Dennis Rader a.k.a. The BTK Killer
Netflix/Getty ImagesLeft: Sonny Valicenti as Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. Right: Dennis Rader.
One of the show’s more notable teases features the appearance of Dennis Rader in the series. Rader, better known as the BTK Killer, tortured and murdered 10 people from 1974 to 1991, strangling entire families to death and engaging in autoerotic sex acts surrounded by their corpses.
Though his appearance is still just a suggestion at what the show has planned for a future episode, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with John Douglas’ career.
Having interviewed nearly all of the nation’s most infamous serial murderers, Douglas has said that Dennis Rader is one of the most cold-blooded killers he has ever interviewed. “I’m a Christian, you know,” Rader told Douglas. “Always have been. After I killed the Oteros [family], I began to pray to God for help so I could fight this thing inside me.”
Douglas knew better, writing of Rader, “Most people were shocked when the news broke that Rader was president of his church congregation, but I wasn’t.”
For men like Rader, church was just another means to wield power over others in a respectable, public manner — but when that wasn’t enough for them, they turn to into monsters.
Still the shock in Rader’s Wichita, Kansas community when he was revealed to be the BTK Killer was genuine. On the surface, he was a dedicated, fastidiously church-going family man with a wife named Paula, a daughter named Kerri, a steady job, and ties to the community.
Rader worked as a ADT service technician, something that allowed him to track, stalk, and locate his victims in broad daylight.
As a security technician, he was intimately familiar with home security systems that were designed to keep men like Rader out of their homes.
He targeted young girls and their families, in one instance making two sisters, who were 9 years old and 11 years old, watch as he strangled their parents to death. Then, he killed the girls, hanging one of them by the neck to choke to death while he masturbated in front of her.
Rader especially enjoyed sending letters to the police and the newspapers to taunt them with pictures of his victims after he’d killed them — or even of himself wearing a mask and the clothes the victim was wearing when the were killed.
Part of his game was to leave clues behind at each crime scene, baiting authorities into trying to capture him. He was too clever by half, though, since one of these clues would lead investigators right back to him.
Bo Rader-Pool/Getty ImagesDennis Rader, the BTK Killer, in court. Wichita, Kansas. August 17, 2005.
In 2005, Rader mailed a floppy disk to a news station, as part of his game. When investigators examined the data on the disk, computer technicians were able to connect the data to a location — the church where Rader was church-council president.
When the police asked Rader if they knew why he was being arrested, he he smugly replied with “Oh, I have suspicions why.”
In the show, Rader appears as an unnamed character in the opening sequence of each episode, but the facial features, mustache, baldness, and eyeglasses bear an unmistakable resemblance to the real-life BTK killer.
What’s more, in the season 1 finale, we see burning sketches of young women who appear bound and gagged, a major MO for the BTK killer.
