Interesting read regarding BTK killer's family

[nursewife]

I'm huge reader of true crime. I thought it was an interesting read regarding BTK's daughter, and how she has dealt with her father being a serial killer. I found the part about him using her room to grow plants rather interesting.

www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/03/07/a-serial-killers-daughter-struggles-to-forgive-her-dad.html

The FBI man knocked on Kerri Rawson’s door 10 years ago.
She looked out from her tiny apartment near Detroit. He was holding an FBI badge.
She almost didn’t answer. Her father, a code compliance officer in the Wichita suburb of Park City, had taught her to be wary of strangers, and this one had sat in his car next to her trash dumpster for an hour. She’d called her husband.
But after the FBI guy knocked, she let him into her kitchen, where she’d made chocolate Bundt cake. From now on, the smell of chocolate cake would make her queasy.
He asked whether she knew who BTK was.
Yes. BTK — Bind, Torture, Kill — was the serial killer who scared her mom decades ago. The FBI guy was her dad’s age — late 50s, wearing glasses and a necktie, nervous. She was a substitute teacher taking a day off, still wearing mint green pajamas, though it was past noon.
Her father had been arrested as a BTK suspect, the man said.

He needed to swab her cheek for DNA.
At that moment in Park City, Kans., shortly after 12:15 p.m., Kerri’s mother, Paula Rader, sat down to lunch at home, waiting for her husband. Cops rushed in, guns drawn. A week later, Paula’s lunch still sat uneaten in the house she had lived in with her husband, Dennis, since the early ’70s. She would never sleep at that house again.
Other cops had just arrested Dennis Rader as he was driving home for lunch, pinning him on the pavement as they cuffed him. Around Wichita, officers were picking up Rader’s family and friends for questioning.
At the police station, Paula defended her husband. Had she ever noticed anything unusual? No.
Back in Detroit, Kerri yelled at the FBI guy.
The last time she had seen Dad was weeks before, in Park City at Christmastime. He looked sad. She remembered his bear hug, how he smelled, his brown code-compliance uniform.
“See you in a while,” he’d said.
This could not be true, she told the FBI agent.
Dad had called last night, asking whether she’d checked the oil in her car.
Now, with the FBI guy, she did something she would do many times over the next seven days — defend and then doubt her father’s innocence.
She told him about Marine Hedge.
Hedge, 53, had been a grandmother with a silky Southern accent, five feet tall, weighing no more than 100 pounds and living six doors from the Raders. Kerri’s father had waved to her driving to church. She disappeared in 1985, when Kerri was 6, her body found in a ditch. Paula had worried about safety.
“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “We’re safe.”
But now Kerri remembered that when Hedge had disappeared, Dad was not home. “It was stormy, and I didn’t want to sleep by myself. My mom let me in her bed — that’s how I know he was gone.”
Kerri’s husband, Darian, hurried into the apartment that day, asked to see the FBI guy’s badge, excused himself to go into the bathroom and called the Detroit FBI office. Yes, they said. The guy is a real agent.
Kerri stared at walls, talked in circles. One moment she’d be furious about the arrest. Then she’d stare. After the FBI guy left, she took down a picture of her father that was hanging in a hallway and stuck it in a closet.
She Googled “BTK” for proof that her father was innocent, but she told Darian she was matching her memories to BTK’s murder timeline and now had doubts.
If this were true, then her whole life might be a lie. Dad might have used her and her family as a cover for murder.
Few people are the sons or daughters of serial killers.
But psychologists say all of us suffer trauma in life.
How we respond defines us. Some of us turn bitter. Others find a way to live in peace. One key, as Kerri’s psychologist said later, is who we have in our lives and how good they are at guiding us.
Another key, as Kerri herself would say someday, is whether we can forgive the seemingly unforgivable.
Feeling violated
The next day, police and politicians gathered at Wichita City Hall to announce an arrest. CNN carried it live.
Kerri and Darian did not have cable, but friends from Houston stuck their phone close to their television.
“BTK is arrested,” Police Chief Norman Williams announced.
Over the phone, Kerri heard cheering.
The cops made her mad, and she got mad again when she learned why they had wanted her DNA. To link her dad to BTK, they’d obtained one of Kerri’s Pap smears from years before at Kansas State University’s health clinic. They’d used that to confirm that the Rader family DNA closely matched DNA in the semen sample BTK left at the scene of a quadruple homicide in 1974. So the FBI guy was double-checking her DNA.
