Monster: BTK - El Dorado [10]

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Rader faces justice. But his capture provides little solace or closure to his victims. Years later, Rader reveals that there are more murders that no one ever discovered.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a freaking crazy man. He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now. Crook County is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets. Seven thousand bodies out there or more. A forgotten asylum cemetery. It was my family's mystery. Shame, guilt, propriety, something keeps it all buried deep until it's not. I'm Larisen Campbell and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever stopped to wonder just how close you've come to danger without even realizing

it? Think about how many people you encounter every day on the street, in the grocery store, at the gym, never truly knowing who they are or what they're capable of. What if one of those seemingly ordinary people was hiding a dark secret? What if they had done something unthinkable or were planning to? The Minds of Madness is a weekly true crime podcast that dives deep into the criminal psyche, covering the most shocking and disturbing cases you've ever heard of from all around the world. Cases like a feral Goldilocks style intruder who

left a disgusting calling card before embarking on a reign of terror leading to a nationwide manhunt or a seductive ex who used voodoo and manipulation to always get what she wanted. With gripping stories, insightful analysis and unforgettable survivor's accounts, The Minds of Madness has everything you need to satisfy your darkest cravings. The Minds of Madness is available wherever you get your podcasts. Or visit mindsofmadnesspodcast.com for more information. It was big news.

I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery, big, big news. A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story. I saw what happened. An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow. He did not kill her. There's no way. Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free? Did you kill her? You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised.

Now what's my night terror? Somebody in my room, on top of me in bed, trying to kill me. Why is that? I mean, I was scared. I was scared of the dark. I was scared to go to the bathroom. This carried over into college. Why is that?

So I've talked to detectives, talked to trauma therapists. Nobody knows how to fix this night terror stuff and nobody knows why is it the bad guy in the room trying to kill me. Do you feel like the bad guy is your dad? Yeah. My dad planned these things, premeditated these things. Was he practicing that murder in our house? Was he practicing corners and closets? You're wondering if that feeling you had was maybe him actually in your room in the closet.

Yeah, some sort of depressed memory where I was scared shitless from my dad. Who's to say he wasn't doing something in my bedroom? I just would rather know. Like for me, I need to know. Because once I know, then I can deal with it. You can divorce a spouse, you can't divorce a father. Mm-hmm.

You can't just divorce your dad. Did a part of you feel like you wanted to make it better somehow? I wanted to help him. Like I'm mad at you in one second and I'm worried you're cold and dealing with this blanket in this cold cell. Like I love you. I still love you. Do you still love him? Oh yeah. I mean I told him that and the letter's really odd. Like, I love you and I don't know what's wrong and I don't know why you did this. And I wrote him and I was like, I'm so sorry.

Like I'm so sorry something must have happened to you. You're just thinking something awful must have happened to you to turn you into this. And I'm so sorry, you know know that you're alone and that we're not with 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 it back and then brings them back to the point of death. From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters and this is Monster BTK. On August 18, 2005, Judge Gregory Waller sentenced Dennis Lynn Rader to 10 consecutive life terms.

The sentence, a minimum of 175 years without the chance for parole, was the longest the judge could deliver. The next day, August 19, 2005, Rader was taken from the courthouse to the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas, just 30 miles from Wichita. Our news station covered the caravan from departure to arrival, and we were on scene for the last sighting

of Dennis Rader outside prison walls. He is getting out of the car right now. He's in his orange jumpsuit. It looks as if his feet may be shackled. He's walking in the prison right now. There he walked in the door and there he is. There he's inside. That's it. Closure is difficult. For the families of Raiders victims, it may never come.

