Original subtitles

[slow music]

- I walked into the interview room

and I introduced myself to Gary Ridgway

and I said, "Gary, I'm Dr. O'Toole

"from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit.

"And the task force has asked me to stop by

"and see if you are worthy of being in the FBI's research."

He was very eager.

He said, "Oh, yes, yes, I am.

"I'm very willing to talk about it."

So he looked in the camera and he said.

[dramatic music]

- [Man] Five of the most prolific serial killers

in American history were all operating at the same time.

- [Reporter 1] John Wayne Gacy.

- [Reporter 2] Ted Bundy is still alive.

- [Reporter 3] BTK.

- [Reporter 4] Jeffrey Dahmer.

- [Reporter 5] The so-called Green River Killer.

- [Mark] This was the golden age of serial killers.

- [Reporter 6] For years,

the Green River task force has chased the ghost

of a killer too diabolically clever to catch.

- There were a number of detectives

who truly believed Gary Ridgway was the Green River Killer,

but certainly we did not have the evidence

to move forward with prosecution.

- Serial killer Theodore Bundy is executed

after nearly a decade on death row.

Bundy was convicted of three brutal murders

and was linked to dozens more.

- I was glad when he was gone,

but unfortunately, killing a serial killer doesn't stop them

from being a serial killer.

They did their damage.

- [Reporter 7] It took the jury less than two hours

to find John Wayne Gacy guilty of murdering 33 young men.

- When he was sentenced to death, he didn't even blink.

He didn't bat an eye, nothing.

And that's a true sociopath.

The guy was scary.

- [Profiler] Serial killers, they're very arrogant,

they think they're unstoppable.

And that's what happened with Dahmer.

- This kid had had a small hole drilled in his head

and acid poured in,

so he couldn't communicate with law enforcement.

- They let Konerak go back into Jeffrey's apartment.

And within an hour, he killed him.

- Back in 1974, we couldn't even spell DNA,

but at Josephine's feet, there was a pool.

31 years later, the genetic profile would be drawn

from one of those preserved pieces of evidence.

- BTK goes through this period

where he does not kill for years.

- And then in 1985, he kills his neighbor Marine Hedge.

Well, they never dreamed this was BTK

because BTK had disappeared.

[dramatic music]

- Dennis Rader was a church-going,

well-respected member of the community

that hid this incredibly dark side.

Now there was a long period of time

when Dennis wasn't active physically in killing.

He was active mentally.

He fantasizes about it.

You can only fantasize so long before you cross that line.

Once you cross that line,

that is not a line you can come back from.

- After he kills his neighbor, Marine Hedge,

and then Vicki Wegerle, BTK disappears again.

He waits five more years, until 1991,

to kill again.

And this is Dolores Davis.

- My mom, she had gone out to eat, came back,

and I know Mom's habit.

She'd stay up till about 10 or so

and then she'd lock everything down and she'd go to bed.

- Rather than trying to break quietly

into Dolores Davis's home, he just throws a cement block

through her sliding glass door.

- I got a call from my sister that next day saying

that her house had been broken into and she was gone.

- Dolores starts off as a missing person

but it's clear from her residence

that something bad had happened.

- The one thing that really stuck out to me,

there was a half-eaten bowl of cereal on her countertop.

I said, "Something's wrong about that."

She never went to bed with a dirty kitchen, period.

He thinks he's a comedian,

so he ate a bowl of cereal to let everybody know

that he was a serial killer.

Isn't he a charming fellow?

- [Anchor] Dolores D. Davis was abducted from her home.

Her body was found 13 days later

under a bridge in Northern Sedgwick County.

Davis had been strangled.

Her feet, hands, and knees were bound with pantyhose.

- They told us that they had found a white female.

He said, quote, "We're 99% sure it's your mother."

And that's troubling because

if she wasn't recognizable, then that's hard to swallow.

I came unglued.

I just completely lost it.