She felt violated.
Kerri and Darian did not feel safe; Kerri slept on the couch, Darian on the floor. They slept as if one of them needed to be on watch.
TV crews knocked on their door, camped in their parking lot.
“Go away,” Darian called through the door.
When Darian drove to work, TV crews followed; he did U-turns to escape.
Kerri read news from Wichita every day. “Ten murders? How many more will he be accused of?”
She again Googled the BTK timeline. Mom was pregnant with her in 1977 when BTK murdered Nancy Fox.
After the media showed up demanding to talk to BTK’s daughter, Darian watched his wife change.
Athletic and nearly five feet 10, she was no girly girl, and Darian loved that. She could walk for days with him, carrying a wilderness backpack. She always put her needs second to others. But now she was BTK’s daughter. She even looked like her dad — same dark hair, same eyes. She shared his middle name, Lynn.
She felt as if she’d done something wrong.
Darian heard her repeat things, sometimes 25 times in a row.
Kerri searched her memories.
The night of Marine Hedge’s murder, Dad had taken Brian, her 9-year-old brother, on a Scout campout. Had it been an alibi so he could sneak out of the campout and murder Hedge?
In 2004 near Christmastime, after BTK had threatened to kill again, Dad had driven her to the airport to pick up her brother. Dad wandered off.
Was he mailing something? Watching the news? She minutely analyzed her whole life.
People said in news stories that Dennis Rader obsessed about little things. Kerri remembered how Dad spoke sharply if she sat in his chair or failed to put shoes away. Cops said BTK made strange marks in his communications. She remembered weird marks Dad made on newspaper stories. “Code,” he called it.
A father confesses
“I still seek the ‘whys.’ ”
— Dennis Rader in a Jan. 20, 2015, letter to The Wichita Eagle from prison
In Wichita, Kerri’s uncle Jeff Rader got fed up with reporters from CNN and Fox News driving by. He stepped outside his mother’s home and said she was 79 and frail, that she sometimes fell. Now she was taking crank calls. “There are sick people out there,” he told reporters. “The sort who want to kick someone when they are down.”
Kerri flew into Wichita three days after her father’s arrest. On the plane, she escaped by reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But on her layover, she saw Dad’s face filling the Dallas airport’s TV screens.
Mike Clark, the family’s pastor, visited Dennis Rader in jail a week after his arrest.
Clark called Paula afterward. Kerri watched her mother take the call, with a yellow legal pad in her hand. Paula wrote “he’s confessing” and underlined it as she talked.
So it was all true. BTK had operated for 31 years, starting four years before Kerri was born. He had murdered the Oteros — a mother, a father and two children, ages 11 and 9. BTK had tortured victims, sexually defiled several. He had taken Hedge’s body inside Christ Lutheran Church, where he was congregation president. In church, he posed her body, strapped high heels to her cold feet and took photos.
That confession did it for Paula. She never saw, wrote or spoke to Dennis again.
Everybody assumed BTK was some sort of sadistic genius. The real BTK was an ordinary, inarticulate doofus, Darian thought. And a good dad, Kerri told him.
He did not hit. Did not abuse. With Mom, Dad taught godliness. Kerri had two college degrees; Brian, her older brother, had been an Eagle Scout and was training to serve on U.S. Navy nuclear submarines.
‘Just did bad things’
“I write not to ‘toot’ my horn . . . but to help clarify or shed light on a daughter’s trust and a Father’s love for each other, torn by senseless and horrid attacks on people.”
— Dennis Rader, Jan. 20 letter to The Eagle from the El Dorado Correctional Facility
Dennis, sentenced to life in prison, couldn’t understand why no family visited. He told Pastor Clark that he had been a good man “who just did bad things.”
Kerri, disgusted, wrote him: “You have had these secrets, this ‘double life’ for 30 years; we have only had knowledge of it for three months. Give us some time . . . We are trying to cope and survive . . . You lied to us, deceived us.”
The family dreaded a trial. Every deviant act would be described on TV. But they argued. Maybe he was sick and needed help?
He decided to plead guilty to spare them. Kerri felt relieved — until the plea hearing. Her father told a national television audience at length how he murdered people. He seemed to enjoy the story. He lingered over how he’d murdered the Otero children.
He even brought up Kerri. “Joseph Otero had a daughter, I had a daughter.”
