Monster: BTK - Childhood of a Killer [2]

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

The killer's face comes to light. This is not who we were expecting. How did this man become a ruthless murderer? And who else did he kill?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beckley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail.

The person who did it is still out there. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On Tech Stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok, to ask

burning questions about technology, from high-tech to low-culture and everywhere in between. Join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and this January, we're going to go Apple Podcasts, or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr. With guest appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised. I think he would have eventually killed again. But what really got him to finally surface, which was his downfall, it was the 30th anniversary of the crime. A lawyer in town was going to write a book. When he read that, he says, no one's going to write this book.

What do they know about me? They don't know the motive or anything. I'm going to be the one to write this book. That's how he surfaced. This was definitely the opportunity that he was waiting for to come forth. Here he is, back in the news, and in his mind, you know, his hero status. And now he's starting to show off the trophies. He's starting to send us trophies. He wants to be back in the news. He wants his 15 minutes of fame. He wants to be identified. And I kind of said it with tongue in cheek that if we

hadn't figured out who it was, he would have called his own news conference. He wanted to control the narrative. He thought about what if he got caught, and he had kind of a plan in place as to what he would do about that. So he decided he was going to come back and start doing this cat and mouse thing where he would send these missives to the police to show that this story isn't over and that he's also looking for the next victim. He used it on a church computer

so that it was traceable back to that computer. His name was there. So finally, the police watched his routine the way he had been watching victim routines to figure out he goes home for lunch every day. This is when to get him. Agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI, and members of the Wichita Police Department

arrested Dennis Rader, 59 and a white male, in Park City, Kansas. And so they pulled him over, and he acted like, what took you so long? I've been waiting for you. Someone killed four members of a family. Hedge vanished from her home suddenly last weekend. Her phone lines had been cut, her door left open. You see the victims laying there with plastic bags over their heads,

strangled. You could tell it was a planned scenario. While police have said no more about the contents of the letter, it does contain some sort of threat and implies the killer may strike again. He's going to play with these victims. He'd get them to the point of death and then bring them back. And then brings them back to the point of death. For My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters and this is Monster BTK. Moments ago, a press conference in the city council chambers at City Hall concluded, we finally came down to an announcement of what a lot of Wichitans have been waiting for for well over 30 years.

He actually named himself BTK, Bind, Torture, and Kill. This coward killed the father in the house that day. He killed the mother, tied them both up, and tortured them. And again, the question that arises is and one of the questions that has yet to be answered was he trying to be caught on february 25th 2005 dennis raider was revealed to be the btk killer to everyone's surprise he was a seemingly normal guy. 59 years old, worked a city job, owned a house with his wife, two kids, wore glasses, balding. As my former Cake TV anchor Larry Hatterberg says, this is not the guy we were expecting. When people said BTK, you think of a wild-eyed Manson-like character.

Just, whoop, crazy person. What we didn't understand is he was the guy next door. He went to a local church. He was in charge of the congregation. He worked in an important job in Park City, Kansas. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was going to the movies with us. I would have never, ever guessed that. Hours after he was captured, I realized I had seen this man before, and very recently. Only two weeks prior, Dennis Rader, along with a tour group from Christ Lutheran, had visited Cake TV. In fact, he had personally requested the tour for himself

and six other members of his church. I remember I first saw him sitting in a folding chair three feet away from me as we reported the latest on the BTK. In fact, he walked around the studio chatting it up with all of us. He then asked if he could take pictures with his 35 millimeter camera. And then to my surprise, without asking, he slung his arm around my shoulder and snapped a photo with me. Looking back, I am filled with dread, realizing that he was in fact the BTK killer. After he was caught, I was just shocked by how brazen this was. One of the first people to learn about BTK's identity was his daughter, Carrie Rawson. People are like, how did you not know these things? But Dad was Dad.

I mean, he'd always had been short-tempered at times, short-fused, controlling. I didn't know any difference. In the aftermath of his capture, everyone wanted to know the details of this now-famous killer named Dennis Rader. But Carrie says her father's life was pretty normal, at least on the outside. We were pretty much the classic Midwestern family. Middle class, three-bedroom ranch, meticulous yard, flowers, tulips, the grass is mowed. We go to church on Sundays religiously. He was like full suit type. He would

polish his shoes the night before. Years later, Carrie was forced to come to terms with who her father was. And she was plagued by the obvious question, how? How could an average Joe like her dad become such a monster? I mean, I think his three brothers turned out fine. So if you're going to do nurture nature debate, I mean, they all have the same genetics and the same home life and they're fine. So what makes one person turn into this monster and other people not be? I don't think anybody really knows, and I don't think he knows. One of the keys to my dad is figuring out what drives that,

but also, like, is there a way to, like, help somebody like that before it turns into murder? Or give them an outlet, a safe outlet, where they're not hurting anybody. As to how a supposedly normal guy could murder innocent people, Carrie says she is just as stumped as everyone else. There isn't just one answer to these guys. It's complicated, and you're relying on someone that's not a reliable narrator to help you figure out what's wrong with them.

