Why Are Cops Still Investigating BTK Cases Twenty Years After His Arrest?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
So this next conversation here that we're having about Dennis Rader, BTK, has to live with the question the other ones don't really have, which is what the hell happened during the 13 years between January of 1991 when Dennis Rader killed Dolores Davis in Park City and March of 2004 when he started writing letters to the Wichita Eagle again? That stretch is on the official record as quiet. No confirmed murders, no taunting communications, no public BTK activity. He had all just the compliance officer in his city truck, the church council president at the lectern, the husband, the dad, the Cub Scout leader.
The standard line in every documentary on this period is that Rader stopped killing, got it under control, aged out, settled in, became the man you saw in Handcuffs on the News in 2005, the city employee with the badge. And that story might be true. It might also be incomplete. The reason I want to spend an entire episode on this, because it's the part of the case nobody fully understands, is that serial killers don't always stop. The default assumption with a man like Rader is not that the killer chose to retire. The default assumption is that the killer kept going, slower, or in different places, or in different ways. And the system missed it. So the 13 quiet years, or either 13 years of him stopping, or 13 years of nothing, investigators caught, there is a difference between those two things. This is the fourth of five conversations about Dennis Rader and the case, the country has been telling wrong for 20 years. We've already taken apart the legend he wrote about himself, the chase that didn't close, the costumes that made him invisible. Each of those had an answer at the end. This one doesn't fully. So let me walk you through what's on the record. What is suspected and what is still actually actively being investigated? Let's start with the last person Dennis Rader will kill that the file can prove. January 19th in 1991, Dolores Davis, 62 years old at the time, a widow living alone in Park City, Kansas, two miles from Dennis Rader's own house. He breaks in, he waits, he kills her, puts her body in the trunk of his own car, drives the car to a county road outside town and dumps her under a bridge. He drives home and he goes to bed. Next morning he gets up, goes to work as a compliance officer for the city of Park City, checks tall grass, he finds a junked car, keeps that job for the next 14 years. Dolores Davis' body is found February 1st in 1991 12 days later, Park City has a brief moment of public alarm and then it settles. The community has been on edge for so long that a new shock has a short half-life. The next city council meeting, the compliance officer wears his clipboard and his badge and listens like any other citizen.
Kills nobody else that the official record will ever name. Serial killers do not always stop. That's the line every expert repeats carefully when they talk about cases that go cold and stay cold. Killers age, killers find new vectors, killers get caught for something else, killers die. But the killer fully stopped killing and lived as a regular husband and father for 13 years straight is not the default explanation in any of these cases. It is one possibility, it is not the leading one, however. So what exactly happened during the quiet years? There are three theories. I'm going to walk through each one of them. Theory one, he stopped. The case for him stopping is particularly circumstantial. By the time he killed Dolores Davis, Rader was 45 By 2004, when he resurfaced, he was 59 His daughter, Carrie, was a teenager.
And then a young adult during these years. He had a job he liked. He had a church he ran. He had a city truck and a badge and a clipboard and a routine.
He also had a wife.
Paula Rader is one of the great unanswered figures of the BTKK. She lived in the same house with him for more than 30 years and by every public account did not know what he was doing. She would fall for divorce after the arrest. The marriage ended after more than three decades. What did Paula see during the silent years? She saw the husband. She did not, by her own statements and by every official account, see anything else.
What did the silent years look like day to day? He got up at six. He drove the city truck. He cited residence. He came home for dinner. He took the Cub Scout Pack to summer camp. Drove his son Brian to college. Drove his daughter Carrie to high school events. He sat on the church council. He sat on two municipal boards. He measured grass with a tape measure. He brought home a city paycheck. He went to bed in the same bed he had slept in for 20 years next to a wife who by all accounts loved him. That's what the years looked like from the outside. And there's a quieter psychological note in there worth raising. Rader, in his correspondence from prison with the forensic psychologist Dr. Katherine Ramsland, used a specific phrase for his own cycle. He called it powering down, powering up. The phrasing is his. According to Ramsland, he experienced long stretches where the urge cooled. He stayed busy in his official roles. The urge would eventually, however, return.