He said Nancy Fox defiantly smoked a cigarette before he strangled her with a belt. He said the Oteros pleaded for their lives and that Shirley Vian died while her children screamed.
Sympathetic police
“I gave up years ago hoping that someone would forgive me and understand.”
— Dennis Rader, letter from prison to The Wichita Eagle, Jan. 26, 2015
Weeks after the arrest, Kerri, at the family house in Park City again, found papers with her father’s little code marks and called police, wondering whether they would want them. And so she met Ken Landwehr and Kelly Otis, two cops who helped catch BTK.
They treated her kindly, like a victim.
Landwehr had silver hair and dark eyes that looked deep; he talked in warm tones. The investigation, he said, showed that she and her family were victims as much as the families of the 10 dead. Otis gave her his business card, with his cellphone number scribbled on it. “Call me if you ever need anything.” She put the card in a pocket and carried it for years. Dad was a monster. These guys were noble.
One night in 2006, while Darian slept, Kerri lay beside him and wrote to Dad.
“Should I tell you that I grew up adoring you, that you were the sunshine of my life . . . true, even if it is coming out jaded and bitter now? But really, who could blame me? Hey, it’s OK to yell at your father all you want when he’s a serial killer.
“I just wished you were sitting next to me in the theatre, sharing a tub of buttered popcorn. But you’re not. You’re sitting in your concrete room (what you like to call it, your room! Hello!!! It’s a jail cell, not a room! Like you’re staying at some inn where they serve you breakfast in bed with a fresh-cut flower on the tray, instead of where you really are, where they serve you on a cold metal tray that slips through a crack in the door.)
“That tub of buttered popcorn reminds me that sometimes I just want to go out and buy the biggest, buttery tub I can find and wave it in your face and say, ‘Ha, you won’t ever have this again,’ and ask was it worth it?
“In the next breath I want to ask if you’re staying warm at night . . . I’m so sorry that you’re alone in that small cold concrete cell and sometimes I just wish I could give you a hug.”
She never sent that letter. She couldn’t bring herself to hurt him.
Legacy of murder
Compassion has limits.
Dad committed his first murders at age 29. She was 27. She worried maybe something would change in her in two years, though she had never gotten even a speeding ticket.
“No,” Darian said. “You don’t just flip a switch and one day become a serial killer. Come on.”
She could not imagine what she would tell her children, if she had kids someday. “How do you say your grandfather is a notorious serial killer?”
When her father wrote, his letters sometimes went into the trash, where she dumped cat litter on them.
Other times, she’d write, and he would not, and later write that he’d been busy.
“Busy?” she thought. “What the hell is he doing in prison to be ‘busy’?”
She later learned that he had a fan club — loons who wrote to him. She worried they’d look her up.
Motherhood
At age 29, her dad had become a murderer. At age 29, she became a mother, and suddenly she despised her father.
In 1974, he had killed two children.
In 1977, he had locked Shirley Vian’s two children in a bathroom, then strangled her while her 6-year-old son watched through a keyhole and screamed.
In 1986, he killed Vicki Wegerle while her 2-year-old watched from a playpen.
“Man hurt mommy,” the child told police.
“Once I got pregnant with my daughter,” Kerri said later, “I just got really mad at him . . . became very protective of my kids.”
She stopped writing. For good, she thought.
Treating the trauma
Sue Parker, a Detroit-area therapist, treated Kerri for five months in 2007, two years after the arrest. Parker saw a woman with above-average intelligence, poise and post-traumatic stress.
Emotional trauma is an affliction more widespread than anyone realizes, Parker knew. Look at prison inmates. Look at addicts. As Parker would say later, are all of those people really all bad people? Or did something happen early on that triggered what they did?
But Parker also knew that trauma doesn’t always determine how we recover.
“It’s not just about trauma. It’s about the severity of the trauma and how long it goes on, but it also depends on the coping mechanisms the victims have — and it depends also on their support system, who they have around them.”
Kerri ended up fine, Parker said later. Betrayed, yes, on a level only God can understand. But Kerri left her care looking healthy, strong and resourceful, Parker said.
Why? In part because of the therapy. And in part because Kerri had had good people around all her life. A good husband. Church. Friends. And good parents. Not just Mom, Parker thought.
Dad, too.
The cops said Dennis Rader had fancied himself, in his interrogation, as a James Bond character with cover stories. He was Christ Lutheran’s congregation president. A Boy Scout volunteer.
