Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door (42 page)

His name was Jeff Rader, he said. He was fifty years old, a plumber. He had never paid much attention to the BTK killings, and Dennis had never talked about them. He first knew something was up on the afternoon of February 25, when an FBI agent and two Wichita detectives interrogated him. When one of them blurted out that his brother was BTK, Jeff had laughed.

“I said, ‘No
way
. You got the wrong guy.’ But they just shook their heads. And one of them said, ‘We’re sure.’”

Jeff said Wenzl could not go in to see his mother, age seventy-nine. “It’s too hard on my mother,” he said. “And you’ll get the dogs to yapping. But I’ll talk with you for a minute.”

His mother was very frail, he said. “She falls down once in a while. Doctors think she might have water on the brain.”

The family never saw any sign that his brother could be a killer, he said. “My mother still can’t believe it. She’s still very much in denial. And so am I. But maybe, with me, acceptance is starting to creep in. I don’t think my brother is BTK. But if he is�if that’s the truth�then let the truth be the truth.”

Cruel people had made prank calls to harass his mother, he said. “There are a lot of sick people out there. The sort who want to kick someone when they’re down.”

Television broadcasts had aired errors and speculation about the family, he said. No one in the family had turned in Dennis, for example. The four Rader brothers grew up with a loving mother and a tough but decent father, Jeff said. Their father, William Rader, had served as a marine and was a God-fearing man, strict but not unreasonable.

“All four boys became Boy Scouts,” Jeff said. “We were a normal family. The boys all liked to be outdoors, go for hikes. We loved to hunt and fish.”

There was no trouble in the family, no abuse, he said. The FBI agent had asked whether he or any of the boys had been sexually abused by their father.

“I told them no. And that’s the truth.”

With nine years between them, he did not spend a lot of time with his eldest brother, he said. And Dennis didn’t want him around at times when they were younger. “But that was common in that an older brother never wants a younger brother around to tell on him,” Jeff said. His brother was a good kid. “I wasn’t,” Jeff said. “I was a hell-raiser. But Dennis wasn’t.”

As adults, the brothers gathered with their mother at Thanksgiving, at Christmas. They enjoyed each other’s company. Dennis and his wife, Paula, went to the house often to look after his mother, Jeff said. His brother often took the lead on that, driving their mother to the doctor when needed.

The family never had a clue about BTK, he repeated. He said their parents tried to teach them to be religious and to know the difference between right and wrong.

That same day, the cops stopped talking to Dennis Rader. He was devastated. He had loved it, loved talking to “Ken,” loved “helping” the police, loved “working the cases.”

An unhappy Rader’s booking photo.

The cops, glad to be done with him, handed him over to Sheriff Steed. Rader’s first residence at the Sedgwick County jail was a small cell in the health clinic. The jail, the state’s largest, had held high-profile inmates before, including Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City bombing defendants. The jailers did not usually put inmates in isolation, but the staff had to improvise with Rader. They needed to evaluate where he could be safely placed.

The jailers instructed Rader to answer a questionnaire that asked about his emotional state, including whether he felt shame or embarrassment.

Yes,
he wrote.
Because I got caught.

Rader’s ten murder charges once again make headlines.

49

June 27, 2005

Guilty Times Ten

As cops and prosecutors prepared for Rader’s plea hearing in June, women wrote him marriage proposals and sent him money. Finally, he’d tapped into the romantic bad-boy mystique of serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, who both married pen pals in prison. Fans wrote asking for autographs or interviews, and scholars and pseudoscholars sent queries about his psychology. Rader enthusiastically answered correspondence. People tried to sell BTK/Rader keepsakes online: code compliance documents with his signature, jailhouse letters, copies of the
Eagle
with the banner headline “BTK is arrested.” He told jailers that his leg irons would fetch a thousand dollars on the memorabilia market.

A Topeka oil and gas analyst named Kris Casarona wrote long letters to Rader. She was thirty-eight and married; she often visited him in jail and wrote to him nearly every day. They insisted there was nothing to this other than the desire of a Christian woman to reach out to another person of faith.

Rader wrote to the three anchors at KAKE-TV. He clipped a photograph of Susan Peters and Jeff Herndon out of an ad in the
Eagle
, autographed it, and mailed it to them with a cheery note; he sent a color photograph of his flower garden in Park City to Peters. He drew a cartoon frog with wings on the envelope of a letter to Larry Hatteberg. He noted that he could not talk about the court case, but that he loved Hatteberg’s work, especially the features called “Hatteberg’s People.” Perhaps Hatteberg could do a heart-warmer on the positive aspects of his life and work.

“Think about it,” Rader wrote, “and I will too…. I will keep the door open. And if it doesn’t work out�well�anyone can do a story along the line of�Animal Control–Code Enforcement�helps society out as a ‘Better Home & Garden Cop.’ Could be a start.”

Hatteberg replied in polite but wry terms: “You mention in your letter the possibility of doing a story with a human touch about your life as the Compliance Officer in Park City. If I understand your thoughts (you might have to help me out a little here)…I want to be clear, I am a journalist and if I do one side…I need to do the other side….”

