Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

- People in Wichita had been terrorized

by the BTK Killer for 30 years.

- BTK has killed seven people, Chief.

What kind of leads do you have?

- No solid leads, at all.

- When they finally announced that there was a serial killer

on the loose, what was that like for you?

- The one thing BTK likes,

more than anything else, is publicity.

- When he went uncaught, it just confirms for him,

he's smarter than the police.

- Question for Wichita back then,

is how many more people are gonna die?

♪ ♪

- After BTK was apprehended,

detectives searched his office and his home

and came up with a stash of Polaroids

that looked as if there were male victims.

♪ ♪

And they asked him who his male victims were,

and he didn't understand what they meant.

And they mentioned these Polaroids,

and then he said, "Oh, that's me."

[camera clicks]

[camera clicks]

♪ ♪

- He would dress in slips

and female underwear that he had stolen.

He would wear a mask that had makeup on it, a wig.

- Rader told himself that acting out these fantasies

helped him diminish the desire to kill somebody.

[camera clicks]

But on the other hand, he's also completely immersed

in what it's like to be a victim--

Feeling the ropes around him,

wanting to do this to somebody.

And the more he did that, that kind of ensured

that he would act out again.

- Well, good morning. - Hello, Dennis.

I'm Dr. Katherine Ramsland,

professor of forensic psychology

and the author of multiple books

about extreme offenders, like serial killers.

I've been corresponding with Dennis Rader to try

to understand what led him to become

one of the most notorious serial killers in America.

This is the first time that Rader has explored

these topics in depth with anyone.

- The more information we have about serial killers,

the more we understand what makes them tick,

the easier it will be to prevent them.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

Sexually-compelled serial killers tend to get addicted

to what they're doing.

They tend not to have control over the addiction,

but Rader did take breaks.

He went three years. He went five years.

♪ ♪

so he stands apart from many of them

in that it's more an identity thing--

He wants to be a serial killer--

Than that he can't help himself.

Because he could help himself and did.

♪ ♪

Through the work I've been doing with Dennis Rader,

I'm hoping to dissolve some stereotypes,

to include outliers like him,

and show that we need to accommodate more data

than we have, in the past, about serial killers.

♪ ♪

- The most important thing that everyone can do

is certainly be aware that we do

have a very serious problem.

- When the announcement came out from the police

that there was a serial killer in Wichita,

Rader found that exciting.

Finally, he had gotten some attention,

even though they didn't know who it was.

He enjoyed the idea that he was terrorizing the Wichita area.

- The hunt began Friday when KAKE received this letter

from the man police say is the killer of seven people

over the past four years.

He calls himself the BTK Strangler

and promises to kill again.

- Why do you think you wanted this recognition?

- Rader never grows up,

in terms of the attention he needs.

It all goes back to that arrested development.

- Of course, keep in mind, you're not dealing

with a, quote, normal criminal.

Assuming that the person is still alive,

that person is gonna kill again.

- When Chief LaMunyon announced that we did,

in fact, have a serial killer,

people were frightened.

It had changed the entire complexion

of how people went about their daily routines in Wichita.

- Police were just baffled.

They didn't have an answer.

Usually, if somebody got murdered in Wichita,

we had an answer pretty quick.

- Saying "Wichita" and the term "serial killer"

in the same sentence, I never thought I'd do that.

And particularly terrifying for young women,

because are they gonna be next?

And that's what everybody thought.

BTK messed with your mind.

He was controlling the police department,

he was controlling the news media,

and he was controlling the public.

♪ ♪

- While Wichita is reeling in fright,

Rader is going about his business

pursuing his degree in the administration of justice.

- While you were in school,

you were also committing your own crimes.

Were you listening for things that would help you?

- He learned a lot about how police investigated crimes,

which helped him to know what to do, what to avoid.

That subject matter just helped him

to become a better predator.

♪ ♪

What did you want to do with your degree?

- Serial killers who are attracted to law enforcement

know that a police officer is in position

to know a lot about potential victims,

and they can approach people with a sense of authority

by flashing a badge and getting people

to go walk away with them.