But on that day in August, at the very least, we reveled in the peace of mind that came with the closing of his cell door. Unfortunately, through all of this and through the things that he has done, everyone was willing to listen because everyone wanted to hear from the man that committed these crimes. Now, I think everyone is sick of what he has to say. The reason we know so much about Dennis Rader is because of his narcissism, his intense desire for publicity. And while us locals had had our fill,

there were others who saw immense academic potential in studying Raider's mind. When this opportunity came up, I had just completed a book where I had looked back over the past century of mental health experts who had taken extra time to really learn about an extreme offender from the offender's point of view. And I was in prime position then to do exactly the same thing. I had role models. Throughout this season, we've heard the inside scoop on Raider from forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland. In 2010, she began a professional relationship with him, which culminated in the book,

Confession of a Serial Killer, the untold story of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer. I did not approach Rader. What happened is when he was arrested in 2005, someone else had approached him to write a book. She worked with him for five years, corresponding, thinking she was going to do this. And I saw her on Facebook and said, whatever happened to your book? And she begged me to take it over.

I had to go through a process of being vetted by the victim's families and the attorney. He had signed his life rights over to them through this other writer. That took some time, a couple years. And in the meantime, I got to know Rader by playing chess. We'd write some letters. He wanted me to solve some codes because he wanted to communicate with codes.

So I began to just kind of follow his lead. He would write very long, like 20 page letters. And embedded in these letters would be these codes and their meaning. And I had to try to figure it out. Also, he wanted to communicate that way to keep the guards from knowing what he was talking about. That's kind of the gatekeeper. If you're not going to do the code thing, we're not going any further. And then as all the legal stuff got into place, we began to talk on the phone.

The very first time I spoke to him on the phone an hour earlier, my father died. So it was very numbing, but at the same time it was a good way into him because he remembered his father dying. I think it invited some warmth and compassion from him as our first time we're talking on the phone. It feels jarring to hear Ramsland talk about building compassion between her from him as our first time we're talking on the phone. It feels jarring to hear Ramsland talk about building compassion between herself and Raider. But developing this relationship was integral to her ability to study him.

The third way we got to know each other was watching TV shows, which began to serve as metaphors for his experience. He wanted me to watch Bates Motel and The Americans, and I wanted him to watch The Walking Dead. And so between those shows, we would talk about the characters in ways that demonstrated some of the things he was trying to tell me.

Like with the Americans, it's Soviet spies embedded in American culture and raising a family and acting as if they're completely like everybody else, exactly as he was doing. And he even thought of himself as a spy. Or Bates Motel, which was about the making of a serial killer. So whenever something would happen in one of the shows, he would use that to talk about his experience. Ramslan wrote about Rader before she began working on Confession.

For instance, she mentioned him in her book Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, but her coverage never went into this much depth. Only when the opportunity came my way did I realize what a unique opportunity it was because he was not like a typical serial killer. He was an outlier. I get a lot of questions from mostly high school students asking what motivates a serial killer?

And it's hard for me. I just say it's not a criminal type. They each have their own motivational spectrum. And you have to look at the factors in their development to understand why they're doing what they're doing, because it's different from one to another. Even if you categorize them as sexually compelled serial killers,

there's still a lot of differences among them. I think looking at the raw ingredients of any extreme offenders' developmental trajectory helps us with trying to understand at what points in their life did something change? Did a trigger to violence become part of their perspective? What were some of the factors and elements involved? So, Rader was an opportunity as an outlier to the thinking of the FBI to find out what's going on here. What do we need to know about this guy? There were logistical challenges communicating with Raider in prison.

As Ramsland said earlier, their letters and phone calls were monitored. I told him, we need to have a coherent set of codes if we're going to talk about some of these things. And so I created the codes that we were going to use. And I used a cave metaphor because he liked caves. And he had this whole thing about three being a magical number. So everything I did, like three layers of soil, three types of plants, three types of gardening tools, things like that. In the introduction to the book, she describes figuring out the code as one of the most complicated aspects of the project.

What resulted is a symbolic alphabet with letters A through W, all representing different phrases. A bleeding heart was going to connote whoever he was talking about. Of her work with Raider, Ramsland says this type of research could be used to develop treatment programs for kids who might be at risk of becoming one of these offenders. And because of this potential, she emphasizes that its use is more that of a textbook than entertainment. It's not a true crime book. It's a book where Dennis Rader and I explore his life story together with clinical tools. I call it a guided autobiography because he's not just blathering on about himself without any structure.