They hold their keys, and they don't even know what's wrong with them, and then he's over here reading, trying to figure out what's wrong with them. Throughout this podcast, Carrie will provide

firsthand insight on her father, Dennis Rader. There is perhaps no better time than right now to revisit the BTK story. According to many sources, Raider's health is declining. He may not have many years left to live. His victims are finally speaking up, ready to tell their stories after all these years. And most frightening of all, it might not be over. The Osage County, Oklahoma Sheriff's Office says an old crossword puzzle from Dennis Rader

links the serial killer to the disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney from Pawhuska, Oklahoma. That's right. In 2023, police discovered new cases in Oklahoma and Missouri that might be the work of BTK. Cases we didn't know about until now. Rader refuses to give straight answers from prison, but he's playing along. It seems like he's enjoying the fame and publicity. It's a level of sickness that's difficult to fathom. For any psychopathic offender who really doesn't have any remorse for what they're doing, I don't think their values comport with most of the world. And that's why they can get away with what they can get away with, is that they don't feel any

remorse about the things that they're doing. And although Rader has never been given the psychopathy checklist evaluation, I think it's pretty clear that he has psychopathic features. My name is Catherine Ramsland. I'm a professor of forensic psychology, the author of Confession of a Serial Killer about Dennis Rader and written with Dennis Rader and an assistant provost of DeSales University. Ramsland is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to the inner workings of Dennis Rader's mind. Following his capture, she spent years interviewing Rader in person, in prison.

To her, Rader is one of the most peculiar cases out there. First of all, he didn't fit the typical image of a serial killer. Why didn't he look like Ted Bundy? They were pretty disappointed that he wasn't this kind of sexy hotshot that Bundy had presented himself to be. He's this kind of pudgy, aging guy that was a disappointment. He was not like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. What does it say about what we think are formulas?

I mean, the formulas came out of the FBI. They were not correct about all the factors in the background of a serial killer. So Rader was an opportunity as an outlier to the thinking of the FBI to find out how did he become a serial killer? Why did he want to do this? That's a really good question. When most people think of a serial killer, they imagine this mysterious genius,

some evil celebrity type, someone who stands out. But to the naked eye, Rader was none of those things. At least on the surface, Rader had a fairly average Midwestern upbringing. Nothing about his childhood stands out as something you would expect for a person who grew up to become a serial killer. He didn't have abuse. He didn't have neglect. I mean, there really wasn't anything. He had an intact family. They didn't have a lot, but they had a house. They raised

chickens and rabbits, and he had a dog. So, pretty normal. But what you see isn't always the truth. Dennis Rader grew up in and around Wichita. Dennis was the eldest of four boys. So as the oldest brother, he was kind of the leader. They did a lot of cowboys and Indians, as kids out in the Midwest do. He had friends. He did a few pranky things, breaking into his school once. For the most part, he was a pretty good kid. But as Ramsland and others have learned since, there were peculiar and haunting signs in Rader's early life.

He had some resentment toward his mother. Most of the things he remembered about his mother were when she humiliated him or made him feel powerless. That's important to his development into a murderer, specifically of women. Apparently, Rader didn't think very highly of his mother. But more than that, he almost seemed to hate her. His feeling was that she wasn't a very good Christian, which I think is interesting. The memories that stood out most to him are when she shamed him once when he, you know, had an admission in his underwear and she was horrified and said, you know, when your father gets home, I'm going to tell him about this and this is not something good boys do.

And she made him feel awful about himself, powerless. The one memory he had that he kept saying over and over and over was so important was one time she was moving furniture around, got her ring caught on a spring on a couch, and she told him to go get help. And he said that seeing her helpless and him in position to have some power over her had been very arousing.