- We not only read, of course, what he wrote.

Every piece of paper was examined.

Everything was looked at for evidence.

Not one piece ever had a fingerprint,

had a hair, had a fiber that could be identified.

And to me, that's why he feels confident

in sending these letters.

- You would get these mailings,

and they would be in all kinds of bizarre shapes.

I thought there might be something symbolic

about what he was sending.

It was just the fact that he thought he might

have touched it, and he didn't want anyone

to see his fingerprints.

♪ ♪

- Rader has an attitude that he is smarter than other people,

because he's more vigilant, he's more attuned.

He watches people as a predator,

in ways that most people are not doing.

So as he's also developing knowledge

about law enforcement and investigation procedures

and forensic practices, that's just increasing his sense of,

now I know what to do, and no one will be able to touch me.

Studying that is very important

to our understanding of serial killers,

because if they really believe they are untouchable,

that's where they'll make their mistake.

[dramatic music]

- As my partner and I tried to puzzle out

what we could do to advance the case,

really the only thing that we knew of that he had created

and touched, held was the communications.

Now, the letters were typewritten

and then copied multiple times.

In 1978, there was not a copy machine on everyone's desk.

So we sent a detective to hand carry the evidence to Rochester

and had Xerox work with the material for about a week.

- They were able to trace one of those copies

by looking at the fracture and scratch marks

that were present on the plate

that you lay the copying material on.

[scanner whirs]

- And they were able to trace the two copy machines back

to public use copy machines, the kind where you just

put a nickel in the slot and make a copy.

One was in the basement of a building

at Wichita State University,

and the other one was on the second floor

of the public library,

actually where the first Otero letter was found.

The one thing that we did not have before was that,

somehow, this perpetrator had a connection to Wichita State.

[scanner whirs]

- After you knew that they had traced your Xeroxing

to Wichita State, did it scare you

that they were closing in on you?

- Rader would keep these journals

to describe what he was doing.

He had his own drawings,

plus he had various items for his hit kits.

As these things piled up,

he needed places to secure them

against anyone finding them and figuring things out.

So basically, the items from both his murders

and his fantasies went into these hidey holes.

- During my work with Dennis Rader,

one of the things he made for me

was a map of these hidey holes.

The map itself indicates the various places

around Wichita he would have gone to hide some things.

Like, he would find an abandoned

piece of equipment that had sat there for months,

so it looked like nobody was going back to it.

So he might use that as a temporary stash.

He buried a few things.

It was important for him to have this rigidity,

this regularity of the map,

which is exactly the way he lived his life.

And after 1979,

BTK seemed to have vanished.

- BTK, all of a sudden,

just kind of disappeared from public eye.

There were no murders that we knew of.

Everything kind of died down

and started to get back to normal in Wichita, Kansas.

♪ ♪

- You got Wichita all in a frenzy over a serial killer,

and then you went quiet.

What were you doing?

- Right.

- When you ask an expert why a serial killer stops,

they normally are gonna tell you they die,

or they are in prison and can't have access to other victims.

But he said he was always hunting.

It just had to be perfect for him

to decide to go forward with a hit.

♪ ♪

- He liked his family life,

and he liked the idea that he was BTK and nobody knew.

- Dennis, he would get 3x5 index cards,

and he would cut out pictures of models

out of advertisements, and he would affix it to the card,

and then, on the back, he would give her a name

and characteristics, likes and dislikes.

And then he would put a card in the seat beside him,

as he would ride around, and he would, you know--

"I'm spending the day with Sally," or whoever.

It was like he had a relationship.

- He would talk dirty to this 3x5 card, the slick ad.

Then, before the family would get home,

he would go get in the shower with his card and masturbate.

That was his preferred means of sexual gratification,

and he said, "That's why you don't have more victims dead,

because I enjoyed playing with myself

as much as I enjoyed playing with others."

♪ ♪

Dennis Rader had the opportunity

to travel the entire state of Kansas,

and because he was traveling and living in motels,

he said that gave him the opportunity

to practice his bondage.