It's structured to benefit my field, criminology, and law enforcement. Rader's narcissism does make it difficult to discern his fiction from reality. But Ramsland's professional background and the relationship she built with him before starting the book allowed her to call him out on his lies. I had the complete transcript of the police interrogation. I had five years of correspondence from the other writer. I had the whole DA's file. So yes, I know he's going to play me if he can, but I have the objective background.

He's obviously going to be able to talk more about what was really going on at the crime scenes in ways that no investigator will ever be able to do. But at the same time, he's narcissistic. He does want publicity. He does want to be known in a certain way, and I have to keep that in mind as well. But that's okay because that's data for me. I didn't care if he told the truth or he lied. All of that's data. There are more layers than just what a killer says,

so it's not really about asking that person a whole bunch of questions to get into who they are, you have to watch their behavior and the inconsistencies and the oddities. For example, on a scene in The Americans, there was a really brutal scene where they put a burning car tire over this guy to get him to say something.

And Rader was furious, just furious that that was on TV. Like, okay, you're a serial killer. You've done terrible things to people. And this is a fictional scenario. Why are you so angry? When we started playing chess, he told me not to cheat. Really? In your whole scheme of morality, that's what matters to you, that I'm not cheating at a chess game? To me, that's all very interesting behavior because what is he showing me about what matters to him?

On certain issues, Rader was more defensive than others. On certain issues, Raider was more defensive than others. If it was something in which he had no real investment in how he wanted to present himself, then he'd sort of laugh it off. Yeah, you caught me or something like that. One time he was talking about how much he loved his son. I said, well, you know, you used your son's car during your cat and mouse game. He was away in the Navy. And I said, what did you think your son would feel like when you were arrested and they found out his car was the one on the surveillance video?

His first response was, well, I was never going to get caught. I never even thought of that. Then he got upset with me because I was questioning the narrative that he loved his son. I was basically saying, that's not a very loving thing to do to your son. What you did to satisfy yourself is not a loving thing to do to the family you say you love. And he got angry.

And his response was to write a very long letter justifying everything. I would tell you the members of his family don't feel that loved because he destroyed them, destroyed them, but he doesn't see it that way. He thinks they should just get over it and reconnect with them. That's how he views it. But that's again that notion of a very shallow emotional processing of the world. He thinks that what he's done does not have that much enormity and shouldn't, and that they're his family and they need to forgive him and get back in a relationship with him. That is how he thinks.

It's hard to imagine a world where anyone could forgive Rader. I think for the average person, it's common to wonder whether these types of violent offenders experience remorse. And when I think back to his court appearances, I know that Rader doesn't. These days when Rader looks back, he regrets, it's not the same as remorse. He regrets hurting his family. He regrets that he's in prison, that he missed out on a lot of life.

He sometimes thinks about religion, but I think for the most part he does not believe that there's an afterlife. that he missed out on a lot of life. He sometimes thinks about religion, but I think for the most part, he does not believe that there is an afterlife, that he will have to face some kind of judgment. The killer part is essentially how he identifies, that he embraces that. It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this?

From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit. And that was my mission, to snuff the f*** life out of this guy. He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department. I had a wife and I had two children.

Nobody knew anything. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Torn between two worlds. I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing. He was a freaking crazy man. We don't know who he is, really. He is my father.

And I had no idea about any of this until now. Welcome to Crook County. Series premiere February 11th. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt. Yazoo clay eats everything.

So things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not. In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more. All former patients of the old state asylum. And nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery. But in this corner of the old state asylum, and nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery.

But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it. Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think. The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larysen Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeart Radio app, is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13

El Salvador? How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab? Or why the Japanese yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Gold, and we're the hosts of the Underworld Podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.