But BTK had been a good dad, Parker said. Even when every word he said was a lie.
In the end, Parker said, we are not our parents. We are who we are.
Kerri is not “the daughter of BTK,” Parker said.
She’s Kerri.
But Kerri herself didn’t entirely believe that.
What defines us
“To live in an 8’ x 12’room for a very long time; most of us that live here will go ‘crazy’ at some point.
“But, it’s that separation from others that finally is your worst nightmare.”
— Dennis Rader, in a letter from prison to The Wichita Eagle, Jan. 26, 2015
For five years after her daughter, Emilie, was born in 2008, Kerri cut her father out of her life.
Darian spoke to her with compassion, made her laugh.
In church, she clung to teachings about God’s love. But when it was announced that the next Sunday’s sermon would address forgiveness, Kerri stayed away.
She gave birth to a second child, Ian, in 2011, but her dad’s betrayals kept poisoning her life.
When friends questioned whether it was wise for them to have children, Kerri ignored them. She never worried about her kids inheriting a serial killer gene.
When Emilie, at 5, understood what “grandfather” meant, she asked where her grandfather was.
“In a long time-out,” Kerri replied.
Couldn’t Kerri go see him? Emilie asked.
“It’s a really long time out,” Kerri replied.
Kerri asked friends “Don’t tag our children” on Facebook. When friends asked why, she didn’t know how to answer them. She told some of them that “my dad did something terrible.”
“What?”
“Just Google me.”
And they would. And then: “Oh.”
There are two kinds of friends, Darian said later. “The kind that when we told who Dennis was, they’d just say, ‘That’s super-weird, but it doesn’t change the way we think about you guys.’
“And then there’s the other kind . . . who perhaps think this thing defines you.”
Forgiveness
One day at church, they listened to a woman describe being raped. She said she forgave, not to help the rapist but to lighten her own suffering.
Kerri talked about that for days, to Darian, their pastor, to church friends.
In August 2012 at her church, NorthRidge in Plymouth, Mich., she publicly announced that her father was a serial killer and related her story to a women’s ministry.
“I have not forgiven him,” she told them.
Marijo Swanson, another church friend, talked to her about forgiveness. How we handle betrayal is on us, she told her.
“If we choose not to forgive or not work at healing from the betrayal,” she said, “we continue to give the other person power to control us and our feelings.”
In the fall of 2012, while working out in a gym, Kerri suffered a stress fracture in her tibia. She was laid up for weeks, with time to think.
One day, the forgiveness just poured over her. She sobbed so hard that she had to pull the car over. The anger was gone, the hurt was fixed, the holding out against Dad was not there anymore.
But forgiveness did not mean she’d made peace with murder.
Her father belonged in prison.
‘Kerri again’
In December 2012, Kerri wrote to her father for the first time in five years.
She told him she would never forget his crimes or be at peace with what he’d done. But she wrote that she was at peace with the man who raised her. That man was a good man, whatever else he’d become.
And then she wrote of her life, which he would never see.
She wrote of the grandchildren he would never meet.
“I have come to terms with what happened with you and laid it to rest. I am never going to understand it but I forgive you.
“I don’t know if I will ever be able to make it for a visit but know that I love you and hope to see you in heaven some day.”
After that letter to her father, Kerri changed.
“Before she forgave him, she thought of herself as BTK’s daughter,” Darian said later.
“But as soon as she forgave him, she was Kerri again.”
But forgiveness is not tidy.
In February 2013, Kerri spoke at her church again from a prepared speech.
“(God) told me, ‘you have a Dad problem, you have a trust and obedience problem. You trusted and obeyed your earthly father and he hurt you, so now you’re holding out on me. You have been holding out on me for seven years.
“ ‘Let’s fix that.’
“He told me that I had a forgiveness problem, which is a love problem, which is a God problem.”
“I told Him that ‘I love you.’
“He said, ‘Then show me.
“ ‘Do it.’ ”
And so she had done it, she told them. She had forgiven him. In December 2013, she wrote to her father, telling him once again that she forgave, that she loved him.
Rader, or so he wrote from prison to The Wichita Eagle, was stunned.
“Forgiveness is there between the lines, she writes on those days she thinks of me, and the dark deeds, she recalls all that we did as a family — many good memories, and that helps her make the day.
“That is true love from a daughter’s heart.
