Why Did The Press Print BTK's Own Self-Made Nickname For 30 Years?

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
All right. BTK, Dennis Rader, the Wichita Church guy, the Cub Scout leader who got himself caught in 2005 because he asked the cops in writing if a floppy disk could be traced.
You know him. What you've been told about him for the last 20 years is that he was a force of nature, a criminal mastermind in a city, compliance uniform driven by something he called Factor X. The story has been on every documentary about him since 1978, when the first typed letters and the words Factor X went to a local television station in Wichita, Kansas. It's been printed in every book. It's been repeated in every podcast. It has been more or less unchallenged. The version, this mythical criminal mastermind for almost 50 years. And the problem with that story of the mastermind, the reason I want to spend five episodes taking it apart this week, starting with this one, is that Dennis Rader, he's the one who came up with Factor X. He coined the phrase. He coined his own nickname. He mailed letters to the Wichita Eagle and Cake TV for 30 years, telling them what frame to use, what name to use, what kind of killer to make him into. He wrote his own narrative. The mythology of BTK is the mythology Dennis Rader composed about Dennis Rader, sitting at a typewriter in his own kitchen while his wife slept down the hall. And we bought it. The press bought it. The cops who finally caught him had spent decades fighting a man who had also been the chief author of their official theory of him.
This is the first conversation we're having in this series of five.
And I want you to give me your thoughts on this story and the angles that were going down, the lanes we're going to explore here in the BTK story in the comment section on our sub stack in YouTube. The links are in the description.
So this first conversation, what I want to do is set his version of this story down and pick up the actual file. Because once you read what's in the actual file, the whole legend stops looking like a story about a force of evil and starts looking like what it always was, a vain man's marketing plan.
Yeah, it's really what it comes down to.
The next four episodes and this one are going to be about the chase. The cops never quite closed in on him on to the 70s and 80s, the costumes, the day jobs, the church positions, the Cub Scout pack that made him invisible. The 13 year silence between his last confirmed kill in 1991 and his resurfacing in 2004 In the moment in early 2005, when he caught himself with a floppy disk, he was vain enough to send it with TV station. But before we get to any of that, you need to understand the room he wrote his own legend in, because everything that comes after, the chase, the costumes, the silence, the catch, all of it makes more sense once you've taken his version of himself apart. So February 10th, 1978, Park City, Kansas, to suburb that's just north of Wichita. I actually used to live there for a short period of time. Well, about 10 years really. Dennis Rader is sitting at his typewriter in his own kitchen. He's 32 years old. He has a wife named Paula. He has a young son named Bryan. He's enrolled at Wichita State University, working towards a degree.
Let's sit with this for a second. The administration of justice, that's what he's studying. By day, he's an alarm installer for ADT security systems in Wichita. He drives a Mark-Van. He has business cards. The people whose houses he services believe he's making them safer. It's funny, when I first moved to the Wichita area around 2006, BTK had just been caught. But one of the first things I did, and I didn't know a lot about the BTK story, other than the surface information, was I got an alarm system, an ADT alarm system, put into my house in Park City, Kansas. It's kind of crazy. It's funny. There's a lot that converges on this city of Park City. There's actually one of our contributors on our show here, Jennifer Coffendaff, a retired FBI Special Agent. She's from Park City too. I mean, never crossed paths there years ago, but it's amazing the amount of people who came out of this little tiny town. I mean, it's like a village almost, just north of Wichita.
It's an interesting place.
He's killed seven people by this point, four members of the Otero family in their own house in January 1974 Catherine Bright, 21 years old, in April of that same year. Shirley Vane, in March of 1977, with her three children, home in the next room and surviving Nancy Fox and her duplex three weeks before Christmas of 1977 The Wichita police have a composite sketch based on the survivor's description. They have a typewritten letter hidden in the library book in October of 1974, in which he confessed to the Oteros and named himself BTK for the first time. They don't have his name. That night, in his own kitchen, while his wife and son are in the house with him, Dennis Rader sits down at his typewriter and writes a letter to KAKE TV. In Wichita, they just call it Cake TV. I know, nothing says News You Can Trust Like Cake.