We know this stuff because we've been there. We've seen it and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Breaking news tonight. The return of Tot Mom. It feels got your podcasts. away. Guys, please don't miss this. Please join us. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There is a thread that ties everyone together who is still to this day interested in Dennis Rader. It is the desire to understand why he did it and if we could stop something like this from happening again. For Larry Hattaberg, his BTK days didn't end when we covered the caravan to El Dorado. I wrote to him in 2005 and I did get three or four letters back from him. When I got the first letter from Dennis Rader, the postman stopped out front, came up to my door, rang the doorbell, and he's holding the letter by the edges like it's a horrible thing and he said, I just want to tell you I'm delivering this to you and I hate every moment of this. That is an appropriate response to receiving a letter from Dennis Rader.

In one of the letters, Rader had an eerie request for Larry. He said, look, Larry, I love your show. I used to watch Hattaberg's People all the time when I wasn't incarcerated in here. He said, I want to be on Hattieburg's People. Hattieburg's People was the series that I did of great people in the community. So I wrote him back and I said, Dennis, the fact that you've killed 10 people tends to negate any of the good that you've done in the community. And he didn't write me back after that.

But in the last few years, they've restarted their correspondence. Larry's received letters from Raider as recently as the end of 2024. The reason I stay kind of involved in it and the reason I will occasionally write to BTK is that we still to this day do not know what caused BTK to become a murderer. And there are a million teachers out there with kids in their classroom and they know

something is wrong with a child, but they don't know what to do. They don't know how to do it. So the question becomes, how do we identify these children who are going to grow up to become a BTK? Until we have those answers, the BTK story will never be dead, even if he dies tomorrow. And that's why I stay involved in it. On the other side of things, there are those who've decided it is better not to indulge their curiosity when it comes to Dennis Rader. Here's Bob Smyzer, a member of Rader's former church, Christ Lutheran. I really wanted to go see Dennis in prison, not because of anything I could ask him or anything because he lied to you, but to see who he is, strip that facade,

a Dennis Rader facade. I think in prison, you would have finally got to see him as he really is. And that interested me. Ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons. Do you think if you went to prison, could you talk to him as Bobby, an old friend? I don't know that we'd talk as old friends, but we would talk about his mom and dad, those kind of things. Those conversations would be fairly simple.

They'd be fairly easy and they'd be natural. If there's anything left of the Dennis Rader facade, or is he just BTK 100% of the time? Bob poses a good question. Is there anything left of the Dennis Rader facade? This is something Kerry Rosson's been trying to figure out for the last two decades. It took her years to sort through her complicated emotions after her father's arrest. For like the first nine and a half years, I was totally shut down.

I was hiding who I was. I'm in like this mega church outside Detroit, Michigan where we moved in 2003. I'm leading Bible study. I'm in this MOPs group with young mothers and toddlers and I'm not telling people who I am. My picture had never been out there in connection with my dad. I didn't have social media at the time. I had gone through the worst day of my life, the worst thing I could imagine. I'm a trauma survivor, an abuse survivor, and I'm not telling anybody about this. The most I would say, well, this bad thing happened to me.

It's really hard to sit in Bible study on a Tuesday morning, and the woman next to you is saying, like, her worst day of her life is her dishwasher broken or kitchen flooded. And I'm literally having to leave the room and cry in the bathroom because how do you even drop dad into that? Like even with trusted friends of mine I would try and they would tell me stop talking you're giving me nightmares. I was so shut down those first nine and a half years because I was scared. I was scared of this

man in the arrest photo. I was scared of what he had done. I was even scared of other family members. There was some wacko coming after me. She learned to compartmentalize to separate the father she'd known from the killer she'd been introduced to. With my father, I have to put dad in BTK. When I interviewed with Dr. Phil, he was helpful. He did a timeline, and he put photos of my normal life above the timeline. And then underneath he put crime scene photos and photos of my dad after the arrest and things. BTK things.

And he said, stay above the line as much as you can, because that's safe and sane. When I was talking about unleashing all the BTK stuff, I didn't do it in a healthy way. I just pulled it all out. And so when I went back into therapy, she goes, okay, now for the first time we got to go put it in order. So we took the Wichita Eagle Book by Winslow and three other journalists, and I took it into trauma therapy for months. My paperback was like dog hair covered, marked up in pen.

