by Kerri Rawson
Your family is not condemning you; we’re trying to cope with our own thoughts and feelings. Strangers can write and visit or hang out with you in jail, because they are not emotionally attached. Your family is—and it’s too hard sometimes.
In one way, it’s as if you died on 2-25. You’re no longer around to share our lives, and that is something we have to deal with. We’re going through a grief process, like if you had died, because we are grieving the loss of you as a husband, father, brother, and son.
There will be no more: camping trips, fishing trips, vacations, Christmas mornings, Christmas get-togethers, walks around the school, fireworks—with you. That list could go on and on and on. You’ve lost so much, but so have we, and we need time to come to terms with that.
You’ve had these secrets, this double life, for 31 years; we’ve only had knowledge of it for three months. Give us some time and try to be patient with us. This family is not “being unChristian,” we are trying to cope and survive. This is the only way we know how.
You’re still a husband, father, brother, son, and friend. However, you lied to us, deceived us—we have been hurt more than I ever could have imagined—and you need to realize that. Life isn’t the same for you, but it’s not the same for us either.
Our lives changed forever also on 2-25, and by no choice of our own. You separated those two lives you led, never let them intersect. You seemed fine with this, and you seem to not understand why we’re all not fine with it also.
Mom, Brian, and I are trying to hold on to all the good times—all the years we shared, but even that is somewhat tainted right now, because after 12 p.m. on 2-25, that all changed.
You did things in your life that were not true to your character—unthinkable things to have been done by someone as good, trusting, moral, and loving as you are—as we knew you. You don’t seem to get what it’s like to have to try to reconcile the man we know and love, the man we looked up to, the husband, father, brother, son—with this other man.
I don’t even think it is mentally possible to do it.
I’ve tried not to get upset or angry with you in my other letters, but you seem confused about the family, seem confused about our feelings. Maybe it’s part of your mental illness, if you have one, you can’t understand why we’re not acting the same, why we are not as loving, understanding, caring as we were before 2-25.
I’m sorry if I’ve upset you but you needed to hear it from someone. Life is not hunky-dory, everything is not okay, but this family is trying to make things okay again in the only way we know how.
Things will never totally be okay again—ask Andrea and her folks about losing Michelle. Mom is trying to start her life over, Brian and I are trying to make the best of it, and everyone else is coping in the only ways they know how, but you’re going to have to be a little understanding of us also.
Maybe Pastor Mike or the psychologists can help you make sense of some of this, but it needed to be said. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. Thank you for writing and letting me know how you’re doing.
Love,
Kerri
BREAKING NEWS: GUILTY TEN TIMES OVER
MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2005
WICHITA
The BTK suspect, Dennis Rader, arrived at court this morning in Wichita, Kansas, wearing a cream-colored sports coat and a black tie. He quickly pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder, and then, in the presence of the victims’ families, proceeded to describe in horrifying detail his crimes that terrorized the Wichita community for decades.
Under direction and questioning by the judge, Rader’s statement went on for over an hour. Rader’s testimony was broadcast live on TV and was reported with frequent updates on the internet. Some say Rader’s tone was flat, monotone, and showed no emotion. At times, Rader was confused, mixing up addresses of crime scenes and even the names of victims.
Rader’s family was not in attendance, nor were they available for comment afterward. Rader’s next appearance in court is scheduled for mid-August, when he will be sentenced.1
CHAPTER 37
Truth and Justice Can Hurt
After my dad’s arrest, Wichita police detective Tim Relph questioned him. Relph said, “People will think ninety percent of him is Dennis Rader and ten percent is BTK, but it’s the other way around.”1
I’ve always argued he’s 95 percent my dad and 5 percent, I don’t know—don’t know that man. Never met him. My father himself has said, “I was a good man, who just did bad things.”2
Wherever my father falls, I’ve still not reckoned fully with who my father really is.
