S3 Ep362: BTK | How a Floppy Disk Led to Dennis Rader’s Demise (Part 5)

Crime Weekly

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True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 126 minutes

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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 Lavasar.
0:17.4	We are back after our Thanksgiving break. Hopefully everybody had a great holiday.
0:21.9	Ours was busy. Yes, I feel like I was saying, on Crime Weekly News, I gained about eight pounds, but it's fine. We ate a lot of food. We're wearing my sweatshirt now, so I'm good to go. I feel like I'm still looking okay we're not going to put on anything too tight fitting here same i have an oversized t-shirt
0:37.5	on sweatpants that's what i live in. That's it. That's it. So we are on part five,
0:42.9	which is our final part of the Dennis Raider BTK series. How kind of get you to where we are so far?
0:50.3	So by the early 1990s, Dennis Raider was living a life that looked great from the outside.
0:55.8	He was a father raising two teenagers, a trusted member of his church, a scout leader, and a
1:00.8	compliance officer for the city. But behind that facade, he was still BTK, still fantasizing,
1:07.2	still prowling, and still keeping trophies in his hidey holes scattered across the city.
1:12.2	In 1991, Raider murdered his last known victim, 62-year-old Dolores Davis, and once again
1:19.0	returned home to play the role of husband and father while police searched for answers.
1:23.3	But after Dolores' murder, something shifted.
1:26.6	For more than a decade, Raider managed to push the black hat into the background, or so he says, relying on his family, his work, and also his elaborate bondage rituals to keep his fantasies alive and at bay.
1:38.5	Still, he never stopped watching.
1:41.0	So by the early 2000s, DNA was transforming cold case investigations and departments
1:46.0	across the country were identifying long, unknown killers. And when Raider saw that the Green
1:51.6	River killer had finally been caught, he realized his own time might be running out. So he decided
1:57.3	to wrap up all things BTK and go into retirement.
2:02.1	But then in January of 2004, 30 years after Raider killed the Otero family, remember, he's been doing this for three decades, which is an insane amount of time.
2:14.2	So after 30 years, after he killed the Otero family, a newspaper article referred to
2:19.4	BTK as a forgotten killer. I don't know if they did this intentionally. I think they probably
2:25.8	didn't do it intentionally, but this was an insult that Dennis Raider could not tolerate.
	...

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