- His MO was bind, torture, kill,

leave the body in the house.

But Dolores Davis's body was found in a ditch.

It just didn't fit.

- From a police perspective,

they're still dealing with homicides

on a case by case basis.

Something like a change in MO could really trigger the idea

that this is not the same killer, that this is a one-off.

So the police are not looking at BTK.

He is not a suspect.

In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer's also flying

under the radar of police.

- Jeffrey Dahmer's victim selection,

young gay men, racial minority,

allowed him to evade law enforcement

for a longer period of time,

because he knew on some level

that this was a disenfranchised element of society

that would go unnoticed were they to disappear.

- Dahmer met Tracy Edwards outside the Grand Avenue Mall

and then they went to his apartment.

- Dahmer said, "Why don't you come back to my place

"and I'll pay you some money to take some pictures of you

"and we could watch some movies."

- So I thought about it, said, "Yeah, he's pretty cool.

"I guess it's all right to go have a beer."

'Cause I thought he was an average guy,

seemed normal to me, you know.

- Dahmer offers Tracy a drink of rum and Coke

because Dahmer was out of the sleeping pills.

- I had my head turned like this,

looking at the fish tank, you know.

And before I knew it, he threw the handcuff on me.

- Tracy said,

"Okay, there must be something wrong with this guy.

"I'm just going to appease him

"and talk to him for a minute."

Especially when Dahmer pulled out this huge hunting knife.

And Dahmer puts on "The Exorcist 3"

and they're watching it and Dahmer's humming

and rocking back and forth, almost going into a trance.

And saying things to Tracy Edwards like,

"Oh, you wouldn't believe what I've done

"and I'm going to do to you and I want to eat your heart."

He actually put his head up against Tracy Edwards' chest

just to listen to his heartbeat

because he wanted to hear it before he murdered him.

- Like I knew that it was

a life and death situation then, right?

Yeah, it was me against him.

- Eventually, Tracy gets loose, punches him,

and he gets out of the apartment,

half naked wearing this one handcuff.

- Mr. Edwards is able to run onto the street

and flag down a squad.

And those two officers first just tried to use their key

that they had for their police handcuffs.

That key didn't work.

And so they went back to the apartment,

thinking that they're just going to get the key from Dahmer

and take those handcuffs off

and that's going to be the end of it.

- I'm in my house and then I open up my door

and I'm looking out here and I'm seeing the guy

who was at his door,

dangling this handcuff thing like this.

And there's an officer standing there

and I hear people coming in the apartment.

I hear a little bit of commotion over at his house.

- One of the police officers goes in the bedroom.

and they see a drawer that's open.

- They had no idea what they would find there.

Didn't know there was a skull in the refrigerator.

It was a death nest.

[intense music]

- [Reporter] Milwaukee police were led to an apartment

in this building after they were flagged down

by a handcuffed man who claimed he had been attacked.

- The police went up and they were talking to Dahmer.

Well, one of the officers went in the bedroom

and saw the photos in the drawer.

And that started everything.

- In this drawer are dozens of Polaroids of young men,

dismembered, murdered, in a bathtub,

their skin stripped off, you know, just awful pictures.

So the cops arrest Dahmer, who starts to fight with them.

- And then I heard an awful horrible scream.

It sounded like an animal's growl,

like a bear or something like that.

It was Jeff.

He screamed like that because he did not want them

to look in the refrigerator and to see the head.

- Then they open the refrigerator.

There's a fully enfleshed skull

of one of his earlier victims.

And he's telling them right away what's happening.

Short order, he's giving a full confession.

- They said, "Where's the key for the handcuffs?"

He said, "I don't have it.

"I was going to cut his hands off."

- That day after he got arrested,

they started bringing out boxes and big soup kettles,

and I'm going, "Well, what's in there and what's?"

And they said, "Please, ma'am, don't look in there."

They said, "Those are body parts in those pots

"and in those boxes are skulls."

