Why Did Wichita Suspect The Wrong Husband While BTK Was Still Free?

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
All right, let me walk you through one of the harder facts about the BTK case, which is, BTK case, it's kind of hard to say anyway, which is that for 31 years, Wichita PD had pieces of Dennis Rader sitting in evidence rooms. Not theories about him, pieces. And they couldn't put the pieces together.
This is not going to be one of those episodes where I'd tell you the cops were incompetent because mostly they weren't. The 1970s and 80s did not have DNA. The agencies didn't share databases. The FBI was just starting to figure out what criminal profiling was. Wichita PD ran point on most of these cases, but Dennis Rader lived up the highway in Park City, which is a different jurisdiction technically even though it's right there, with a different chief and a different filing cabinet. So when I say the chase didn't close, I'm not saying the cops were idiots. I'm saying the system had specific moments in specific files where it blinked, and the cost of those blinks got carried by people who did not deserve to carry it. The episode we're about to walk through has one survivor, one wrong man, and a sketch of 18 years in the middle of someone else's life that nobody is ever going to give back to him. This isn't an episode about a slow procedural failure. It's an episode about what that failure cost in real human time. This is the second of five conversations about Dennis Rader. In a case, the country has been telling wrong for 20 years. The first one was about how Dennis Rader composed his own legend. The one about him being BTK, Factor X, Minotaur, all that bullshit. This one is about the chase that that legend lived inside of. And as we go through it, I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Links are in the description. And if you've not done so already, press subscribe or if you're listening or watching us, so you don't miss any of our reporting. So it's April 4th, 1974, three months after Rader killed four members of the Otero family in their own houses. Five months before he writes the engineering library letter that introduces BTK to the Wichita Eagle for the first time. Catherine Bright is 21 She works at the Coleman Camping Company in Wichita. You have a Coleman cooler, it's out of Wichita. Her brother Kevin is 19 Kevin had stayed over the night before because there was snow and he didn't want to drive home. Around noon, Catherine and Kevin walk into Catherine's house and Dennis Rader is already inside. He's been waiting. He shows them a gun. He ties them both up in separate bedrooms. He had been planning a Catherine alone visit. He had not planned for the brother. In what comes next, Rader makes a mistake that almost saves the entire case. He underestimates a 19 year old. Kevin Bright works his way out of the restraints. He fights Rader. Rader pulls his gun and shoots him in the forehead. Kevin keeps fighting. Rader shoots him again near the mouth. Kevin plays dead on the floor. Rader, by his own account, later panics. Rader goes back to Catherine and stabs her. Then he runs out the back. Kevin gets up. He's been shot twice. One bullet is still inside his head. He runs out the front, flags down a neighbor, gets driven to Wesley Medical Center. He goes into emergency surgery. Catherine arrives at the same hospital. She dies on the table during her own surgery hours later. And here's the part to actually hold on to before Kevin Bright goes under for surgery. Well, he still has one of Dennis Rader's bullets in his head. Detectives walk into the hospital room and ask him for a description of the man. He gives them one. A police sketch artist comes in. Kevin describes a face. The artist draws it 19 days later on April 23rd, 1974 The Wichita Eagle prints that sketch on the front page.
Now you don't have to take my word for how good Kevin Bright's description was. You can actually take Dennis Rader's because years later in his own confession, he said this about that sketch in his own words. He did a fairly good description of me. And I thought the picture in the newspaper was uncomfortably close to me. But no one ever came for me.
I want to say this. This is a weird personal observation that I made while living in Wichita. Just a year after Dennis Rader was caught in 2006, there's a lot of people in Wichita, Kansas that look like Dennis Rader. I don't know what it is. I don't know why it is. Have you ever lived in a town where there's just kind of a contagious look? It's not that everybody's related or anything like that, but there's just kind of a look that people have. A lot of them. And men of his age in Wichita, Kansas, for a long period of time, many of them resembled BTK. That's probably also how we got away with it for so long, because it is a very generic look, a very common look.