JUNE 27, 2005
DETROIT
We knew the guilty plea was coming. But we didn’t know my dad would be asked by the judge to describe the murders to the court. I don’t think my dad knew either.
I didn’t watch it live. Instead, I watched a few short clips of my dad speaking and read through the court transcript posted online. That’s all I could handle.
Along with the rest of the world, on the day my dad pleaded guilty, I learned many horrific details of his crimes. Unlike the rest of the world, I was able to tie many of my dad’s details to my own life. His words wreaked devastation in my life for years, though I lost some of those memories.
Self-preservation. Survival. Dissociation. Denial. Call it what you want.
There are things I knew in 2005, knew deep in my broken soul, knew in minute detail, that I forgot and wouldn’t be able to recall until I faced them again. It took the next ten years to piece together what I know now.
DECEMBER 1973
While driving Mom to work one winter morning in late 1973, Dad spotted Julie and Josie Otero leaving their home. Mom had been skittish about ice and snow-packed roads since her accident, and Dad, who had been laid off from work, would have naturally offered to drive her.
Dad stalked the Otero family for the next month and committed his first four murders while Mom was at work a few miles away. Dad also stole Joseph’s silver wristwatch and Joey’s black transistor radio.
It wasn’t until 2015 that I realized the Otero home—a sharp white bungalow with black trim and shutters and a black cast-iron railing on the porch—appeared strikingly similar to my grandparents’ home. The Otero home was near Edgemoor Park, inside of which sits the Rockwell branch of the public library, a place I sometimes visited with my dad. I can recall driving along their street but couldn’t tell you if Dad ever slowed down as we passed.
I know that when I was young, a transistor radio sat beside my dad’s bed. I still don’t know if it belonged to Joey or not.
APRIL 1974
In April 1974, after murdering Kathryn Bright and almost killing her brother, Kevin, Dad hid his bloody clothes and murder weapons in my grandparents’ white tool shed and chicken coop. He disposed of them later. I played hide-and-seek with my cousins in that shed ten years later.
Kevin gave a good description of my dad to the police, including that he was wearing an air force parka, green with fur around the hood, and a silver wristwatch with an extendable band on his left arm. I didn’t know about Kevin’s description till 2015.
I wore one of Dad’s air force shirts for Halloween when I was in high school. It was green, short-sleeved, and said Rader on the pocket, but I don’t recall seeing the parka when I was younger. Dad always wore a silver wristwatch when I was growing up, though I still don’t know if the watch I so closely associated with my dad was Joseph’s watch, nor do I know which one Kevin saw.
In 1974, a sketch based on Kevin’s description to the police ran in the Eagle. In the drawing, the suspect had a round face, small dark eyes, and a dark mustache. Dad said later he thought the drawing printed in his newspaper was “uncomfortably close to me, but no one will come for me.”3 I didn’t see the sketch till the night of my dad’s arrest.
MARCH 1977
In March 1977, Dad, carrying a briefcase and posing as a detective, showed a picture of my mom and my one-year-old brother to a li
ttle boy, asking if he had seen the boy in the picture, then followed him home. Dad knocked on the little boy’s door, spoke to his mother, Shirley Vian Relford, then forced his way into their house and murdered her after locking her three screaming children in the bathroom.
I don’t know which picture my dad showed the little boy that day.
DECEMBER 1977
In December 1977, Dad spotted Nancy Fox working at a jewelry store in the Wichita Mall. He stalked her and strangled her with his belt in her home.
I occasionally shopped or saw movies at the same mall with Dad. I remember waiting at that mall for the Oldsmobile to get new tires at Montgomery Ward when I was around ten. We walked through the parking lot over to Taco Bell for lunch, and I can recall watching Dad fill out a pile of job applications while we shared a bag of churros. He had been laid off from ADT not long before.
It wasn’t until 2015 that I shook out a memory of Dad taking off his belt and snapping it at me when I was around the age of four. I can still see him, framed by the dim light in our hallway, looming, menacing, threatening to hit me. When I remembered that, I understood what sometimes felt sinister in our home.