It was horrible.

It was absolutely horrible.

- After Dahmer's apprehended,

the news of what happened

with the Konerak incident comes forward.

- [Man] The neighbors called police when this 14 year old,

a brother of the boy Dahmer molested,

was seen running naked and bleeding

from Dahmer's apartment.

The police returned the boy to Dahmer

after he said they were lovers.

- He got away with it by telling the officers,

"This is my lover."

- I do think there was some shoddy workmanship

on the police part that night.

They supposedly didn't even check Dahmer's ID

to check if he had any criminal history.

- That would have been another person,

or if that boy be white, could've been different.

- [Reporter] Outrage over Dahmer has shifted to police.

There are charges of racism, a belief that

many of the killings could have been stopped.

- Because it was in the inner city,

ghetto neighborhood, poor black people.

They just mistreated all of us down there.

They should be held responsible.

- You didn't say nothing about this white boy over here,

killing us over here.

Somebody that's gonna investigate

the police department.

- [Crowd] We want justice! We want justice!

- Relationships between law enforcement

and marginalized communities were very tense.

Not much has changed.

And I think that's evident considering, you know,

the summer of unrest we had in 2020.

We still have a long way to go with police relationships

and communities of color.

- [Woman] Jeffrey Dahmer today changed his plea

from not guilty to guilty but insane.

- And you're doing this of your own free will?

- Yes, I'm doing this of my own free will.

- He never denied that he killed.

He pled guilty, gave full confession and pled guilty,

so the focus was insanity or not.

- [Man] The trial will be

to determine Dahmer's state of mind

when the murders occurred.

- The defense was that Dahmer lost control of himself.

This necrophilia, the desire for sex with dead bodies,

the desire for sex with unconscious bodies,

put him out of control.

He couldn't control it.

He ought not to be held accountable.

That was the defense.

- So you have some of these serial killers

who are engaging with the victims after they die.

Guys like Bundy and Gacy and even Ridgway

leaving and then coming back a day or two later

to then engage with the victim.

That means that you have total possession, total control.

They're yours.

Guys like Jeffrey Dahmer are actually consuming

parts of their victims.

So why would you do that?

Because you can possess them forever if you eat them.

So that's really the ultimate possession.

- I was the district attorney for 38 years

and so I've had a lot of experience.

So the necrophilia wasn't that shocking.

Cannibalism, I tell you,

I had not been exposed to very often.

Would you state your name, spell your last name?

- Dennis Murphy, M-U-R-P-H-Y.

I've interviewed Dahmer for 66 to 68 hours,

which resulted in a 168 page confession.

And the first thing he told me is

"You should kill me for what I did."

He then purchased a meat tenderizer

and used it on the bicep.

He stated he would use salt, pepper,

and A1 steak sauce on it.

He stated that it tasted like beef or filet mignon.

[intense music]

- [Reporter] Today at the Jeffrey Dahmer insanity trial,

a detective testified

on how Dahmer told him he would eat some of his victims.

- The reason that he consumed the bicep,

because it was big and he wanted to try it.

During the interrogation with Dahmer,

once I got him to feel more comfortable with me

like a buddy, he just kept giving us information.

We asked him about his friends.

He said he'd never had any.

In fact, we checked his phone records.

He never made a personal call in five years.

He stated that he kept the victim's skull,

which he boiled to remove all the skin.

And he kept the scalp with a small ponytail

because he liked it.

I asked him why he did this.

Several times, he told us for his own selfish desire

for self-gratification.

- Nobody can deny Jeffrey Dahmer is a sick person.

He's not psychotic and he's not legally insane.

- Insanity is a legal definition,

it isn't a medical definition.

The insanity defense is a very difficult defense to employ.

It's rare that it's used

and it's even more rare that it's successful.

- [Reporter] Over the weekend, the jury ruled

that Dahmer was sane when he murdered

and dismembered 15 young men.

