A Serial Killer’s Daughter

by Kerri Rawson

  As I stepped through the back door into the kitchen, I was assaulted with memories—old smells, old sounds. This had been the only home I’d known for twenty-five years except when I lived in Manhattan. It didn’t quite look like home anymore, though. It was still full of familiar items but had an air of loneliness and chaos. It was evident something had happened here; the feeling wasn’t just of a family packing to move.

  My mom, grandma, and aunt came in and set to work in the living room, settling into a routine they seemed to know well. The room was disordered: a half-full large black trash bag sat in the middle of the hardwood floor near a wooden filing cabinet from my parents’ bedroom, a kitchen chair, and a shredder.

  I should have been here weeks ago, helping.

  Mom was going through a pile of financial records going back many years, shredding most of it. She didn’t want to throw out anything with her or Dad’s name or personal information on it, so she shredded them instead. Odd things of Dad’s—like citations he’d written in Park City—kept appearing on eBay. We didn’t doubt folks would dig through our trash either.

  My aunt also said she thought the shredder was therapeutic: Dennis . . . buzz . . . whirl . . . gone.

  I left them to it and walked around slowly, wandering into the bedroom I painted lilac three years ago. It was Mom’s pretty guest room, the one Darian and I had stayed in at Christmas. Seeing her blue-and-white pitchers proudly displayed in a wooden china cabinet and the white bedspread with the delicate purple flowers made me want to bawl.

  To heck with my father.

  I stepped into my parents’ bedroom but couldn’t handle seeing my dad’s odd assortment of knickknacks set on his dresser—like the little black stone figure with the tiny, piercing red eyes he’d gotten in Asia during his air force years. It had taken on a whole other dimension of weird. I wouldn’t ever set foot in that room again.

  I crossed the hall into the southwest corner bedroom—my old room—noticing the crushed wood at the bottom of the door where Dad had kicked it in a decade ago. My old bed and dresser were still there, but Dad had mainly been using the room for storage. In the middle of the room sat a folding table with Eagles still stacked on it.

  I adored my bedroom growing up—it was a sanctuary where I’d passed countless happy hours by myself—but it had never fully belonged to just me. Mom used the fold-down desk for her typewriter when I was little, and my parents kept books on the top built-in bookshelf until I was tall enough to stand on a chair and snoop in their grown-up paperbacks. They both had always used my closets for storage; Dad even kept his handful of shotguns and hunting rifles, in their light-brown leather cases, in my back closet at times.

  Dad’s guns.

  Used mainly for target practice, the guns were not loaded when they were in the house, or that was the assumption, anyway. It was also assumed they had not been used in the commission of a crime, but now there was no way to know for sure.

  Dad had usually kept his long guns in the heater closet, which was harder to reach because it often had a cabinet pushed in front of it. I never knew where he kept his bullets, though, or his large handgun in the black case with red padded lining.

  He had gotten into gigantic trouble with Mom when I was around twelve. She had come across a green fanny pack under the desk in our living room that held a small snub-nosed revolver. It looked like one that could be stuck down a sock in an ankle holster.

  Loaded? Not loaded? No idea.

  She rightly flipped out on him, yelling, and he actually looked abashed, muttering some nonsensical explanation while he took the pack away from her.

  I’d gone target shooting with my dad once when I was in middle school, on a Rader family campout in the fall. We fired his shotgun and rifle at yellow clay targets we set in cornstalks and tossed high into the air. With his heavy handgun, we shot across a small ravine into hay bales.

  I liked the long guns better but wasn’t fond of the bruise the shotgun kicked into my shoulder. I only fired the handgun a few times because I disliked its purpose—I knew it wasn’t for hunting.

  On this day my eyes darted to my closets. I knew the guns had been removed by the police, but now I questioned my father, my memories—my life. What kind of man kept guns in his kid’s closet?

  Can’t we go back to how things were?

  They weren’t really ever that way, kid.

