31 years of the BTK killer

Edie Magnus Correspondent • Profile

"Dateline NBC" aired an exclusive jailhouse interview with the man who named himself BTK for his propensity to bind, torture and kill his victims.

This interview, obtained by “Dateline,” was conducted by a Harvard-trained psychologist, Robert Mendoza, who performs more than a hundred evaluations for criminal and civil cases each year. He was hired by the defense team to assess Rader’s sanity. 

The conversation was taped just a couple of hours after Rader had pleaded guilty to 10 counts of murder in June. Within hours of delivering those remarks, Rader spoke about his appearance in that courtroom.

Mendoza: How you feeling?

Rader: I really feel pretty good. It’s kind of like a big burden that was lifted off my shoulders. On the other hand, I feel like I’m a star right now.

The man who taunted the media, the police, his community and the nation for more than 30 years, finally answered some of the questions of why.

How a hometown boy became BTK
Dennis Rader was a hometown boy raised in the Wichita area, one of four sons raised by church-going, Lutheran parents. His mother has been described as loving, his father as tough but decent. One brother said their home was without problems, without abuse.

But while Rader appeared a clean-cut high school senior in his 1963 yearbook, he was already having bizarre sexual fantasies. He kept them hidden as he served his country in the Air Force, then married a girl from home in 1971. But a couple years later, he could no longer keep those fantasies locked only in his mind. His obsession with sex and bondage evolved into deviant violent acts carried out on real people — and ultimately led to murder.

Rader: I started working out this fantasy in my mind.  And once that potential — that person become a fantasy, I could just loop it over.  I could lay in bed at night and think about this person, the events and how it’s gonna happen.  And it would become a real, almost like a picture show.  You know, I wanted to go ahead and produce it and direct it and go through with it.  No matter what the costs were, the consequences.  It was gonna happen one way or another.  Maybe not that day, but it was gonna happen.

No one knows for sure why he had to kill to fulfill those fantasies, but in this interview with the psychologist, Rader says that he picked his first victims, members of the Otero family — utterly at random in late 1973.

The first murders
Rader had recently been laid off from a job and says he was feeling down and out at the time and had begun “trolling,” as he put it, in certain neighborhoods, including along Edgemoor drive where the Oteros lived.

Rader: That neighborhood, I guess, became what I call a haunt. It had special appeal to it.  I’d been there.  I started knowing the roads.  I knew the people.  You know, I’d drive by, watch cars, people pull out of their homes, and people go, wrote telephone numbers down, or wrote addresses down.  This is how it really started is by haunts.  That Edgemoor area was my first big haunt.

Julie Otero, her husband and their five children lived on Edgemoor then. It was just Mrs. Otero’s bad luck that she happened to catch Dennis Rader’s eye while he was driving down her street. 

Rader: She came out of the house and took the kids to school, so I followed them to school.  I thought, well, that’s a corner house.  That’s a possibility.  And I was in between work.  Idle hands, what is it? 

Medonza: The devil’s workshop?

Rader: Yes, and all these things seemed to happen most time when I had idle hands.  I had just lost a job at Cessna.  That was demoralizing to me. 

Mendoza: So they were convenient?

Rader: Convenient.

Mendoza: How did they fuel the sexual fantasy, though?  Was there something specific about them?

Rader: Mrs. Otero’s attractive.  And then I saw Josephine, too.

Josephine was the Otero’s 11-year-old daughter.   

Rader: So I must have had that somewhere in my mind.  A younger person — that must have locked in on me.

It would be nearly two months before Rader acted on the sexual fantasy involving Mrs. Otero and her daughter.

Inside the Oteros home
On January 15, 1974, Rader broke into the home of the Oteros, the objects of his obsession.  He says he entered the home that day a very anxious man, though he recounts the story with a strange lack of emotion.

Mendoza:  You were nervous?

Rader: Oh extremely nervous. All of a sudden, I had already cut the phone line. And, it’s funny, because I left my knife.  I left the cutter.   I had to come back and get those later.  But then, the door opened.  So here I am.  So do I just walk out the back door and they call the police?  Or I go for it? 

And I went for it.  You know, it’s just like, now I can’t back out of it.  And that’s basically what happened all the way through. "I can’t back out of this. I’ve got to go all the way now."

At that point, he says acting out his sexual fantasy was his only goal, murder was not yet part of his plan.

He says the family didn’t take him too seriously at first. 

Mendoza: What happened once they saw you?

Rader: Well, they thought it was a joke. I went in, I think it was a younger Otero and they were all in the kitchen, they were making sandwiches.

Mendoza: The younger male or female?

Rader:  No, it was the younger—the junior—uh, Joseph. 

Rader says to keep the family calm, he made up a story about why he was there.

Rader: Mr. Otero actually stepped up and told him I was coming for some food.  I was wanted in California or wanted.  I needed some food and water and some money and transportation. That was my ruse to kind of calm him down. He kind of laughed a little bit.  He said, “What is this, a joke? You know, who sent you over?  My brother-in-law?”

Rader says the family bought his lie about being on the run from the law and not wanting to hurt them. And so, at gunpoint, they acquiesced to his tying up all four of them — mother and father, and younger son and daughter — without a struggle. 

Rader: So they were cooperating with me 100 percent.  And that’s probably their demise. If they probably struggled and fought with me, it would have been a different story.  But they felt fairly comfortable so that’s what I was going to do.

As Rader tells this story — like he does so often — he paints his own conduct in the best possible light.  So he says he took pains to make his victims feel even more comfortable by actually loosening some of the binds around their hands and feet.

