Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered ten people in Sedgwick County, Kansas between 1974 and 1991.
He is also known as the BTK Killer or the BTK Strangler. "BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill", which was his infamous signature. He sent letters describing the details of the murders to police and local news outlets before his arrest. After a decade-long hiatus, Rader resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent guilty plea. He is currently serving ten consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.
Rader was particularly known for sending taunting letters to police and newspapers. He authored many communications from 1974 to 1979. The first was a letter that had been stashed inside an engineering book in the Wichita Public Library in October 1974 that described, in detail, the killing of the Otero family in January of that year. In early 1978, he sent another letter to television station KAKE in Wichita, claiming responsibility for the murders of the Oteros, Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox. He suggested many possible names for himself, including the one that stuck: BTK. He demanded media attention in this second letter, and it was finally announced that Wichita did indeed have a serial killer at large. A poem was enclosed titled "Oh! Death to Nancy," a parody of the lyrics to the American folk song "O Death."
In 1988, after the murders of three members of the Fager family in Wichita, a letter was received from someone claiming to be the BTK killer, in which the author of the letter denied being the perpetrator of the Fager murders. The author credited the killer with having done "admirable work." It was not proven until 2005 that this letter was, in fact, written by Rader. He is not considered by police to have committed this crime.
By 2004, the investigation of the BTK Killer was cold. Then, Rader began a series of 11 communications to the local media that led directly to his arrest in February 2005. In March 2004, The Wichita Eagle received a letter from someone using the return address Bill Thomas Killman. The author of the letter claimed that he had murdered Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986, and enclosed photographs of the crime scene and a photocopy of her driver's license, which had been stolen at the time of the crime. Before this, it had not been definitively established that Wegerle was killed by BTK. DNA collected from under Wegerle's fingernails provided police with previously unknown evidence. They then began DNA testing hundreds of men in an effort to find the serial killer. Altogether, over 1,300 DNA samples were taken and later destroyed by court order.
In May 2004, television station KAKE in Wichita received a letter with chapter headings for the "BTK Story," fake IDs, and a word puzzle. On June 9, 2004, a package was found taped to a stop sign at the corner of First