- Dahmer got a life sentence for each of his victims,

957 years, without the chance of parole.

- [Judge] The sentence is structured in such a way

that this defendant will never again see freedom.

- When Gacy was executed,

there were hundreds of people from all over.

- My mother said she wanted to be the one

to push the button, but she passed away before that.

And I do remember her saying, "You better be there."

I said, "I will be there."

He deserved to die.

- There was no sympathy anywhere, as far as I know,

in the world for Gacy.

- Here we are entering the 21st century

and Bundy and Gacy had been executed,

Dahmer was murdered in prison.

And so all we have left are Rader and Ridgway.

By 2001, Gary Ridgway is still married,

still has a stable job, still living in the community.

And he's murdered 49 women

and evaded law enforcement for 19 years.

- But the investigators were pretty smart

because what they did do was they took a saliva sample

from Gary in 1987.

They were hoping that DNA technology would advance

to a point when they would be able to analyze it.

- In 2001, there was a grant for DNA testing

at the Washington State Patrol crime lab.

They asked us for those cases that are really big cases

that you want us to look at DNA evidence.

- The Green River task force had DNA

for four of the victims,

but they knew there were a lot more.

- So it essentially took 14 years

for our DNA technology to get to the point

where we could then analyze the sample

that Ridgway had provided to the early samples

from his early prostitute homicides.

- [Reporter] The sheriff was in his office

when his lead detective gave him the amazing news.

- The DNA came back positive from four victims,

matching to Gary Ridgway and from nobody else,

unless he had an identical twin.

And so that was really the big break in the case.

- You know, we had 40,000 suspects.

Now we got the guy, see.

- It was pretty amazing, you know,

when the hit came out, it was like whoa.

Just tells you what science can do.

Even though there were only four cases

that could be charged at that time,

you know, we knew what we were dealing with,

which was somebody who had killed upwards of 50 women.

On November 30th, 2001, Gary got up early,

went to work like he normally did.

And then the Sheriff's office served

search warrants at multiple locations

and they take him into custody at Kenworth Truck

as he's walking out after work.

- The investigators connected to the Green River murder case

believe it may finally be solved

with the arrest of Gary Ridgway.

- Well, at that point,

you have him for four of the homicides,

but we certainly don't have anything

to connect him for the rest.

According to his defense attorneys,

they did feel very comfortable that they can beat DNA

because Gary Ridgway had always said,

"I'm addicted to prostitutes.

"So yeah, my DNA could have been in them."

But they had told him

if any other forensic evidence comes to light, you're done.

- So the hunt was on for law enforcement

to re-examine all of the forensic evidence

that they didn't have the technology

to process the first time.

And this time they had it

and in law enforcement was not about

to let him slip away again.

[dark music]

- Gary Ridgway was charged with four murders

when he was initially arrested.

And then began a process of analyzing all of the other cases

we could apply modern day forensic technology to evidence

that had been gathered back in the 80s.

- We're now looking at microscopic evidence

that in the past had not been looked at.

- The first of Ridgway's victims was found in July of 1982.

The ligature that was used on Wendy Coffield was her pants.

And they had been wrapped tightly

and kind of knotted around her neck.

That pair of pants was examined

and they were able to find microscopic paint spheres.

- Now, remember where Ridgway worked.

He worked at Kenworth Painting as a taper and a painter.

Micro trace comes back and they're able to definitively say

that the microscopic paint evidence found on the ligatures

associated with Gary Ridgway's locker are the same paint.

- To be able to analyze those little tiny spheres

and determine what type of paint they were

and that they were such a unique type of paint was really,

you know, a pretty remarkable forensic finding.

- And so that physical evidence,

that would never have even been possible back in the 80s.

Science has caught up.

- And as a result of that process,

we were eventually able to make a match

to three additional victims.

So he stood accused of seven murders

and a potential for the death penalty being sought.

