Why Did Wichita Cops Lie To BTK Before His Arrest?

On January 8, 2005, the Wichita Police Department received a typewritten question from the BTK Killer. Dennis Rader had left it inside an empty cereal box in the bed of a pickup truck at a Home Depot parking lot. He wanted the police to tell him, in writing, whether a floppy disk could be traced back to his computer. He asked them to be honest.

They lied.

In the fifth and final chapter of host Tony Brueski's Hidden Killers BTK investigation, the trap Lieutenant Ken Landwehr built over the eleven months of Rader's 2004 communications is walked through in detail. The thirteen-year silence Rader broke in March of 2004 when he could no longer stand being ignored. The eleven communications that followed. The Wegerle driver's license that freed Bill Wegerle by accident. The strategic decision by Landwehr to write back, politely, formally, through classified ads, instead of refusing to engage. The eleven months of feeding Dennis Rader's hunger for attention while quietly building a case.

The episode covers the classified ad that ended the case: "Rex, it will be OK." The lie Rader believed. The purple Memorex floppy disk mailed to KSAS-TV on February 16, 2005. The Microsoft Word file titled Test A.RTF whose metadata named Christ Lutheran Church and a user account named Dennis. The phone call to Pastor Michael Clark. The DNA confirmation. The arrest. The confession. The sentencing speech where Dennis Rader read the names of his confirmed victims like a roll call he was finally getting to deliver. Judge Greg Waller's ten consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole for at least one hundred seventy-five years.

This is the fifth and final uncomfortable truth of the series. He caught himself.

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.


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