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BTK serial killer's daughter: 'We were living our normal life. ... Then everything upended on us
"He asked, 'Do you know who BTK is?' I was like, 'You mean the person that's wanted for murders back in Kansas?' And then he says, 'Your dad has been arrested as BTK.'"
On February 25, 2005, Kerri Rawson found out that her father, Dennis Rader, had tortured and killed 10 people, many of them young women just like her. After an FBI agent broke the news to Rawson, she first tried to defend the dad she thought she knew. But then, Rader confessed to all the horrific crimes he'd committed while being a seemingly normal suburban husband and father.
This is the full story of the BTK Killer's daughter — click the link in our profile to read more.
Late one February evening in 2005, Kerri Rawson went online and listened to a recording of the BTK killer from 1977. It was a 911 call in which the caller casually reported a homicide he had just committed. Rawson realized she recognized the voice. "I knew right away it was my dad," she says.
Earlier that day, when an FBI agent had knocked on her door and informed her that her father had been identified as the BTK killer and arrested for murder, Rawson insisted it was all a mistake. She knew her father, Dennis Rader, as normal, law-abiding, kind: a 59-year-old compliance officer in Park City, Kan. He had even risen to become president of his church council.
He asked, 'Do you know who BTK is?' I was like, 'You mean the person that's wanted for murders back in Kansas?'" Rawson continued. "And then he says, 'Your dad has been arrested as BTK.'"
For the first 26 years of her life, Rawson knew her father, Dennis Rader, as a family man who could be a gruff at times, but who loved her. A man who was the president of his church, a Boy Scout troop leader and an Air Force veteran. A man who was nearly 60 by that point, balding and wore glasses.
Then suddenly, in a matter of minutes, he was being named among the most notorious serial killers by the FBI agent standing in Rawson's new Michigan apartment.
"I was gripping the wall next to my stove, [the room] was spinning, [I was] saying, 'I think I'm going to pass out,'" she said. "[The agent] was asking me questions about my dad, about dates and things, and I was ... trying to almost alibi my father. I was like, 'My father is a good guy.'"
"You don't want to believe it’s true," Rawson continued. "And you know ... the father you know is not capable of any of this."
The abbreviation "BTK" stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill,” a moniker Rader had given himself years earlier indicating what he had done to his victims.
I had my family. I had my husband. I had therapy. But you're, sort of, alone. It's a very lonely -- worst club you could ever imagine belonging to, being the daughter of a serial killer.
For more than 30 years, the BTK killer haunted the community in and around Wichita, Kansas, torturing and murdering 10 people, including two children. He was known for taunting the Wichita community, local media and police with letters, sometimes phone calls, seeking recognition and detailing his horrific crimes.
From the moment the FBI agent broke the news to her, Rawson said it felt like her "whole life was a lie."
"I was born in '78," Rawson said. "My dad murdered a young woman when my mom was three months pregnant with me."
To Rawson, her childhood seemed normal. She said the family lived in a three-bedroom ranch house with a dog, and a treehouse her father built for her and her older brother in the backyard.
“Most of the time, [my father] was even-keeled and kind and warm,” Rawson continued. “At times, he could be very firm or have flashes of anger or outbursts that you weren't expecting.”
“He has said himself that he just got busy raising kids and having a family,” Rawson said.
It was in April 1985 that Rader murdered his eighth victim and neighbor, Marine Hedge, who lived just six doors down.
Looking back, Rawson said she was 6 years old at the time of Hedge’s death. She believed her father was away on a Cub Scout camping trip with her older brother. Rader later told authorities he snuck away from the event that night to commit the murder and returned to the campsite in the morning.
“Somehow I knew -- at 6 -- that her body had been found and that she had been murdered and she had been strangled,” Rawson said of her neighbor. “It scared me. I started having night terrors around that time."
“I would wake up screaming, sitting up in bed, and my mom was always the one that would come comfort [me],” she continued. “She would sit there and I would say, ‘There's a bad man in my house,’ and she's like, ‘No, there's no bad man in your house.’”
Less than two years later, in September 1986, Vicki Wegerle became Rader’s ninth victim. Five years passed, and in January 1991, Rader murdered his 10th victim, Dolores Davis.
But after that, Rader, the BTK killer, went silent. For years, there were no killings, no phone calls to police, no letters left around town or sent to journalists. Most in Wichita believed he just disappeared.
By 1991, when Rawson was 12 years old, her father got a job as a compliance officer in the Wichita suburb of Park City, Kansas. His office was down the hall from the Park City Police Department.
In the years after his last killing, the Rader family continued to live their everyday lives.
Rawson went to Kansas State University, where she met her husband, Darian. In 2003, Rader walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding.
Then, the Wichita Eagle newspaper ran a story in 2004 about the 30th anniversary of the unsolved Otero family murders.
“And we included in [the piece] that nobody remembered him, which invoked his ire,” said Michael Roehrman, executive editor of the Wichita Eagle.
So Rader decided to send a letter to the Wichita Eagle under the name “Bill Thomas Killman,” or “BTK” as the return address.
“I'll never forget that day,” said former Wichita Police Det. Kelly Otis. “We opened it up and it was pictures of Vicki Wegerle, who was killed in 1986 in her home.”
The reports of BTK’s return were explosive.
Rawson said she first read about the serial killer in Wichita in an article on ABCNews.com. As she started to learn more, Rawson said she assumed the killer “was a loner,” some guy who had been in trouble with the law in the past.
She never suspected the man she was reading about online would turn out to be her father.
Between 2004 and 2005, Rader sent a series of various communications to the Wichita Eagle and to ABC’s Wichita affiliate KAKE-TV -- a postcard, a letter -- and in one instance, describing the location of a cereal box left on a county road.
“Cereal boxes because serial killer,” said Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist and author of "Confession of a Serial Killer, the Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer."
Ramsland corresponded and met with Rader over the course of five years after he was incarcerated.
“He thought this is a great joke. ... He got these dolls dressed them to look like his victims, put them into the boxes with ... some of the victims' items,” she added.
In a separate instance, Rader went to a Home Depot and dropped another cereal box containing a communication in the bed of an employee’s pickup truck, asking authorities if he could send them a floppy disk without its being traced, telling law enforcement to “be honest.”
“He says, ‘Let me know ... in the classified ads of the Wichita Eagle, that it's OK. I'll look for that ad and if I see it, give me a couple weeks to send you something,’” Otis said.
“So law enforcement put an ad in the paper that said ‘Rex, it’ll be OK,’” said Tim Relph, a Wichita Police detective. “Eventually the disk arrives, and it is taken directly to a forensics software detective.”
When investigators got into the disk’s metadata, Relph said it showed that the disk had been in a computer registered to Christ Lutheran Church and a user named Dennis.
Investigators started Googling the church and found the website for Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, whose president was named Dennis Rader.
Then began the task of linking Rader to the BTK crime spree. When the murders began in the 1970s, DNA technology had yet to be developed. But biological specimens left behind at his crime scenes had been carefully preserved, allowing authorities by 2005 to confirm the killer’s identity through DNA analysis.
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