What became very clear to us is

that while we clearly would be able to convict Ridgway,

and in my estimation,

a jury was likely to sentence him to death,

there were still many, many, many unanswered questions.

We had more than 40 women still on the list

that we didn't have definitive answers for.

- We were told that the defense team wanted

to enter into a plea negotiation.

Ridgway, in exchange for his life,

would talk to us about these homicides.

- Where the FBI was instrumental for us was

loaning us Mary Ellen O'Toole.

She played a very important part

in kind of breaking through the initial reluctance

of Ridgway to really acknowledge who he was

and why he acted the way he did.

- Mr. Ridgway, I'm still trying to get a sense

of just how effective a serial killer that you were,

how good at what you were.

When an offender is identified,

what you want to do in an interview is be able

to corroborate what happened.

How do you approach a Gary Ridgway?

Not the same way that you would approach maybe a Ted Bundy,

not the same way maybe that you would approach a BTK.

- I want to be the best serial killer out there and kill...

I want 100 this year.

- Gary Ridgway had a competitive streak

when it came to comparing himself to other serial killers.

Thought he was better than Ted Bundy.

He wanted to be recognized

for his successes as a serial killer.

So clearly, I appealed to his ego.

- The one thing he could tell us is

where he had left bodies.

We began taking him out on what we called field trips.

- Okay, it would have been back there.

- We spent hours and hours

with him out at different locations

where he would try to pinpoint as closely as he could

where he thought he had left a body.

- That's where the guardrail, at the end of the guardrail.

You want to, on the left-hand side.

- And finally we recovered four sets of remains

by doing that.

We had Gary Ridgway in our office with us for 188 days,

living with him for 24-seven,

trying to get this accomplished

because our victims were real, living, breathing young women

who had families.

And yes, many of them were involved in prostitution,

but I think it's important that people understand

that they were human beings and that they were valued.

- [Judge] Mr. Ridgway, I'm going to ask you at this time,

how do you plead to the charge?

- Guilty.

- In December of 2003,

in return for Ridgway cooperating with investigators,

he was permitted to plead guilty to 48 murders

and avoid facing the death penalty.

- [Judge] The death of Gisele Lovvorn.

- Guilty.

- [Judge] For the death of Sandra Kay Gabbert.

- Guilty.

- I feel so bad for the women that have passed away

and the families that they left behind.

It broke my heart.

There never will be any justice.

The day he passes is going to be justice.

- By 2004, Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer,

and Ridgway have all been held accountable for their crimes.

And Rader might've been able to get away with it

for the rest of his life

had he not let his massive ego get in the way.

- From 1982 till 2004,

no one thought of BTK at all.

He was just gone, gone.

And after he committed the 1991 Dolores Davis murder,

no one had connected the murders and

he just disappeared.

- Dennis Rader was president of his church.

He was a compliance officer for the city of Park City.

- We've been tracking it down.

The dogs are somewhat territorial, as well as vicious.

- He was living a normal life.

- [Announcer] This is KAKE News.

- [Reporter] 30 years ago today,

15 year old Charlie Otero comes home from school

to find his entire family murdered

in this house on North Edgemore.

And so begins

the most infamous unsolved serial killing spree

in Wichita history.

- The media was doing stories

on the 30th anniversary of BTK's first murder.

- [Reporter] The last known correspondence

from the killer coming in 1979.

- And then in the Wichita newspaper,

it came out that there was an author doing a book,

writing a book.

BTK did not like that at all.

He did not like

that there was someone else writing his story.

There was someone else getting publicity

for the murders that he wanted credit for.

- That was a turning point

for him to begin communicating again.

- He sent a letter to the Wichita Eagle.

"Hey, I'm still around.

"Here's pictures of one of my last murders."

You can imagine how people at the Wichita newspaper

were like "What the hell?

"This guy exists in our community still?"

They didn't believe it.

[dark music]

- [Reporter] The serial killer apparently has resurfaced.

- Called BTK, short for bind, torture, kill.

