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[Music] [Applause] [Music] Welcome to True Crime Garage. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, thanks
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for listening. I'm your host, Nick, and with me as always is a man that's never late to a great garage party. He is the
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captain. Two drinks in and I'm playing with my lightsaber. It's good to be seen, and it's good to see you. Thanks
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for listening. and thanks for telling a friend. [Music] Tonight we are drinking Dimwit by the
00:01:23
good, hardworking men and women at the River City Brewing Company. Garage Grade three and a half bottle caps out of
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Instagram, Twitter, Facebook at True Crime Garage. That's enough of the business. Everybody gather around, grab
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a share, grab a beer. Let's talk some true crime. The following communication was
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sent to K TV and was titled the BTK story. believed to be the autobiography of the killer the police
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were searching for, complete with an outline giving the titles to 13 chapters of the BTK story.
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They were one, a serial killer is born. Two, dawn. Three, fetish. Four, fantasy world. Five, the
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search begins. Six, BTK's haunts. Seven, PJs. Eight, Mid Ruse. Nine hits. 10. Treasured
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memories. 11. The final curtain call. 12. Dusk. 13. Will there be [Music] more? In the spring of 1989, Dennis Rder
00:03:53
got a new job as a census field operations supervisor in Witchah, Kansas. Now, he liked this job for many
00:04:02
reasons, mainly because the job required him to be out driving around in a truck.
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Mhm. One of his favorite things was to eat his lunch in his truck and scout for possible new victims. He also had, among
00:04:16
other strange hobbies, a hobby where he would scour magazines and newspapers for
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ads featuring women that caught his eye. He would cut out the images of the women
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he liked and he would glue them to 3x5 index cards. Each day he would place one in his pocket and the card would ride
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along in the truck with him while he was out doing his job each day. He would write in his journals at home and talk
00:04:45
like the women were real. So he would write things like drove around today, drove around town today with a sexy red
00:04:52
head. note to self, if I ever start doing this, jump off a bridge immediately. In
00:04:58
1991, he was hired by the compliance department in Park City as a compliance officer. This job required him to work
00:05:06
with code violators, issuing tickets and catching dogs. There were varying stories
00:05:13
regarding Raider at this job. Some would later say that Raider used the position
00:05:18
to bully people. Some say he was just doing his job and others even reported that Raider was nice and helpful. In all
00:05:26
likelihood, he probably did not treat everyone the same way. And he definitely harassed some women during the time when
00:05:35
he was working in this position. And there's one story in particular of a woman that had moved into town into Park
00:05:42
City. And she stated that when she moved to Park City, she was single. And Raider
00:05:48
must have taken a liking to her because he was very helpful, like seemed to be checking on her from time to time, very
00:05:55
pleasant, very nice to her, and he would see her often. I think that's called stalking. Well, when she when she got a
00:06:02
boyfriend Mhm. he changed his song and dance. He really started harassing the woman and started harassing the
00:06:09
boyfriend. he would issue them tickets for very minor infractions, almost seeming like he was making things up
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from time to time. And she said that he often would park his truck and sit and eat his lunch where he could see
00:06:25
the house, where he could keep a visual monitoring of the house and maybe of her
00:06:30
as well. Again, that's stalking. Regardless, he seemed to like this job and for many reasons, but mostly because
00:06:36
it gave him some type of authority, giving him a badge and some power. Mhm. Dolores D. Davis, age 62, was born in
00:06:45
1928 in Stella, Nebraska. She was raised on a farm. Now, she was an excellent cook who made everything from scratch.
00:06:54
In 1961, after 12 years of marriage, a son and a daughter, D and her husband divorce. Now, she was a fun, protective,
00:07:03
and devoted mother and grandmother, adored by her family, her son, and you know, his her son always spoke to his
00:07:12
mother on the phone on the weekends, sometimes for hours. When her children and grandchildren gathered for Christmas
00:07:19
at her home in 1990, they spent much time together. But one memory that was created during that trip was they all
00:07:27
sat together and watched the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven. Uh this if anybody's seen this movie, you'll know it's an
00:07:34
emotional movie. It did bring the family to tears. Now D had just retired from her job of over 25 years as a secretary
00:07:43
for a fuel company. She was passionate about animal rights issues and she enjoyed being a Mary Kay cosmetics sales
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consultant. Dennis Rder had spent a couple of months driving by her home and seeing her when he decided that she
00:07:59
would be a good target. Well, this is because BTK found her attractive and she lived alone. In January of 1991, Dennis
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Raider was going to put together a plan to do a hit on her. Now, on the night of
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the 19th, Raider went to Dolores's home. Dolores was home inside reading. Dennis
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waited outside for her to turn off the lights before he would break in. While he's out there, Raider is waiting
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outside. He's wondering he he cannot figure out how he's going to break into the house. He had already checked the
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doors and they were locked and they were far too sturdy for him to pry them open.
