Monster: BTK - PJ Green [6]

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

BTK has killed again. But then, unexpectedly, he stops. Until years later, when he can longer hold it in any longer. He must be known.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you're fascinated by the darker sides of humanity, join us every week on our podcast Serial Killers, where we go deep into notorious true crime cases. With significant research and careful analysis, we examine the psyche of a killer, their motives and targets, and law enforcement's pursuit to stop their spree. Follow Serial Killers wherever you get your podcasts and get new episodes every Monday. Beautiful young women full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace.

They're families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions and memories. I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremorchi. radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Criminalia podcast. I'm Maria Tremorchi. And I'm Holly Frey. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season we explore a new theme from poisoners to art thieves. We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired

by each story. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 what they were having. 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? Listen to The Real Killer Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Monster BTK are released every Monday and brought to you absolutely free. But if you want to hear the whole season right now, it's available ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode. You're listening to Monster BTK, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV.

Listener discretion is advised. Tenderfoot TV. Listener discretion is advised. Dolores Davis was reported missing on January 19, 1991. I remember my wife answering the phone. I saw her come in. I could see her mouth that word is your sister. And I kind of waved her off. It's like I don't have time for it. She said, this is important. My name is Jeff Davis, and I'm the son of Dolores Davis.

So I picked up the phone and I talked to my sister, and she's pretty razzled. She says that one of our cousins had called, and they had been contacted by the Sheriff's office, and had been told that Mother's house had been broken into, and that Mother was missing. And I knew as an ex-cop that meant she was probably dead. The body of Dolores Davis was found on February 1st at the intersection of West 117th Street North and North Meridian Street in Park City by a teenager named Nelson Schonk.

Again, police failed to connect it with BTK. With this murder, there were multiple opportunities where Raider could have been caught. With Dolores Davis, he wanted to do something different. He wanted to take her body and take it to a barn. But it was a foggy, snowy night, so he got lost and he had to finally just dump the body out under a bridge. So he comes back and he's going to change into his, the Boy Scout uniform stuff, and a cop comes along and they're checking people because they're looking for this missing woman.

And the cop is supposed to check everybody. Had he checked Raider's car, he would have found things that would have been very suspicious. And Raider immediately started talking about, oh, you know, I'm a Boy Scout volunteer, you know this camp up here. And with the idea that no one would suspect somebody who volunteers with the Boy Scouts to be a nefarious killer, and he was right because the cop let him go. Cop did not do his job that night because of course, a nice guy like this isn't the

kind of person I'm looking for. So the stereotype and the expectation allowed Raider to be not caught that night. 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 there 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. 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. From My Heart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Susan Peters, and this is Monster BTK. It was May of 1991. Dennis Rader had gotten away with his 10th murder just four months earlier. Rader could have used this success to keep killing. But instead, he pulled back and got a job

as a compliance officer for the city of Park City, a small suburb just outside of Wichita. This was a job that would keep Rader very busy. Here are his words from the book, Confession of a Serial Killer. I revamped the program there, set up new animal control laws and enforced them, and set up professional standards and training.

I started code enforcement on junk cars, trashing the yard, unmowed grass, etc. The position became more professional throughout the years. This job earned Raider some unwelcome notoriety in the neighborhood. Here's Kerry Rosson, daughter of Dennis Rader. People in Park City, they knew him as a compliance officer and like there's stories of him getting a ruler and measuring their grass and being a hard nose about their animal being loose, that they didn't have the permit for their garage that they're building or their yard sale. I mean, he could be a total hard ass. We even had to change our phone number after he got that job because people were calling

mad. I mean, there were people that didn't like him, including people, sometimes myself, because he could be a bracelet. This is Bob Smeiser, a Wichita native who personally knew Dennis Rader. If Dennis was nothing else, he was very, very by the book. There was no gray. It was black and white. And he was very precise in how things were done. And if you worked with Dennis, that's the way you did it.

I'm not saying it was bad. I'm just saying that that's how he saw things was ABC. Bob and Raider went to the same church, Christ Lutheran in Park City. Most of their interactions were normal, if not curt, but there was one incident with Raider that had put Bob on edge. One of my older daughters lived in Park City, in the house that her grandparents had lived in, down the street from Denison. But my daughter came to me and said, Dad, you know, Denison's showed up in our backyard. And I said, really?

Why are your dogs getting out? Is there something? No, no, we ain't had any problem with the dogs getting out. We got that fixed up. She said, it's just creepy. I said, okay. And I happened to catch Dennis at church.

