The Double Life of Dennis Rader: Church Leader, Scout, and VTC Maniac

American serial killer Dennis Rader was the furthest thing from a maniac. He led a church community, ran a Boy Scout troop, was the life of the party, a loving husband and caring father. But at night, for almost 20 years, he tortured and killed people in the city of Wichita and its suburbs in the state of Kansas. The criminal reveled in his elusiveness and sent mocking messages to the police and newspaper editors. He signed his name with the pseudonym BTK, which stood for "Bind, Torture, Kill."

Dennis Lynn Rader was born on March 9, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Kansas. The boy's father served in the army, and his mother worked as an accountant. In addition to Dennis, the family had three younger sons - Paul, Bill, and Jeff. When the future maniac was still very young, his father was sent to serve in another city, so the whole family soon settled in Wichita.

Dennis's parents worked a lot, so he had to look after his younger brothers. After his arrest, he told psychologists that he was always irritated by the lack of proper attention to the children in his family. From an early age, Rader began to show sadistic tendencies. He tortured and killed animals, and as a teenager he admired the serial killer Harvey Glatman.

Dennis was a scout and often went on hikes. During one of these outings, he fell and suffered a head injury. This affected his personality, and sadistic sexual fantasies were added to the existing deviations. Later, the maniac said that sometimes he tied his legs with ropes and pulled a bag over his head. These are the actions he subsequently repeated with his victims.

Despite his eccentricities, Dennis seemed like a normal young man. He was a good student, graduated from Kansas Wesleyan University, and served in the Army from 1966, where he achieved the rank of staff sergeant. In 1970, Rader returned to civilian life and got a job as a butcher at Leekers IGA, where his mother worked as a bookkeeper. At the same time, he enrolled in Butler County Community College. Three years later, Dennis received an associate's degree in electronics and got a job in his field.

In 1971, while in college, Dennis married Paula Dietz. They had a son, Brian, in 1975 and a daughter, Kerry, in 1978. In 1976, he enrolled at Wichita State University and graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Justice Administration. By the early 1990s, Dennis was serving as the president of the Lutheran Church Council and was the head of the Scouts in Kansas.

It would seem that Rader had a model biography of an average American. He had a family, a spacious house with a swimming pool and a cozy yard where they cooked barbecue on weekends. But in addition to this life, there was another one that no one suspected. Dennis committed his first murder on the night of January 15, 1974, while his wife Paula was peacefully sleeping at home.

Dennis Rader entered the Otero home through the back door and killed everyone inside. The victims included 11-year-old Josie, her 9-year-old brother Joseph, and their parents, Joseph Otero Sr. and his wife Julie. Rader took photographs of the mutilated bodies at the scene of the first murder. He also took the victims' underwear with him. Afterwards, he returned home, took a shower, and began getting ready for morning church as if nothing had happened.

Nine months after the murder, a young man took the Otero family's life. He told police that he had committed the crime with two friends. When Rader learned of this, his vanity was piqued. He wrote a note revealing details of the murder that no one else knew, and hid the letter in an engineering book at the Wichita City Library.

Then Dennis called the local newspaper and told them how to find his letter. In the letter, he introduced himself as VTK and said that he planned to continue killing. That same year, the maniac stabbed student Katherine Bright to death and wounded her brother, who tried to stop the criminal, with a revolver. As before, the scene of the massacre was the victims' home.

When Rader's wife became pregnant, he took a break and did not go hunting for three years. But in 1977, he returned to his old ways. He killed Shirley Vian Relford and Nancy Fox. Dennis most often used nooses, and less often, a knife. He used a revolver only in exceptional cases, fearing that the sound of gunshots could give him away.

Before killing the victim, the maniac could mock her for a long time, not forgetting to photograph his actions. At the crime scene, Rader sometimes put on the underwear of the murdered women, a female mask and a wig. He tied himself up and took pictures. He enjoyed playing the role of the victim in order to imprint vivid impressions of the murders in his memory.

Although the maniac behaved rather carelessly at home, his wife did not notice anything. Once, after reading a letter signed by VTK in the newspaper, she told her husband that the killer made the same stylistic mistakes as he did. Another time, she found a strange sealed box with the victims' belongings in the basement. But all this, strangely enough, did not alarm her.

Dennis's children also found nothing unusual in his behavior. Later, the maniac's daughter Kerry recalled how once during an argument, her father grabbed her brother by the neck and began to strangle him. She and his mother had to pull him away to save their son's life. But even this incident did not seem strange to them. The wife and children, justifying themselves, said that such outbursts of rage happened to the head of the family extremely rarely, so they did not attach much importance to it.

Meanwhile, Dennis didn't stop. In 1986, he killed his ninth victim, 28-year-old Vickie Wegerle. The crime took place in her home in front of her two-year-old child, who was watching from a playpen. Fortunately, the child was unharmed. After this incident, Rader went into hiding for five years. During this time, he got a job as a law enforcement officer in the Wichita suburb of Park City. His colleagues described him as a decent and strict employee.

On January 19, 1991, the maniac went looking for a victim again. This time, he killed 68-year-old Dolores E. Davis. Since the woman lived alone, her body was discovered only on February 1. This was the last, tenth, murder of Rader. From 2004 to 2005, Dennis sent several mocking letters to the police and newspaper editors. In them, he described the details of his crimes and mocked the inability of law enforcement to catch him. It was one of these messages that helped identify the criminal.

On February 16, 2005, he sent a floppy disk containing a text file to the Fox TV office in Wichita. Police experts examined the disk and found traces of a deleted Word file containing metadata. Among them were the string "Christ Lutheran Church" and the name Dennis. It was not difficult for detectives to determine that Dennis Rader was the president of the church board.

To rule out a mistake, the police compared DNA from a medical test of Rader's daughter Kerry, made in one of the city's clinics, with DNA from skin particles found under the fingernails of the murdered Vicky Wegerle. The analysis showed a complete match of the samples. After that, the court issued an arrest warrant for Dennis.

Rader was detained on February 25, 2005, on the street when he was returning home from work in his car. During the arrest, the man tried to resist, and the police had to use force. After that, police and FBI officers conducted searches in his home and in the Lutheran church. There they found photographs and video recordings from the crime scenes, sex toys, a mask, wigs and personal belongings of the VTK maniac's victims.

On February 28, 2005, Rader was charged with ten murders, and on March 1, he was set bail at $10 million, which his family was unable to post. On June 27, 2005, his first court hearing took place, during which the defendant confessed to committing all ten murders. That same day, his wife filed for divorce.

On August 18, the maniac gave a half-hour speech in which he showed no remorse for his crimes. That same day, the court sentenced the 60-year-old killer to ten life sentences with the possibility of parole only after 175 years. Rader's house was sold for $90,000, and the proceeds were given to the victims' relatives as compensation.

Dennis Rader was sent to Eldorado Maximum Security Prison to serve his sentence. He was placed in solitary confinement for fear that other inmates might kill him. For good behavior, he was allowed to watch television and read newspapers. His children do not visit him in prison. However, his daughter Kerry sent a letter saying that she forgave her father. She later published a book called "Daughter of a Serial Killer: My Story of Faith, Love, and Survival."

Dennis Rader's story is a chilling reminder that a monster can hide behind the mask of a decent person. Do you think it's possible to recognize a person's tendency toward cruelty by even the most insignificant behavior, or can such monsters really pretend to the very end?