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After she turned out the lights, Raider cut the phone line to the house. He then
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found a cinder block in someone's backyard. He carried it over near Dolores's home. He lifted it up until it
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was shoulder high. He centered himself on a large sliding glass door in the back of the house. Raider launched the
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heavy block into the air and through the window, instantly shattering the glass.
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Dolores ran out of her bedroom screaming. She saw Raider standing inside her home. He told her it was cold
00:09:10
outside and that he needed some warmth, some food, and some money. He ordered her to return to the bedroom. He
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followed behind. Once inside the bedroom, Dennis Rder pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and put them
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on her wrist. To try to calm the woman down, he kept telling her he just needed her car keys and then he would be gone
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in no time. Once she calmed down, Raider took the cuffs off of Dolores and tied her hands together with rope. He took a
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pair of panty hoes from one of the dresser drawers. He wrapped them around her neck, strangling her until she was
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dead. Blood had started to come out of her ears, mouth, and nose. It took him about 3 minutes to strangle her. Raider
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then wrapped her body up in the blanket that was on the bed and carried her body
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out to the trunk of her car. Then he went back into the home and collected some jewelry and clothing of
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Dolores's. He then hopped into her car and drove off. He dumped her body in a covert by a highway. Then he drove to
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another location and hid the trophies he had collected from her house in a safe spot so that he could retrieve them
00:10:28
later. Then, and I find this to be awfully strange. Mhm. He drove her car back to her house and put it in the
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garage and then he strange. He walked like two miles to his own vehicle. I do find this incredibly strange. But here,
00:10:46
one thing I do know about BTK is this. At one of his crimes, he actually left the gun that he used during the crime at
00:10:53
the crime scene. I don't know which crime scene that was, and he said that he had to go back and retrieve that gun.
00:11:01
My guess is it might be this one, right, that he's talking about or his driving around and saw a bunch of cops and
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thought, you should just go back to the house and drop off the car at the house.
00:11:11
Well, and a little behind the scenes thought here for everybody. That's kind of why I picked the beer this week to be
00:11:17
dimwit. We have this individual Dennis Rider that likes to portray himself of a certain intellect and to be very smart
00:11:25
and cunning and outsmarting the police and outsmarting his victims when in reality he's just kind of a a buffoon.
00:11:33
You know, he's just kind of dimwit. Yeah, he's a dimwit. Very good. So, I think maybe it might be this crime where
00:11:39
he realized that he had left the gun because he he dumps her body in this culvert just to kind of conceal her and
00:11:46
then he decides to go hide these trophies that he intends to retrieve later, driving her ve vehicle back to
00:11:53
her home, walking two miles to his own vehicle. And then once he gets his vehicle, he drives back to her body,
00:12:01
picks it up, and takes it to another location much further away. He decides that he's going to dump her here at this
00:12:09
new location. Right? This is under a bridge out in the middle of nowhere. Now, the next day, he's still all
00:12:16
charged up and hopped up on these fantasies and thinking about the night before. The next day, he returned to the
00:12:23
body. He placed a plastic mask over the face and put lipstick and makeup on the mask and then he took several photos of
00:12:32
the body. Two weeks later, the body was discovered. The murder was featured in the newspaper. The connection to BTK was
00:12:41
not made. According to Dennis's journals, with each kill, he was extremely paranoid after his murders.
00:12:49
each time expecting the police to show up at his door at any time. But each time that feeling would go away after
00:12:57
about a month or so, and after the paranoia left, each time then he would be back out trolling for victims again.
00:13:05
This murder took place in 1991, but we're not going to hear from the BTK because he goes dark until 2004.
