement officers," Foulston said.
In all, Rader talked to police for more than 32 hours, describing in disturbing and photographic detail all 10 slayings, Foulston said. He enjoyed the slayings so much that he got aroused just describing them to investigators, she said.
When he learned police would obtain a search warrant for his house, he drew a map of it and told where he kept mementos from each victim, including jewelry and underwear.
He also led them to what he called the "mother lode," a filing cabinet in his City Hall office where he stored diaries, drawings and poetry depicting the slayings.
On a large projector yesterday, Foulston showed Kentucky prosecutors Rader's drawings of fantasy torture devices.
Investigators asked Rader whether anything happened in his childhood that could explain his behavior, Foulston said.
Rader said that as a boy, he watched his grandparents strangle chickens at their farm. He soon began killing animals.
By age 29, he started killing people. Rader never raped or sodomized any of his victims; his deviant pleasures came from watching them die, Foulston said.
Yet his wife and children had no clue he was a serial killer and pedophile, Foulston said. His family has since disowned him.
"He had these different waves of his personality," she said. "The serial killer, the son, the husband, the father. Nobody that knew him in his church or in his community believed he could have been the one."