- One of the things that Rader did to kind of compensate

for the fact that he didn't have time for victims,

was come up with what he called motel parties.

And the motel parties

were autoerotic kinds of activities.

He had dolls that he used

to help facilitate his imagination,

and he would experiment.

- Rader often would take items from his victims' homes

that he could then use to replicate

what he had done to them,

but in an autoerotic sort of scenario.

So he might dress in a slip or pantyhose or underwear

that he had taken and imagine what it must have been like

for one of his victims to know that they were about to die.

- Rader grew careless, and there were times

when he would use the privacy of the home

to do some of his autoerotic activities--

Dress himself in a woman's slip,

maybe his wife's, put a noose around his neck.

And at one point, his wife came home unexpectedly.

- I think the fact that Rader had put his marriage

and his family and his whole life on the line

when he was indulging in his autoerotic activities

speaks to the addiction of it,

but also, his belief that he was really

smarter than people, he was special,

and he just wasn't going to get caught.

♪ ♪

There was a time where you thought about suicide.

[dramatic music]

- You put a loaded .357 in your mouth?

- And what did it feel like when you didn't

pull the trigger, and you put the gun down?

Then what--then what went through your mind?

- Well, it sounds like you gave it a lot of thought.

Was that about having regrets and remorse?

- Okay.

I wouldn't call it remorse

so much as just, how did my life get this way?

Maybe I should end it, before I do anything to anyone else.

But I think those moments were pretty temporary.

[dramatic music]

- The first thing you have to realize about psychopaths

is they're-- They're wired different.

They don't feel emotions the same way regular people do.

The best way to describe a psychopath

dealing with emotions like guilt or shame or remorse,

which don't exist for them, is if emotions are color,

they're colorblind.

Regular people, in the normal population,

we can look at a traffic light and see red for stop,

yellow for caution, green for go.

A psychopath-- they learn, okay,

the light at the top means stop,

the light in the middle means caution,

the light at the bottom means green.

But they don't see the colors.

They're just following the norms and customs

and you know, laws in society,

which, if you're a psychopath, don't apply to them.

♪ ♪

- Dennis had a number of jobs

in which he was able to travel.

He worked in a security company.

After he lost that job,

he worked for the Census Bureau.

That let him go to other states,

where he had the opportunity and took the opportunity

to at least watch for victims, sometimes stalk them,

and even plan for doing something to them.

In one town, he actually dug a grave for someone

that he believed he was going to murder.

- Is there a possibility that there could be more murders?

The one thing that bothered me, in reviewing the Otero files,

was it was difficult for me, as a homicide investigator,

to grasp the idea that a person's first killing

would be four members of a fa-- how do you control

and commit four murders-- And very calculated murders?

I mean, bringing weapons with you,

bringing the instruments of binding, everything.

It just didn't seem plausible to me.

♪ ♪

- Because he did take out-of-state trips

during a time period when he talked

about the urge or Factor X being very strong,

I think it's possible there might be other victims.

So if there are, I want to be the person he tells that to.

Remember the dream you sent to me?

I want to read that back to you

and see if you have anything to say about it.

Do you mind?

- Okay, so the dream was about a boxcar,

and here's what you wrote.

♪ ♪

"One end had an old-fashioned barber shop,

"like my Grandpa Cook had.

"In my dream, I'm working on a letter to you,

"so it is spread out on the table.

"I get my call number for a haircut

"and realize there is too much stuff left out

"for eyes to see.

"So I walk back to put it into my black briefcase.

"Then the alarm clock goes off in my dream,

"and I'm trying to shut it off,

"and at the same time, two police officers come in.

"One taps me on the shoulder and says,

"'We know you did more than ten.'

"Then I awake to find out

the real alarm clock is buzzing away."

[alarm clock beeping]

I've always really wondered

about that dream and what it meant,

and it sounded like you meant some very dark things.

- The dream suggests he's about to tell me something

that the police already suspect,

because there are two officers who come in.

And it has to do with his darkest secrets

that he might have been about to tell me

and then decided not to.