He was just a young boy, but it was really exciting to him to see that look of helplessness on her face. And that would become the image that he wanted to replicate on the faces of his female victims, was that completely helpless woman who needs him to do something, and what he does is kill them. Rader was also infatuated with TV and movies. him to do something, and what he does is kill them. Rader was also infatuated with TV and movies. As a kid, the media he consumed left a large and lasting impression on him. One of the most formative things that happened to him as a kid was watching a movie called The House of Wax.

And it was only when I watched it that I realized how inappropriate this movie was for kids to see. There's a guy who was taking live people and covering them in wax for his museum. You shouldn't have done that, my dear. It is Kathy. It's Kathy's body under the wax. I knew it. But one scene that I think was very memorable to young Dennis was a dark-haired woman, whose mother was dark-haired, being bound, and she's naked. You don't see all of her, but you definitely know she doesn't have clothes on. And she's struggling as she's about to get the hot wax dripped on her, killing her.

And I'm sure that he was just fixated on that image of a dark-haired woman struggling and bound, because that became central to his sexual fantasies later on. This was just the beginning of Rader's obsession with torture. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beth Lee is guilty. This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head.

Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes?

She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet. And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often. On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface

of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night. Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the

singularity. So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr., with appearances from Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And check out betteroffline.com. As a young boy, Dennis Rader's fascination with bondage took root. As Katherine Ramsland says, he developed a love for garments. He would cozy up to his grandmother and the silkiness of her ribbons in her hair. And then sometimes he'd sort through the drawers of his mother and grandmother and the slips in the underwear. He just loved the silkiness of that, so that became part of it. But nothing was quite as forceful for him as bondage.

He'd go out in the barn and tie ropes around his waist. And eventually, as he matured, he would have orgasms when he did this without touching himself, according to him. Just that pressure around his waist would be enough, and so bondage became a huge deal for him, and as he merged that with the image of the struggling, bound woman, that became the central figure of his erotic fantasies.

Then he discovered, when he was 14, he discovered true detective magazines that his father was reading and hiding in the car, and one of them was about Harvey Glattman. And Harvey Glattman was a serial killer from the 50s who would persuade women, beautiful women, to come and model for him. He'd pretend to be a photographer, and then he'd say, well, he's taken photographs for these two detective magazines,

and he needs to bind them, because you have to have the bound, terrified woman. And they would let him, and then once he had them bound, he would tell them he was going to kill them and then get these photos of the utterly terrified, bound, trapped female. And they did end up on the covers of a true detective magazine. And Rader saw this image of a totally helpless woman, which is similar to that image of his mother, is totally helpless, bound, scantily clad, female, and sealed itself.

So he's 14, and he's looking at this and going, that is the image that he would always want to try to replicate. Bondage, which was erotic to him as self-bondage, which was erotic to him, as self-bondage, became part of what had to be in all of his murders. He had to have the bondage thing, always. Rader's daughter, Carrie, now even remembers her dad talking about these detective magazines. Now, I thought maybe those were, like, inappropriate, but somebody told me they were pretty normal in a drugstore. Bondage photos of women.

So my dad was influenced by this. When he was 7 or 8 years old, he's reading these detective magazines. He's influenced by these photos. If you talk to my dad, it sounds like he probably had what nowadays we call a conduct disorder when he was a young boy. There was no help in the 40s and 50s. It only got worse. Rader's fantasies became more and more elaborate.

He would imagine creating what he called girl traps, where they would be totally helpless. He would have complete control and domination over them. And so that was a big part of his fantasies. He would draw that on the board in his classroom while other people were out at recess. On the farm, Rader tested out his ideas on animals. A very good precursor for crimes is animal cruelty. Animal cruelty is a big, big one. And he got heavily involved with that, killing cats, killing dogs. My name is John Douglas. I was with the FBI for 25 years. Wrote a book about inside the mind of the BTK strangler. I was one of the first people to analyze the case, and it was pretty

good analysis. You've probably heard about John Douglas before. He is the famed FBI profiler who helped kickstart the agency's study on serial killers in the 1970s. He was also the inspiration for the Netflix series Mindhunter. Like Catherine Ramsland, he dedicated years of his life to trying to understand BTK. Now, the best place to look, he says, is in early childhood. And pretty early on, Dennis Rader took interest in some very troubling behavior. As he just mentioned, Rader took joy in causing harm to animals. He went on a family grouping where they had a chicken to cook. They bound the chicken up and tie them to a post before they kill the chicken. And he liked that. He got excited about that as well. As Douglas says, this all came back to his bondage fetish.