I had to go line by line through that thing in therapy. And I couldn't even do it in order. I couldn't handle the 70s. And so I started with HEDGE and I worked up through the 91 and then I went back to the 70s. And so when I was done with therapy, dad was strictly BTK to write. I had to go back and then I went back to the 70s. And so when I was done with therapy, Dad was strictly BTK to write. I had to go back and then separate that

and go back and find Dad and then find me. Once Carrie had found herself again, she realized her story might be able to help others. So she took a chance at sharing it. I started talking to the media in 14. I mean, it's rare to get somebody like me, a family member of these guys, to talk. It sets off your PTSD. You know, there's shame in it too, because we've been beat up in the media.

We've been beat up by people commenting on social media. Some of us go into hiding, change our names. I thought the answer was to hide. But hiding meant tearing more inside. It's like when you bandage a wound too tight, it's festering and rotting underneath because you're not letting it get air or light. When I started speaking up, I realized not only was it healing me to talk about it, I was getting an inbox full of people saying

I was reaching them because I was talking about something in forgiveness, or they were a soldier that had come home with PTSD, and they had identified with me in my night terrors, or my fears, my anger, or family members of criminals that were going back and forth between they still love this person, but they were angry at at them and how do they deal with the media. Something I was sharing, something I was saying, people were identifying with and it was helping

them. While Carrie was working through her trauma in therapy, she kept her distance from her father. Their communication ebbed and flowed, and there were several years where she had no contact with him. We stayed in touch with letters off and on. I had forgiven him in 2012. I had wrote him that night

after five years of no communication, and we had been talking back and forth in letters more. He read the Wichita Eagle article in 15, called Forgiveness Isn't Tidy, and he said when he read that article in the eagle, he realized at that moment more the impact of what he had done to our family. And he did feel it, and he said it caused him to shed a tear. But in that same letter or in the next letter to me, he's back being a narcissist trying to control whatever he has left. And the only thing he has left in this world is his physical body.

He's very scared of his own death, ironically enough. We told him after he died, we would have him be cremated and we would scatter his ashes out in the flood hills because we can't have a gravestone for him and we wouldn't want one anyway. We'd just get defaced and we've had to tell him over and over and over and over again in letters. So now here he is in 15 telling me in this letter he knows he's had this massive impact on my family and in the same letter he's saying well you guys aren't really communicating enough,

and you're not sending me money. And there's this woman in Arkansas, she's in my fan club. I think maybe I'll just sign my papers over and she can have my body and give me a gravestone. Because that's all he has left, right, is his dead body. So he's literally holding it over my family. is his dead body. So he's literally holding it over my family. Raider isn't the first serial killer to have a fan club. Black Market memorabilia has been popular for killers like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Jeffrey Dahmer. Here's Catherine Ramsland. Even when he was doing the cat and mouse with police and he would see this stuff

being covered by the local TV station or the newspaper, he imagined that he had a fan club that he had to please. And I think he still feels that way today. I mean, he's slowing down, he's tired. We talk about that he wants to cut back on all the correspondence, and yet if he gets new correspondents who feed into this need that

he has, he keeps them. No one person, of course, can reverse the horrific damage done by Raider. A genuine apology from the killer would even fail to do so. But unfortunately, that doesn't stop us from wishing it could all be undone. I want my dad back. I want the seven families to have their families back. I don't want the generational impacts, the community impacts, the thousands of people he's impacted, the detective's lives he's run. If you could wipe all of that out and just have the 10 living people back and have life, that would be ideal.

But you can't do that, right? There's no time machine, there's no time loop, marble, whatever. This is reality. I can't change anything. I can't help who I am, but I can do something good with what I've got. And this is what I have, so I do it. He thinks he can just get on a microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this.

From I Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit. And that was my mission, to snuff the life out of this guy. He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department. I had a wife and I had two children.