00:13:13
Yeah. the whole time, I guess, living his life, doing normal things, more normal things. Um, however, it would be
00:13:22
what brought this on, I believe, is in January of 2004, the Witchah Eagle ran a story on the 30-year anniversary of the
00:13:31
BTK case. Right. Two months later, in March of 2004, a letter arrived at the newspaper. According to the information
00:13:39
on the envelope, the letter was from Bill Thomas Kilman. The return address was 1684 South Old Manor. The the
00:13:48
address was fake. There was no such place in Witchah. Now, people had always wondered if you
00:13:56
think about the initials of Bill Thomas Kilman, so that's BTK, right? Yeah. And then the other thought was, was he
00:14:03
playing some kind of game? You know, BTK would be an old man by now, and the address used was 1684 South Old Manor,
00:14:12
right? Anyway, inside the envelope, they found photocopied snapshots of a woman who appeared to be either unconscious or
00:14:20
dead. She's lying on a floor. It also contained a photocopy of a driver's license of a 28-year-old Vicky Weggerly,
00:14:29
whose 1986 murder had never been solved or linked to the BTK strangler. Mhm. On the letters, BTK was written at the
00:14:42
bottom of the page. There was also some type of code made up of letters and numbers. Police sent the code to
00:14:50
codereers, but they they came up with nothing. They couldn't crack it. Well, when you're stupid and you come up with
00:14:55
a code, normally it's hard for anybody to to crack it, right? Because it didn't make any sense. In 2000, in the year
00:15:03
2000, this was 2000, four years before BTK ended his silence, the Wagerly cold case became hot. Mhm. The Witchah police
00:15:14
detectives, this is Kelly Otis and Dana Gouge, they were assigned to work on the
00:15:20
unsolved 1986 killing of 28-year-old Vicky Waggerly. A wife and a mother found bound and strangled in her home on
00:15:28
West 13th Street. Mhm. Now, the police had found a man's DNA. This was under the victim's fingernails. And in 2003,
00:15:38
the lead homicide detective, Ken Landwear, remember we talked about him. He was one of the members of the
00:15:43
Ghostbuster Squad. By this point in his career, he's now the lead homicide detective for the Witchah, Kansas Police
00:15:51
Department. Yeah. He had the two detectives on the case test the DNA that was found. Landware had always suspected
00:15:59
that the Vicky Wagerly murder could be the work of BTK. Now, as you know, when it comes to lab work, current cases take
00:16:07
priority over the old ones. So, it was not until after the first communication from BTK in 2004 that they would get the
00:16:16
results back. Well, and it could have been as simple as, hey, we he's made contact again, so they bumped up the
00:16:23
priority. Yeah. Yeah. They may have moved it to the the front of the line. Mhm. But shortly after he broke his
00:16:29
silence, they received the results from those tests and the profile was entered into a newly developed national database
00:16:36
of criminals. Now, there was no match for this. However, the DNA test showed that the same killer had been in the
00:16:45
homes where BTK strangled four members of the Otoro family in 1974 and Nancy Fox in 1977. Mhm. But once police saw
00:16:55
the photocopy of the pictures, then the driver's license and the letters BTK, the hunt was on. So, police announced
00:17:05
the startling new development and the news media pounced on this story. Police received over 1,000 tips over the course
00:17:14
of the first weekend of this investigation that they just launched. Mhm. Now, to handle the response from
00:17:21
the public, police set up a command center at a law enforcement training academy. They needed elbow room for
00:17:29
phone banks and for computers, and they just needed space to work on this thing.
00:17:34
The Sed the Sedwick County Sheriff's Office assisted with data entry and research support. Callers gave police an
00:17:43
overwhelming number of possible suspect names. Detective Landwear and crew decided suspects would be eliminated
00:17:51
systematically and scientifically. Now, the eliminators would be as follows. One
00:17:56
would be race. So, the DNA profile showed the killer was a white male. Mhm. So, if you weren't a white male, you're
00:18:04
eliminated, right? Age. The calculation was based on the idea that the killer probably would have been at youngest 18
00:18:12
to maybe 20 years of age when he killed his first known victims, right? The oturos in January of 74. So the killer
00:18:20
would be at this time 48 years or older. Now incarceration was also very much an
00:18:27
eliminating factor because someone who was in jail or prison during any one of the murders was eliminated. Also,
00:18:35
prisoners in recent years would have DNA on record, and police knew that BTK's DNA didn't match anything in the
00:18:43
database. Right. The most important of all of the eliminating factors was, of course, DNA. In a somewhat controversial
00:18:51
move, investigators took 1600 DNA mouth swabs for men, mainly in and around Witchah, but a few came from people
00:19:01
living out of the state. Almost all of these 1,600 people volunteered and complied to submit their DNA. Well, and
00:19:10
the other crazy thing is is now they're they're realizing with the research that
00:19:15
BTK wasn't dormant. Yeah. And actually a lot of people at this time had probably
00:19:19
forgotten about BTK. The Witchita was no longer afraid of this person. Most people had assumed that he had died or
00:19:26
moved on. But yeah, like you said, you know, he it wasn't that he wasn't dormant during this two and a half
00:19:32
decades. He had just simply kept a lower profile than in his earlier killings. And now police had to wonder, as did the
00:19:40
community, how many killings was he responsible for over the course of that time? Mhm. On June 9th of 2004, what
00:19:50
police would later call communication number three, this was found at the corner of First in Kansas, taped to a
00:19:58
stop sign. One of the documents in the package graphically described the Ouro family murders. Also, there was a
00:20:06
drawing of a nude female bound, gagged, and hanging from a rope. With the drawing were the words, "The sexual
00:20:13
thrill is my bill." This guy's such a douche. In July, workers at the public library discovered a clear plastic bag
00:20:21
at the bottom of a book return bin. Written on the bag were the letters BTK. Inside were five sheets of paper. Two of
00:20:31
the pages detailed BTK's involvement in the death of a troubled 19-year-old man named Jake Allen. Allen's death was
00:20:39
ruled a suicide. Now, Allan was a star athlete in high school who dreamed of being an
00:20:46
optometrist. Allan was picked up and arrested by police. He and some buddies were out drinking and driving and they
00:20:54
had alcohol in the car. After his arrest, he was convinced that he would never get into college. And it is
00:21:02
believed because of this that he decided to take his own life by lying down on the train tracks. Yeah. He was crushed
00:21:10
almost beyond recognition. Now BTK however wrote in this communication that he had been responsible for the death
00:21:20
of, as he put it, old Jakey after meeting him in a computer chat room and convincing the young man that he was in
00:21:28
fact a private eye hunting for BTK. The letter claimed that the young man Jakey had sexual perversions involving
00:21:37
masturbation, bondage, and homosexuality and claimed Jakey agreed to help the fake private eye in his
00:21:46
investigation to find BTK. These, of course, are all lies. However, the police at the time did not know this.