“What else can a father ask for.”
But that was not the final word about forgiveness or BTK.
Fearful and angry
“Yes, I feel deep remorse, but I doubt ofsome one (sic) killed a loved one, I would ever forgive them.”
— Dennis Rader, in a letter from prison to The Wichita Eagle, Jan. 26, 2015
In September, Kerri was with her children when she saw Stephen King give a TV interview.
King said he’d written a story inspired by her family years before, “A Good Marriage,” about discovering the monster in the house.
Furious, she broke the family’s nine-year silence and gave a newspaper interview, lashing out at King. Among people giving her rave reviews: Dad.
“She reminds me of me,” he wrote to The Eagle. “Independence, fearless, uses the media.”
“I was touch by it, and what Kerri said. I could tell, it came totally from within her, ‘an emotional venting.’
“People reading the release, will see we had a ‘good Family.’ Nothing to hide; only me with my ‘Dark Secrets.’
“Like she said, I was a good Dad (but only did bad things).”
“Disgusting,” Kerri thought.
Bad memories came back.
She remembered late 1996. The family had lost a cousin to a wreck and was losing a grandfather to illness. To comfort the family, her mom made manicotti.
“My family got into some kind of argument at dinner, and we had this old rickety table and someone — I don’t remember who — pounded on it and the legs broke and all the dinner came crashing down, scattering noodles and sauce all over.
“My dad was so angry at my brother, he put his hands around my brother’s neck and started to try to choke him. My mom and I stepped in right away and broke it off.
“I can still picture it clearly, and I can see the intense anger in my dad’s face and eyes. Close to manic.”
Forgiveness is complicated.
“I fight my dad sometimes in my dreams, never understanding who let him out of prison; I’m always very fearful of him and very angry in my dreams,” she said.
“Sometimes I’m even fighting for my life or frantically trying to convince others of the truth.
“I don’t know what this says about forgiveness.”
Return to Wichita
“Age is also catching up with me, beginning to slow down, nap more, reflect on life, work on poetry, art, read, play chess, no much ‘telly’ anymore; I’ll soon be 70!”
— Dennis Rader, in a letter from prison, Jan. 20, 2015
On a bitterly cold January morning, Kerri walks along Rock Island Rd. in Wichita, hands shoved in her pockets.
“Coming back here to Wichita is like stepping into enemy territory,” she says.
She wonders whether people might recognize her and throw up.
She talks of forgiveness but can’t talk about “him” without swearing.
“I feel bad for the 30 years of s--- my dad gave this town — 30 years of bad things because of one man, my dad. The terrible things he did to the victims . . . Women were scared — my own mother was scared to go home.
“I forgave him. “But I didn’t do that for him. I did it for me.”
From downtown, Kerri rides nine miles (14 kilometres) north to Park City, to her old block.
“There’s my grandma’s house, and there’s where Mrs. Hedge lived . . . And here is where our house was.”
It is a vacant lot — a patch of pale tan grass hibernating beneath patches of dirty snow. The city bought the 960-square-foot house and bulldozed it in 2007 to discourage gawkers.
She walks to the back of the lot and points out the tiny creek.
“I used to play, a total mud girl, mud from head to toe in that creek . . . To get to my grandma’s house, I had to walk past Mrs. Hedge’s house, and now (at age 6) I was afraid. And the guy who killed her was living in our house.”
She shows where her tree house stood, built by her dad, so big that three kids could sleep inside.
She shows, with a sweep of her arms, how big his garden had been.
“He liked to do hobbies, because it kept him out of trouble. He turned my bedroom into a nursery for plants when I was 3, and I’d sleep with my brother in the bunk bed. I was so annoyed with my dad. But now you realize, that kept him out of trouble. He was trying to stop.
“So it was plants — or murder. Later it was stamps . . . We had hundreds of stamps in tubs. My mom and I ended up using them on envelopes. So every time I stick one of his stupid stamps on an envelope, it’s like making part of the evil go away . . . He thought he was somebody important and that people would want them for a stamp collection. Instead, I mailed letters for 10 years to the electric company. It makes me happy. You put that in the paper; Dad will be mad.”
She points to a small depression in the grass — the grave of a pet dog long dead. His name was Patches.
The cops dug up Patches’ remains to see whether BTK had buried any secrets with the pet, she said.
He had not.
But nothing about her life was spared, she said. Nothing.
Not even the graves of long-dead dogs.
©2015 The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.)

