Original subtitles

This captain comes into our Homicide Unit

holding an envelope in his hand.

And he gave it to my partner, Dana.

Inside was a photocopy

of three Polaroid photos

of a dead woman that I recognized as Vicki Wegerle.

Vicki Wegerle was a homicide victim from 1986,

but the police department doesn't take pictures of crime victims

with a Polaroid.

Somebody obviously took her picture as she was dying.

At the very bottom,

was the symbol used by a serial killer who started killing in 1974.

The victims had been bound, gagged and strangled with a cord.

It'd been decades since his last communication.

A plastic bag over her head, and a cord looped around her neck.

Most people thought that he was either in prison, or dead,

or moved away.

My boss looked over that letter.

I'll never forget what he said.

"Gentlemen...

hug and kiss your families, because we're gonna work for a long time."

"BTK is back."

Okay, we're recording.

Okay.

My name is Kelly Otis, and in 2004,

I was a homicide detective with the Wichita Police Department.

When I was young, my father died,

and I was raised by a very strong single mother.

At the age of 21, I entered the police academy.

I did 11 years in patrol, and then I got promoted to detective.

And that's when I started working with my partner, Dana.

I've always wanted to be a detective, ever since I was a little kid.

I just didn't take people committing heinous crimes

and getting away with it very well.

When we got the letter from BTK,

we put together a task force including Kelly Otis...

How's that sound? Is that okay?

...myself and Tim Relph.

I remember BTK well from my childhood.

The daughter was found hanging from a pipe in the basement.

You didn't have to worry about the bogeyman or anything like that.

Your fear was this brutal murderer.

What leads do you have?

Well, very honestly, we have... no solid leads at all.

Once he reemerged,

you know exactly what your task is.

It's time for us... to catch that guy.

I started looking through the old files,

photographs, and the diagrams of the crime scene.

The first murders attributed to BTK,

um, were the Oteros.

The BTK story goes back to January of 1974.

BTK cut the phone lines at the back of the house.

And he entered through the back door, ended up taking control of the family.

Strangling Mr. Otero.

Mrs. Otero.

And the young boy.

He then took Josephine Otero to the basement.

She was bound up and then hung from a sewer pipe.

Josephine Otero was just 11 years old.

I had kids at the time,

and I found it extremely disturbing looking at those pictures.

It... It was horrendous.

And you... you can't unsee something, right?

BTK's second murder was Kathryn Bright.

His next victim was a single mother,

Shirley Vian.

And then there was Nancy Fox,

who was bound and tortured.

He sent multiple communications

to media outlets describing what he did.

"The code words for me will be bind them,

torture them,

kill them.

BTK."

We talked about it a lot, and we agreed

that if he would start sending letters like he did back in the '70s,

we'd have a shot at catching him.

Now we have much better fingerprinting and DNA testing.

If he made one mistake, our unit would be able to pick up on that.

BTK was serious about wanting to spread panic,

wanting to spread fear.

National attention is exactly what he wanted.

And so we used the media

to appeal to his narcissistic side.

Wichita Police Department, on Friday,

received a letter that most likely came from BTK.

There was hope he would send additional packages or letters

without actually killing someone new.

This is one of the most challenging cases I've ever been involved with,

and I find the individual that is doing this

would be very interesting to talk to.

A serial killer apparently has resurfaced.

The killer breaking his silence after 25 years.

People immediately fell back into their fears.

Maybe he's a little closer.

It's stressful.

Could be

the guy next door.

I... You know, I have no clue.

It had been a little bit over six weeks.

We hadn't heard anything from BTK.

And finally...

...we get this phone call.

Good evening. We have exclusive details

on new communication that could be from the serial killer BTK.

When we opened it up, we weren't sure what we'd find.

The contents looked very suspicious.

The news station had received communication

allegedly from BTK.

The police were called, and in no time,

a detective arrived to retrieve the letter,

to see if it contains the clues needed to track down BTK.

When we got it back up to the crime lab, oh, I was extremely excited.

Maybe we'd get some DNA off the envelope.

Maybe we'd get a hair sample.

But when we opened it up...

it was extremely bizarre.

Inside of that package,

had a word-search puzzle.

We found words like "victim."

"Follow."

And then "insurance man."

"Lost pet."

"Serviceman."

He was playing a game with us.

And I think that he was having fun with it.

When the crime lab processed the evidence,

there was no DNA, no hairs, no fibers, no fingerprints.

And it was so frustrating.

If you have any information that can help police,

you can call the BTK tip line.