00:21:55
And this was this was actually, you know, where I call Dennis Rder a dimwit. uh this may have been a smart move on
00:22:02
his part just simply because the investigation at that time was white hot, right? And this this is Dennis Rder
00:22:11
throwing a wrench into that welloiled machine because then the police spent weeks focusing in on Jake Allen,
00:22:20
conducting interviews, sifting through his computer, investigating if he was the latest BTK victim. But it was all
00:22:29
for not. It was it was just a farce put on by Raider after he read about the boy's suicide in the newspaper. Now,
00:22:37
what might not be a phony story is that also in this communication, BTK stated that he had some future female and maybe
00:22:46
a child victim in mind, that he had spotted them and had already began to troll them and he just had to quote,
00:22:55
"Work out the details. [Music] [Music] All right. Cheers, mates. We're uh drinking the dimwit. Let's get back to
00:23:16
the dim wit. Cheers, Captain. It was in October that BTK reached out again. What
00:23:22
we're seeing here is a frequency. He can't control himself at this point, right? He's he's enjoying this
00:23:30
communication back and forth too much at this point. Mhm. This communication was
00:23:36
found in a UPS dropbox by one of their drivers. Again, it was a plastic bag with the initials BTK on it. Inside were
00:23:46
three note cards and on them were what BTK called his uno dose trace theory stating that the world of the BTK is
00:23:55
based around the number three and triangles. I could go into this it I I know this stuff but it makes little to
00:24:07
no sense at all. like, you know, like he would draw like a triangle and it would
00:24:10
at one point put BTK police, right? Right. Detectives, you know, or or I'm sorry, BTK, victims,
00:24:18
police, you know, and then the other it sun, heat, warmth, like it was just stuff that made no sense at all, right?
00:24:26
Um, this communication also it contained what is thought to be pieces of the killer's autobiography. And as usual,
00:24:36
this was full of errors and misspellings. It was now, and we kind of talked about this, we don't know if if
00:24:42
he was just an idiot and he was had misspellings or had errors or if he did this on purpose to like throw off the
00:24:49
scent. Yeah. So, um, do you want me to kind of fast forward a little bit since we're on that subject? Yeah. So, yes,
00:24:57
you're you're exactly right. The FBI warned the local police department to not fall for what could be what is
00:25:05
commonly used when these guys make communications is a lot of them will purposely misspell things or they'll
00:25:11
have grammatical errors. In this case with BTK, that was the thought, right? That was the thought
00:25:18
during the time of the investigation after he was caught and after he was uh wrote out his own confessions. They saw
00:25:26
those same. The guy couldn't spell and he couldn't write. Well, he might had some form of dyslexia probably. You
00:25:34
know, which would probably make him feel self-conscious, which would probably lead him to want to feel powerful. Yeah.
00:25:41
You know, I laughed there, but I only laughed there because I actually think maybe he's just more impulsive and less
00:25:48
in control of himself than he thinks that he is, right? Um and that and that this bad spelling thing is something
00:25:54
that has always uh been a part of him right now. Speaking of communications, the next communication was as the others
00:26:03
were strange. Uh this was a strange one and they seem to be getting more and more strange as they were getting more
00:26:10
frequent. This time it was a cereal box that was found inside I'm sorry. Inside the cereal box, they found jewelry from
00:26:18
one of his victims and a little doll, like a like a Barbie doll. Mhm. And the Barbie doll had bindings on it, and it
00:26:27
was tied by the neck with a to a little piece of pipe. The the box also contained a note card asking a question.
00:26:35
Had the officers received number seven from the Home Depot parking lot? The answer to that question is they had not.