Nobody knew anything. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Torn between two worlds. I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing. He was a freaking crazy man. We don't know who he is, really. He is my father.

And I had no idea about any of this until now. We don't know who he is, really. He is my father. And I had no idea about any of this until now. Welcome to Crook County. Series premiere February 11th. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt.

Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not. In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more. All former patients of the old state asylum and nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery. But in this corner of the South it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it, nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo Clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think.

The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larysen Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 in El Salvador? How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn you get your podcast. We're the hosts of the Underworld Podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week, we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.

We know this stuff because we've been there. We've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Breaking news tonight, the return of Tot Mom. It feels like a dirt sandwich in my mouth. TikTok stardom ahead as Casey Anthony haters beg, please go away. Guys, please don't miss this. Please join us. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. January 15, 2024, marked 50 years since the tragic Otero murders.

Can't believe it's been that long, yet it feels like yesterday. Charlie Otero, the eldest Otero sibling. The pain is still there, the intensity of the anguish and the grief is still there. But I've learned to push it aside when it gets overwhelming and embrace the good. Knowing that I am where I'm at today is because of the full turnaround of all of this. I got my life back when he got caught.

Over the last few years, Charlie's turned his pain into a platform, giving speeches at prisons throughout the country. I'm doing well and I only hope to do more good work in the future. And I'm gonna use this 50th anniversary as a catalyst, if I can, to do the work that I started doing. And it makes me feel better.

It makes me feel good to take all the stupid stuff I've done in my life, spin it into a lesson for the guys to learn from my mistakes. I've always believed it's cheaper to learn from other people's mistakes. And if talking to other people about. I've always believed it's cheaper to learn from other people's mistakes. And if talking to other people about what I've experienced helps them deal with whatever trauma or, you know, victimization they've had in their lives,

then I'll continue. I don't live for the poor Charlie thing. I live to honor my promise to the Lord, give him my life, so, you know, I'm not a great Christian, but I try to be a good one. And if I can keep one criminal from getting out and hurting another family, then I will continue to go to jails and prisons and reach out to the guys who are getting out. And he tries not to dwell on the trauma of his past. I live with the memories of my family in a good place.

I don't like to think of them the day they died anymore. I like to think of what we had before, going to the beach, being together, going to church, all those good things. And for me, the past is good for two things and two things only, and that's fond memories and lessons learned. Jeff Davis, son of Dolores Davis, echoed a similar sentiment when recalling his own mother.

I know I'll see her again. So that in itself brings a lot of hope. I'm not getting any younger and there'll come a time where I won't be here but where I will be will be with her. We had a lot of good little average everyday kind of time that we spent before she killed her. We just talked and laughed and shared stories and made fun of some of the stuff she used to say. I get comfort from that too, knowing that I know what the future holds and I know what the past was, and those were all positive. And that helps. After 32 years, even the worst wounds start to scar over. As for his thoughts on Raider?

I'd like to say I've forgiven even all that good stuff that I'm supposed to do. I haven't. That's something that I think about. I just haven't got there. The way I justify this, I don't think about him at all. He's a little insect that skitters around in his 8x12 style, still thinking everybody thinks he's cool. He thinks all the guards like him. That's just how Belou's doing it. He's just not worth my time thinking about. In the years I've known Steve Relford, son of Shirley Byan, I've watched him have a rougher go at it.

Have you been able to forgive yourself? Forgive myself? No. To deal with myself? Yeah. I don't think I'll ever forgive myself. I try. I get drunk. I get fucked up. Try to forgive myself. It don't work. Nothing works. It's alright. That ain't working. You know you were six years old. You had no idea. There's no reason to feel any amount of guilt or anything. Yeah, that's what people say, but I can't help how I feel.

Did BTK ruin your life? Forever. Yeah, he... He fucked me for life. In 2017, Steve himself was serving time in El Dorado, the very prison that holds his mother's killer. How'd that feel? What did that do?

