31 years of the BTK killer

Re-emerging 30 years later
On January 2004, in Wichita Kansas, Dennis Rader was 58, still living in the house on Independence street. Rader was a compliance officer for Park City and an active member of the Christ Lutheran church.  He'd been married 32 years, his son and daughter were all grown up now. 

And the other Dennis Rader?  The brutal strangler who'd so far gotten away with all those murders all that time —and hadn't been heard from in 25 years?

Rader says he was "retired." "He was gonna go off the face of the earth."

Or so he says. 

Soon enough an excuse to grab the limelight would come again.  The Wichita Eagle published an anniversary article about the mysterious serial killer known only by the name he'd given himself, BTK and who had committed his first murders 30 years earlier. Of course, it was all so long ago Rader found his exploits weren't even front page news anymore.  He says it all made him feel a little itchy. 

Rader: That really stirred it.  I read that in the paper and I always though, you know, I'd like to bring this back out again, but should I?  And I think I've reached the point in my life — the kids were gone.  Not really bored, but kind of  bored.

And something else: Rader knew a local lawyer was writing a book about him — or about BTK, that is. That didn't sit too well either with the man who had such an enormous appetite to draw attention to himself.  Rader felt only he could do justice to his story.   

Rader: Eventually I was going to tell the story in my terms and not his terms.  They already had the killings, so that's factual.  But they didn't know how I worked and moved around the projects, the haunts, how I picked my victims.  They didn't know how that worked. I could just really stir the hornet nest up with the media by just showing them pictures and puzzles and playing a game with them.

So in March 2004, Rader made contact, not just signaling that he was still around, but far more ominously sending what appeared to be proof of yet another murder another young woman whose death had never been conclusively linked to BTK.

The innocuous looking piece of mail landed on Wichita Eagle reporter Hurst Laviana's desk. 

Laviana: I copied the envelope, copied the letter and took the letter straight to the police department.

Magnus: Did you read it?

Laviana:There's nothing to read.  There are no words on it. I thought it was crime scene photographs that some crackpot had gotten a hold of on the Internet or something. The pictures appeared to be pictures of a dead woman.

Her body had been posed several different ways, these were clearly not police photos.  And there was something else:  a photocopy of a driver's license of Vicki Wegerle.

Laviana: Vicki Wegerle's driver's license.  And I immediately knew this probably came from Vicki Wegerle's killer.

In September 1986, Vicki Wegerle, a young mother was found tied up and strangled in her home.  And a trophy had been taken, in this case her driver's license.  So police had naturally suspected BTK but there were differences, too:  especially that the killer had never publicly boasted about it afterward, as was his pattern. 

Now all these years later, in addition to the copies of the photos and the driver's license, there was the envelope they came in. The return address said, "Bill Thomas Killman."  "BTK." 

Laviana:  And that's when we realized this may be the real deal.

Magnus: Tell me about that moment.

Laviana: It's just total disbelief that he was still here.

Laviana agreed to give the police two days to nail it down, and then broke the story.  The ghost was back. Police could now say that more than 17 years earlier, Vicki Wegerle had indeed been BTK’s 8th known victim.

Fox: So by resurfacing in 2004 and sending a letter along with a photograph and the driver's license of the victim he's saying, "I'm still here.  You never caught me.  And I've been here all along."

Former Wichita TV news director Ron Loewen made a prediction to us almost a year before Rader was caught — and sadly, when it was all over, he'd be proven right. There had been two more murders never before connected to BTK that brought the total number of his victims to 10.

Unknown victims: Marina Hedge and Delores Davis
In 2004, Rader was still hiding evidence about his murder of Marine Hedge.  She lived on his block and they knew each other.

In court, Rader described how, after bowling one evening in 1985, he broke into her house and waited for her to come home. Rather than leaving her body in her own home, Rader changed his m.o., confusing police at the time.

Lamunyon: Killed her in her house, put her in the trunk of her car, took her to his church, put her on a blanket, tied her up in different bonding situations, took pictures of her and put her back in the trunk and took her out and dumped her. It was the middle of the night.  He had a key because he was one of the leaders of the church.

Marine Hedge's body was later found buried under some leaves and branches in this ditch, several miles from her home.

And even as his persona BTK re-emerged in 2004, Rader was also hiding evidence about his last victim:  Delores Davis, whom he killed in 1991. 

Her son Jeff talked to us recently  after viewing Rader's interview with the psychologist.

Davis: She was a kind, considerate, empathetic, gentle person given the circumstances of her death she kept her class and her dignity and her poise right up to the end.

In court Rader said he used a concrete block as a battering ram to crash through Delores Davis' sliding glass door and enter her home. Rader then took her body from the house.  But authorities only knew that she was missing.

Davis: Probably kidnapped at best or dead at worst. So that kind of started the clock on a seemingly 13-century time frame, where we didn't know what happened to her  and that  is a trip to hell.

13 days later, his mother's body was found under a bridge. Of course police didn't know then who'd done it.  Jeff Davis says he slipped into despair and depression that destroyed his marriage and worse.

Davis: I would go to bed every night for the better of five years and I prayed to God that he'd let me die.

Delores Davis driver's license and social security card had gone missing — taking trophies was certainly the kind of thing BTK did to his murder victims. But there were many other aspects of this crime that strayed from his usual m.o. 

So until Rader was caught and the police announced Delores Davis as the tenth victim, her son was left to wonder.

Davis: I guess there was the remote possibility that there was some phantom serial out there but honestly I never connected it with BTK.

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