00:26:45
So, so here's here's what he's doing. Okay, he's kind of he's kind of numbering his communications, right? If
00:26:54
you just like he named himself, now he's numbering his communications. He's not he's not technically numbering them, but
00:27:00
but this would be the seventh communication that they received in 2004. And he's saying, "Wait a second.
00:27:09
Did you receive number seven from the Home Depot parking lot? So, but seven in the same year. Yes. Seven in the same
00:27:17
year. I just want to be clear about that. Right. So, what what I'm getting at is this would be the seventh
00:27:23
communication that they had received. It's the eighth one that he has sent to them. He's asking them, did you get
00:27:29
number seven? Because he knows that sometimes they receive these things and they don't tell anybody. Right. his
00:27:34
whole thing that his his whole his whole ritualistic attitude here is he has to have that broadcasted. He
00:27:44
has to get the notoriety for these communications. He has to see his name in the paper, right? And because he
00:27:50
didn't, he wants to know, well, did you receive that and you're just keeping it quiet or did you not find it? Right?
00:27:57
Well, they had not received this. And the way that this worked out was they go to this Home Depot and they're they're
00:28:05
looking around. They search the store inside and out. They can't find anything from BTK. They can't find any form of
00:28:12
communication. Note, it should be pretty obvious once they find what they're looking for because he almost always
00:28:18
puts the initials BTK on the communications. So, what they do is they get a bunch of the surveillance tape
00:28:24
from the parking lot, from the Home Depot, and on one piece of footage, this was from days before that they spotted
00:28:33
where an SUV had pulled into the almost empty parking lot. This would have been when the store was not open. Mhm.
00:28:41
Parking lot's almost empty. This SUV pulls in. Somebody gets out of the vehicle, walks across a short way across
00:28:50
the parking lot and has some kind of object in their hand and they toss it into the back of a pickup truck, into
00:28:56
the bed of a pickup truck. Mhm. The crazy thing here though, Captain, is the detectives. We have Landware who's been
00:29:06
working this case for almost 20 years. We have all these other detectives that have been hunting this madman. Could you
00:29:11
imagine? They're seeing what they believe to be BTK's vehicle. Could you imagine what's going through their
00:29:18
brains? They Well, they're looking at a shadow, like a a shadow figure of the guy that they know and believe to be
00:29:26
BTK, the guy that they've been hunting all these years. They can they're seeing him, but not his face. Well, what they
00:29:33
end up doing is they have to get the They have no idea what was thrown into the back of that truck or how they're
00:29:39
going to find this thing, right? Well, maybe if they get the license plate number, they could track down the the
00:29:44
vehicle. They couldn't because it was too blurry. Too blurry. Plus, if they could do that, then you would think they
00:29:50
could get BTK's license plate number. True. But think of the risk that he he's Okay, we've covered so many retail cases
00:29:58
lately. Please upgrade your cameras, people. Please. It's ridiculous. Well, what they did, captain, was they were
00:30:07
able to decide that they could determine the approximate size and wheelbase of the vehicle that the suspect was
00:30:15
driving. Mhm. This was interesting because they actually really narrowed it down to a very few models, a very few
00:30:24
vehicles and models. And what they were able to determine was that if in fact this vehicle was not stolen, that he was
00:30:31
driving his own vehicle, let's say, right? He would be one of about 200. He would be one of about
00:30:40
2500 local residents that owned a vehicle matching this description. Oh, let's go knocking on doors, my friend.
00:30:48
Well, that would be an option, but they actually came up with the communication before they would have to take that
00:30:55
route. So, what happened was the manager of the Home Depot put up flyers inside the store asking all of the employees,
00:31:05
"Did you receive anything strange in your vehicle? Did you find anything weird and you don't know what it is? Let
00:31:12
us know." Well, a roommate of a guy that worked there that owned a the um the guy
00:31:18
that worked there owned a pickup truck, right? His roommate had found a cereal box in the back of the dude's pickup
00:31:24
truck. Cinnamon's Host Crunch. It was uh Special K cereal. Oh, that's not a cereal. That's a garbage. He He assumed
00:31:34
that it was trash and he had thrown it away. He assumed, right, cuz that cereal's garbage. I like Special K. Wow.
00:31:41
Now, the trash had not been collected from the home yet. Mhm. So, they were able to retrieve this special case
00:31:48
serial box. This was recovered and inside there were there was a two-page document and on it was a long list of
00:31:55
BTK's projects or what he called his PJs. There there was also a question and this was asking landware. This was
00:32:05
asking Landwear directly if BTK wanted to send a computer disc to them, could they trace it? And he asked them to give
00:32:14
him the answer in the newspaper in the want ads under the miscellaneous section. And if they can't trace it to
00:32:22
put in the message, Rex, it will be okay. Also, they should run the ad for several days so that BTK would not miss
00:32:31
the ad if he were out of town or didn't pick up the paper that day. Please run the ad multiple times for me. This was
00:32:38
weird because now we have Raider wanting to start communicating by sending them floppy disc from computers. And for the
00:32:46
first time, BTK is asking the police a question. This is a dumb question. rather than just kind of telling, you
00:32:55
know, directing the conversation and telling them whatever he wants. When your teacher tells you when they stand
00:33:02
up in the front of the classroom and they say, "Students, there are no dumb questions." You say, "Yes, there is.