He enjoyed being in control while something or someone was helpless. He liked the appearance of bondage and when someone is stuck, someone's control, someone can't get away. The chicken can't get away. Eventually, Rader became bored with the fantasies, the magazines, and the chickens. As a young man, he escalated to finding women and stalking them. At first, it started with just looking. He was certainly a peeping Tom, and he was already beginning to be fetishistic, where he wanted underwear, clothing that he would steal off the lines in the neighborhood. And then he was involved in peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people being undressed. He would not enter until he got older, but when he was younger, he was just looking and fantasizing about what he could do. As he began to age, he then began entering the houses.

He thought of himself like a spy. He did do some surveillance of people, some following women. This is Catherine Ramsland again. She says that after high school, Rader joined the Air Force in 1966. He did basic training in Texas before being stationed in Okinawa and eventually Tokyo. And his experiences there only deepened his fanatical tendencies. He had sexual experiences when he was in the military with sex workers. That kind of sealed the fantasy.

And it was after he came back and had gotten married that he began thinking about abducting women. Rader left the Air Force in 1970 and moved back to Wichita. There, he met Paula Dietz, whom he married in 1971. But as Catherine Ramsland said, his marriage did not stop him from pursuing his fantasies of abduction. He started to pick women in the neighborhood and think about ways to snatch them. He wanted to take them to an abandoned farm, so he had scouted out farmsteads around Kansas, and he wanted to abduct this bank teller. Ramsland elaborates on this incident in her book,

Confession of a Serial Killer. Here is what Rader told her. I saw a bank teller at the Twin Lakes Bank. I had seen her when Paula and I did business there. I knew when she had a lunch hour. The bank teller parked her car across the street of 21st North. Many cars there could shield me in hiding. I knew her car. He didn't know what he was going to do. He hadn't planned very far, except that he was going to take this young woman out to the abandoned barn, find her, do something with her.

My main theme was to hang someone. The act of hanging was sexually exciting to me. The elements of being bound or straining with a rope or noose around the neck, legs bound and no escape. For self-gratification, I'd hanged myself to the point of almost passing out. I had an old barn in mind. We could be completely alone, and I could better control them. I loved old barns, and there were several located around Wichita that I could use for hanging victims. That was the first time he really acted on the fantasy. It was, I'm going to grab somebody.

Timed like a clock, she entered her car. I approached and tried to force myself in. She screamed and fought back. I finally gave up and told her I'm sorry. I was trying to take a vehicle and leave the area. It was a ruse. That calmed her down. I told her I was going to leave her alone, and I quickly left.

But that was the start, and the fact that he crossed that line was important. The second line he crossed was breaking into houses. As he began to break into houses, he felt very powerful. People were not there, but he would stand in their home and he felt that sense of violation. That gave him a lot of courage because he realized he could get into their home, take something and get out and not be caught. That empowered him with the sense that now he could do this. He could get into a home and abduct somebody, which was the first plan. What follows is a sequence of events that eventually pushed Rader into his first violent act. Not long after getting married, Rader got a job at Cessna, the big aviation company based

in Wichita, Kansas. Rader discussed this job. Here are his words, again read by a voice actor. Cessna had been my ideal job, working in the electrical tool and dye part of the plant. It was a challenging job, but one that I was learning to love. But Rader wasn't at Cessna for very long. Due to rising gasoline prices, the aviation industry was in financial duress.

And he got laid off. That's the job that he loved. What he will say is that's what triggered the first murder, is he was angry. He did not like the fact that his wife was now the breadwinner. He felt powerless. So again, he's in a situation where a woman has power over him and he doesn't like this. I had low frustration tolerance in stressful situations. If criticized, especially if I'm right, I literally explode.

Don't count to ten, I get hot, break into a sweat and seek mental revenge. I believe I'm too smart to go postal, so if I made a revenge attack, it would be with stealth and planned. Loss of personal power can cause burning resentment. Frustration seems to be a key. Either the system or a person not understanding me on the issues surrounding the problem. I believe job loss causes a lot of anger and frustration. Ego is the key. Rader decided it was time. No more fantasies. This time, he was actually going to kill. And he found his first victim, or victims. The following excerpt comes from the book Bind, Torture, Kill, The Inside Story of BTK. Dennis Rader had seen the woman and the girl one day while driving his wife to work at the Veterans Administration.