Not long after I recalled the memory of the belt, I spilled a jar of nails in my home. As I picked up the nails, my PTSD monster reared its ugly head. I remembered visiting the hardware store with my dad when I was little. Did Dad buy items he used for murders when I was along?
Dad had stolen some of Nancy’s jewelry, and years after his arrest, he said about that time, “I thought, no, I’m not going to give it to my wife, that’s too cruel. I thought about giving it to my daughter once. And I maybe did give it to my daughter.”4
APRIL 1985
Dad told the court on the day of his plea he left a “commitment” on Friday evening, April 27, 1985, to break into the home of our neighbor Mrs. Hedge. My dad was a Scout leader for years, and Mrs. Hedge attended the church in Park City where my brother’s pack met.
I told the FBI agent in February my father wasn’t home the night Mrs. Hedge had gone missing—he was on a Cub Scout campout with my nine-year-old brother. That was the night we had a thunderstorm and I curled up with Mom in her bed.
Dad hadn’t wanted to say openly in court he had used my brother’s campout as an alibi. But that night, Dad left the Scouts, drove to a bowling alley, sloshed some liquor in his mouth, pretended he was drunk, and took a cab to our neighborhood. He carried with him a bowling bag as a hit kit. He walked through the park behind my grandparents’ house, cut Mrs. Hedge’s phone line, and broke into her home. A home with a floor plan identical to ours.
He waited in a closet for her to come home and then strangled her. I still don’t know which closet he waited in. Which room was hers? Mine? I don’t know.
I vaguely remember seeing an old maroon bowling bag with a white stripe when I was young. I don’t know if that’s what Dad used. I also bowled at the same alley in middle school.
At my dad’s plea hearing, he told the court he wrapped Mrs. Hedge’s body in a blanket and used her car to drive her to our church. He carried her body in, dressed her up, and took Polaroids. He then drove east and discarded her body out in the country. Dad went back to the bowling alley, left her car, and drove back to the campout in his car.
I likely attended church that Sunday with my mom and likely played among the tall swaying pines after the service let out.
Mrs. Hedge’s body was found a week later, with odd, out-of-place pine needles lying nearby. From my understanding, they had inadvertently been picked up when Dad laid her body down on the ground at church.
A few weeks later, Mom scolded me for climbing the tall pines at church, and minutes after, I broke my arm running around inside. Dad carried me out of the church and placed me in the back of our silver Oldsmobile.
I realized after finally learning the truth at the plea hearing that Dad was likely upset about missing our Padre Island trip because it meant he had to stay in town while the police were looking for Mrs. Hedge’s murderer.
I learned about my dad, Mrs. Hedge, and the photos at the church at his plea hearing. Sometime during the next ten years, I suppressed that knowledge. It only came back to me after I read about it in 2015, and at the age of thirty-six, when I read about the odd pine needles found by her body, I found myself racked with grief—sobbing.
SEPTEMBER 1986
A month after my family’s vacation to Disneyland, while I was sitting in my third-grade classroom, Dad took a lunch break from ADT, disguised himself as a telephone repairman, and forced himself into Vicki Wegerle’s home. Dad murdered her while her two-year-old son cried and her older daughter was at elementary school. Dad dumped evidence in a trash can at a nearby Braum’s before returning to work.
In 2015, I found out Mrs. Wegerle volunteered as a babysitter at Saint Andrews Lutheran Church, the same place Mom and I had watched children during aerobic classes before I was old enough to attend school. I have no idea if we ever met Mrs. Wegerle or if my dad was aware of the possible connection.