I said, hey, what's up with my daughter and her husband? He asked me where they live and I told him, why? Well, I said, you know, you've showed up in the backyard a few times. Just found it a little creepy, just sort of wondering, oh, it's their neighbor. I'm a little issue with their neighbor. In the last couple of years, my daughter and I have talked about it. She told me that her neighbor was single, a single woman. Single vulnerable women were Raider's bread and butter.

From the middle of 1991 on, Raider used his compliance officer job as a way to stalk women. There were other PJs. PJ Tube, PJ Webb, PJ Twin Peaks, PJ Music, PJ Clipip and PJ Spider. This last one was a B.E. where I entered and waited, but no one came home. Most of these were in Park City area or north of Wichita. I was always on the prowl. It's a common thing in the true crime books that are written about Rader to say that he went dormant between 1991 and 2004. And that's, he says that's not true.

Author and professor of forensic psychology, Katherine Ramsland. He gave me a list of 55 different projects of women he had seen and stalked and he had named them. He had their address. He had named them, he had their address, he had described them, he just broke in their house and they didn't come home, or there wasn't a good opportunity. You know, during his college years, he could say, I'm writing a paper at the library, and then go stalk someone without anyone suspecting anything. But once he was a father and husband and really had to have a schedule, it was much harder

to do. But he did not go dormant. It's just that he didn't succeed. And he talks about it being like a fisherman. He goes out to fish and sometimes comes home empty-handed. We don't know for sure if Rader killed again during this time period. It's possible, but nothing has ever been confirmed. If he did, in fact, stop killing, it begs the question, why?

Why would he stalk but never kill? I don't think it was anything like some moral idea, like maybe I should be attending to my soul now, or I don't think it was anything like that. I think it was bad timing. I don't think he had any reason to stop. I think he just didn't have the opportunities that he had had earlier and he was feeling much less agile. His body strength wasn't what it had been. That put him at risk for getting caught if he had to jump out a window or something like that. So I think he was feeling kind of vulnerable and that maybe some of the things he had done earlier, he was not going to be able to pull them off.

As the years passed, everyone in the Wichita area wondered, what happened to BTK? Bob Smeiser says that on more than one occasion, he was with Raider when that very question was brought up. Every Sunday morning in the North X, this group of guys that we went fishing and did those things, we all got together and talked. And BTK came up. Dennis was always really quiet. One of the guys said, you know, BTK must have been pretty smart. You know, and Dennis said, yeah, yeah, he was. He thought, you know, I'm the smartest guy in the room and they're never going to catch me. It's likely that Rader did think he was the smartest guy in the room because he'd miraculously gotten away with murder over and over again. Police at this point thought BTK had

either died or been arrested on other charges, when in reality, Raider was walking through people's yards and collecting items from their homes. He can't help himself. I guess sometimes my dad could be a dickhead or something growing up, but it's just, it's like an iceberg, right? Like you're only seeing the very tip of somebody with him. You're not seeing all the stuff underneath. Repressing those feelings turned Raider into a pressure cooker, ready to explode at any moment. And his family usually paid the price when he did. Carrie recalls a time when Raider got violent with her older brother, Brian.

In August of 96, it was a week before I was to go to K-State as a freshman. My cousin Michelle, she was killed in a Jeep accident on my mom's side of the family. It was a really horrible accident. She was like a sister to me. I was deeply grieving. All my family was. And I come home after my first week of college. My mom had made manicotti for us after working all day and gone to all this trouble. My brother was still living at home in 96. For some reason we got into a family fight. Now I'm sure grief spilled over. My dad's dad, William, had leukemia so there's a lot of

stress going on. We've got this little kitchen table and somebody pounds on the table a metal leg comes out and so all like the plates come crashing down on the floor. There's like Manicotti red sauce all over everywhere and my dad is blaming my brother and my dad snaps and he just lunges out of his chair at my brother. He starts strangling him from the front. These sorts of violent outbursts were not uncommon, and they were typically directed at Brian. In fact, a similar incident happened again just a few years later.

Maybe around 2000, 2001, my dad went for my brother again up against the utility closet in the kitchen where he stored everything. He pushed him against the same thing again with the hands. And after that, my brother moved out. My dad's done it twice, and we're not telling anybody. I don't know, what do they tell domestic abuse victims? If they're strangling you, they're escalating, and they're going to kill you eventually. There's literature about it.

