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Crime Weekly

S3 Ep358: BTK | Letters, Lies, and the Church of Death (Part 3)

Crime Weekly

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.89.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 101 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1974, Wichita, Kansas was shaken by a series of brutal attacks inside family homes. Men, women, and children were bound, tortured, and killed by a predator who called himself BTK. For 17 years, he terrorized the community, claiming at least 10 victims and taunting police with disturbing letters that detailed his crimes. Then in 1991, the killings abruptly stopped, leaving law enforcement and the public to wonder if the killer had vanished forever.

For more than a decade, there was silence. Then in 2004, BTK resurfaced with new messages, reigniting fear in Wichita. But that renewed need for attention would ultimately be his downfall, and by the following year, detectives had identified the killer as Dennis Rader, a father of two, a Scout leader, and a trusted member of his church council. Rader was the last person anyone suspected of being a sexual sadist serial killer, but once investigators began putting all the puzzle pieces together, it became clear that Rader’s family-man persona was just a mask covering the monster beneath.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow. And I'm Derek

0:16.4

Lavasar. All right. So today we are diving into part three of Dennis Rader, the series. I will give you, as usual, a little synapsis of what we've already talked about. And then we will dive into the new stuff. But first, I want to talk about something really quick. So I do want to address and take a minute

0:42.0

to clarify something that I said during our BTK discussion last week. We were talking about,

0:48.3

you know, whether Dennis Rader was mentally ill in the way we typically think of that term. And I said, I don't believe so. I think,

0:56.8

if anything, and this hasn't been proven, it was just a speculation of anything, somebody like

1:02.2

Dennis Rader would have a personality disorder, like narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder.

1:09.2

And I do want to be clear, I think that I misspoke in a way

1:14.9

that I didn't intend to because when I said that personality disorders can't be treated or

1:21.3

cured, I wasn't really speaking about your average personality disorder like OCD or borderline personality

1:31.5

disorder, things like that. I was thinking of it in the context of Dennis Rader. I was thinking

1:37.4

of it in the context of, you know, somebody whose personality disorder focuses on, you know, control, manipulation, a lack of

1:50.0

accountability, and really not having any self-awareness. So my intention was never to stigmatize

1:56.6

anyone dealing with personality disorder. I've talked about borderline personality disorder

2:00.3

in many of my own videos on my channel. I've talked about borderline personality disorder in

2:01.1

many of my own videos on my channel. I was specifically speaking about people like Rader,

2:08.1

individuals who are deeply dangerous, unwilling to take responsibility, and they use their

2:12.6

pathology to harm others and then to make excuses for the reason they do it. So somebody with, for instance,

2:19.6

narcissistic personality disorder, the whole, one of the big trademarks of that disorder is

2:25.4

nothing's ever their fault. So you can't really manage or treat something or someone when they

2:33.0

are unwilling to acknowledge that they're the problem

2:36.0

and they have an issue. And with those specific personality disorders, the ones that are dangerous,

2:42.9

the ones that, like I said, sort of center around manipulation, control, knowingly hurting other

...

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