The serial killer who taunted Wichita residents for three decades pleaded guilty Monday to 10 murders, calmly and politely recounting his crimes in horrific detail in an hour-long court hearing as victims’ relatives stoically absorbed the sordid story.
Dennis Rader, 60, a former Boy Scout leader and church president who in poems and packages sent to news outlets nicknamed himself BTK – for bind, torture, kill – referred to his victims as “projects” as he answered questions from a judge, and said strangling them was part of a sexual fantasy.
Repeatedly calling the judge “sir,” Rader methodically described trolling neighborhoods in search of prey, taking names from mailboxes and stalking women, but he said he also picked at least one target at random.
“‘Potential hits’: In my world, that’s what I called them,” he said, occasionally closing his eyes or rubbing his forehead as he spoke in a monotone. “If one didn’t work out, I just moved to another one.”
He told of placating one woman’s crying children with blankets and toys in the bathtub before he cinched a rope around her neck. He said he used a pillow and parka to make a man with a broken rib more comfortable before placing a plastic bag over his head. He recalled masturbating after hanging 11-year-old Josephine Otero in the basement of her family home.
He explained that he carried “hit kits” – a briefcase or bowling bag filled with rope and other supplies – parked his car blocks away and talked his way into homes by saying he was, for example, a repairman or a private detective. He offered no motive other than sexual fantasy, and spoke of putting victims “down,” as a veterinarian might a dog.
Recounting the 1974 massacre of four members of the Otero family, Rader said, “I had never strangled anyone before, so I really didn’t know how much pressure you had to put on a person or how long it would take.”
Steve Osburn, chief of the county’s public defenders, said that his client pleaded guilty because he “basically wanted to take responsibility for his actions” but that lawyers had also determined that an insanity defense was unrealistic. “From a legal standpoint, we had nothing to work with,” he said.
Rader, who worked at a security company and as a suburban city inspector, faces consecutive life sentences when he returns to court Aug. 17. He admitted to killings between 1974 and 1991, when Kansas did not have the death penalty.
The pleas, which were not part of a deal with prosecutors, stunned but satisfied many people connected with the case in Wichita and the surrounding towns in central Kansas where Rader lived his double life.
“This individual is 100 percent pure evil; there are no redeeming aspects of this human,” said Richard LaMunyon, who oversaw much of the BTK investigation as Wichita’s police chief from 1976 to 1989. “The fact that he had a family, the fact that he had a wife and children, the fact that he went to church – that was all a cover.”
Jeff Davis, whose mother, Dolores, was Rader’s final victim, likened the killer’s emotionless display on Monday to someone “reading out of a phone book” and denounced him as “a rotting corpse of a wretch of a human hiding under a human veneer.”
“He was putting on Serial Murderer 101 for us,” said Davis, who lives in Memphis, Tenn. “I’m spiteful, I’m vengeful, and I relish the thought that he knows that he’ll walk into that prison but he’ll be carried out.”
Rader talked for more than an hour, under questioning by Judge Greg Waller, in a small, stuffed courtroom, his tale beamed live on local and national television stations. He wore a bulletproof vest under an ivory sport coat and blue necktie, and asked his lawyers for a glass of water before admitting, in the judge’s words, that he had killed 10 people “maliciously, deliberately, willfully and by premeditation.”
In 1977, he said, he sneaked into 25-year-old Nancy Fox’s apartment, snipped her phone lines and waited in the kitchen for her to come home. But Rader did not rape Fox – indeed, there was no evidence of sexual assault of any of his victims, though semen was sometimes found at the scene. “I was also undressed partially, and got on top of her,” he said. “Then I strangled her with a belt. I took the belt off and replaced them with pantyhose. Then at that time I masturbated. I dressed and took some of her personal belongings and left.”
Eight years later, Rader hid in the bathroom of Marine Hedge, 53, who lived down the street from him in the tidy town of Park City. “She screamed, and I strangled her manually,” he recalled. “I wasn’t wearing a mask at the time. She knew me casually. She liked to work in her yard. It was just a neighborly type thing.” Afterward, Rader said, he took Hedge’s nude body in the trunk of his car to Christ Lutheran Church – where later he was elected president of the council – and took some pictures of her in “bondage positions” with a Polaroid camera.
After 17 years of killings accompanied by anonymous letters and phone calls claiming responsibility, BTK was silent from the 1991 killing of Dolores Davis, 62, until early 2004.
After an article in The Wichita Eagle marking the 30th anniversary of the Otero killings, postcards and packages containing clues and trophies – victims’ driver’s licenses, a doll – turned up in local newsrooms, libraries, a park and a police station.
Rader was arrested in February 2005, when a computer diskette he sent was traced back to his church. Many people believed that he wanted to be caught.