If they're strangling you, they're going to escalate, and you're going to kill you eventually. There's literature about it. If they're strangling you, they're going to escalate and you're going to end up dead. Of course, I don't know that. I'm not even equating it to abuse. And I literally had had conversations with my mom. We would read something in the news and she's like, why are these women staying with these guys? Why are these battered women not leaving?

And we talked about it, that we would always leave and we wouldn't do that. We were that family. I mean, there's sort of like this whole Midwestern thing, like you don't talk about your problems and you look like you have it together, or everybody has problems and so you're not special. But like, mom and dad are firstborns and we look a certain way and we wear our nice clothes to church. Our kids are well behaved. We get together with our families. As time went by, Raider became less and less able to control his anger. As much as he tried to be a father at home, he was instead becoming more of a monster. And it only got worse.

If you're fascinated by the darker sides of humanity, join us every week on our podcast Serial Killers, where we go deep into notorious true crime cases. With significant research and careful analysis, we examine the psyche of a killer, their motives and targets, and law enforcement's pursuit to stop their spree. Follow Serial Killers wherever you get your podcasts and get new episodes every Monday.

Beautiful young women full of life and dreams murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions and memories. I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was big news.

I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news. When a young woman is murdered, a desperate search for answers takes investigators to some unexpected places. He believed it could be part of a satanic cult. I think there were many individuals present. I don't know who pulled the trigger. A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.

I saw what thing that happened. An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow. He just saw his body just kind of collapsing. Two decades later, a new team of lawyers says their client is innocent. He did not kill her. There's no way. Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free? Are you capable of murder? I definitely am not. Did you kill her? Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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. A few steps and that many times you have blood splatter, where's the change? Close. 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. As he got older, Raiders' neuroses became more pronounced at home. Growing up, Carrie was made to feel paranoid and confused by her father. My dad was so OCD. It's so weird. He murdered two children, right? He murdered Josephine Otero and Joey Oter's so weird. He murdered two children, right? He murdered Josephine

Otero and Joey Otero in 74. He murdered an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old. Yet he became so overly protective, especially of me and my mom. He had dead bolts on our front door and our back door in the kitchen. It was almost like he was protecting us from him, but it was because he knew how bad people could be. He had that keen ability to read bad people and know to stay clear. But Carrie knew none of that. To her, this was traumatizing. When I'm little, he's teaching me these things. You're not supposed to be telling kids about

home invasions, right? And he's telling me like, well, the kitchen door isn't that great because the window's too big and somebody can just punch out the glass and then they can reach in. But if it's deadbolted and the key's not in, then they can't get in. They gotta like jam the door more. He's telling me when I'm little, don't open the door to strangers. Question them, make them show you like they're badgered. They're telling you they're a cop, or a maintenance man checked their uniform because he literally used what he calls a ruse. He has and will break into homes with women home during the day taking care of children and

murder these women in front of their children. And yet he is obsessively trying to keep me safe. Raider would continue to train Carrie as she got older about how to look out for bad guys and to defend herself. This is mid-90s. Around 15 or 16, we're at Twinlake Shopping Mall, not far from where Vicki Wargurly was murdered in 86. We're at Sears, and he decides at that moment that that is a good time to teach me safety and security

in a parking lot. He's physically showing me, now if a bad guy rushes you, you can knee him in the balls, so you can poke their eyes out, or you can jab him with their elbow. He's literally showing me how to bite him off. He's like, you're gonna start driving now, so when you're gonna start driving now,

so when you're going to a dark car at night, check your back seat and make sure there's not somebody laying in your back seat. Or check underneath your car because somebody skinny could be under there and they'll slice your ankle. And he's showing me how to do the key. As a woman, all women know you stick the key in between your hands and you can use it as a weapon.

He's teaching me that when I'm 15. On the surface, there's nothing sinister about a father teaching his daughter self-defense. For normal families, this wouldn't raise any red flags. And it didn't for Raiders. But his self-defense lessons weren't the only obscure clue to Raiders' dark secrets. obscure clue to Raider's dark secrets. My dad never bowled, but nobody questioned like this maroon and white bowling bag that was kept by our door and of course you never looked at anything of dad's because it would make your life really uncomfortable and awful. What was in there?

It was his hit kit. We camped a lot so we had tubs with rope and canvas tarps because he would build two shelters when we're camping and he would store the stuff. So it wasn't unusual to have these things in your house and you don't go snooping in dad's stuff. Carrie says it's chilling when she thinks back to her father's hobbies, many of which were likely covers for his murderous activities. I used to go to the hardware store with my dad when I was a kid. He built us this massive tree house

that was one of his projects he threw himself into after gardening. I found out later he would get supplies for his hit kit while he was at the lumber store, probably with me. I used to share cryptograms with my dad. He taught me how to do them. That was another thing I shared with my dad. As the years passed, Raider's children got fed up with his controlling behavior.