  I wasn’t doing a very good job of choosing keepsakes; I kept getting lost in myself. I wandered back out to the living room, where I’d stacked two large tote boxes near the door. They were full of stamps, mainly unused unique ones my dad had been collecting the past several years. There was also a large stack of many first-day issues, hand-canceled, sealed in plastic, addressed to my dad. Those were expensive compared to the price of a stamp, but they weren’t usable, nor could we sell them due to his name on them.

  I bet he had done that on purpose, thinking they would be valuable because his name was on them.

  “Hey, Mom, do you want me to leave a pile of unused stamps with you and Grandma? You won’t have to buy stamps for years!” Dad wouldn’t like us using his precious stamps to mail the utility bills, but that was exactly what we were going to do.

  How had he afforded all these stamps? My folks hardly had money to spare. They had even remortgaged the house at one point. The house was barely worth more than the mortgage owed on it. I had no idea how Mom was going to make ends meet on her small salary. Another betrayal.

  I grabbed a few empty tote boxes and carried them to my bedroom, sorting through my old stuff from high school and college.

  Keep. Keep. Trash. Trash.

  I rifled through my bookshelves and noticed a black-and-red paperback set at an angle on a lower shelf. It looked like it had been set there absentmindedly.

  Dad.

  I picked it up and turned it over; it was true crime.

  Of course.

  It wasn’t mine. I had never seen it before.

  A gray business card he’d been using for a bookmark fell out—one of my dad’s old cards from his census days.

  I turned over the business card; it had odd shorthand scribbles on it in his small, boxy handwriting.

  In January 1991, Dad murdered Mrs. Davis. Dad’s business card from 1990 had CliffsNotes for a murder he was planning—when? In 1990? 2005?

  I’m not going to survive this.

  The room started spinning, turning electric, bright red. Hazy, like I was going to pass out.

  Not this again.

  I reached for the bookshelf.

  God is my rock and my salvation, whom shall I fear?

  My now oft-repeated jumbled verse saved me. I straightened back up. This was actually happening. Dad really was a murderer. Seeing his chicken-scratch on the back of that card had done it for me—it was true.

  You’re BTK’s daughter—BTK’s your father.

  I put the card back in the book and slowly walked with the book down the hallway, past the place where we had been told Dad stored his trophies under the floor. I stopped in the living room, looking around with wary eyes. What in the heck else was still in this house?

  I told my family about the book but didn’t show them what was on the back of the card. I asked for the phone book and looked up the number for the Wichita Police Department. I hoped to reach someone from what had been called the BTK task force before Dad was arrested.

  “Hello? I found some BTK evidence.” I paced in the kitchen.

  The male voice on the other end seemed bored when he replied to me. I wasn’t the first caller, obviously.

  “What and where did I find it? Well, you see, I’m his daughter. I’m home from Michigan, helping clean out our house and I came across—”

  Now I had his attention. “Hold on, miss.”

  I spoke briefly to a detective.

  “Hey, Mom? Landwehr and Otis are on their way.”

  Within ten minutes, there was a knock at our front door. I looked through our small glass window—
like Dad taught me. Ken Landwehr and Kelly Otis were standing there.

  I unlocked the deadbolt, undid the screen door latch.

  “Hi. I’m Kerri Rawson, Dennis’s daughter. Come on in.” I looked them both in the eyes and stuck my hand out. They both grinned a bit at me. And I gave them a slight smile.

  You’re going to be okay.

  Ken was the homicide unit commander and the leader of the BTK task force. He had been out front in press conferences when BTK was in the news the previous summer. Ken was wearing a soft gray suit, with his badge and cell phone attached at his waist. He didn’t strike me as just a badge; his dark eyes were surprisingly kind—sad, even. I wondered what he had to be sad about.

  Kelly Otis, a detective who had worked tirelessly on the BTK case, wore his light-brown hair in a short buzz and struck me as grizzly bear–like in the best ways possible.

