An infamous American serial killer had given himself the name by which he wanted to be called by the newspapers and the police.
As a BTK Strangler he wanted to go to the black bars of crime and "BTK" was the acronym for his perverted action (bind, torture, kill - bind, torture, kill).
Between 1974-1991, Dennis Rader tied up, tortured and killed 10 people in Kansas of the US, sending gruesome descriptions to the press and law enforcement authorities about his dark make-up.
And then it stopped suddenly. Only more than a decade later, in 2004 in particular, he started sending his creepy letters again and the following year he was caught.
It was in 2005 that his daughter, Kerri Rawson, was formally informed by his agent FBI that BTK Killer was none other than her father. His victims even included many young girls, like her.
The shock for the 26-year-old was immediate. He had never suspected anything. Kerri had grown up in a loving family and all she could remember from her childhood were moments of happiness and family warmth.
Her kind-hearted father took her for fishing and cycling and in fact they always decorated the Christmas tree together, it was a tradition for a father and daughter to do it.
In 2005, however, her world collapsed. The 26-year-old was informed that the man who had plunged Kansas into terror and mourning was her father.
The perverted serial killer who liked to tie up, torture and kill. And then to gossip about his crimes.
The image that 26-year-old Kerri had of her father was that of a good family man, of a loving father who was always there for her. That is, very far from the image of one serial killer who slaughtered people and resorted to macabre crimes.
When the FBI finally caught the perpetrator and charged him with 10 counts of first-degree murder, it meant the daughter had to see her whole life in that light again.
She was now the daughter of a serial killer. Serial killer who even had two children in his victims. How do you survive after that? How do you manage it?
Kerri Rawson was born in Wichita, the largest city in the state of Kansas, in 1978. Her idol was her father, a scout in his infancy and president of the parish church council.
In his 60s and with the obvious thinning of his hair, he was the typical American dad. And he had done well in his life. He went to university at the age of 30 and did a lot of work to live with dignity for his family, his wife, his daughter and his son.
How can Kerri not feel proud of her dad? And then, one frothy day, the door slammed. And that blow would change everything.
"It was a typical day. "I was still sleeping," he recalled interview given in 2019 to the ABC News network, “I was a substitute teacher and I had a break that day. I had already got up and I was wondering "who is this man in my apartment building?" And then he told me it was the FBI. "
He continued: "He asked me '' do you know who BTK is? ''. I said, "You mean the man wanted for murder in Kansas?" And he then said '' your father was arrested as a BTK '' "…
Rawson's parents met at church. Shortly after they met, Paula Dietz said the big "yes" to the marriage proposal and they both got married in 1971. Now we know that up to that point Rader had been passionate about them. serial killers and had shown the first signs of his perversion.
He himself confessed years later that his dark impulses had begun much earlier. "When I was in elementary school, I had some problems. Sexually, sexual fantasies. Probably more than normal. All males go through some kind of sexual fantasies. "Mine were probably weirder than most people."
Teen Rader imagined women tied up and helpless. He said so at least in some of his letters to the police. He could, however, in his adolescence contain these impulses. In 1966 he joined the Air Force and when he stopped serving in 1970, he immediately met his wife.
"Good-natured" and "polite" were called by those who knew him personally. And so did his children, Kerri and Brian. When he was about the same age as a small child, an innocent incident was to play a major role in his psychosynthesis.
One day his own mother had a small accident. THE βέρα she was caught in a spring on the couch and could not be released. This fact, to see her immobilized and helpless, gave him so much joy that he began to think about it constantly.
And we know this from another letter to the police. As we know, his sadistic tendencies first manifested in small animals. As a child, he stole clothes from his neighbors and dressed as a woman in his room.
But now his psychosexual impulses had found a way out of violence and fetishism. He would no longer keep his fantasies in his mind. Between 1974-1991, it would pass into practice. In a perverted, murderous act under the noses of his family…
BTK Killer has terrorized the people of Wichita and the surrounding area for more than 3 decades. The strangler remained free, so the danger had never passed.