- Breaking his silence after 25 years.

- Wichita Police Department on Friday received information

from Wichita Eagle, received a letter in the mail.

We have been able to

verify this communique most likely came from BTK.

- He loved catch me if you can, catch me if you can.

I'm going to taunt you till the day I die.

- In 2004, Dennis Rader begins

to leave these elaborate packages.

In one instance,

he left a cereal box at Home Depot in the bed of a truck.

And remember, when Dennis Rader started killing in 1974,

there weren't video cameras in every parking lot.

But by 2004, video surveillance cameras became the norms.

And so they were actually able

to get his black Jeep Cherokee on camera.

- Very grainy.

You wouldn't be able to identify anybody,

but Relph took one look at that film and said,

"That's a Jeep Cherokee."

- Now that's, trust me, in Kansas,

that's not exactly whittling things down,

but it's still something about him that you know

that he doesn't.

That's very powerful in the hands of investigators.

We knew far more about him in just a couple of months

than we knew in the first 28 years of this investigation.

The technology had allowed us to move quite a bit forward.

- In the package left at Home Depot,

he asks about whether or not a floppy disc can be traced.

- And he wrote it on a...

He even wrote it.

"Be honest."

This guy thought we were enjoying things

as much as he was,

that we wouldn't lie to him

because God, we don't want this fun [beep] to stop.

- Well, law enforcement was not honest.

- They say, "No, it cannot be traced."

Once he got that assurance, he sends a disk to a TV station.

- A couple of days later,

Fox affiliate says, "We've got a floppy disc from BTK."

Raced it down to the police station.

- There's one file on that disc

and it's simply labeled, "This is a test."

That's all it says.

But embedded in there then is Dennis

and Christ Lutheran Church.

- And four or five people are on different search engines,

just trying to put stuff together as quick as we can.

Immediately, the congregation leader,

Christ Lutheran Church, is Dennis Rader.

- I still to this day,

when I talk about it or think about it,

you still get goosebumps

because that's him, that's BTK.

And after all of this time,

after 30 years of trying to find this killer,

there he is in that picture.

- So we go flying off toward Park City.

And as we go by the house,

we see that Jeep Cherokee in the driveway.

We got him.

- But they still don't have enough information

to link Rader to the early homicides.

So what do they do?

- We did have, at that time,

a comparison of crime scenes where DNA was collected.

You had semen that was at the feet of Josephine Otero.

You had semen that was in a bathrobe, Nancy Fox.

- We wanted to get Rader's DNA without him knowing it.

- They found out BTK's daughter had attended

Kansas State University.

Sure enough, health services there had a pap smear from her.

They got a search warrant.

- Well, we got her sample that was used

in reverse paternity to show

that this girl is a child of this genetic profile

that is BTK.

So there was no one else in the world

that could be BTK at that point.

- So it was when we got those results back,

we felt that we had sufficient probable cause

to make an arrest.

- I called the mother of Nancy Fox

the night before we went after him.

Very few people get to make that phone call,

but I called her and I said,

"Tomorrow, we're going to go get that guy

"that killed your little girl 27 years ago."

[ominus music]

- We pulled up about a block away from Dennis Rader's house.

Once he came down the street, you know,

it was just this avalanche of cars.

They had him on the ground and handcuffed him.

We were in and out of there.

- [Announcer] This is KAKE News at six.

- A quarter century search

for Wichita's worst serial killer is over.

The BTK murder mystery may be nearing an end.

- The man they call the BTK strangler is in custody.

- Dennis Rader, 59 and a white male.

- When I saw a picture of Rader,

he just didn't seem to be anything but a weakling.

I wanted revenge.

I wanted revenge for my family.

That's all I could think about.

- The interrogation started with Kenny Landwehr

and a guy named Bob Morton with the FBI.

- Lieutenant Landwehr will take out a floppy disk.

And he says, "When did you send us this?"

Dennis Rader says.

