He appeared to be just another god-fearing churchgoer, father, and family man. He wasn’t.
At the age of twenty-one, Dennis Radar, after dropping out of Kansas Wesleyan University, joined the United States Air Force. On his application, he neglected to mention that while in his teens he reveled in killing small cats and dogs by hanging them until their necks stretched and their legs stopped kicking.
That was just one of his “quirks”.
To any of his friends and family, he was not overly sociable at school, yet was polite, quiet, a nice guy who fitted in.
He stayed in the Air Force from 1966 to 1970, achieving the rank of Sargeant and being well respected by his men and superiors. Upon leaving, he went back to Kansas, got a job at an Independent Grocers of Australia Superstore, and got married at the age of 26 in 1971 to Paula Dietz.
Everything was normal. But it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.
The decline started the following year when he lost his job, had too much time on his hands, and his feelings of depression began to lead him towards a dark place filled with fantasies of blood and murder.
On January 15 1974 he selected his first victims, breaking into their home through the back door, and forcing them upstairs at gunpoint. Once in the bedroom, he tied up Joseph Otero, his wife, Julie, and their two young children aged 9 and 11.
He hadn’t initially intended to kill them all, but the unexpectedness of Joseph Otero being present forced him to change his plans. Even so, he may not have gone through with it if it hadn’t suddenly dawned on him that he didn’t have a mask on.
Not being a very experienced killer, it took a couple of attempts to kill the parents as the bags he tied over their heads didn’t work perfectly the first time, and he had to resort to strangling them one at a time.
The son he suffocated with a bag over his head, while the elder daughter he took down to the basement and hung her, indulging in his sexual fantasies after she was dead.
In April, he broke into another apartment and strangled then stabbed to death Kathryn Bright and then shot her brother twice when he turned up unexpectedly. Amazingly, the brother survived but was unable to give an accurate description to the police so Radar remained free to kill again.
And kill again he did.
Over the next three years, he killed 2 more women, and it was at this point, that he began taunting the police, seeking notoriety even after just having his daughter in 1978.
In letters he sent to a local radio station he suggested his own serial killer’s name, BTK. It stood for Bind, Torture, Kill, basically what he did to his victims.
His new moniker was flashed across the papers, whispered in fear on the news channels, and made him famous, a target for the police.
He loved it and secretly laughed at the ineptitude of law enforcement as they failed to catch him as he continued to kill and dote on his daughter at the same time.
He took her fishing, celebrated Christmas with her and his wife, laughed, and loved like any other family man.
As a Boy Scout leader, he embarked on trips and influenced young minds and for the Christ Lutheran Church where he worshipped regularly, he became the president of the church council.
It was in April 1985 that he murdered his neighbor, 53-year-old, Marine Hedge, and took her corpse to his church where he staged her body in various stages of bondage and took pictures for his scrapbook.
Afterward, he dumped her body in a ditch, thought nothing more of it as he continued to attend the church as usual with his family, singing praises to the Lord. Dennis Radar appeared to be a pillar of the community, a respected family man, and not even those closest to him suspected that he was the BTK killer, not even when he killed again the following year.
Another quirk his congregation was unaware of, apart from the fact that they had a serial killer in their midst, was that he had a penchant for dressing up in women’s clothing, even going as far as tying himself up and taking pictures of himself, pretending to be his victims.
Perhaps because of this role-playing, incredibly bizarre as it was, his urges to kill were satisfied and it wasn’t until 1991 that he killed again, his final victim to be was Dolores E. Davis.
Not because Radar was caught, but because he took a break to attend his daughter’s graduation, and devote himself to family and church matters.
As for the police, they had no clue who the BTK serial killer was and, in the end, had to consign his case to the cold case file, unsolved but not forgotten.
And that’s where it would have ended, Dennis Radar fading into obscurity, his fame etched into history as the killer who had gotten away with 10 murders. That’s where it would have ended if…
…The Wichita Eagle hadn’t received a letter in March 2004 confessing to the murder of Vicki Wegerle in 1986
…KAKE, a television station in Wichita, hadn’t received a letter in May with fake details of the BTK killer.
Dennis Radar was taunting the police. But in doing so he was poking the sleeping bear.
No longer was his case cold. The investigation was reenergized, with further packages with false clues planted where they would be discovered after he alerted the authorities to their whereabouts.
His sheer audacity motivated the police to go into overdrive mode. They conducted DNA matches on any samples gathered from the sites where the victims were found, no matter how inconsequential they at first appeared.
Hours of surveillance camera footage taken from around the areas where the packages were left were pored over. They wanted to get him badly, wanted to wipe the smirk off his face that they knew was there.
They had loads of data, hours of footage — that led nowhere and to no one.
But they were patient. They knew that all the BTK killer had to do was make one small mistake and they would get him. The good news, if there was any, was that while he was toying with them at least he wasn’t out there killing anyone.
That was about to change.
After more than a decade, Dennis Radar was targeting his next victim, stalking her, intending to strike in October.
But then a package that he had left in a truck went missing, annoying Radar so much that he had to direct the police to the area where he had left it, and therefore delaying his kill.
The package was eventually recovered by the police from a trash bin where it had been discarded by the truck owner, a doll bound and gagged inside.
Inadvertently, Radar had just helped out the investigators.
He was unaware that there was a camera overlooking the parking area and that there was now a video available for the authorities to study around the date the package had been dropped off.
They scrutinized every second, noted down every car and person on the footage, watched as an unrecognizable figure dropped the parcel off then sauntered back to his black Jeep Cherokee.
Unfortunately, the vehicle registration plate was unreadable and couldn’t be traced back to him. That was in January 2005. In February, Dennis Radar, the elusive BTK serial killer, was going to make a simple mistake that was going to get him caught.
A floppy disc that he mailed to a local TV station to show just how much smarter he was than the police, was forensically examined, the police hopeful that a clue to the sender’s identity could be found.
When they found the clue they couldn’t believe their luck.
There was some deleted information on the disc that they managed to retrieve from the embedded metadata. That bit of data mentioned the Christ Lutheran Church, and the last document edited was done by a church-goer called Dennis.
Further investigation revealed Radar’s last name, his position at the church, and that he owned a black Jeep Cherokee.
A DNA test taken from his daughter’s recent pap smear at her university confirmed that he was their man.
His arrest happened on February 25, 2005, and the FBI, Wichita Police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation swooped on his home, his workplace, his church and gathered up all the evidence they could find.
It was all ultimately enough for Dennis Radar to confess to his crimes and get handed a damning verdict of 10 consecutive life sentences when he had his day in court.
His wife divorced him within months of his arrest. His daughter found it hard to reconcile that the father who had taken her on multiple fishing trips was a heartless killer. His congregation was appalled that someone they had prayed next to, had looked up to, had been a monster in their midst all along.
The most disconcerting thing about Dennis Radar was that he looked and even behaved like your average church-going family man.
He looked harmless, friendly even, but what lurked behind his disarming smile, behind his glasses, was the mind of a psychopath who couldn’t understand empathy, couldn’t feel remorse for the 10 victims he had bound, tortured, and killed as the BTK Strangler.