They got older and both eventually moved out. But Carrie says she never forgot about her father's defensive training or the paranoia that came with it. In 2001, I'm up at K-State. I've been in the dorms for five years. I'm ready to have my own apartment. I call my dad. I said, I found this little apartment on the corner in Manhattan. It's a one bedroom. I want to live by myself. And I said, the problem is the only door is a patio door.

Now I'm upstairs, but the door is pretty flimsy. The lock is really flimsy. And I don't have any way to get out. If there's a fire, somebody gets in my home. He said, well, are there any other windows? And I said, yeah, in the bedroom upstairs. If I had to, I could jump out of that and a fire. He said, well, are there any other windows? And I said, yeah, in the bedroom upstairs. If I had to, I could jump out of that and fire. He said, well, tell me about the location.

I said, well, it's on a busy corner. It's across from a Pizza Hut and a Dillon's. I said, it's well lit. It's active. And he said, no, you're fine. You're safe. No one's going to mess with you there on that corner. He said, go ahead and rent it.

And when I come up, I'll rig something up to secure your door. So he took a broom and he took the broom part off of the handle and he wedged the handle in the door for me so that every night when I went into my apartment, I would wedge it so that even if somebody broke my flimsy lock, they couldn't open the door. This story really struck me. It sounded odd that Rader would tell his daughter that no one would mess with her on a busy corner, when he himself had committed murders in broad daylight on

busy streets. In my visits to the victims' homes, I was often shocked by how public the properties were. But yet again, Raider's mind doesn't work like the rest of us. When Kerry and Brian moved out of the house, Dennis invested more time and responsibility at Christ Lutheran Church. This is where he and Bob Smyzer got to really know each other. I think that for him in the church that it may have been repentance. He was trying to figure it out. I've stood at the front of the church with him when we had communion and it was just him and I in front of Pastor Clark. You know, he'd say a little prayer and always had to wait for Dennis.

I mean, he was always a little long-grabbed. Now, was that show? I don't know. Bob says that Dennis always seemed like a loner. They rarely talked about anything important. Dennis and I were never best friends. I don't know that he had one. He always felt like he was a little bit guarded. He did help my mother.

I had a fire in 95 out here on West Central, in the apartment she was living in. I bought her a hat of fire. She had a bunch of smoke damage, water damage, and called Dennis, and Dennis went out and helped haul her stuff over to my cousin's house. Bob never imagined that this man had a twisted dark side. I had not seen that component of Dennis.

I hadn't seen that component. Neither did Pastor Michael Clark, who had a close relationship with Dennis. In fact, Clark relied on Dennis for chores around the church. If one of the acolytes hadn't got there and the candles didn't get lit, he'd always turn to Dennis and say, Dennis said Dennis would do that. Their relationship was good. He was somebody who could depend on him. Looking back, Bob never would have expected that Raider was BTK.

But he felt that something big was going to happen regarding the mysterious BTK killer and soon. I just got this feeling. I want to know this guy. In 2004, Bob's premonition would begin to take shape. That year was the 30th anniversary of the Otero killings, the first BTK murder. It's pretty common for news outlets to program anniversary retrospectives for big events. In the case of unsolved murders where there's been no justice for the victims or their families, there's an added goal of potentially generating new leads. And that's what happened in Wichita.

The Wichita Eagle ran an anniversary piece and there was a show on the Otero murders on the 30th anniversary that ran in like January of 2004. And that supposedly woke my dad up. He said that he was kind of bored. The kids were grown. We were safe. We were out of the house. He had raised us well.

Nobody remembered BTK, and he wanted to terrorize the community again. On January 17, 2004, the Wichita Eagle newspaper ran an article titled BTK Case Unsolved, 30 years later. Here is an excerpt. It was a routine followed by thousands of Wichita women in the late 1970s. Upon arriving home, check the phone immediately. If the line is dead, get out. What made the case frighteningly different for city residents was the fact that the killer

sent several taunting letters about the crimes to local media. The article, written by reporter Hirsch Laviana, was a complete retrospective on BTK's many terrible deeds. Dennis saw the article. To him, it was a resume of his many accomplishments. Part of the article features Robert Beatty, who wrote a book about the hunt for BTK. In it, Beatty said that he did not think BTK would ever return. Dennis took that as a challenge.

