years, and i prayed to god that he d let me die. dolores davis driver s license and social security card had gone missing. that was certainly the kind of thing btk did to his murder victims. but there were many other aspects of this crime that strayed from his usual m.o. so, until rader was caught and the police announced dolores davis as the tenth victim, her son was left to wonder. i guess there was the remote possibility that there was some phantom serial out there, but honestly, i never connected it with btk. how dennis rader led police straight to his door. he said, we ve got him. i wouldn t do that. get married? no, i wouldn t use that single miles credit card. nice ring. knock it off. ignore him. with the capital one venture card you earn. double miles on every purchase. [ sharon ] 3d is so real larry. i m right here larry. if you re not earning double miles.
bonding really started. you know. i just really opened up. we shared jokes and everything else, just like we were buddies. he s proud of what he had done. he was having, in a perverse way, fun, talking with his colleagues, the police. what do you make of the camaraderie he says he enjoyed with all of the police officers who said they were interrogating him when he was arrested? well, it implies a certain degree of control here on the situation. i m a good guy, they re a good guy, we re all in the same profession here. i work law enforcement, technically. he was a wannabe cop. it makes him feel better to think of them as peers. but however much rader may have imagined he was still in control, the reality was just the opposite. richard lamunyon, who once headed up the department rader dismisses as the keystone cops, says the script was going their way now. were they, in fact, playing him? absolutely.
the christ lutheran church. he d been married 32 years. his son and daughter were all grown up now. and the other dennis rader? the brutal strangler who had so far gotten away with all those murders all that time and he hadn t been heard from in 25 years? btk was retiring. he was going to go off the face of the earth. or so he says. soon enough, an excuse to grab the limelight would come again. the wichita eagle ran an article about the mysterious serial killer, known only by the name he d given himself, btk, for bind, torture and kill, and who had committed his first murder 30 years earlier. of course, it was all so long ago. rader found his exploits weren t even front page news anymore. he says it all made him feel a little itchy. that really stirred it. i read that in the paper, and i thought, i always thought you know, i d like to break that back out again, but should i?
he s been playing games with us for 30 years. you think we re going to shoot straight with you? i don t think so. so, naturally, the police lied and told the killer they couldn t trace a disk to him and waited to see if he would fall for it, which he did. rader s last communication was a computer disk filled with more taunts and puzzles. he sent it to a local television station. the police were able to trace it to a dennis and a computer at rader s church. by googling the church name and dennis, the police quickly zeroed in on dennis rader. what nailed him ultimately was the last floppy disk. what nailed him was his hubris. he went too far. police also used a surveillance tape from that home depot to figure out that the person who dropped off the btk letter was driving a car registered to dennis rader s son. but to make certain they had their man, they needed a dna match. so, authorities got a warrant for a tissue sample from rader s daughter, on file at a kansas
public servant was actually the monster btk, whom everyone feared? but it was in that job that at least some people saw a darker side to dennis rader. dee stewart, a longtime acquaintance of rader s, has a good friend who reported to him in the compliance department. this friend, she says, found him controlling, and belligerent. there were times when he yelled at her in front of other employees. he demeaned her. he told her she would never be as smart as he was. but she says he could turn his good and bad sides on and off. he could be berating her, he could be screaming at her. and if the phone rang and it was a member of his family, he turned into ward cleaver. dr. fox says this apparent jekyll and hyde personality is classic for many serial killers. i don t believe there are two raders in one body. it s just that we all have a range in our personality. and someone like dennis rader indeed has two different shades,