- Rader's coming to terms with the fact

that law enforcement lied to him.

It was a reality check in where he realized,

well, maybe I didn't outsmart than this time.

- The man accused of being the BTK serial killer returns

to a Kansas courtroom this morning.

Families torn apart by the BTK killings will be able

to look someone in the eye and possibly hear the evidence

linking 60 year old Dennis Rader to the killing spree.

- Constitutions of the United States

and the state of Kansas provide that a person charged

with a criminal case is entitled

to have a jury of 12 persons, 12 of his peers.

- He wanted to see me.

He asked them if I could come down and visit him.

I would see him at least twice a week at the county jail.

Eventually, our conversation came around the issue

of whether or not he should plead guilty or go to trial.

I said to Dennis,

"You have already admitted the crimes that you've committed.

"What good will it do to go to trial?"

I says, "It will keep this community uproar.

"The church will be in uproar.

"Your family will be just totally in an uproar."

I says, "What good will it serve to do that

"if you already admitted your guilt?"

- [Judge] All right, Mr. Rader,

at this time, how do you plead to these 10 counts?

- Guilty.

- Mr. Rader, do you desire to say anything

on your own behalf in mitigation of the punishment?

- Your honor, Sedgwick County,

the victims throughout the community,

my family, the victims, dishonor.

Dishonesty to my family.

- His wife, Paula, definitely was the victim.

She had no idea what was going on in all those years.

None whatsoever.

- Paula Rader never has talked

or communicated with him ever, ever again.

And she got an emergency divorce,

I think like three weeks later or a month later.

- [Judge] We will now proceed to sentencing you,

Dennis L. Rader, to serve a term of life

for each one of these counts.

Those sentences that are run consecutively

one after the other.

- I believe most women

in Wichita were very emotional that day

because we really didn't believe it would never happen again

until we saw those prison doors close.

And you're like, we're finally safe.

We're finally safe.

- I'm not going to have my mom back.

And the hurt's going to be with me till I die.

But the fact that he got called out for what he was

and the whole world sees him

for the insignificant little piece of garbage that he is,

makes me smile on a good day, I think about that, you know.

- Very few people get to slay their childhood dragons.

Back in the 70s,

he was a seven foot tall fire-breathing dragon.

And then to grow up and to get in this job,

and then for him to poke his head up

and to think you're going to get your chance to play,

to be a witness to history.

- For the people in Wichita, it was a terrible time,

but we got through it.

I hope people can figure out what caused him to kill.

'Cause we still don't know, why did Dennis Rader kill?

What caused him to be the monster he became?

- It may be impossible to understand exactly why each

of these five men became serial killers.

As we move forward

with advancements in forensic psychology,

we may understand the risk factors

for this type of extreme violence

and may be able to intervene

before they turn into serial killers like these five.

- Well, I think this is really the interesting dynamic

about this golden age of serial killers.

These five men were so prolific for so long.

This is when law enforcement really started

to make all kinds of strides.

It was because of these individuals.

We really significantly improved

our communication capabilities, developing task forces,

national crime information databases,

automated fingerprint systems, DNA databases.

All of that started to catch up with these killers

who'd actually been leaving lots of evidence,

we just hadn't been able to analyze it.

They were really the catalyst

for so much that happened in law enforcement

that allowed us to actually apprehend them.

- Now in an age of 24 hour news cycle and social media

and the access we have to information as a society,

serial killing would be a much more difficult endeavor.

- You know, everybody says closure for the families.

There's no such thing as closure.

Yes, they do have answers.

But to have someone that you love taken from you violently,

there's no closure.

- Susan Elaine Rancourt, 18 years old.

- Julia Maria Burgos Otero.

- Michael Moreno, 14 years old.

- Darrell Samson, 19.

- [Woman] Every one of these victims mattered.

Everyone counted.

Everyone was loved.

Everyone was missed.

Everyone deserves to be remembered.

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