JANUARY 1991
Dad said again in his plea hearing that he left a “commitment” the night he murdered Mrs. Davis in January 1991. He actually was at Trappers Rendezvous, a winter Boy Scout gathering north of Wichita with my fifteen-year-old brother. He left, parked at the church in Park City where the Scouts met, and walked a mile and a half in the cold to her home. He threw a cinder block through her sliding-glass door, murdered Mrs. Davis, used her car to move her to a fishing lake, hid items of hers under the old white shed at church, and then moved her body again using our silver Oldsmobile. After that, he returned to the Scouts.
We fished a few times at that lake tucked along I-135, and as a kid I played back by the white shed at church, where I petted horses over the barbed wire.
He used our car. The one he used to teach me how to drive. The car I accidentally hit the brakes too hard on at a yellow, sending Dad and me on a 180-degree wheel-screeching spin. The car I drove to high school with a K-State Wildcat bumper sticker that poked fun at rival University of Kansas, declaring, “Jayhawk in trunk.” I was mortified when I found out about the car and Mrs. Davis.
When Dad mentioned throwing the cinder block through Mrs. Davis’s sliding-glass door at the plea hearing, I remembered the conversation I had on the phone with Dad in 2001 about renting an apartment with a sliding-glass door. He told me it was safe.
JUNE 2005
I’d been fighting hard the past four months to not completely split apart, fighting to hold my tattered remains together. On the day of my father’s plea hearing, the weight of what he had done, the enormity of it, crushed me once more.
Dad had taunted and mocked the community of Wichita and the police with his BTK communications, but he also mocked my family’s church and my grandparents—using these beloved places as cover for his crimes.
Stalking, then breaking and entering. Torturing and violently killing ten people. Almost killing an eleventh person. Desecrating their bodies. Part of a family: a father, mother, two children. Orphaning three children. Terrorizing children in homes where their mothers were murdered. Daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, grandmothers.
Seven families were destroyed by my father, never to be the same again. Eight: his family—my family—too. My family—not his, no longer his.
No longer his.
CHAPTER 38
175 Years Is a Long Time
JULY 2005
WICHITA
On July 11, my old home was auctioned off in a circus. The police barricaded the street and folks stood around watching the show. The local and national media, potential home buyers, and curious folks trampled through my house and backyard, now emptied of everything but the appliances.
I’d been home that week, staying with my grandparents and Mom down the street. I flew out the day the satellite trucks arrived, chuckling loudly as I glanced down the street to the gathering clown show trying to score a big scoop. The national media seemed to be unaware that
the interviews they so urgently sought were sitting a block away. I was relieved to take off for Michigan a few hours later, though.
At the auction, a woman purchased our home for $30,000 more than it was worth, saying she wanted to help my mom. Later the sale stalled when lawsuits were filed, one by three of the victims’ families and one by the state of Kansas. While dealing with the lawsuits, Mom kept making payments on the old house to avoid defaulting with the bank. She also began renting a new place. None of this was her fault, of course, yet she was stuck with Dad’s costs and consequences.
On July 26, Mom was granted an emergency divorce from my father. She actually apologized to me for her divorce finalizing on my wedding anniversary. I don’t remember if I laughed or cried when she told me.
Thirty-four years, one marriage. Gone like that. Two years, one marriage, fighting and holding on against immense odds. It felt like many lifetimes had passed between my wedding day and July 26, 2005.
I wrote my dad later that day.
July 26
Dear Dad,
Hi—sorry it has been a while since I wrote.
Even though I knew what was coming the day of the plea, I was still thrown for a bit of a loop—along with most everyone else. We were told you were guilty from the first weekend, because the FBI told us you were confessing. And we had also talked to some of the Wichita Police later on, who confirmed what the FBI told us.
There was no way to refute the evidence they had, so intellectually we were able to start accepting the truth. Knowing you would be in prison the rest of your life, we were able to start dealing with this new reality early on.
Even though we understand the truth intellectually, emotionally, it’s much more difficult and confusing. I’m not sure we will ever be able to accept it on that level.
Mom’s doing good and starting to move on. Brian’s school is going well, it will not be too much longer, the fall, when he will be ready to go to fleet.