00:33:11
When you're a serial killer, you do not ask the cops if they can trace something
00:33:16
or not." The police, they went ahead and ran the ad in the newspaper. Mhm. and their ad read, "Rex, go ahead and send a
00:33:24
floppy." Well, on January of 2005, Dennis Rder became the elected president of council at the Christ Lutheran
00:33:34
Church. Right. On February 16th of that same year, a padded envelope arrived at Ka TV. Inside were more index cards and
00:33:46
a purple computer disc. The disc was turned over to the police analyst. The disc contained one message and the
00:33:55
message said, "This is a test. See note card for further instruction." The note cards said that
00:34:02
any communication going forward from the killer would have a number on it. That way, if one was lost, they would know.
00:34:10
Yeah. Or if somebody else was writing to them pretending to be the BTK, that they
00:34:15
wouldn't get mixed up. It only took the analyst a few more minutes to pull the information that they were searching
00:34:22
for. This revealed that the author of the test message was someone named Dennis and the owner of the computer was
00:34:31
the Christ Lutheran Church. Now, this is going to sound completely crazy for somebody that
00:34:38
you've looked for for 20 years. I mean, and when you factor all involved, you're
00:34:43
talking about this is over a 30-year manhunt for this guy, right? So, what did they do? They did a quick Google
00:34:50
search. And this quick Google search told the officers that Christ Lutheran Church was located in Park City, right?
00:34:58
And that a one Dennis Raider was listed as the church's president. They put surveillance on their subject,
00:35:07
but they didn't jump on him and arrest him right away. They wanted to make sure that they had good solid evidence on
00:35:14
this guy to connect him to BTK before the arrest. Landwear wanted DNA from Raider to tie him to the DNA that was
00:35:24
found at multiple crime scenes where BTK had killed. Right. But how were they going to get Dennis Raider's DNA without
00:35:31
tipping him off? Well, this is this is wild. So, they start doing some digging on Dennis Rder, his background, and his
00:35:39
family. One thing that they discovered is that his daughter Carrie had attended the University of Kansas
00:35:47
State. While she was there, she had been treated or or received some kind of, you
00:35:52
know, checkup or treatment at the health clinic there. Yeah. They took her DNA. Yeah. So, she was no longer she was no
00:36:01
longer a student there. she had graduated before, but they still had things that they believed that they
00:36:07
could pull DNA from. So, they get a court order and they go to the Kansas State University. They find these items.
00:36:15
They get a court order to test them for DNA. And what they discover is that it tested positive, that the DNA that they
00:36:23
tested was the daughter of the killer that they knew to be BTK. Oh, good. Because I just hate this guy.
00:36:32
you know. Yeah. You and I mean you and the rest of the world, right? He's just I hate him. So, the the task force that
00:36:39
we have, they were worried that somehow the media might learn of Dennis Rider before they could arrest him. Mhm. This
00:36:45
was a concern because this had actually happened before. This was when they had they they they had a guy that they liked
00:36:53
as BTK. His name was Roger Valdez and they wanted to get DNA swab from him. He was one of the few people that didn't
00:37:03
really want to comply and give them the DNA swab. And it was because through the
00:37:07
media he had heard that he was considered a prime suspect at the time. So they had a leak somewhere amongst
00:37:15
this task force. They were worried would Dennis Raider would this be leaked to the media and Dennis Rder catch wind of
00:37:21
this. So they're going to have to move a little faster than they wanted to. However, for Raider, what the police
00:37:28
wanted to do was map out precisely and coordinate a plan to simultaneously arrest him, search his home, other key
00:37:36
places, and contact and interview his relatives all at the same time. So, what they did was they organized 215 officers
00:37:46
and agents were assembled to take to take this on. Well, that's a lot of money. A lot of this was mostly for the
00:37:54
searches that were going to be done, right? So now they were going to use Dennis Raider's schedule against him.
00:38:00
Raider was predictable and the detectives knew this from following him over the course of that surveillance.
00:38:07
They knew what time he went to work. They knew what time he came home for lunch every day and so on and so forth.
