Police said Saturday they have attributed two more slayings to BTK, from and No charges had been filed Saturday. Prosecutor Nola Foulston said that while there is no statute of limitations for homicide, the death penalty would not apply to any crime committed before , when the death penalty was introduced in Kansas. Police did not say how they identified Rader as a supect or whether he has said anything since his arrest. Kathleen Sebelius, attending a conference in Washington, said state highway patrol officials familiar with the case told her DNA evidence linked the suspect to the slayings.
BTK sent letters to media about the crimes in the s, but stopped for more than two decades before re-establishing contact last March with a letter about an unsolved killing. Since then, authorities said the killer has sent at least eight letters to the media or police, including three packages containing jewelry that police believed may have been taken from BTK's victims. One letter contained the driver's license of victim Nancy Fox.
The new letters sent chills through Wichita, but also rekindled hope that modern forensic science could find some clue that would finally lead police to a killer most thought was dead or safely locked in prison for some other crime. A source with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said surveillance gave police their "first big piece" of recent evidence, leading authorities to a vehicle and the suspect.
One of the victims newly identified by police, year-old Marine Hedge, lived on Rader's street in Park City. She was abducted from her home in , and her body was found eight days later along a dirt road. Their competence was questioned, and their actions were often second-guessed.
The BTK slayings began in with the strangulations of Joseph Otero, 38, his wife, Julie, 34, and their two children. The letters began that same year, with poems and graphic descriptions of the crimes. The killer even called police with details of Nancy Fox's slaying.
How about you? The letters stopped in the late s, but picked up last March, when a letter arrived at The Wichita Eagle with information on an unsolved killing, a copy of the victim's driver's license and photos of her slain body. The address appeared to refer to a now-vacant building. If he had, they point out, he had 31 years to turn himself in. The beginning of the end for BTK came in January , when he sent a postcard to a Wichita TV station describing a package he claimed to have left by the side of the road.
In the message, BTK also asked about the status of another package he said he had left at a Home Depot store a few weeks earlier. The roadside package turned out to be a cereal box containing a document. It described in gruesome detail his first crime—the murders of a couple and two of their five children. The box also held some jewelry and a doll with a rope around its neck; the doll was tied to a curved PVC pipe, apparently representing one of the victims, an year-old girl.
An initial search of the premises turned up nothing from BTK. But a store employee told police that his girlfriend had found a cereal box with writing on it in the bed of his pickup truck about two weeks earlier.
The employee, thinking it was a joke, threw the box away. Police recovered the trash and found the box, which contained several documents, including the one asking police whether BTK could communicate with them via a floppy disk without being traced. Police ran the ad. Two weeks later, a disk arrived in the mail at another TV station, along with a gold chain, a photocopied cover of a novel about a killer who bound and gagged his victims, and several 3-by-5 index cards, one of which gave instructions for communicating with BTK through the newspaper.
Landwehr says Rader had taken pains to delete any identifying information from the disk. A simple Internet search turned up a Web site for the church, which identified Dennis Rader as president of the congregation. Police quickly determined that Rader was a code compliance officer in Park City, located his address, drove past his house and saw a black Jeep Grand Cherokee registered to his son, Brian, in the driveway.
BTK's arrest is announced at Wichita City Hall the following day, drawing applause from the audience gathered. The scheduled hearing ends after a few short minutes, an acknowledgment from the defense that the state possesses enough evidence to send the case to trial. Two weeks later, a silent Rader has the judge enter a not guilty plea for him. Catching prosecutors off-guard by pleading guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder, Rader provides the court with explicit details on how he selected, stalked and finally killed each of his victims.
His lawyer later notes that they went with the guilty plea due to overwhelming evidence against their client and the lack of firm legal footing on which to enter an insanity plea. The two-day sentencing hearing features testimony from investigators who describe Rader's documentation of his torture-fueled sexual fantasies, emotional pleas from the victims' families and an apology from the convicted killer, who expresses hope that the families will one day forgive him.
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January 15, Rader kills four members of the Otero family A year-old married Air Force veteran, Rader makes the plunge into infamy after severing a phone line and entering the East Wichita home of Joseph and Julie Otero, the latter a former co-worker at the Coleman equipment company. Two weeks after police placed an ad, a package arrived from BTK at a local news station. The package included a floppy disk. They also managed to find out that the document was created by someone named Dennis.
The serial killer who took 10 lives felt betrayed that the police lied about being able to trace the floppy disk. Rader was convicted of all ten murders and sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole, with a minimum of years. He is currently serving his life sentence in El Dorado Correctional Facility.
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