[Saint Monica]

They obtained her pap without her prior knowledge or consent.

[nursewife]

Mar 7, 2015 12:03:56 GMT -5 Saint Monica said:

They obtained her pap without her prior knowledge or consent.

I was bothered by that since its accessing health info without permission. I'm assuming they had a warrant. 

[mala]

I have feelings about this. Not sure I can articulate.

[ttt]

Mar 7, 2015 12:39:59 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 12:37:08 GMT -5 nursewife said:

I was bothered by that since its accessing health info without permission. I'm assuming they had a warrant. 

I live in Wichita, and did at the time he was caught. It was widely reported that they had a warrant. 

He was actively stalking several women at the time he was captured. I have no problems with this. 

I'm confused as to how they could get a warrant for her personal health information when she was not a suspect and not involved in any way with the crime. And then they don't even have to tell her that they've done this?? 

[mala]

Re the pap smear: if they had a warrant I won't get too up in arms about it. Is is violating and shady? Yep. At the same time, though, unless you lived there during his murders or resurgence, you really don't know what the atmosphere emotionally was there. (I have family in Wichita, though I've never lived there myself.)

[mala]

Mar 7, 2015 12:49:49 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 12:43:23 GMT -5 ttt said:

I'm confused as to how they could get a warrant for her personal health information when she was not a suspect and not involved in any way with the crime. And then they don't even have to tell her that they've done this?? 

they did not access her personal health information. They got a warrant to test her cells that had been collected and had been stored, with thousands of others after testing, at a lab storage place, to test to see if certain portions of her DNA matched with certain portions of the DNA found at one of the murder scenes. Which it did. I thought it was brilliant, and still do. 

That is brilliant

[nursewife]

Mar 7, 2015 12:39:59 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 12:37:08 GMT -5 nursewife said:

I was bothered by that since its accessing health info without permission. I'm assuming they had a warrant. 

I live in Wichita, and did at the time he was caught. It was widely reported that they had a warrant. 

He was actively stalking several women at the time he was captured. I have no problems with this. 

I didn't know he was actively stalking when he was caught. I'd love to read more about this. 

[nursewife]

Mar 7, 2015 13:00:28 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 12:52:26 GMT -5 nursewife said:

I didn't know he was actively stalking when he was caught. I'd love to read more about this. 

It was terrifying. He was sending messages to news stations, to the police, the newspapers, leaving hints around town. It was something new in the paper, monthly, for months till he was caught. 

I remember him leaving a naked barbie doll, with a noose around its neck, in a special k cereal box north of town, by a stop sign . He also had one of his victim's driver's licenses, that he sent to someone else. After he was caught the police contacted the people he had been stalking. 

Woah. I can't imagine finding out that the BTK killer was planning on killing you. 

[Velar Fricative]

Thanks for sharing. I can't imagine the wide range of feelings his family feels.

[Velar Fricative]

Mar 7, 2015 13:37:13 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Did he want to get caught?

I fell down the rabbit hole and read his wiki because I forgot how he was caught. He wrote a letter to police asking if they could glean personal data from a floppy disk since he wanted to send them a letter via floppy disk. The police responded via newspaper ad that it was safe for BTK to send them a floppy disk. So he did and they found erased data related to his church with his name on it, leading them to the subsequent searching and DNA testing. So either he was a dumbass or wanted to get caught.

I did want to learn about why there was a 14-year hiatus between communications from him but didn't see anything, so he may not have offered an explanation.

[nursewife]

Mar 7, 2015 13:31:02 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 13:21:58 GMT -5 nursewife said:

Woah. I can't imagine finding out that the BTK killer was planning on killing you. 

nor I. 

it was such a remarkable time here. A local lawyer had published a book about the BTK killings, or was writing a newspaper article about them or something, it had been 15 or so years since the last killing, and the thought was he was either dead or in prison. When the book/article was published, Dennis Rader came out of the woodwork and started contacting the media to say UM, I'm still out here and you never ever caught me, ha ha kind of thing, the book is wrong.  And he got all fired up again. 

I remember the day he was caught. A patient and I watched it live on CNN. I've read a few books about him, and find his thought process interesting. I've read numerous books as well, but they didn't touch on his "almost" victims. I must be a serial killer junkie. I love reading about these crimes. Another I find fascinating is the Zodiac killer. 

[jeaniebueller]

Mar 7, 2015 13:48:39 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Mar 7, 2015 13:37:13 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Did he want to get caught?

I fell down the rabbit hole and read his wiki because I forgot how he was caught. He wrote a letter to police asking if they could glean personal data from a floppy disk since he wanted to send them a letter via floppy disk. The police responded via newspaper ad that it was safe for BTK to send them a floppy disk. So he did and they found erased data related to his church with his name on it, leading them to the subsequent searching and DNA testing. So either he was a dumbass or wanted to get caught.

I did want to learn about why there was a 14-year hiatus between communications from him but didn't see anything, so he may not have offered an explanation.

I think that by 2004, he wS so over confident he wasn't going to be caught and in his sociopathic mind, thought there was no way they could catch him. Plus, he is an oldz so I have no doubt he lacked the understanding of the disc info.

[mala]

Slight tangent: My uncle was a crime reporter for the eagle at the time he was caught. And he (BTK) was active while my mother was still living there. It was all my mom could talk about when I visited. I couldnt imagine living in Wichita for any of it.

[gpw]

@cse1960 did he ever say why he chose his victims? Was there any rhyme or reason to it?

[origami]

Mar 7, 2015 19:42:26 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 19:05:21 GMT -5 mala said:

Slight tangent: My uncle was a crime reporter for the eagle at the time he was caught. And he (BTK) was active while my mother was still living there. It was all my mom could talk about when I visited. I couldnt imagine living in Wichita for any of it.