The number, two-six-eight-four-one-seven-four,

open from 8:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday.

The phones began to ring, and they didn't stop.

Four hundred or more tips in the first 24 hours.

By 48 hours, it was over a thousand tips.

People were calling in from all over the country.

They suspected so-and-so is BTK.

It was almost overwhelming.

But we had a huge advantage in 2004 than any detective that touched this case.

DNA technology is a huge asset to investigators.

Cops back in the day took really good care of the evidence from the crime scenes.

And so, we were able to get DNA profiles of BTK

that were left in the Otero home in 1974.

Every time we got a potential suspect,

all I had to do was go get their DNA,

and the DNA would tell us if it was him or not.

We worked all hours.

Dana and I became fans of Diet Mountain Dew

because of its high caffeine content.

And we were eating out three times a day.

Cheeseburgers and chicken fried steak for dinner.

Food that was not good for you.

Your family suffered because BTK was all you'd think about.

Catching him was all you're driven to do.

Living like that, you know, was difficult.

There was some frustration that we were going into

six, seven months now,

and we had no good suspects.

It's a grind on you, and it's a grind for your family.

If I knew it was gonna be a long night, I'd just go home,

kiss my wife and, uh, just looked in on the kids.

You can get a little stream of light pretty quickly from those kids.

But then, afterwards, I went right back to work.

I was in the office working late when I got a call.

An unusual package was discovered

taped to a stop sign at First and Kansas.

Inside, there were multiple index cards.

And the title was "Death on a Cold January Morning."

It was an absolute blow-for-blow about what happened in the Otero house.

How he came to the decision to pick the Oteros,

how he approached the house,

what he did with each victim.

It contained so much detail, there was little doubt that it was BTK.

I have five children, and, at that time,

my oldest child was

about ten years old.

The thought that he could strangle a child,

the thought that he could hang a child...

You certainly realized the depravity of it.

We had to stop him from doing it again.

Police say they are still receiving tips

and want the public to continue to call the BTK tip line.

The number, two-six-eight-four-one-seven...

Saturday night, I'm going through tips, and I find one I found very interesting.

This gentleman matched what we knew about BTK.

The consensus was BTK would be extremely smart,

probably lived alone.

An eyewitness at the Kathryn Bright murder,

back in the '70s,

believed BTK had to be in his twenties,

and that would now put him in his fifties.

The person named in the tip was a professor, kind of a shut-in.

He'd lived with his mother up until her death.

So, I got a hold of my brother Dana and said,

"Come with me, this one's kind of different."

We didn't have a really good suspect very often.

There's a possibility this person could be BTK.

And I can hear footsteps in the house.

And the door slowly starts to open.

I see the tip of a butcher knife.

I said, "This is the Wichita Police.

I need to ask a few questions,

but I'd really like you to put that knife away."

Dana and I are looking at each other like, "This is kind of weird."

He comes back, and he opens the door,

then turns around and walks inside.

It was dusty, and dingy, and dark.

Your eyes take some time to adjust.

Kelly's talking to him about, you know, getting a DNA swab from him.

And I'm looking around, and I see all these ropes tied in knots.

Bind, torture, and kill.

That, of course, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

I'm trying to draw Kelly's attention to this.

And then my flashlight lands on an engineering book.

When BTK sent his very first letter in the '70s,

he put it in this book at the library,

and the book was Applied Engineering Mechanics.

So, now I'm in this house with this gentleman

who fits the age profile

and obviously likes knots.

And now he has an engineering book,

and I thought, "Holy cow, this could be the guy."

Finally, he allowed me to take his DNA.

And as we were walking out of the house,

I got goosebumps.

Evidence was taken to the Forensic Science Center to be tested.

I had them move it to the front of the line, because I thought,

"If anybody is gonna be him that I dealt with, it'll be this guy."

Two days later...

I got a call.

Said, "Nope, no match."

I was disappointed, for sure.

I thought we were talking to BTK, and we weren't.

Another possible communication from BTK,

a suspicious letter left at the downtown library.

- Okay. - All right.

What he said was, "I have spotted a female, a latchkey kid.

Just got to work out the details.

I'm much older and have to condition myself carefully.

I think fall or winter will be just right for the hit."

He was telling us he had a victim picked out

who was probably a child.

And that was petrifying for all of us.

We believed that he had just become more emboldened

because we hadn't caught him.

The stress was... was climbing really, really high.

Now, would this latest letter be a warning?

Wichita Police seem concerned BTK might strike again.

