Book reveals Kansas serial killer's plans for 11th victim


1 photo
Save Story
Leer en español

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The BTK serial killer planned to kill an 11th victim by hanging her upside down in her Wichita, Kansas, home, according to a new book by a professor of forensic psychology. It's a story police heard from Dennis Rader himself in 2005, but decided at the time to suppress to protect the woman.

The story was made public in "Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer," which has a scheduled release date of Sept. 6. The book was written by Katherine Ramsland, a professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania who worked with Rader on it under an agreement that proceeds from its sale goes to the victims' families trust fund.

Lust and a desire for fame and power drove Rader — he called himself BTK for "bind, torture and kill" — to murder 10 people in Wichita from 1974 to 1991, according to the book's author.

Wichita police detectives who captured Rader in 2005 told the Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/2bDqQdF) they are incensed with the pride he exhibits as he goes into detail about the tortures he planned to inflict on the 11th victim. He was arrested before he was able to carry out the murder.

"For him to reveal this information now is cruel," said Tim Relph, a former BTK task force investigator.

Relph and fellow task force investigator Kelly Otis said the book allows Rader to carry out one more act of horror.

Rader wrote three and a half pages of the book about his plans for his last kill. "This was supposed to be my opus, my grand finale, and to make it different, I would set the house on fire using propane canisters," he wrote.

He said he got into the woman's backyard and knocked on her door, but aborted his plan when a city street crew showed up unexpectedly to work outside the house. He planned to kill her the following spring, but was arrested in February 2005.

Otis said the problem with anything Rader says is that most of it is fantasy, although police found that a street crew did show up outside her house on Oct. 22, 2004.

Police said they suppressed most of the details of the planned murder for 11 years because they feared what the shock of a public revelation might do to the woman. But authorities did inform the woman after finding out that defense attorneys for Rader had hired investigators who might contact her.

"She's a pretty tough lady, but this shook her up quite a bit," Relph said.

Rader's daughter, Kerri Rawson, told the newspaper that her father cooperated on the book because he's proud of his murders. She said the book feeds his ego and his narcissism, and disputed some of the accounts of his family life in the book.

"He's a psychopath," she said. "You can't take anything he says as truth."

Ramsland said the purpose of her book was to give criminologists, forensic psychologists and others some insights into a serial killer's mind by relating the stories he tells and how he tells them.

Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photos

Most recent U.S. stories

Related topics

U.S.
The Associated Press
    KSL.com Beyond Series

    KSL Weather Forecast

    KSL Weather Forecast
    Play button