Why Did Wichita Cops Lie To BTK Before His Arrest?

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
He held his story for 31 years. He gave it away in a Microsoft Word document. Okay, so we end where Dennis Rader's run ended, which is at his own typewriter, or computer, January of 2005, with a question for the Wichita Police Department. The question is whether a floppy disk can be traced back to his computer. He's typed it and printed it. He's put it inside an empty cereal box. He's left the cereal box in the bed of a pickup truck in a Home Depot parking lot because in his previous communication he had told the police where to look. He has signed it with his self-given initials. Be honest, he writes.
Like I said, this man's not a genius. Be honest. Come on, we're buddies, you know? We go way back. That's the delusion of this crooked old man, this pathetic dog catcher, has this delusion that he's buddies with the police department because they haven't caught him yet. It's a big cat and mouse chase. Ha ha! This guy's insane. He still is insane. Dennis Rader still writes to people. Well, when he still could write. I don't know if he's writing to this moment in time, but I know as recent as just a few years ago, this guy actively communicates with journalists, former journalists and other people that he initially communicated with back in the day. Pen pals with a lot of folks. And I can tell you, Dennis Rader still believes his own myth.
One thousand percent. Are there more puzzles he wanted people to solve? I believe there are. Time will tell if they ever will be with his declining health, age and ability to communicate and cognitive abilities. The clock may have already run out, quite honestly.
Unless what's left behind can lead to answers.
But that's a whole other chapter for hopefully the future.
Back to the past, back to the moment before.
B.T.K.'s streak of ignorant luck-conningness runs out. Be honest. Well, the Wichita PD answered him. The answer is a lie. Whoa!
His question was, can you trace a floppy disk to a source if it was sent through a computer? They reply, no, nope. Can't do that, Dennis, nope. Knowing full well you can. Dennis got caught on metadata. Four days later, Dennis Rader mails a purple Memorex floppy disk to a local TV station. He thinks the lie is true. He thinks he is, as he has been for 30 years, so the smarter one in the room. He's wrong. And the case ends in a phone call to a Lutheran Church.
He did it on the church computer. This is our fifth and last of five conversations about Dennis Rader. At a case, the country has been telling wrong for 20 years. We've taken apart the legend he wrote about himself. We've walked the chase, the cops never quite closed, and the case they never were able to get to the end to till Dennis ended it himself.
We've laid out the official roles that made him invisible. We've sat with a 13-year silence. We still don't fully understand. This one, this chapter, is about the part of the story he handed in voluntarily, and the lieutenant in Wichita who led him.
If you stand in the four previous conversations, if you stand up side by side, and one piece is missing, he built his own mythology, but mythology doesn't catch you. The police missed pieces, but missing pieces doesn't catch you either. The costumes works until they didn't. The quiet ears suggested he could have stayed quiet, and he didn't. Why didn't he stay quiet? Because silence was the worst possible thing for the man Dennis Rader had built his whole inner life around being. Silence meant the world wasn't talking about him. Silence meant the BTK brand he had spent thirty years building was being forgotten. Silence meant somebody else somewhere else was getting the coverage he believed belonged to him. He could not tolerate being ignored. That instinct will in 2023 drive him to write to a national newspaper from prison about another arrested killer just to compare himself to the new headline. We'll let that letter alone. The instinct matters more than any particular use of it.
And as we go through this, your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube, links are in the description. In 2004, that same instinct, it does something else. It drives him out of his 13-year silence. He sits down at the typewriter, picks up the keys to his old story, and he starts typing. March of 2004, the Wichita Eagle publishes a 13th anniversary article on the Otero family killings and then they had a parade through town with the rope snub kidding. That's just, it's, you know, I get it's news and you do anniversary. This is a weird anniversaries type article. But look, I get it. I lived in Wichita. This was a very traumatic thing for that community. And it is something that people look back on almost in mystery and silence and survival and a lot of emotions there.