Rader:  I’m trying to comfort them as much as I could.

Mendoza:  To keep them quiet, or because you actually were worried about it?

Rader:  Both.  But, you know, although — I’m not a bad guy, I care for people.  You know, I have concerns for people.  And I hadn’t really crossed that path yet where I was going kill the people yet, so I was still in concern mode.

"Dateline" asked James Alan Fox, one of the nation’s leading criminologists and a professor at Northeastern University to give his analysis of this interview. His most recent book about serial killers includes BTK.

James Alan Fox: What you’re seeing here is a very early form of a future serial killer who’s still trying to decide what it is he’s going to get out of these crimes. He wants to fulfill his fantasy, but it’s not necessary for them to feel excessive suffering. At this stage, he hadn’t yet made a decision to kill.

Fox has has studied serial killers for 25 years and has written numerous books.

Rader: I had them all controlled completely. I went in the other room and I thought, “Do I just leave or what?  They already know me—my face.” So I went back and put a plastic bag over Mr. Otero’s head. I put a garnet over his neck and pulled up on it.  And that’s when it all hit the fan: They could all see what I was doing.

Rader describes first strangling the mother and father while their 9-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter watched. Although he is describing acts of unspeakable cruelty, his voice is utterly devoid of emotion.

Mendoza:  Kids were watching this?

Rader: Yes, they were watching it.  They were screaming and hollering.

Mendoza: Did you want to move them from the scene at all?

Rader:  No, no, I had to get control.  It was really noisy.  They were they were screaming and—

Mendoza:  The noise is bothering you?

Rader:  Yeah, the noise was bothering me.  And the mailman would be out there, or somebody would be walking by.  So I had to control it very quickly.

"He only looks at these events from his own perspective," analyzes Fox. "This is all a script designed to please him,  because remember, it was almost like these people weren’t real. They were just actors.  And they didn’t matter.  What mattered was his enjoyment.  And the kids screaming was just taking away from his enjoying all of this stuff.  How can he get aroused with all these kids screaming?"

Rader: (Sighs) It was just something that I had to do. Once I started with Mr. Otero, I knew I had to do all four of ‘em.  It’s like an execution— you know, once you start it, if there’s witnesses, you had to do it all the way around. 

For someone who seems so callous, you might assume Rader was always a coolly efficient killer.  But the way he tells it, Rader didn’t have a clue how much force it took to end a life—and so tried several times to strangle Mrs. Otero only to have her wake up again.

During the woman’s last, desperate struggle for consciousness, Rader says she was fully aware he was snuffing out the lives of her husband and two children.  In what he says were her last words to him, Mrs. Otero’s humanity shines against the killer’s inhumanity. 

Rader:  Mrs. Otero had woke up and she actually said, “God have mercy on your soul,”  is what she said.  And I put her down permanently.

Mendoza: This woman who probably knows now that she might be going to die, she is generous with you.  Asking God to have mercy on your soul?

Rader:  Yeah. Yeah.

Mendoza:  Pretty generous thing to tell a man—

Rader:  Someone who’s trying to kill you.

Mendoza:  That’s killed and tortured your family and is about to do the same to her.

Rader:  Yeah.

Rader eventually took young Josephine Otero down to the basement of her home and hanged her from a pipe.  The police found semen near Josephine’s body. 

"Going forward, recollections of what he had done with these victims fueled his desire to do it again," analyzes Fox.

Rader says the whole experience left him quaking.

Rader: I was really on a, not a sexual high, I was just scared high.  I was really nervous, sweating, I had sweat running off me all over the place.  And I just, you know, I had gloves on.  I had rubber gloves, and they were just full of water, sweat.  It was just really...  my clothes were just soaked with sweat.  Very nervous.  Not like a master criminal at all.  This is my first time that I’d ever crossed that barrier.

Several hours later, Charlie Otero, then 15, and his sister Carmen, then 13, came home from school.

Charlie Otero: As I walked through the back door I noticed the kitchen was in disarray.  Things were on the floor. It didn’t look right. And I yelled out, “Is anybody home?”  That’s when I heard my sister cry out, “Charlie, come quick!” I ran through the hallway down to the bedroom and I found Carmen with my parents. My father was tied up, his eyes were bulging.  His tongue was about bit off.  My mother was on the bed. She didn’t even look like my mother.  And I looked at my dad. I could smell the death and the fear in the room.

Charlie and Carmen had not seen what had happened to their younger brother and sister when they were taken to the police station. They say they told police to make sure Joseph Jr. and Josephine did not enter the home. 

Charlie: So I was telling the police the whole time, “Go to Josie and Joey’s school and keep them from coming home.  I do not want them to come home and find the house the way it is with police everywhere.”

Carmen: We were afraid of what they would see.  We were at the police department for quite awhile and we kept asking them, you know, “Did you get a hold of the little ones?” And finally they finally told us, “You don’t have to worry about that.  They were killed also.”

Charlie: When they told me about Josie and Joey, I just died inside. After that day, I lost my religion instantly.  The minute I saw my mother, I said, “There cannot be a God.  Not only can there not be a God, but I hate him if he is a God, if there is one.”

A despair not difficult to understand from a man whose mother, father, sister, and brother were slaughtered in their own home, horribly and inexplicably. 

While the Oteros were the first, they would not be the last people to fall victim to Dennis Rader’s hellish world.

There would be more bodies, more suffering loved ones, more questions about who he was and why he was doing this.

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