Kansas City News Blog

The Wichita Eagle played a prominent part in the BTK story. In 1974, before Wichita knew it had a serial killer in its midst, a man called one of the newspaper’s columnists and told him where he could find information about the unsolved quadruple homicide committed months earlier. The cat-and-mouse game resumed in 2004, after the Eagle published a story about the 30th anniversary of the first murders linked to BTK, who was thought by many to be dead or incarcerated before he reemerged.

It’s fitting, then, that Eagle reporters have written a definitive account about the case. Bind, Torture, Kill, by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly and Hurst Laviana, tells the story of Dennis Rader’s crimes and the police’s effort to apprehend him. Investigators determined Rader’s identity after a computer disk he sent to a TV station was traced to a church he attended. Rader ultimately confessed to 10 murders and is serving multiple life sentences in a state prison.

I spoke with L. Kelly, an editor at the Eagle, about the book, which is in stores now.

Do you think Rader left more victims than we know about?

I do not. He was an obsessive record keeper, first of all. The members of the task force were very diligent in going through his logs, going through his records, and contacting as many folks as they could track down, because they wanted to make sure that there weren’t more victims. But they turned up no evidence of additional victims. Plus, he was so arrogant, he wanted to get credit for all of his crimes. He insisted that there were no more, that he would have killed more if he could have. But he claims no more victims. Unlike some serial killers who were playing games with the cops along those lines – “I killed more, but I’m not going to tell you” – I don’t think that was part of Dennis Rader’s makeup.

What was the best missed opportunity to catch BTK?

The best missed opportunity was probably the fact that at one point [in 2004] there was a fugitive in the shed of his his home. The cops were called by Dennis Rader himself, in Park City. He said, “There’s someone in my shed. Come get him out.” There was evidence of his crimes in his shed. That was pretty gutsy on his part. That just showed the depth of his arrogance, how bullet-proof he felt at that point.

Your book says that investigators had “cleverly” played Rader. But it seems like he made himself pretty easy to catch once he resurfaced.

Well, he was really drawn into their strategy of communicating. He thought he was going to be able to play this game with [Wichita police Lieutenant Ken] Landwehr forever. He, in his own mind, was sucked into believing that Landwehr wanted it to go on forever and that he would not get caught. If you remember, he asks Landwehr, “Why did you lie to me?” [In his correspondence with police, Rader had asked if floppy disks could be traced.] In the end, he felt betrayed. He had spent his entire life betraying other people, and he didn’t think that he himself would ever be betrayed. Sort of interesting irony, I think.

It was interesting to learn that Rader, once captured, disappointed the cops who had chased him for so long. One interrogator thought he was a “dork.”

I think it’s human nature to be fascinated by murder. It goes back to Cain and Abel. So many of Shakespeare’s tragedies are based on murder. Jack the Ripper has held such a fascination for us from the Victorian era. We as a human beings have a craving to understand what drives someone to murder. If we ourselves can’t conceive of doing it, we don't understand what would drive someone else to do it and do it repeatedly. Certainly a homicide detective, who has spent so much time and effort and has been obsessed by a case, wants to think that they have an adversary that is worthy of their time. To finally meet someone and think, “This is it,” has got to be a disappointment.

Rader’s wife of 34 years obtained a divorce after he admitted to his crimes. Has she granted any interviews?

She has not. Her thinking is, she’s done nothing wrong, she has nothing to answer for. I think that’s a pretty strong woman.

Do you have any thoughts on whether she suspected anything? Your book describes how she found one of his twisted poems in the late 1970s.

I think that Dennis Rader was a master at explaining himself. He was a master liar. He was a chameleon. He could make people believe what he wanted them to believe about himself. He had an awful lot of different personas, which is not to say that he had multiple personalities. But just like all of us, we are different people, given different circumstances. He was just an expert and presenting himself differently to different people. He was very devoted to his wife, and I think he gave her no reason to suspect him. – David Martin