When I got home late, I'd turn on some mindless TV show.

And I might drink a little bit of a good whiskey.

And then I'd go crawl in bed.

But my brain would begin to spin.

So, I'd get out of bed, shower, shave, put on a clean suit,

and go back to work.

There were times I'd roll in at 4:00 a.m.,

and there'd be another detective who couldn't sleep.

And so we would sit in the task force office

talking about theories and strategy.

And what in the heck can we do to stop him?

This is KAKE News.

It appears BTK is communicating again.

KAKE TV receiving another mysterious message today.

Investigators arrived minutes later

to pick up the postcard and evaluate it.

BTK had written,

"Where between 69th Street North and 77th Street North on Seneca Street?"

Which is north of Wichita out into a rural area.

And then it said, "Have you or PD received number seven

at Home Depot drop site

January 8 of '05?"

So, he was telling us about two packages that hadn't been recovered.

That was huge.

It was game on at that point.

I drove up to North Seneca to collect the first package.

This was a secluded area.

The road was sand and dirt,

and leaning up against a street sign,

there's a

Post Toasties cereal box.

Cereal box for a serial killer, I guess.

Inside it was a cheap doll...

tied to a sewer pipe.

It was sickening.

He was trying to make this look like Josephine Otero.

The idea that he might kill someone else,

that it may be a kid,

you know, was taken to heart by everybody on the task force.

If you wanna kick a police department into high gear,

just threaten children.

You're just pressing all the buttons to get a police department fired up.

I drove to the Home Depot to see if we could recover the other package.

We didn't know what we were looking for.

We went all over that store...

and just did not find anything.

So, we put a sign there to ask anybody if they saw anything unusual.

Our concern is that it'd been found and disposed of.

That people didn't recognize it for what it was and thrown it away.

It was after midnight.

I got a call from the 911 dispatcher,

and she said they had had a phone call from a gentleman,

and that he was an employee of Home Depot.

He recalled finding something suspicious in the bed of his pickup truck,

which was parked in the parking lot.

I called him and I asked him what he thought was suspicious,

and he said, "It was a cereal box."

I said, "Well, where is that now?"

And he said, "I have it on my kitchen table."

Inside, there was another note.

Okay. All right.

You ready?

We're ready.

"Can I communicate with floppy

and not be traced to a computer?

Be honest.

I will try a floppy for a test run sometime in the near future.

February or March."

This was a bad strategy on his part.

Some things are deposited upon floppies or thumb drives

when you put them in a computer.

Most people don't realize that,

and we were way willing to bet that he didn't realize it.

He wanted us to respond by taking out a personal ad in the newspaper,

and he wanted us to refer to him as Rex.

The decision was made that we weren't gonna be honest with him.

And so, we put an ad in the paper that said,

"Rex, it'll be okay."

You just felt the pendulum moving.

We were gaining ground on him.

The employee that found the package was able to pinpoint the date

when the package ended up in his vehicle.

Home Depot had an extensive video surveillance system.

Maybe we'd capture video of BTK coming in and leaving.

The video was pretty grainy,

so fuzzy, you're... you're not gonna make any ID.

But as it pulled away,

we were able to get some good shots of the side of the vehicle.

We watched it

repeatedly.

Sizing it up against other cars.

Ground clearance, the wheelbase,

the rake of the windshield.

We sent a bunch of those pictures to video forensics.

And pretty quickly, they came back with a confirmation.

The vehicle's a Jeep Cherokee.

That's investigative gold.

You know, we knew he had a Cherokee. He was caught on video.

Now he wants to send us a floppy?

That's more mistakes in the last couple of weeks

than he's made in 31 years.

And you can only make mistakes so long and not be caught.

Two weeks after putting the ad in the paper,

Fox TV station, here in Wichita, got a package in the mail.

I was really excited to go get it.

I would probably

own up to driving a little bit above the posted speed limit, yes.

We gloved up.

Pulled out this little postcard.

And then...

...there was a floppy disk.

We were all gathered around.

It was dead quiet.

There was one document on there called "Test," a Word file.

The software is licensed

to Christ Lutheran Church.

And this document was printed by a user named Dennis.

A computer forensics examiner gets on the Internet

and searches for Christ Lutheran Church...

and the name Dennis...

and comes up with the president of that congregation.

Dennis Rader.

When we ran him through local state and national databases,

there was no criminal history whatsoever.

Just looked like a normal guy.

He was working for the city as a, uh, compliance officer.