Most of his crimes took place in the 1970s and 1980s, with an unexplained break between 1986-1991.
While torturing and killing people, he always had the first concern to play cat and mouse with the authorities, sending to police and local newspapers letters, drawings and poems, seeking recognition and validation of his murderous rage.
Even the fact that he gave himself the name by which he would be known shows just that, a man who wants to stand out. In whatever way he can.
His first victims were a family. Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their five children in January 1974. Later that year he would kill 21-year-old Kathryn Bright. And two more women (Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox) in 1977.
"I was a victim of a crime before I was even born," his son once said, "I was born in 1978. My father killed a young girl when my mother was three months pregnant with me. "So that makes me a victim of crime because we lived with a criminal."
His eighth victim, their neighbor Marine Hedge, was tied up, tortured and killed in April 1985. The ninth, Vicki Wegerle, died in the same horrific manner the following September.
Dolores Davis became his tenth and last victim in January 1991…
"If we had any indication that my father had hurt someone, let alone killed someone, let alone ten, we would have screamed from this door to the police station," his daughter said at one point. "We lived a normal life. We looked like a normal American family because we were a normal family. And then they came up and down. "
In an interview with CBS last year, she recalled standing in the kitchen of her house in 2005, her eyes fixed on a chocolate cake, as the FBI agent told her who he really was. πατέρας her.
"You are shocked and do not know what went so wrong with you, the room is literally getting brighter. And then it gets dark. As if it is spinning… And so you focus on things like the celementedes or a bag, because you are in a state of injury and you do not know it and you want to be caught somewhere ".
He remembers asking the agent for his ID. That's how her dad always told her to ask for proof of who she says is a stranger. After all, anyone can pretend to be someone else. "And my father came into the houses of the people doing just that."
That day in a few minutes, in one of his apartments Michigan, a typical father would be baptized in a serial killer. And as the FBI told her, one of the most notorious serial killers of modern times.
"He [the agent] was asking me about my father, about dates and things. And I was almost trying to give him an alibi. I kept telling him "my father is a good man". "The father I know is not capable of such things."
Rawson eventually wrote a book ("A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Hope, Love and Understanding") as a kind of purge, in which she tries to unravel the father behind or rather beyond the serial killer.
Her course since then has been a proper odyssey to reconcile these two characters: the father she adored and the murderer that everyone hates. He talks about a "long period that I was trying to recover":
"I had my family. I had my husband. I did psychotherapy. But you are basically alone. It is a very lonely, the worst club you can imagine that you belong to, you are the daughter of a serial killer ".
Despite the years that have passed, it seems that he is still acrobatizing between father and murder. She writes that her father was the one who taught her to be very careful with strangers. He taught her how to hold the key between her fingers when she walks alone in the dark.
"He tried very hard to protect us, but we understood that he was trying to protect us from people like him."
And she also says that she hesitated a lot until she believed that BTK was her dad. Until they made her listen to the recorded messages she was sending to the police and she recognized his voice.
And she was the one who persuaded him to confess her guilt his, bass and relieve the families of the victims from the burden of litigation. And while he initially denied it, he finally pleaded guilty on the very first day of the trial.
He was sentenced ten times to life and the 75-year-old serial killer will remain in Kansas prison for no less than 175 years. She herself, in the promotional campaign for her book, even became a target of criticism.
She knew that her father was watching her from prison, as until then (since 2012) they had developed a frequent Communicate in letters.
As she confessed in one of her interviews, she managed to find strength in her Christian faith and forgive him. This statement brought new outcry and a new campaign to tarnish it on social media.
"People need to understand that when you forgive someone, you do not say that everything they did was okay, because none of what my father did to these seven families was okay. I try to forgive what he did to my own family. I had to let it pass because it was eating me. He was killing me. "
When the journalist asked her if she finally loves her father, Kerri Rawson answered as a daughter. She said she loves the father who raised her.
"I continue to love my father today. I love the man I knew. I do not know any psychopaths. "This is not the man I met and loved."