kansas. his daughter was a high school golf champion. his son is, i think, in the navy. his wife sings in a church choir, has a job in a convenience store. they re average people making a simple good life together. boy, you would never pick him out of a crowd. i thought there would be something that would be more evident, but he was just as beige as beige could be. mike fitch knew rader when they were both employees at adt, where rader worked for nearly 15 years installing home security systems. he remembers rader as a stickler for perfection. making his customers happy was rader s top priority, even if he could be cranky and critical of others. i definitely didn t want to get on his wrong side. i was intimidated by him when i first started working. but fitch says he saw no hint of rader s violent side.
around the time he got that job as a compliance officer. now he really had some power. now he could really push people around. so, he didn t have to do it with physical violence. he could do it through his job. the killer still lusted for notoriety, however. so after first revealing himself in that letter to the wichita eagle, he sent a slew of letters and packages throughout 2004 and into early 2005, to local tv stations, to police. even leaving clues in a public park, a doll with dark hair, her face colored with makeup. her arms bound behind her by a pair of pantyhose. her head contained in a plastic bag. and next to the doll was a copy of the driver s license of one of btk s victims, nancy fox. a handmade word puzzle, which investigators now see contains a group of letters spelling d. rader and the numbers of his address. it all put wichita s serial strangler front and center again, just how he liked it.
killer. but the way he tells it, rader didn t have a clue how much force it took to end a life. so tried several times to strangle mrs. otero only to have her wake up again. during the woman s last, desperate struggle for consciousness, rader says she was fully aware he was snuffing out the lives of her husband, and two children. in what he says were her last words to him, mrs. otero s humanity shined against the killer s inhumanity. mrs. otero had woke up, and she actually said, have god god have mercy on your soul. that s what she said. and i put her down. permanently. this woman who probably knows now that she might be going to die, she is generous with you asking god to have mercy on your soul. mm-hmm, yeah. yeah. pretty generous thing to tell the man
now, all these years later, in addition to the copies of the photos and the driver s license, there was the envelope they came in. the return address said bill thomas killman, btk. and that s when we realized it may be the real deal. tell me about that moment. it was just total disbelief that he was still here. he agreed to give the police two days to nail it down, and then broke the story. the ghost was back. police could now say that more than 17 years earlier, vicki wegerle had, indeed, been btk s eighth known victim. so by resurfacing in 2004, and sending a letter with a photograph and driver s license of the victim, saying, i m still here. you never caught me. and i ve been here all along. his need for attention is apparently unquenched. i absolutely thought that this was the tip of the iceberg.
since. the police once arranged to have a subliminal message, one devised by profilers, inserted into a local evening newscast at kake-tv. to viewers, the subliminal message looked like this. just a flash of light. but slow it down, and there it was. now, call the chief. and you were hoping that perhaps your killer might see it. yes. did you get any phone calls? no. did anybody s subconscious get tapped at all? no, we didn t get anything out of it. wherever he was, the killer could not or would not be reached. even when the police got a break and were able to track down a letter btk sent from a photocopier at wichita state university, they still couldn t catch him. turns out, rader was a student there studying criminal justice. we tracked the communication that he sent us to that copy machine that was at the activity center. and we had detectives go back to xerox company, and they confirmed that s where it came from. but he was on a list with