We went on a fishing trip every year, the guys did. And Dennis never went with us. In 2004, we asked him again. Dennis said, no, he said, I can't. I can't come along this year. I got some projects I'm working on. If you're fascinated by the darker sides of humanity, join us every week on our podcast Serial Killers, where we go deep into notorious true crime cases. With significant research and careful analysis, we examine the psyche of a killer, their motives and

targets and law enforcement's pursuit to stop their spree. Follow Serial Killers wherever you get your podcasts and get new episodes every Monday. Beautiful young women full of life and dreams murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions and memories. I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news. When a young woman is murdered, a desperate search for answers takes investigators to some unexpected places. He believed it could be part of a satanic cult, I think there were many individuals present. I don't know who pulled the trigger. a long investigation stalls until someone changes their story. I like saw what they were happening.

An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow. He just saw his body just kind of collapsing. Two decades later, a new team of lawyers says their client is innocent. He did not kill her. There's no way. Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free? Are you capable of murder? I definitely am not. Did you kill her? Listen to The Real Killer Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 an innocent 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. Eight minutes pass now, and decades after a serial killer terrorized Wichita, Kansas. Cops say the case that was once cold may be warm yet again. In his letters to media organizations, the killer used the initials BTK, standing for bind, torture, and kill. They never caught that guy and 25 years of silence have followed. And today, a Wichita paper says it received another letter

claiming responsibility for an eighth victim who was killed in 1986. On March 19th, 2004, the Wichita Eagle received a new letter from someone claiming to be BTK. The newspaper received that letter, including photographs of the dead woman's body as well as her driver's license as proof that this was in fact BTK. Now he is also claiming that she is victim number 8.

He is not just responsible for killing 7 people. Now the victim number 8 is Vicki Wagerly. She was strangled back in 1986 but her case had never been solved over all these years, nor had it been connected to BTK. BTK, he is sadistic, he is psychopathic, and investigators worry about why he is suddenly making public contact. That letter was from Bill Thomas Kilman, so BTK.

It had three Polaroids of Vicki Wagerly, and it had her driver's license. My name is Kevin O'Connor. I was the deputy district attorney in Wichita, Sedgwick County, Kansas, during the Dennis Rader investigation. The experts on that say that that is him potentially giving up a memento. The Polaroids were significant because Mrs. Wagerly was in very bad condition when the medics found her. So they removed her and took her to the hospital to try to save her.

So there were no crime scene photos of her. And so this had to be the killer or somebody who had come across or had access to the killer's stash. Before now, authorities had no idea that Vicki Weckerle was connected to BTK. In exchange for his name in the paper, Rader was willing to give up his trophies. He wanted to start up a new cat and mouse game. So along with the polaroids and driver's license, he sent along a cipher. I had kept photos of Mrs. Wagerly in my dark green box in my hidey hole in the false bottom

drawer of the cabinet. The code I placed on top was a German fractional. Very simple. You line up the alphabet in columns and put your code word in the first line. It was a German fractional. Very simple. You line up the alphabet in columns and put your code word in the first line. It was a message to the author. Let Beatty know for his book. After years of hiding, BTK was back. Radord loved the attention he was getting in the news, and he wanted more. he was getting in the news and he wanted more. He felt it was time to re-emerge and claim his credit. With 30 years of material and growing older each year, I knew I needed to get it out of the house. I had for many years wanted to take my secret murders, clippings, drawings and stories and put them in a book or story format. My BTK years as a young serial killer were done.

The Eagle ran its story on BTK's return on March 25, 2004. Here is an excerpt. A serial killer who terrorized Wichita during the 1970s by committing a series of seven murders has claimed responsibility for an eighth slaying and is now probably living in Wichita, police said Wednesday. The photographs appear to be authentic, said Lieutenant Ken Landwehr. I'm 100% sure it's BTK. Of course, at Cake TV, we also reported on this letter sent to the

eagle. This morning we have more information on the letter sent to the Wichita eagle by the BTK killer. Even 30 years after BTK's first known murders, investigators are still working the case. Now police believe BTK is alive and living in Wichita, BTK's trademark, writing letters to the paper and cake TV detailing his murders and taunting police. The last known letter linked to BTK was received in 1979. What we didn't anticipate was that very soon we'd be roped into it ourselves. Again. Less than two months later, on May 4, 2004, another

letter appeared, this time at CakeTV. And in an envelope from a Thomas B. Kingman, it read, 1. A serial killer is born. 2. Dawn. 3. Fetish. 4. Fantasy world. 5. The search begins. 6. BTK's haunts. 7. PJ's. 8. MO. ID. ROO'S. 9. Hits. 10. Treasured memories. Eleven. Final curtain call. Twelve. Dusk. Thirteen. Will there be more? This was an outline for a 13-chapter book about BTK, told by him and him alone. The letter also included a word puzzle, a blacked out ID card, and a special officer's badge. For Rader, sending the letter to Cake was an obvious choice.