To know that I was in the same fucking prison as him and couldn't get to him. I think I laid in my bed and cried every fucking night, like I do sometimes now. But I'm a strong-willed motherfucker. You are. You're still around and you're still surviving and you're still trying. You're still trying, Steve. When I can't succeed, I'll go back and try again. It is nearly impossible to find silver linings in the wake of these tragedies. But I take a little comfort knowing that through all of this,

Charlie and Steve were able to develop a brotherly relationship. I met Steve at the Montell Williams show. We're giggling to each other. He gave me a two dollar bill, and gave him an 1890 something silver dollar for friendship because I went one way and he went the other. He's like my little brother now. I worry for him and I pray for him and I'm happy when he's happy. I care about him because I know what he went through.

He didn't have the opportunities I had. He was a lot younger when stuff happened to him. I was blessed to have been raised with a solid childhood. Steve didn't have that. This right here has been my backbone since I've been here, Susan Fetters. Charlie, he's number two. We have bonded and now we're breaking break. You share something in common, you and Charlie. What is that? We both have lost. He lost more than I did, but still lost. And we connect. In 2023, it had been a long time since Dennis Rader's name made the news. But seemingly

out of nowhere, a cold case in Oklahoma got new legs. Just confirmed within the last two hours, a sheriff's office out of Oklahoma in Park City today, searching the former property of BTK serial killer, Dennis Rader. In a breaking news alert, none of us expecting. BTK was back again. Our case close to home is in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, which is Osage County. We had a young female cheerleader, 16 years of age, that came up missing from a laundromat

in downtown Pawhuska in 1976. Her name was Cynthia Dawn Kinney. I'm the under sheriff of Osage County, Gary Upton. In December, late December of 2022, Sheriff Verdon couldn't sleep one particular night and he woke up at 3.30 in the morning and decided, if I can't sleep, I'm gonna watch some TV. And so he tuned into Netflix,

and he watched an episode of Catching Killers, and it was the episode titled Bind Torture Kill Btk. After having watched it, the wheels in his head started to turn, and he started to think about the distance between Pawhuska and Wichita and Park City and determined that two hours away was close enough that this might be a guy that he should at least look at. Sheriff Vernding took a trip to visit Rader at El Dorado.

He spent three hours talking to Dennis Rader in late January, but did not reveal the reason for his visit. At the tail end of that interview, Dennis Rader, unsolicited, seemed to offer up a tidbit of information. Rader said, you know, I have a fantasy that I wish I could have lived out, and he asked Sheriff Verdon if he wanted to hear it. He goes, I've always wanted to kidnap a female from a laundromat. I'd sit outside the laundromat and I'd wait and watch until she was in there alone. And then I would go in and I would grab her

and just take her. After that, Sheriff Verdon went to Wichita Police, got copies of evidence and journals, and we used that intervening time to meticulously pour over those journals, page by page, taking notes, connecting dots, seeing how something from one page related to another page in a spiderweb kind of fashion.

What they found in those journals was big. We see a lot that points him towards Behuska, the particular journal entry that we saw in 1976 called Bad Wash Day. And that particular journal entry indicated that he was going to try to do a breaking and entering someplace on 17th Street. Pawhuska has a 17th Street. He indicated in that same journal entry that that was unsuccessful due to too much noise. And he moved on down to a laundromat. He has a notation called C9, the letter C and the numeral 9. That indicates a chapter in his unpublished manuscript,

and chapter 9 was dedicated to all his successful kills. And those were his personal notes. That was nothing that was meant for the eyes of the police or the media, so it wasn't a brag or a taunt. From there, they got in contact with Keri Rawson. To get her on board was a little bit of an uphill climb. We started revealing little tidbits of information here and there to her. And she started communicating with the media

about her skepticism in regards to us. After a visit where we flew her here, we gave her a peek inside of Pandora's box. And we showed her the information that we had. And we showed her journal entries that related to what we believe. It was then, I think, that she became a real believer in the idea that her father had killed more than 10 people. The sheriff's department then went digging in Raider's backyard for evidence.