Saved by the bell,

because the actual alarm was actually ringing

and woke him up.

This is a dream you had, and you wrote it to me.

What do you think it means? - Yeah.

- Could he be holding something back?

Yeah. Serial killers often do,

because one of the things they're motivated by

is power and control.

And if he has a little secret-- A little, dirty secret,

that could be just the piece

of power and control that he maintains.

And he's got to have something.

- You're clearly protecting secrets in this dream.

And it is related to your BTK activities.

I'm really curious about what else there is

that you would want to tell me.

[dramatic music]

- This dream is related to your BTK activities,

and it is something that you're writing to me,

but you don't want other people to find it.

- Okay, well, let's continue this--

Thinking about this conversation,

and if you do have things that you could write down,

that would be great.

- His explanation for it is pretty superficial

and deflective,

and I think maybe he regrets sending it to me.

♪ ♪

Whenever Rader would decide

somebody was going to be a victim,

they immediately were dehumanized entirely.

They became pawns in his game.

They were projects.

He doesn't think of victims as human beings.

He doesn't think about the repercussions

on their family members.

Even today, it's still so difficult

to get him to admit that they were human beings,

and he caused a great deal of catastrophic trauma

in the lives of all the people who knew and loved them.

And that was certainly the case with Marine Hedge.

♪ ♪

We're in the neighborhood of Park City,

where Dennis Rader lived, on Independence Street.

And just down the street was a neighbor

named Marine Hedge, who was a 53-year-old woman

who lived alone, had no dog,

seemed to have a male friend who came in and out,

but didn't live there.

- And then, one day, when he was looking out his window,

and he saw her out there,

he imagined his hands around her throat.

♪ ♪

At that point, Marine Hedge became a project.

And he had been dormant for seven years.

He hadn't done anything, and suddenly, he decides,

not only does he need to kill her,

but he's going to kill a neighbor.

♪ ♪

- Rader was a Cub Scout leader,

and he used that to stalk victims

and to kill victims when the opportunity would arise.

♪ ♪

He planned a night out with his Cub Scouts.

Once he got them bedded down, he would drive to Park City.

♪ ♪

- He gets to Marine Hedge's house.

He cuts the phone wire.

Her car is in the driveway, but the house is dark.

♪ ♪

He broke in and realizes she's not home.

Apparently, she's out on a date,

but then he hears a car door.

♪ ♪

He went into her closet in her bedroom

and heard the two of them come in.

♪ ♪

- That's when Rader made his move.

But what was interesting in this

is he was going to change his--

His signature behaviors,

aside from cutting the phone line.

He was going to take her body out.

♪ ♪

- His plan then was to take her to the church.

He had keys to the church, as a member

of the governing body of that church.

Took her to the basement,

staged her in various positions,

took photographs with his Polaroid,

and then disposed of the body.

♪ ♪

- We start seeing these big changes,

in between his crimes.

He's getting more emboldened.

And then, being more emboldened

and more narcissistic,

he's simultaneously getting more reckless,

sloppy, and disorganized.

♪ ♪

- My name's David Zickel.

I was a police officer for the city of Park City.

April 28, 1985, I was working the day shift.

Early in the morning, I got a call

to check the welfare of Marine Hedge.

She hadn't reported for work,

and that was very unusual for her.

When Marine wasn't found in her house,

we made a missing persons report on her.

♪ ♪

Then her car was found a few days later

at a bowling alley in northeast Wichita,

and everybody kind of figured

that something foul had probably occurred.

- The body was discovered here, at 53rd Street North,

just east of Webb Road,

a bit west of the area that police had been searching

all weekend for some clue to the disappearance

of 53-year-old Marine Hedge.

- There wasn't any suspects right away,

so when her phone line was cut,

we thought that was very suspicious,

but we didn't know for sure it was BTK or a copycat.

But we did have that in the back of our head that,

you know, BTK had never been captured,

and this could be something,

but she wasn't left in the house.

She was removed from it.

♪ ♪

- You think you could participate

in church activities,

while at the same harming other people?