Hatteberg thought they had done well covering the BTK story, though he also thought the tangle that KAKE had gotten into with the cops over the Seneca Street cereal box drop had been unnecessary. What he was angling for now was an interview with Rader. The first.

Susan Peters had broken two stories: she was the first to interview Shirley Vian’s son Steve Relford, who as a little boy had let BTK into the house. Peters had also been the first to interview Kevin Bright�an encounter that brought down Landwehr’s wrath. In the past several months, there had been times when Peters called the homicide section in tears begging for information about the case. At one point before Rader’s arrest, she called Landwehr to tell him Kevin was in town. The KAKE staff had shown Bright some photos of men they considered potential BTK suspects and he had picked one out. Would Landwehr like to talk to Bright?

Sure, Landwehr said.

He was furious but he did not tell Peters that. Landwehr was tired of this amateur sleuthing. When Bright arrived for the meeting, Landwehr ordered the KAKE crew to stay out. After a few pleasantries, Landwehr pulled a photograph out of his shirt pocket and plopped it in front of Bright.

It was the very man whom Bright had thought might be BTK. It was also someone the cops had long ago eliminated with DNA testing. When Landwehr saw the bewilderment on Bright’s face, he spoke in a cutting tone.

“Why do you think I knew which photograph it was that you were going to try to show me?” Landwehr asked. “Do you think I’m
psychic
, you dumb son of a bitch?”

Bright sat in shocked silence.

A detective spoke up. “Kenny, you’re not talking to a suspect.”

After his arrest, most of Rader’s contact with his family was through Michael Clark, the minister of Christ Lutheran Church. He visited Rader about once a week, sometimes passing along messages. One Monday he was accompanied to the jail by one of Rader’s brothers, Paul, who had secured an emergency leave from serving in Iraq.

Occasionally friends of Rader would contact the
Eagle
to defend him. And sometimes people who had their own suspects in mind, and had been frustrated by the cops’ refusal to arrest them, called to insist the wrong man had been charged.

On June 27, Rader donned a cream-colored sports coat for his plea hearing. The
Eagle
and other news outlets had confirmed through inside sources that Rader had confessed, but no one except his defense attorneys knew whether he would plead guilty. What everyone was hoping for was an explanation.

Outside the courthouse, the usual tent city had sprung up, with satellite trucks and scores of journalists and television crews. Rader had the national audience he craved.

Otis and other detectives met with the victims’ families one block from the courthouse. The cops positioned themselves around the group and walked them to the courthouse, past reporters. The families walked solemnly as though to a funeral, looking down at hot pavement; some held hands. The people with notepads and cameras behaved with restraint; no one asked about “feelings” or “closure.”

The Internet helped build a global audience for BTK news. Even though the hearing was carried live on television, hundreds of thousands of people around the world followed proceedings through the
Eagle
’s frequent online updates. Rader immediately pleaded guilty to all ten counts of murder. But Judge Gregory Waller didn’t let him leave it at that.

WALLER
: “In regards to count one, please tell me in your own words what you did on the fifteenth day of January 1974, here in Sedgwick County, Kansas, that makes you believe you are guilty of murder in the first degree.”

RADER
: “Well, on January fifteenth, 1974, I maliciously�”

Waller interrupted. He didn’t want Rader to merely parrot the charges against him.

“Mr. Rader, I need to find out more information. On that particular day, the fifteenth day of January 1974, can you tell me where you went to kill Mr. Joseph Otero?”

RADER
: “Um…I think it’s 1834 Edgemoor.”

In the
Eagle
newsroom, reporters gasped: Who didn’t know the Otero house was at 803 North Edgemoor? Had Rader really forgotten, or was this just an insult to the family and the authorities?

WALLER
: “All right, can you tell me approximately what time of day you went there?”

RADER
: “Somewhere between seven and seven thirty.”

WALLER
: “At this particular location, did you know these people?”

RADER
: “No, that was part of what…I guess my what you call my fantasy. These people were selected.”

WALLER
: “So you were engaged in some kind of fantasy during this period of time?”

RADER
: “Yes, sir.”

WALLER
: “Now, when you use the term
fantasy,
is this something you were doing for your personal pleasure?”

RADER
: “Sexual fantasy, sir.”

It was clear now that Waller wanted an explanation too…a detailed explanation. But it surprised even Waller that Rader gave chilling details in abundance�though he bungled his victims’ names.

WALLER
: “All right, what did you do to Joseph Otero?”

RADER
: “Joseph Otero?”

WALLER
: “Joseph Otero Sr., Mr. Otero, the father.”

RADER
: “I put a plastic bag over his head and then some cords and tightened it.”

The exchange between Waller and Rader went on for more than an hour, with Rader’s emotionless descriptions of his handiwork becoming more vivid the more he talked. The judge led Rader into a detailed description of all ten murders and a public revelation about what happened after he strangled Marine Hedge with his hands.

RADER
: “Since I was still in the sexual fantasy, I went ahead and stripped her. I am not for sure if I tied her up at that point in time, but anyway she was nude. I put her on a blanket, went through her purse and personal items in the house. I figured out how I was going to get her out of there. Eventually, I moved her to the trunk of the car�the trunk of her car�and took the car over to Christ Lutheran Church, this was the older church, and took some pictures of her.”