Cake TV was my favorite media spot. For me, they seemed to cover the BTK case very well. It's a very odd feeling to go to work every day and know that you have to feed the national media, you have to feed the local media. This is Larry Hattaberg, my dear friend and former colleague at Cake. Larry and I would lead every single newscast with the latest information on BTK. We felt like it was our responsibility to tell people everything we could about BTK.

This was an odd time in my journalism history. Susan and I were in it together, and Jeff and several of the other reporters who worked very hard on this. And we had to cover each other's butts because we didn't know where it was going. We didn't know how it was going to end. Deep down, everyone at Cake was scared. It was a time when we had to look out for each other. We had no idea if BTK would one day just walk through the station doors. One night when we were walking out of Cake, it was quarter 11 or so, and we get just past the concrete stepping into the thing, and a bicyclist is down at the end of our driveway and he comes

at us seemed like a hundred miles an hour and I thought we're in trouble. I didn't know who that guy was and he's coming at us a hundred miles an hour on that bicycle, pulls up in front of us and I thought we're going to shot, stab something. And he was just a viewer. Fear was a dominant emotion for us all. The line, will there be more at the end of BTK's letter in particular would haunt everyone at Cake TV and across Wichita. I would go to the grocery store and BTK was all that people would talk about. Enrollment and self-defense classes went way up

and people started locking their doors again. We all reverted back to the habits of the 70s. After over 20 years of peace, Wichita was once again in a panic. Here's Bob Schmeiser. When that first letter came out, some of our neighbors, some of the kids, were just petrified.

A lot of people didn't know about the seventies. There's a lot of younger people just didn't know. I think that most people thought he was dead, to be real honest with you. The day after we received BGK's letter at Cake News, the police went on air to ask for tips. Based on the information contained in this letter, we are again asking for help from the public.

We want to talk to any citizen who recalls a man seeking access to their residence by presenting identification as an employee of a school or a utility company. Kevin O'Connor says it became an all-hands-on-deck effort to find BTK. Everyone from local police to state police to federal authorities were called in. state police to federal authorities were called in. O'Connor was one of them. It was a very strange and difficult time for my family. I couldn't tell my wife. I mean, it was news that was reporting on it now. But my particular role is I couldn't tell anybody. So I might be having dinner or something and get a call and go, I gotta go. We had Wichita Police, we had the Sheriff's Department, we had FBI personnel, we had Kansas Bureau of Investigation that helped out, we even had law enforcement from the United States

Postal Service. Everybody worked together. It was a beautiful thing to see really, about how all the different agencies focused on finding the right person rather than worrying about who got credit. None of us knew how long this would go on. As it turns out, this was just the beginning. This was my fantasy. The cat and mouse game gave me an adrenaline rush or a high. It also set a stage for the police to know that a serious minotaur was in their midst. I've spotted a female that I think lives alone. Just gotta work out the details. I'm back.

Next time on Monster BTK. This is the strongest warning yet. Police have issued for Wichitans to watch out and take extra precautions after a letter was found at the Wichita Public Library early Saturday morning. They opened it up and it was a dial purported to be Nancy Fox and a description of the Nancy Fox murder. We had one instance in which a news director started to withhold one of the postcards and try to trade it for an interview with the police chief. They got a subpoena and they got a warrant without my knowledge and they went to a case

date. And so the plans were made, search warrants were drawn in advance, and then that was the time to make an arrest. 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 Wasserman 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 iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening. If you're fascinated by the darker sides of humanity, join us every week on our podcast Serial Killers, where we go deep into notorious true crime cases.

With significant research and careful analysis, we examine the psyche of a killer, their motives and targets, and law enforcement's pursuit to stop their spree. Follow Serial Killers wherever you get your podcasts, and get new episodes every Monday. Beautiful young women full of life and dreams murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions and memories. I'm Nancy Grace.

This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremorchi. And I'm Holly Frey. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.

We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Saul. Nothing to happen. 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?

Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.