- Didn't it seem to violate what you believed?

- You can argue all kinds of things

about what's going on in his head, but practicality,

"I'm the president of the church.

"I've got keys to get in.

"I know when people are there.

"This is a pretty safe place where I'm not gonna be seen

"or interrupted doing all of everything

what I've got to do."

- But when you first decided to use a room in the church

to bring a body to dress,

to take pictures of,

did it seem weird?

Like, why would you even think of using the church?

[dramatic music]

- After Marine Hedge's murder,

BTK did not surface and claim responsibility for that.

♪ ♪

- The reason he did not communicate anything

to police or any media

was she was in his neighborhood.

♪ ♪

So the last thing he wanted to do

was have police focused on his very street.

♪ ♪

But time passed, and again,

no one suspected the killer was living among them,

so Rader began planning his next murder.

♪ ♪

- Rader would drive through

scouting or trolling for potential victims,

and that's how he picked Vicki Wegerle.

One day, as he was driving by,

he saw her come out of the house,

and she drew his interest.

♪ ♪

- He then went to Vicki Wegerle's house,

talked his way in,

that he needed to go look at her phone.

♪ ♪

- She was very, very nervous

and was watching him like a hawk.

♪ ♪

Her baby was playing on the floor in the front room.

She said her husband was gonna be home at noon.

And at one point, he was fiddling with the phone

like he was working on it,

and when she turned her head to check on the baby,

he pounced on her.

♪ ♪

- Didn't you know that her husband was coming home?

- When her husband came home and found the baby

and not her, he was initially upset,

you know, that what's Vicki doing, you know,

thought she'd gone to the store and left the baby there,

but then when he walked back in the bedroom

and saw that there were some comforters

that were kind of disarrayed, he said,

"I knew that Vicki wouldn't leave the house like that."

So he searched a little further in,

and that's when he found his wife tucked under the bed,

kind of secreted under the bed.

- And by the time police got to Vicki Wegerle's house

on West 13th, her heart had already stopped beating.

She died within 15 minutes at Riverside Hospital.

Her husband, Bill, supposedly found Vicki

with a noose around her neck.

♪ ♪

- Whenever Rader's targeted someone,

the callousness just sets in,

and anything that that particular victim

is associated with goes along with it.

It's really striking to me that Rader, as a family man,

has absolutely no concern about young children

in a home where he has targeted a victim.

♪ ♪

- At that time, the police accused her husband

and just couldn't prove that it was him.

They really thought that it was him.

- After they interviewed him, it went unsolved.

♪ ♪

Never in a million years did people

tie it to BTK, had any idea.

Police were investigating it as a random act,

and it just basically never was solved.

♪ ♪

- Did you ever think about

what it would be like for you,

if somebody entered your home

and did something like that to your wife?

- But I mean, what if you found her dead, murdered?

What would that have been like for you?

- When I asked him what would happen if he came home

and found someone had murdered his wife,

there's no sense of outrage or horror

that somebody could have done this to his family.

It's--it's more resignation.

Ah, well, karma.

Instead of empathizing with his loved ones' suffering,

he's only able to see

how their possible demise would affect him.

Rader was in his mid-40s.

By this time, he had accomplished nine murders

without anyone suspecting him, at all.

- This is a bridge near Sedgwick,

which is north of Park City,

and underneath here is where the tenth victim

of Dennis Rader was found in 1991.

[dramatic music]

She had been here approximately ten days

before someone from one of the farms came across the body.

♪ ♪

- Mom's name was Dolores,

but people called her Dee.

She was such a loving, giving person,

and that's how I want people to remember her.

She's that star that shines a little extra bright,

because of what she was in this Earth

and what she endured to leave this Earth,

and I think that's really important.

♪ ♪

- Dolores Davis was the last victim of Dennis Rader.

She became a project, as he called 'em.

He was out in that area, saw her out in the yard,

thought it would be pretty easy to get to her, as a victim.

♪ ♪

- There was a Boy Scout--a winter campout for two nights,

so he had various ways he could say

where he was gonna be, so an alibi.

