Kerri Rawson’s father – the BTK serial killer – is serving 10 life terms in prison, but Rawson does not think authorities should give up investigating whether he killed more people than they already know.
The clearest indication that authorities strongly suspect more victims of Dennis Rader may await discovery, came this week when police dug the ground near a Kansas home he lived in with Rawson.
Authorities said they were searching for possible evidence linking Rader to a pair of decades-old, unsolved killings, including one for which he is considered the prime suspect. And the younger of Rader’s two children made it clear she fully supported police’s efforts.
“I hope we solve these cases for these families,” Rawson said in a statement posted on social media. “They deserve all that we can give them.”
Investigations into the 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old Cynthia Kinney in Oklahoma, and the 1990 murder of Shawna Garber, 22, in Missouri, have thrust Rader and his BTK moniker – short for his “bind, torture, kill” method of brutality – back into news headlines.
Kinney, a cheerleader from the community of Pawhuska in Osage county, Oklahoma, was last seen at a laundromat. Garber was found dead about two months after she had been raped, restrained with various bindings and strangled, though her remains were not identified until 2021.
Kinney’s disappearance and Garber’s killing occurred during a 17-year period during which Rader acknowledged murdering 10 other people in the Wichita area between 1974 and 1991.
Pawhuska is about 90 miles (145km) south of Wichita and authorities there have investigated Kinney’s disappearance on and off. The office of the Osage sheriff, Eddie Virden, most recently reopened the case in December. He told the Kansas television news station KAKE that one of the reasons his agency suspects Rader may have been involved was because a bank across the street from the laundromat where Kinney was last seen was getting new alarms installed at the time.
Rader installed alarms across that region for the company now known as ADT Security Services. Virden stopped short of saying it was Rader himself who installed the alarms at the bank near where Kinney was last seen – but his office has decided to take a closer look because the ominous phrase “bad laundry day” appeared in some of Rader’s writings.
Rader has also allegedly claimed to have “fantasized about kidnapping a girl from a laundromat”, Virden said in remarks to the Kansas news station KWCH about an interview he conducted with Rader in prison.
The investigation brought Osage deputies into contact with their counterparts in other jurisdictions, including the office of the McDonald county, Missouri, sheriff Rob Evenson, whose subordinates are in charge of figuring out who bound and killed Garber.
Evenson recently suggested to the Missouri TV news station KSNF that he also has since spoken directly to Rader about Garber, though Rader denied having any involvement in her murder. Nonetheless, Evenson said he was hopeful that the investigation brought on by those revisiting Kinney’s disappearance would “find evidence that will help solve Garber’s case”.
Rader has not been shy about discussing the attention being shown to him by the Osage sheriff. He wrote to Fox News in March that a “sheriff from Oklahoma … is pursuing a case against me … regarding … Cynthia Dawn Kinney” – and that he had been questioned twice as part of the investigation.
“Yet to be arrested,” Rader also said, according to the outlet.
The stage, then, was set for Tuesday’s search by Osage investigators at the site of Rader’s former home in Park City, Kansas, which was torn down years earlier. According to the Kansas station KWCH, deputies were seen digging at the property now owned by the Park City government.
A statement from the Osage county undersheriff, Gary Upton, later announced that deputies had recovered “items of interest”, but it did not elaborate beyond saying they would be examined thoroughly for potential relevance to any investigations.
On the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, Rawson shared some additional details, writing: “Binding type items found under [the] ground in my old yard. Where I grew up. Not far from where the swing set used to be.”
Virden, in separate remarks to KAKE, said some of the items were deeply buried. He also said that a prior excavation in April had turned up other items, among them a pair of aged, ripped pantyhose.
“It was very, very clear someone had created this hole and refilled it with a different material,” Virden said. “Took some precaution to kind of protect some of those items.”
The flurry of activity came nearly two decades after Rader’s arrest in February 2005. A relatively short while before that, he had resumed communications with police and the media after going silent for years amid a public frenzy which the then-unsolved BTK killings had created.
Rader’s capture occurred after he sent a letter to the Wichita Eagle newspaper which contained photos of a 1986 strangling victim along with a copy of her missing driver’s license. Other enigmatic messages and packages followed, including a diskette which was traced to Rader’s church, where he once served as president.
Ultimately, Rader, 78, received 10 consecutive life prison terms for each murder to which he confessed. Kansas did not have the death penalty at the time of the murders. His earliest date to qualify for parole is in 2180, when he would be 235 years old.
Even if the structure of Rader’s punishment means he won’t live enough to even get the chance of an early release, his daughter pushed authorities to continue working to connect him to any other murders he had a hand in, according to a statement she recently released.
Rawson’s statement said she became aware in January that the Osage sheriff’s office was reinvestigating Kinney’s disappearance. And in June, she learned that the McDonald sheriff’s office was taking a closer look at the Garber case, prompting her to call and volunteer her assistance.
She said that McDonald deputies put her in touch with their counterparts in Osage, who flew her in to help. That assistance has involved lifting a “do not contact” order that she had successfully filed against Rader so she could meet with him in prison twice.
Rawson said authorities offered to grant Rader immunity from further prosecution in exchange for revealing whether he carried out any other violent crimes beyond the ones for which he has been convicted. She characterized the offer as an effort to give “decades-long grieving families long-sought answers”.
She told NewsNation that Rader didn’t cooperate. “We’re coming up against a man that’s playing lots of games,” Rawson remarked.
She also said that her father now moves around in a wheelchair and has “lost like seven inches” in height during his imprisonment.
As she saw it, “He’s pretty much rotting … to his core,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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