His wife didn't like driving in the snow. On Edgemore Drive, he saw two dark-skinned females in a station wagon backing onto Murdoch Avenue. After that, he stalked them for weeks and took notes. He followed Julie several times as she drove Josie and Joey to school. He knew that they left about 8.45 and that it took Julie seven minutes to get back home. He knew the husband left for work around 8 a.m. He did not want to confront the husband, so he timed his own arrival for about 8.20. The husband would be gone. The boy would be there, but he was incidental to the plan. He would kill the boy, but he didn't want him.

He wanted the girl. The girl was 11-year-old Josie Otero. The mother was 34-year-old Julie Otero. It was on January 15, 1974, that Dennis Rader took his first victims. As you heard in episode one, he broke in, tied up the family, and one by one, he strangled all of them. There was no going back.

Dennis Rader's transformation into BTK was complete. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beth Lee is guilty. This case, the more I learned about it, the more

I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stabbed somebody that many times, you would have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet.

And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early and often. On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference.

Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr. with appearances from Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans, It Could Happen, Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from, and check out betteroffline.com. After Dennis Rader escaped the Otero crime scene, he slipped back into life at home. He disguised himself as a regular family man in Wichita once again. Rader and his wife Paula had been married nearly three years by this time. They attended church weekly with their parents, and he helped out with the youth group. And he decided to take classes at Wichita State nearby. But in his time alone, he allowed himself to explore his fantasies.

The following is an excerpt from the book, Bind, Torture, Kill, The Inside Story of BTK. He liked to study crime novels, detective magazines, and pornography. He liked to masturbate while playing with handcuffs. In their snug home, only 960 square feet, he hid small trophies. On his wrist, he wore Joe Otero's watch. It ran well and got him to school on time. Wichita State University had started spring classes, and he had chosen a major, administration of justice,

that let him study police officers closely and learn more about his new pursuit. He enjoyed the irony. The events of January 15, 1974 were the violent culmination of years spent fantasizing about bondage, torture, and murder. Rader had mentally built himself into the murderer he'd envisioned. The Otero family was his first taste of success. What really pisses me off about my dad is that he knew what he was or what he was capable of. He even talks about that in Catherine Ramsland's book, that he could have walked into a mental health institution before he murdered the Oteros and asked for help. And he knew that and

he didn't do it anyway because he just wanted that thrill and that hit. And those are words he uses, thrill and hit. Again, Carrie Rawson. She mentions that how each opportunity during the Otero murders, her father chose to cross the point of no return. I mean, everybody has those dark thoughts or the what-ifs, but I mean, there's a big gap between reading something or watching something on TV or thinking something versus when you're premeditating and planning these things. If you're in the store buying rope, that's when you need to stop. At that point,

you probably don't have the ability to stop yourself and you're probably not wanting to. Now, he had a choice. This is where I get really pissed. He comes in, he doesn't have a mask on, and he blames them. He says, well, they saw my face, so I had to put them down. He's literally talking like when he's a compliance officer putting an animal down. Those are his words, I had to put them down because they saw my face. No, you didn't. You could have left. That's where you're not insane.

You're in control. You're in enough control to murder four people and not get caught for 30 years, you totally could have left. But he's such a freaking narcissist, he puts it on them. Nothing about the Otero murders had gone as planned. But as a testament to his delusion, Dennis Rader didn't believe that it was his fault. Here's forensic psychologist Catherine Ramsland. He thought he had left nothing to chance. That was in his head that he had stopped her and knew everything about the house. He had done a terrible job. They had a dog, too, that he didn't know about. And also, their car had no gas in it. So he was going to abduct them in their car,

and that wouldn't have worked out either. So none of the things he had in mind for his first act actually happened the way he had imagined it. And he was terrified that he was going to be caught. He dropped his knife sheath out in the yard, had to go back for it. It's the middle of the day. Neighbors could have seen it. that he was going to be caught. He dropped his knife sheath out in the yard, had to go back for it. It's the middle of the day.

Neighbors could have seen it. It's a house in a neighborhood. Many mistakes made, but still, he did not get caught. So that empowered him to think that, wow, I can kill almost an entire family, and nobody came for me. The Otero murders would only be the beginning of Rader's murderous career. Despite all the mistakes he made, he felt unstoppable. In confession of a serial killer, he had this to say about his first killing spree.

My brain was on fire. I had already cut out and collected the newspaper clippings on the Oteros and started my first hidey hole file, using those college colored folders for term papers with three holes. I had cut and taped the clippings inside. I stored this in the attached shed in the back, an area that my wife would not find. I also listened and watched for any information on the radio or TV.