00:38:13
Now, the police knew that Raider always left his office at 12:15 p.m. and arrived home for lunch to have lunch
00:38:21
with his wife at 12:18 p.m. each day. 3 minutes. As Raider drove onto Frontage Road, this is off of 61st Street in Park
00:38:31
City, an unmarked police car stopped him. There were plenty of guns drawn on him. An officer dragged him out of his
00:38:41
truck. Now, at that point, we the the officers would later say, "At that point, we're dealing with an individual
00:38:48
we believe committed eight homicides." So, we were taking no risk. We we knew that he had used guns before and in
00:38:56
previous crimes. So, they drew guns on this guy. They took no risk. Now, Raider was handcuffed and he was searched.
00:39:03
Moments later, Raider in Landwear, the guy who had been hunting him for 20 years. Wait, did he have one of those
00:39:10
little creepy cards? His little flash cards he made? I wonder if he had one of those on his person at that time. I I
00:39:16
don't know. Was he driving around with a red head? That's interesting if he still
00:39:20
had that hobby at the time. Um, weirdo. But now we have these two individuals. We have the the monster and the guy
00:39:28
that's been hunting the monster for 20 years. They're finally face to face with each other and they're they're saying
00:39:35
hello to one another. They're calling each other mister at this point in the back of the police car. I'm not calling
00:39:41
nobody mister. Police audio taped the arrest from the car um and you and the transport of Raider and took
00:39:51
aerial photographs from a helicopter as well. Right. They stated that he was Dennis Raider was breathing hard during
00:39:57
this time uh as were the officers. And later, Landwear would go on record saying, "I cannot tell you how much fun
00:40:04
it was to finally take this guy down. It was a great day for everyone in law enforcement." Now, Bob Morton, who was a
00:40:12
FBI behavioral analyst, and Detective Landwear, they were the ones that would conduct the initial interview with
00:40:19
Dennis Rider. The idea here, Captain, was that Raider would respond to Landwear because he knew who he was. He
00:40:27
knew him by name. He knew he was active on the BTK case for so long, right? And Bob Morton being from the FBI, well,
00:40:35
this would boost Dennis Raider's ego during the course of the interview. Then the teams of detectives interviewed
00:40:42
Raider about the cases that they had been assigned to. So we have all these murders, all these homicides. We have
00:40:49
other detectives working some of these. Now that we had some detectives during the interviews, the only thing they
00:40:56
spoke to Raider about was his communications with Ka KV, with law enforcement and so on. And the sheriff's
00:41:04
personnel, they approached him about the Marine Hedge and Dolores Davis homicides. Now, you you have to keep in
00:41:11
mind the sheriff's department had to work these two homicides because they took place outside of Witchah City. And
00:41:19
not only that, they were abducted from from another location and then dumped elsewhere. So, how long did they
00:41:25
interview this Creo? Uh, for 32 hours, they interviewed Dennis Raider. And they during that time, they actually
00:41:32
encouraged him to sleep, but he wouldn't. Um, he did nap a couple of times, you know, very briefly, but they
00:41:41
wanted him to get a a good night's sleep, and he did not want to. He wanted to talk. It was about 3 hours and 15
00:41:49
minutes into the initial interview when Raider looked at Bob Morton, the FBI agent, and Morton said to him, "Say who
00:41:58
you are." And Dennis Raider answered, "I'm BTK." Now, Raider's own DNA came back as
00:42:05
a match uh about 12 hours after the start of the interviews, right? He had learned that investigators by this time
00:42:13
had already had his daughter's DNA and had linked that to him and to BTK. And so according to Detective
00:42:21
Landwear at this point, Raider has figured out that he has been put in a corner. and he kind of once that comes
00:42:31
out with the DNA and once he realizes this is what's going on, right? After about 12 or 13 hours into the interview,
00:42:39
he's going to start telling them everything. I mean, everything, right? And to the point that he was even trying
00:42:47
to describe to them the that code. Remember that code that they couldn't figure out? Yeah, the shitty code. Yeah.
