Dennis Rader - "The BTK Killer" - Revealing U.K. Documentary ---
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The FBI man knocked on Kerri Rawson’s door 10 years ago Feb. 25. She looked out from her tiny apartment near Detroit. He was holding an FBI badge.
She almost didn’t answer. Her father, a code compliance officer in the Wichita suburb of Park City, had taught her to be wary of strangers, and this one had sat in his car next to her trash dumpster for an hour. She’d called her husband.
But after the FBI guy knocked, she let him into her kitchen, where she’d made chocolate bundt cake. From now on, the smell of chocolate cake would make her queasy.
He asked whether she knew who BTK was.
Yes. BTK – Bind. Torture. Kill. – was the serial killer who scared her mom decades ago. The FBI guy was her dad’s age – late 50s, wearing glasses and a necktie, nervous. She was a substitute teacher taking a day off, still wearing mint-green pajamas, though it was past noon.
Her dad had been arrested as a BTK suspect, the man said.
He needed to swab her cheek for DNA.
Lunch waiting
At that moment in Park City, shortly after 12:15 p.m., Kerri’s mother, Paula Rader, sat down to lunch at home, waiting for her husband. Cops rushed in, guns drawn. A week later, Paula’s lunch still sat uneaten in the house she had lived in with her husband, Dennis, since the early ’70s. She would never sleep at that house again.
Other cops had just arrested Dennis Rader as he was driving home for lunch, pinning him on the pavement as they cuffed him. Around Wichita, officers were picking up Rader’s family and friends for questioning.
At the police station, Paula defended her husband. Had she ever noticed anything unusual? No.
Back in Detroit, Kerri yelled at the FBI guy.
The last time she had seen Dad was weeks before, in Park City at Christmastime. He looked sad. She remembered his bear hug, how he smelled, his brown code-compliance uniform.
“See you in a while,” he’d said.
This could not be true, she told the FBI agent.
Dad had called last night, asking whether she’d checked the oil in her car.
Now, with the FBI guy, she did something she would do many times over the next seven days – defend and then doubt her father’s innocence.
She told him about Marine Hedge.
Hedge, 53, had been a grandmother, with a silky Southern accent, 5 feet tall, weighing no more than 100 pounds and living six doors from the Raders. Kerri’s dad had waved to her driving to church. She disappeared in 1985, when Kerri was 6, her body found in a ditch. Paula had worried about safety.
“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “We’re safe.”
But now Kerri remembered that when Hedge had disappeared, Dad was not home. “It was stormy, and I didn’t want to sleep by myself. My mom let me in her bed – that’s how I know he was gone.”
Kerri’s husband, Darian, hurried into the apartment that day, asked to see the FBI guy’s badge, excused himself to go into the bathroom and called the Detroit FBI office. Yes, they said. The guy is a real agent.
Kerri stared at walls, talked in circles. One moment she’d be furious about the arrest. Then she’d stare. After the FBI guy left, she took down a picture of her father that was hanging in a hallway and stuck it in a closet.
She Googled “BTK” for proof that her dad was innocent, but she told Darian she was matching her memories to BTK’s murder timeline and now had doubts.
If this were true, then her whole life might be a lie. Dad might have used her and her family as a cover story for murder.
Few people are the sons or daughters of serial killers.
But psychologists say all of us suffer trauma in life.
How we respond defines us. Some of us turn bitter. Others find a way to live in peace. One key, as Kerri’s psychologist said later, is who we have in our lives and how good they are at guiding us.
Another key, as Kerri herself would say someday, is whether we can forgive the seemingly unforgivable.