One thing for sure, that area was now off-limits forever. Except for maybe just a drive-by. After the Otero murders, Rader recognized he had crossed over to what he called the Dark Path. He considered chalking it up to a bad day and moving on with his life, but his killer instincts overrode that sense. He now saw himself as a serial killer, and he liked it. I thought I could control it. I soon realized I was in over my head and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. I quickly was into sexual fantasies beyond my control. I had set my goals to be a white hat high, but the lifeboat drifted away from my reach until the deep water became my coping.

I had trusted myself to steer the right course, but when I studied books about past serial killers, the more I learned. The closer I came to believe I could someday become one. I was on a powerful train and could not get off. The track was set. Superman could stop it, but I was not Superman. To cope with what I was doing, I cubed like I would do as a kid. Cubing is a concept Rader came up with. It's similar to compartmentalization. Here's Catherine Ramsland again. He is all the different faces of the cube.

Family man, church leader, thief, Boy Scout volunteer, all of that kind of stuff. But each face doesn't see any of the others. So when he's a family man, he's a family man in his mind. Because it's only a present moment truth. When he sees the opportunity to be a thief or a killer or a liar, he can turn that face out. So it's all integrated as a whole, but none of the faces see each other. And he came up with that concept. Psychologists call this compartmentalizing,

but that conveys the idea that they're all distinct compartments. When you think of it as a cube, a unified entity with multiple faces that can be switched around to meet the circumstances, that's a much more powerful concept, and that's his concept. He had ways to keep it all hidden, but he didn't think of it as pretending. It was, that's what I do then, but I also have social obligations. I also am a good dad. I'm also a good churchgoer. I'm also a good employee. All of those things worked for him. And I think it's difficult for people to look at such strongly contrasting morality in the same person. That's the mystery. How does that happen? But it does happen. It happens for anyone who's having an affair. It happens with con artists. It happens with a lot of different people who live

double lives of some kind. I don't think they think about it as pretending. I think they just think they have developed alternate life frames. And those alternate life frames are in motion when they're in specific situations. Rader could have been out driving around with his wife and he spots a young woman and decides he's going to come back to that neighborhood to see if he can figure out where she lives. That's exactly what Rader did next. In the weeks following the Otero murders, he decided he wanted to kill again. And soon, here are his words from Confession of a Serial Killer, again read by a voice actor. I believe that by February or March, the hunt began again. I found it exciting to prowl at day or night.

It was very easy for me to spend a little time after classes to prowl or day drive that area. Going to class worked well for me as a cover. I could say I was at the library or use that time to prowl or stalk. Rader was becoming restless. He started to pick out new projects. Projects are what he called the women he would stalk. Each of his projects following the Oteros were younger women spotted alone in the wild. Some of them had a family, but Rader had already proven he wasn't averse to taking the lives of children. Raider zeroed in on a young woman named Catherine Bright.

She was a fellow student at Wichita State. So it was one day after classes or in between, I spotted Bright arriving home with a friend, another female, maybe a sister. She was at her mailbox. She fit my fantasy profile. A co-ed. Dishwasher blonde, small. I saw her go into the house, and I thought, that's a possibility. My heart raced as the hit came into focus. From that moment on, I locked in on that house. Next time on Monster BTK. He was constantly trying to trip the police up. I was planning on tying her up on the bed, either half naked or totally. This crime goes to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. He loses control of the situation. We had arrested a couple of brothers

who admitted that they had killed the Oteros. If I was doing the Oteros, this is how I would have done it. He considered himself to be among the elite serial killers, and so he named himself BTK. He enjoyed communicating with Cake TV. Cake TV was his favorite station. He had watched it since he was a child. I write this letter to you for the sake of the taxpayer, as well as your time.

Monster, BTK, is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts. The show is written by Gnomes Griffin, Trevor Young, and Jesse Funk. Our host is Susan Peters. Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey, alongside supervising producer Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Podcasts include Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, alongside producers Gnomes Griffin and Jesse Funk, and supervising producer Rima Ilkayali. Marketing support by David Wasserman and Allison Wright at iHeart Podcasts

and Caroline Orajema at Tenderfoot TV Additional research by Claudia D'Africo Original artwork by Kevin Mr. Soul Harp Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA and the Nord Group For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't

happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Begley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail.

The person who did it is still out there. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On Tech Stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok, to ask burning questions about technology, from high-tech to low-culture and everywhere in between. Join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go

on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference. Better Offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth at Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr. With guest appearances from Behind the Bastards Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.