00:42:54
He was trying to tell them that the letter that he mailed to the Eagle in 2004, what he had used was German
00:43:01
fractional code that he claimed that he knew from his military background. And remember, they sent it and nobody could
00:43:08
crack it because the code actually made no sense. He he got it wrong when he tried to remember it. Uh and damn
00:43:15
dyslexia getting in the way again. Well, in the interview process, he tried to prove them wrong, trying to recall the
00:43:22
code himself, which he he couldn't. Dimwit. Another interesting thing though here, Captain, was that during the
00:43:30
course of the interview, Raider repeatedly tapped on the disc, on the computer disc. They put it on the
00:43:36
interview table and they just kind of set it there right in front of him. Okay. And he tapped on it. Well, he
00:43:42
would tap on it and throughout the course of the interview and at some point he looked at the officers,
00:43:48
Landwear in particular, and he asked him, "Why did you lie to me?" And Landwear said, "Because I'm trying to
00:43:56
catch you." Yeah. Why wouldn't I lie to you? I'm trying to catch you. Yeah, you killed people, you son of a [ __ ] Yeah,
00:44:04
we're going to lie to you. Well, I think see that's what what's weird though is that okay, so something psychological
00:44:11
had taken over with Dennis Rder and this was actually something that the FBI had
00:44:15
recommended that the police do a long time ago in their investigation. What they had recommended is that they create
00:44:23
the persona of some kind of super cop. All right? So that Dennis Rder would identify the the investigation into him
00:44:32
and to his killings through one person and one person only. That he could he could take this this detective and he
00:44:40
could put him on a pedestal in his mind. He's now this super cop that is a worthy
00:44:45
adversary of his hunting him. Somebody that is his equal. Mhm. And through over the throughout the course of many years
00:44:53
of looking at that one person and having this person that he considered to be an
00:44:58
equal, he let his guard down to the point where he then believed that he could trust him, that that his equal
00:45:07
would be honest with him and that the game of cat and mouse would continue forever. Well, that wasn't going to be
00:45:14
the case, obviously. Right. Right. And the FBI did say that they believed with somebody, and they always believe this
00:45:21
usually when a killer is willing to communicate multiple times with the media or law enforcement, is that
00:45:28
usually they will lead them to they will lead law enforcement to themselves. They
00:45:32
will get themselves caught because their ego and because of their need to make these communications.
00:45:39
Now, Raider did voice concern about how his arrest would affect his family, his church, and the city of Park
00:45:48
City. When teams of investigators told Raiders's wife and his grown son and daughter about his arrest, they were in
00:45:56
disbelief. They had no idea that their husband or father was this monster. Mhm. Um they
00:46:06
did they did exactly like they said they were planning to do. Remember we said that they brought in 215 officers
00:46:13
because they wanted to search his all at the same time. They wanted to arrest him, search his home, interview his
00:46:19
relatives and and they did that. And some of them didn't even live in Witchah, Kansas. So what they did was
00:46:25
they distributed officers out to those locations. They sat there and waited. And at at that specific time between
00:46:34
12:15 and 12:18 on that day, those officers were to go and bust into the home, knock on the door, do what you got
00:46:44
to do. You need to be in these locations all at the same time. On March 1st, 2005, Raiders bail was set at $10
00:46:53
million and a public defender was appointed to represent him. On May 3rd, the judge entered a not-uilty plea on
00:47:03
Raiders's behalf as Raider did not speak at his arraignment. However, on June 27th, the which was the scheduled trial
00:47:11
date. Yeah. Dennis Rider changed his plea to guilty. Um the thought here was that he would save his family some
00:47:19
anguish and shame of of going through the details of the crime. that was not to be because he was forced to describe
00:47:28
the murders in detail during uh he was he was ordered to give a full confession basically right now could there be some
00:47:35
murders out there that he didn't confess to for some reason possible it's possible I doubt it like you said
00:47:41
earlier it seems to be that he wants the credit let's say that's a terrible word
00:47:46
but that's what he wants he wants the credit for his actions and for what he thinks to be some kind of career
00:47:54
or some kind of great work that he believes that he did. Now, during the and I'm sure some people have seen this
00:48:03
by now. You can actually find the full confession online. I believe it's like 48 minutes long. It's awful. It's very
00:48:09
tough to listen to because he doesn't seem like he gives a [ __ ] He seems like he's kind of giving the weather report
00:48:16
to somebody when he talks about these crimes. One thing that I know that really sickened the family, his his
00:48:22
direct family, especially his daughter, was that one, they they they didn't believe he was guilty until they, you
00:48:30
know, the next day when they found out, well, he confessed to police, they're like the DNA matches, right? Well,
00:48:36
they're like, crap. You know, that he did really do this. And then once he's in court, when he's going over the
00:48:43
description of these murders, Mhm. A lot of people thought that he may have purposely droned on about the murders of
00:48:53
the two children. You know, most of his victims were adults and a lot of people seem to think that he hovered around
00:48:59
that a little longer than necessary. Maybe he took some kind of pleasure in talking about those specific murders out
00:49:07
of the whole group. Yeah. Yeah. So he offered no apologies during the course of this confession and at Dennis
00:49:14
Raider's August 18th sentencing victim's families made their statements after which Raider did apologize in a rambling
00:49:23
30inute monologue. Dennis Rder was sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences with a minimum of 175 years to
00:49:32
be served. Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the murders that he committed. So he is in solitary
00:49:40
confinement with one hour of exercise per day and gets to shower three times per week. And guess what that makes him?
00:49:49
What? One stinky piece of [Music] [ __ ] Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling a friend. Thank you for sharing
00:50:06
on social media. We would be nothing without you. We'll be here back in the garage next week and we want to see all
00:50:13
of you here as well. Until then, be good, be kind, and don't litter. [Music] [Applause]
00:50:40
[Music]