It really was terrifying. I moved here the year before his last killing, and was here for the year around him coming back and then getting caught.  He was known to have gotten into one house using false credentials for a utility (Southwestern Bell, I think) and so everyone was very cautious about people claiming to be utility workers. He would also cut people's phone lines before breaking in and waiting on people to come home (hiding in closets at times); people would walk inside and check their phones before shutting their front doors, if their phone was dead they'd leave.  He hit small neighborhoods, with average sized homes; any age of victim.  

that really does sound terrifying. Esp to the victims. I can't imagine coming home to a killer in the closet.

[ttt]

I made the mistake of reading more about these murders and now I really wish I hadn't.

Reading some of those details just makes me wonder how anybody can believe that all human life is sacred and everybody has a soul. Very obviously this isn't true, when people like that exist and are capable of doing those things with zero remorse.

I can't imagine what it must be like for this woman, knowing her father was a monster like that. 

[origami]

Mar 7, 2015 20:21:53 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 19:52:45 GMT -5 gpw said:

@cse1960 did he ever say why he chose his victims? Was there any rhyme or reason to it?

they lived alone, or were vulnerable in some other way. 

he killed a family of 4

[origami]

Mar 7, 2015 20:28:39 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 20:26:04 GMT -5 origami said:

he killed a family of 4

indeed. He said he thought the father of the house was gone, but he was not. He used a gun to threaten them, tied them all up, and then killed them one by one, starting with the dad. 

ah so he thought the mom was "alone". But why pick them in the first place?

[ChillyMcFreeze]

I remember exactly where I was when I heard he was caught, driving to high school and thinking re: the floppy disc, "what a fucking moron."

Fascinating and tragic about his daughter having to retrace every moment with a suspicious eye.

[thejen626]

Mar 7, 2015 20:22:11 GMT -5 ttt said:

I made the mistake of reading more about these murders and now I really wish I hadn't.

Reading some of those details just makes me wonder how anybody can believe that all human life is sacred and everybody has a soul. Very obviously this isn't true, when people like that exist and are capable of doing those things with zero remorse.

I can't imagine what it must be like for this woman, knowing her father was a monster like that. 

Please don't quote...

My biological father wasn't a serial killer, but he and my mother got divorced when I was very young. I never really knew why. I'd heard snippets that he was "off" but never really thought about it. My mom raised me and my brother as a single mom and she got remarried when I was 19. She was really successful, a VP at a financing company, and on our local City Council for a few years. I saw my dad occasionally as a child but when I was 14 I made the decision to not go to his house anymore. I saw him a few times from 14-20 years old and not at all since then. Just no desire on my part and he was always kind of an asshole.

Imagine my surprise when I was about 28 and my Dad called me after a many years hiatus, demanding to meet his granddaughter because he saw a Christmas card at my Aunt's house.. I basically told him to fuck off and die, and I called my mom to vent about it because I was pretty upset.

She proceeded to tell me that the reason she left him was because there was a really pretty single woman neighbor that they used to live next door to. He would always talk really disparaging about her, like "oh she's such a slut, different men in her apartment every weekend", etc. Anyway some of the women neighbors started complaining about peeping Tom in the apartment complex.

My mom once caught my Dad at the pretty neighbor's window she told him she wasn't messing around and that she would leave him if she caught him doing that again.

Shortly after that, the chief of police and my mom were out at dinner, they were friends, and my mom mentioned this had been happening. The next day after my Dad left for work, someone left a police file on my mom's front door.

Ugh. I've never typed this out before and it's harder than I thought it would be.

Turns out my Dad was the prime suspect in a bunch of fucked up crimes against women. Stalking, peeping tom, etc. and it had been escalating and getting worse. My mom wouldn't tell me specifics, just told me "trust me, you don't want to know" ughh.

She divorced him and never told him that she knew any of this. He was pretty high ranking in the military and she did tell his commanding officer (a woman).

As far as I know he wasn't ever arrested or anything. I tried googling when she first told me all of this and didn't find anything.

It's pretty terrifying to know that my biological father was so fucked up. I have tremendous daddy issues and abandonment issues and I'm sure thats all contributing factors.

Again, please don't quote.

[janetplanet20]

Oh man, I cried reading the article. I feel so sad for the daughter. I can't imagine finding out your father is a serial killer.

[thejen626]

Mar 7, 2015 22:33:01 GMT -5 @soudesafinado said:

Mar 7, 2015 22:07:57 GMT -5 thejen626 said:

Please don't quote...


Again, please don't quote.

Well, I don't know what to say exactly, but maybe you can seek out the kind of help the woman did in the OP that helped her work through everything? 

Oh, I'm not torn up about it on a daily basis, I just avoid it, I'm sure that's healthy lol... I only found out a few years ago so it's not like I grew up around it. Plus, the not knowing specifics has been good for me.