  I instantly took a liking to these two. They both looked intently at me, truly seeing me. They were kind, respectful, and stood in our living room politely listening while my mouth ran a mile a minute. I handed them the book and card, they both looked it over, and Ken casually tucked it next to his side.

  No careful handling, no crime-scene bags—he didn’t need it as evidence. I think they had just wanted to come see us and the house. (For the record, it looked as if a tornado had passed through the living room.)

  We didn’t talk for long, but I think I attempted to thank them for Dad. I might have even worded it like that—“Thanks for Dad—catching him, and all . . .”

  They got out their own business cards and scribbled their cell phone numbers on the back. “Call us anytime, day or night, if you or your family need anything.”

  They left not long after that.

  I never got a chance to see or speak to Ken again before he passed away in 2014. I carried his and Otis’s cards next to the one from the FBI in my purse for many years to come, and I later programmed Otis’s number into my cell on speed dial—just in case.

  These weren’t bad guys. They were genuinely concerned for me and my family. They had been aiding and assisting us for years, trying to catch my father. To stop him from hurting anyone else, including us. They were defending us now, saying publicly in interviews they were sure my family—including my mom—had not known what my dad was doing.1

  They were also trying to protect us from the local media. They said we didn’t want to be bothered, didn’t want to talk. They said, “Leave them be.”

  I called, asked for help, and they came flying.

  These guys are heroes.

  I felt terrible at how mad I’d been at them: the entire Wichita police force, the KBI, and FBI for taking my dad away, for using my DNA.

  I need to let my anger go.

  I didn’t like being mad at the police, but it was easier than being mad at my dad. It was too much to put on just him, so I’d spread my anger around.

  Forgive.

  I needed to forgive them for taking away my father; it was their job and they had done it well. He deserved to go away—forever. That was on him, not them.

  Maybe I could still be mad at the FBI for botching how I was notified back in February? And the media. Definitely still them. Yeah.

  CHAPTER 34

  Fight for Those You Love

  APRIL 2005

  After Landwehr and Otis left, Mom said, “Well, I think that’s enough for the day.” She was a seasoned pro at the understatement.

  It had been shocking to come across Dad’s book with his murder notes, but in light of what had already been removed from our house and his office at work, it seemed way down on the scale of insanity. I didn’t think the police missed anything else, but if they had, I wasn’t about to go play detective.

  On the night of my dad’s arrest, worried the police might ransack our home, Dad drew a map to incriminating items he had hidden. What was found included old detective magazines up in the attic and down in the crawl space, magazine clippings of women and children stored in a tote box in a closet, and a hit kit.

  The question still comes up over and over: How could we not have known who my dad was and what he was doing? Skepticism from strangers—and their insistence on vocalizing it publicly—was one of the most infuriating parts of this whole disaster. They’d say, “He kept evidence in their house, for Pete’s sake.”

  The thing is, you didn’t go rifling around in Dad’s belongings. He could cause enough grief without any of us needing to deliberately seek it out. You could even get snapped at for being in his corner of the bedroom, for “messing with things that don’t belong to you.”

  Mom and I would open Dad’s bedroom closet to hang up his work and church clothes after getting them out of the dryer, but all I ever saw were some suitcases and a couple of filing tote boxes, nothing out of the ordinary. Mom’s much-less-tidy closet, with shoes of many colors piled up, was more interesting—and the one that held the Christmas gifts, anyway.

  Dad was the one who ventured up in the attic and down in the crawl space—both of them dingy, tight areas.

  He kept the Christmas decorations up in the attic, standing the small wooden ladder in the kitchen closet and climbing halfway up into the dark hole in the ceiling with the cold draft, passing down odd-smelling boxes to us kids. When I was tall enough, I went up the ladder, curious what an attic looked like, but all I saw were white boxes marked “Xmas Deco” and a stack of dusty old magazines I glanced at, then dismissed.