This was the impetus for the new surge in media attention. You can look behind me and you can see the sidewalk here that has been dug up and neighbors tell me that law enforcement have been sifting through there like they were going through gold. This latest news surge is something that we, as a sheriff's office, didn't want. It was somewhere in Park City in this second visit

to his property that we were outed. Since the cat was out of the bag, we've decided we just have to take our shot. The Osage County Sheriff's Department had already made a trip out to Raider's property. The house and Raider's tool shed though, were raised back in 2006 to deter tourists and media attention. Investigators went to the lot to look for personal effects and potentially a driver's license.

When we went there in April, we discovered that the city owned the property. It was still flat and devoid of any construction with the exception of a sidewalk that had been poured from the street all the way through the property around behind the houses to a playground. It was a brand new sidewalk that was poured in 2020. So in April, we did not have permission

to tear up the sidewalk, but Park City police stood by while we dug on the edges of it. And it was then that we discovered the pantyhose. It was tied in a knot that would be suitable for a bondage of either wrists or ankles. They had to get under the sidewalk. So fast forward to when we have gotten permission to remove the concrete sidewalk. Once again, we had Park City on hand. They removed the concrete and we discovered the hidey hole.

It was lined with shingles and the inside of the hole had a lot of gravel. We cleared all that out, discovered personal items that looked like trophies that would belong to a female, and we also found bondage material, chain clips and a small length of chain. It looked like what Dennis has talked about in his writings before. Not everyone has been on board with this new series of events. Not only was Kerry skeptical, but so was the Wichita Police Department at first.

Everyone kind of starts out wondering what our motives are, obviously. You know, even KBI, even OSBI. Our next hurdle is our approach to the FBI. And obviously the ultimate goal is closure for the victims' families. BTK still has not been confirmed as the killer of Osage County's Cynthia Dawn Kenney. In 2024, Rader was absolved of the 1990 killing of a Missouri woman named Shawna Garber. This case had been reopened in response to the Oklahoma investigation.

The last updates police had on Kinney's case were in September of 2023. To me, this case in Oklahoma confirms something I believed for years. That Dennis Rader is one of the most evil killers in American history. I've called Wichita home for over 30 years. And in my time here, we've been through so many phases of the BTK story. And every single time we think we've made it to the end of BTK's reign of terror, it all comes spiraling back. Over the course of this podcast, I've spoken with multiple people whose lives were upended by

Dennis Rader, but none of them are victims. All of them are survivors. Their example strengthens my resolve to keep telling their stories. Their stories not of lives ended by BTK, but stories of redemption and hope. Things Dennis Rader will never have. It is my hope that we can continue to build a compassionate community in spite of a seemingly never-ending saga of darkness.

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 Lindsay, 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 Wassermann and Allison Wright at iHeart Podcasts, and Caroline Orogema 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 iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.

My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything.

He was a frickin' crazy man. He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now. Crook County is available now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets. Seven thousand bodies out there or more.

A forgotten asylum cemetery. It was my family's mystery. Shame, guilt, propriety, something keeps it all buried deep until it's not. I'm Larisen Campbell and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever stopped to wonder just how close you've come to danger without even realizing it? Think about how many people you encounter every day, on the street, in the grocery store, at the gym, never truly knowing who they are or what they're capable of. What if one of those seemingly ordinary people was hiding a dark secret? What if they had done something unthinkable

or were planning to? The Minds of Madness is a weekly true crime podcast that dives deep into the criminal psyche, covering the most shocking and disturbing cases you've ever heard of from all around the world. Cases like a feral Goldilocks style intruder who left a disgusting calling card before embarking on a reign of terror, leading to a nationwide manhunt.

Or a seductive ex who used voodoo and manipulation to always get what she wanted. With gripping stories, insightful analysis, and unforgettable survivor's accounts, The Minds of Madness has everything you need to satisfy your darkest cravings. The Minds of Madness is available wherever you get your podcasts or visit mindsofmadnesspodcast.com for more information. It was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news. A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story. I like saw, nothing happened. An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow.

He did not kill her. There's no way. Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free? Did you kill her?