He was married, uh, had a daughter and a son.

We got his address,

and then we were headed out the door.

It was like a race to drive by there.

But I didn't drive fast enough.

And Tim Relph beat us there

because he drives that way.

We knew the house'd be on the east side of the road.

That driveway isn't visible

until you get almost in front of the house.

And...

we saw the Cherokee.

It was excitement. It was crazy excitement.

And I stomped on the accelerator, you know, spun the tires.

I called the lieutenant, said,

"Grab everybody you can get your hands on and come down.

We're going through the door, he's there."

And he said...

"Stop.

You guys need to come back."

I knew we didn't have enough evidence to arrest him,

but you can see

this is everything you've been working for not only in the last 11 months,

but... but as... as a policeman, as a homicide detective,

this... this is it.

And he wants me to turn and leave,

and I'm like...

You know, that...

That's a tough, tough phone call.

You got to turn your car and you got to head back to Wichita.

The research into Dennis Rader was in full overdrive.

It was like, learn everything we can about this guy.

Is there someplace we can find his DNA?

And that's when we discovered

one of his children had attended Kansas State University.

Most female students can have free checkups,

so we wondered if maybe she had an exam that would have saved any of her DNA.

Because a familial DNA match

would be enough for us to arrest Dennis Rader.

We were able to seize that DNA.

And then we were just on hold

waiting for the results.

And then my cell phone rang.

That was a, um...

That's probably the happiest phone call I ever got in my life, truly.

Dennis Rader's BTK.

It's him.

I drove to our task force office.

Dana was already there.

Tim's already there.

We were ready to take this guy off the street,

put him in prison for the rest of his life.

But then the next morning,

the chief wanted the SWAT team to arrest Dennis Rader.

I said, "Chief, um, we want to arrest him.

We're the ones that have been chasing him for 11 months.

We can arrest him just as easy as a SWAT team."

And he kind of gave me the look like, you know,

maybe I was a little bit out of line.

Kelly Otis would have burned his house down

if we didn't get a chance to arrest him.

And the chief said, "Okay."

He worked in this office up here, just south of 61st.

But we knew that we had to keep this a very low-key takedown.

So, our plan was to line up on a side street,

and as soon as we knew he was coming home, we would set up the arrest.

The helicopter above,

it's telling us, uh, where he's located,

so we know he's on his way.

He's been stopped on that curb line.

I'm in between these two cars with a 12-gauge shotgun,

just in case he came out armed.

The detectives grabbed him, pulled him out of the truck,

and put him face down in the middle of the street.

I Immediately pulled my handcuffs out and cuffed him.

I was glad to be the person to do that.

He's a big guy.

Um, stocky, tall.

He's wearing his uniform from his work day.

As we were getting ready to move him, he looked at us and said...

"Would somebody please go tell my wife I won't be home for lunch?

I assume you know where I live."

We wanted to get Dennis Rader out of here.

Now, we have to put 30 years of violent crimes together

to present to a judge and a jury.

So, the work was not done.

Dennis Rader was brought in to our headquarters.

He was escorted to the fifth floor, where we had a room already prepared.

There was an FBI agent and a lieutenant in the Homicide section.

Impressive people, impressive credentials

appealing to his narcissistic side.

The rest of us were watching over closed-circuit TV.

Is he gonna talk? Is he gonna deny?

Lots of anticipation.

As a suspect, I assume you have something on me,

otherwise you wouldn't have brought me in.

He seemed cocky.

He wasn't worried about what was gonna happen.

And then the lieutenant tells him,

"This is how we caught you."

Things have occurred medically with your children,

and those samples are saved.

That's what brings me to you.

That's why I know your... your DNA is gonna match BTK's.

So, why don't you just say it?

Say... say who you are.

BTK.

Then he talked... for hours.

Hours.

Gloating on what he did.

This is his greatest accomplishment, and he's never been able to talk about it.

And make no mistake about it, he's proud of it.

Then I whispered in her ear a little bit.

You know, I told her BTK was a bad guy.

That's when you get upset, when you get angry.

He had no remorse.

None.

I was really sick of him.

The next morning, I... I went to church, you know, and just...

Just praised God.

Okay.

This is such a bad idea. Us three on microphones right now.

Exactly.

- That is Dennis' most worst punishment. - Yeah.

Not that he's locked up, but that nobody gives a shit about him.

Yeah.

This man that had infected my childhood,

you know, he was done.

Few people get the chance to vanquish their tormentors like that.

Very few people get to slay their childhood dragons.