I pretty much just told DH and one of my friends, and haven't thought about it since then. But reading this obviously triggered something in my head.

[thejen626]

Mar 7, 2015 23:20:57 GMT -5 JayhawkGirl said:

thejen626 I'm sorry. I'm glad he's out of your life. The paranoid side of me would make sure school knows he can never have contact. For some reason his insistence after the holiday card hit my radar as worrisome.

I remember exactly where I was when word broke about BTK. My coworker grew up near him and had family there still and was so happy he'd been caught.

Oh thank you!

He lives in TX (we are in OR). He called me the one time when DD1 was about a year old, and I sent him some very specific text messages back, and haven't heard from him at all since then. I'm really not worried about it at all.

[Deleted]

I knew the BTK killed killed families but I had no idea he killed women while their children watched and left the children to live.

I really have no words for that kind of evil.

Obviously killing families is horrible. I'm not saying he should have killed more people or anything. I just can't get the idea of those poor kids waiting in the bathroom while he killed their mother. I just can't. And the terror these women must have felt as they were being killing. Because you know they assumed he would kill their children next and they wouldn't be able to comfort them.

That's probably the one thought that has terrified me more than anything else. I really can't remember what made me think that thought before, some story I read I guess. But the idea that I couldn't comfort my child as they were dying is the truest fear that I have.

[rosiebear]

I feel like she was under significant pressure from her church to "forgive him," as if it were some sort of character flaw if she could not.

That quote about how, if you choose not to forgive someone, you are giving them power over you bugs me a lot. I think it's bullshit: some things, for some people, are simply unforgiveable. Acknowledging that and giving yourself a fucking break for not being able or willing to forgive monstrous acts is not a weakness.

[mouse]

Mar 8, 2015 12:19:26 GMT -5 rosiebear said:

I feel like she was under significant pressure from her church to "forgive him," as if it were some sort of character flaw if she could not.

That quote about how, if you choose not to forgive someone, you are giving them power over you bugs me a lot. I think it's bullshit: some things, for some people, are simply unforgiveable. Acknowledging that and giving yourself a fucking break for not being able or willing to forgive monstrous acts is not a weakness.

Forgiveness is a huge thing in my family too. Frankly, I cannot figure out what they mean by forgiveness in these circumstances. I'm told "you don't have to forget, you don't have to stop being sad, angry or upset or let the person into your life. You just have to forgive." Okay, so what exactly am I doing, other than reciting the word "forgive"?

Her church may have a better definition of forgiveness, but that's been my experience.

[nursewife]

I'm glad this got discussed. I'm so fascinated by the detective work and crime. Thanks for what you added @cse1960. If I was in a similar situation, I don't think I could ever forget. I don't think that I could ever make peace with it. Personally, for me to forgive someone, I need lots of time, to work and feel through all the emotions and details. In that kind of a case, I don't think I could stomach the details, but would want to know what made him tick. I think knowing what made him do this would be a huge part, because I would want to ensure that I'm not capable of having those feelings or thoughts.

Sorry for what your family has gone through thejen626. I think you show great restraint not asking for details. From what I said before, I wouldn't be able to move on without knowing details. I have a second uncle that is schizophrenic. He stabbed someone and will spend the rest of his life in prison for attempted murder. Before this happened, he was obsessed with my sister and I. I was young, 8 or 9 and didn't really know much about him as he lived in Australia, and was back home to visit. Since growing up, I've found it so interesting to find out more about him. I think some of my reasoning is wanting to make sure I'm not capable of similar actions.

[Deleted]

Mar 8, 2015 12:19:26 GMT -5 rosiebear said:

I feel like she was under significant pressure from her church to "forgive him," as if it were some sort of character flaw if she could not.

That quote about how, if you choose not to forgive someone, you are giving them power over you bugs me a lot. I think it's bullshit: some things, for some people, are simply unforgiveable. Acknowledging that and giving yourself a fucking break for not being able or willing to forgive monstrous acts is not a weakness.

Refusing to forgive your sister for calling you a whore in the 7th grade resulting in a family rift that leaves you out of family gatherings, support, and all the cool stuff that comes with having a family definitely gives your snotty ass sister power over you.

Refusing to forgive your father for murdering people is just common sense. I'm not sure even Jesus expects that much. 

[heyjude]

Mar 7, 2015 20:38:01 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

Mar 7, 2015 20:34:35 GMT -5 origami said:

ah so he thought the mom was "alone". But why pick them in the first place?

he'd followed the little girl from school a number of times. (Edit: and watched the house, and family, for a while)

....and THIS is why I don't have the stones to be a free range parent.