BTK, the ‘Dork’ Serial Killer

It’s fitting, then, that Eagle reporters have written a definitive account about the case. Bind, Torture, Kill, by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly and Hurst Laviana, tells the story of Dennis Rader’s crimes and the police’s effort to apprehend him. Investigators determined Rader’s identity after a computer disk he sent to a TV station was traced to a church he attended. Rader ultimately confessed to 10 murders and is serving multiple life sentences in a state prison.The Wichita Eagle played a prominent part in the BTK story. In 1974, before Wichita knew it had a serial killer in its midst, a man called one of the newspaper’s columnists and told him where he could find information about the unsolved quadruple homicide committed months earlier. The cat-and-mouse game resumed in 2004, after the Eagle published a story about the 30th anniversary of the first murders linked to BTK, who was thought by many to be dead or incarcerated before he reemerged.

I spoke with L. Kelly, an editor at the Eagle, about the book, which is in stores now.