- She had a date that evening,

a dinner date with her friend, who she'd been seeing.

They went back to her place early evening.

He went home.

As far as I know,

she went to bed under normal circumstances

at about 10:00.

♪ ♪

And somewhere before midnight,

he made his move.

♪ ♪

- He just took a cinder block

and threw it through the patio glass.

♪ ♪

- He said, "I'm on the run from the cops.

"I just need your car and some money.

"I'm gonna tie you up to give me a head start,

"so you know, I get away from here

before you call the authorities."

And so he took her to the bedroom,

tied her up.

He leaned over and whispered into her ear,

"I'm BTK. I'm a bad dude."

♪ ♪

- A lot of people think it's the inflicting the pain

they enjoy, but that's just a tool.

The worry, the fear, the suffering.

That's what he really enjoyed.

♪ ♪

- I'm sure then, she knew she was doomed.

I shudder to think about it.

Killed her with her own pantyhose,

in her own bedroom.

So just-- The terror is palpable.

♪ ♪

- He took her body to a location.

Country road under a bridge.

And there he posed her in different positions,

took some pictures.

[camera clicks]

- After Rader hid Dolores Davis' body,

he went back to the Scout camp and snuck back in.

♪ ♪

A missing persons report had been filed for Dolores Davis

by her boyfriend the morning after she disappeared.

When police saw her broken window

and that a jewelry box was missing,

they put out an all-points bulletin

searching for a perpetrator.

♪ ♪

Rader sneaks out of the Boy Scout camp again

the next night to go back to the body.

It's still bound with the pantyhose and whatnot,

but nobody has discovered it yet.

♪ ♪

On the way back to camp this time,

Rader goes to a rest area

to change his clothes back

into his Boy Scout leader clothes,

and when he's in the stall, a trooper comes in.

Trooper says, "A crime has happened.

We're looking for people who just look out of place."

Rader was worried, because at this point,

he had the jewelry box in the car,

and he knew if they asked to look in the trunk of the car,

they would see those items that were clearly not his

and were--would have then been related back to Dolores Davis.

- So Rader talks about the Boy Scout camp nearby.

"I'm just here, on my way back to it."

Trooper says, "Okay.

You're not the kind of person we're looking for."

And Rader goes back to the Boy Scout camp

and is not a suspect in this crime.

♪ ♪

Rader made him feel like,

well, an ordinary guy like this

who volunteers for the Boy Scouts

couldn't possibly be the person we're looking for.

If your job was to question everybody

and look in their cars,

then you do that even with somebody

who volunteers for the Boy Scouts.

♪ ♪

If I were using this case to inform law enforcement,

I would show how an officer in the case

actually made an error that let Rader go free,

because he adhered to the stereotypes.

♪ ♪

- The enormity of what I was afraid

had happened, had happened.

♪ ♪

Part of the frustration and the pain

was the fact that we knew so little.

We had no witnesses.

The car was clean of prints.

There was nothing in the house.

They had nothing to go on really.

♪ ♪

- The police did consider that, certainly,

Hedge and Davis were part of BTK.

I think they even thought Wegerle might be,

but there were a lot of differences.

Why would there be so much time between #9 and #10?

It didn't make any sense, at the time.

♪ ♪

- What we didn't know is BTK

was going to the store with us,

he was eating popcorn at the movies with us,

he was going to church with us.

He was the guy next door.

♪ ♪

- I can't tell you,

when BTK reappeared,

how shocked everybody was.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

- Well, we didn't know if BTK was

gonna show up in our bedroom.

- I can't even describe how frightening it was.

- He had followed me home,

and then he started stalking me.

♪ ♪

- That was our first sighting

of what we believed was BTK.

- Dennis Rader has gotten away with this for 30 years.

- We were in the newsroom going, "Oh, my gosh."

♪ ♪

- It regenerated the fear in Wichita.

- That was one of those moments,

you were just ecstatic.

- My name is Cheryl Sarkozy.

I'm a survivor of BTK.