  I remember Dad clearing the hole and lifting the cover above the crawl space in the kitchen closet only one time. That was the day an F-5 hit southeast Wichita and Andover in April 1991, killing seventeen people. We were riding out the warning in the hallway like always, but Dad had actually been scared that day, moving hurriedly through the house, repeating, “This one is really bad, and if it shifts tracks, we will crawl down under the house.” Mom replied, “There is no way I’m getting down there with all those spiders.” She meant it too.

  As for the tote box with the magazine clippings, I don’t know where it was found. But I would simply have to revert back to the basic rule of the house: “If it’s Dad’s, you leave it alone.”

  I scoffed when I heard that Dad had left a hit kit lying around. It sounded quite a bit like our tornado preparation box: plastic, rope, duct tape, tools. Not knowing for sure whether it was a tornado box or hit kit, or maybe both, bothered me for years, though.

  I also wondered what would have happened if any of us had stumbled across Dad’s criminal paraphernalia. If Dad had been discovered by one of us, if he felt cornered, would he have hurt us to protect himself? Would we still be alive now?

  It hasn’t escaped me that the fact my family was still alive seemed to disappoint a few of the most vocal strangers.

  Dad also kept severely incriminating items at his office—which was down the hall from a police force. I’m sure people called foul on that too. And I’m sure Dad found it funny—he had been right there under their noses. Mocking them.

  Dad was keeping items he took from his victims in his locked cabinet at work, just like he had under our floorboards. He also had binders full of original copies of his BTK communications, crime and bondage drawings and photos, and meticulous logs.

  There was no reason for any of his colleagues to question a locked cabinet though. He was a good employee, a hard worker who went the extra mile.

  He was also a con man who had snowed all of us for three decades. Mocked us.

  Best I can recall, I only came back to the house one more time to pick up what I wanted to take to Michigan. Along with my dad’s stamps, I packed his state quarter collection, his Boy Scout manual, and his guides to birds, astronomy, and hiking.

  I was fighting hard to hold on to the man I loved—how had it only been eight years since the Grand Canyon? I wanted some of his camping gear, too, but that meant having to go outside and open the small attached shed. I wasn’t sure I could muster the courage.

  The shed was where we stored gardening tools
and fishing and camping gear and where we hung Patches’s and Dudley’s leashes. I often went to the shed for those things. But now the newspaper said Dad had stored some of his BTK logbooks in there. From what I understand, he built a false back into the shed, which is maybe why the FBI asked Mom about the dryer in our kitchen; it vented out from the side of the shed. I remembered the miniature plants that were perched high on a platform covered in bright-white insulation with pink fiberglass sticking out.

  Were Dad’s logbooks—where he had written down graphic details of his seven murders from the 1970s—in that shed? Next to where I’d stood when I was tiny, learning about life from him? Concentrating really hard, I can vaguely remember three-ring binders with the ADT logo on them—red, blue, and white. I couldn’t tell you, though, if I’m recalling them from my dad’s office downtown or on the upper shelf of the desk that sat in the living room, or if I’m picturing them somewhere else—someplace odd—like the shed.

  Concentrating that hard is gonna be the death of you, kid. Go get the things you want. It’s okay. You don’t need to be afraid.

  The LORD is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?1

  Mustering my courage, I walked outside. I instantly recognized the familiar metal clink as I closed the gate behind me.

  Oh. No dog here. You don’t need to latch the gate anymore.

  I walked a few more steps to the shed, took a deep breath, and pulled on the door; it had been sticking for years. The door opened with a slight pop of air.

  Nothing scary in here. Just Dad’s tools and fishing poles.

  I grabbed the camping gear I wanted and closed the door with a shove of my hip. I took a quick glimpse of the backyard, then turned and carried my dad’s gear to the car.

  It would be ten more years before I would step foot in that backyard again, and if I’d known, I would have taken my time.

  I would have walked to each of the four towering trees I’d always loved so that I could say goodbye, especially the one whose large branches shaded the porch swing that sat on the red-brick patio my dad had laid. It was the best tree for climbing and I had spent hours lounging in it, reading.