A Serial Killer’s Daughter Read online

  Those hit singles came out in 1970, shortly before my folks met. Dad, the oldest of four brothers, was the last of them to meet Mom, the oldest of three sisters. At Christ Lutheran Church, my grandma, Dorothea, would say to my mom, Paula, “I’ve got one more son. You haven’t met Dennis yet. Just wait, he will be back home soon.”

  In the summer of 1966, Dad enlisted in the military on his own terms before the draft got him. He traveled happily for four years as an air force communication linesman to assignments that kept him out of Vietnam: Greece, Turkey, South Korea, and Okinawa, Japan.

  Dad could shimmy up a power pole effortlessly, installing antennae, wires, and whatever else he needed to rig up with a few flicks of the wrist, a bit of tinkering, and patience. He came home with stories and a box full of photos and souvenirs, his time abroad spent more like a tourist than a sergeant serving in wartime.

  Two of Dad’s brothers fought in the jungles of Vietnam: Paul as a sailor on a navy PT boat, Bill as a marine walking the bush. My uncles didn’t talk much about their tours of duty, but it was clear: they sure didn’t feel like vacations. Dad’s youngest brother, Jeff, was spared from having to go to Vietnam.

  My dad’s father, William Rader, grew up in Rader, Missouri, a town founded by my ancestors in the 1800s. His family later settled in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he and his siblings worked the family farm. In February 1943, my twenty-year-old grandpa joined the Marine Corps. Two months later, my seventeen-year-old grandma, who lived in Columbus, Kansas, rode trains out to San Diego, California, to marry her high school sweetheart on his day off from aircraft mechanic training.

  I always imagined my grandparents dancing to “Moonlight Serenade” by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, a favorite of Grandma Dorothea’s and mine, although the timeless swing tune “In the Mood” might have been more their speed. They had one night together; then it was back to the realities of World War II.

  Grandpa soon ended up in the Pacific, repairing B-25 bombers that survived enemy fire and somehow made it back to Midway Island. He came home full of stories about crash landings, airplanes full of bullet holes, and life on a two-square-mile atoll in the middle of the ocean.

  A shore leave rendezvous netted the birth of my dad nine months later in March 1945. Grandma and my infant father stayed with family in Columbus for a year until Grandpa made it back home in March 1946. Grandpa cooked in the mess on the ship as they crossed the Pacific, peeling mountains of potatoes, saying later, “It sure beat swabbin’ decks.”

  When Dad was little, my grandparents moved to the Riverview area of north Wichita for Grandpa’s new job working the graveyard shift at the Ripley plant for Kansas Gas & Electric (KG&E). The red brick smokestacks, standing tall across the Little Arkansas River, could be seen from the street where Dad’s family settled in a sharp white bungalow with black trim.

  Dad and his three younger brothers slept in bunk beds in one room, where Dad spun stories of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers as the younger ones drifted off to sleep. The boys walked to Riverview Elementary down a street lined with arching trees, and every autumn they each got a new pair of jeans Grandma patched again and again before she turned them into shorts for summer break. Growing up, the boys spent a lot of time outdoors, roughhousing, fishing, and shooting around the river.

  In 1960, Grandma took on a calmer day job as a bookkeeper for Leeker’s Family Foods. My fifteen-year-old dad soon joined her as a grocery bagger and stocker.

  Later, when we all gathered in the fall for Rader family campouts, my dad and uncles would spin story after story from their own boyhood while my cousins and I drifted toward sleep next to a blazing orange campfire. There were war stories and ghost stories, tall tales and humdingers.

  My mom’s mother, Eileen, graduated from Plainview High School in south Wichita in 1944 and went to work at Boeing. She drove a Cushman cart on the factory floor, delivering parts as B-29 bombers churned out overhead.

  My mom’s father, Palmer, grew up in WaKeeney, Kansas, and served two years in the Pacific as a radioman and Morse code operator with the army air forces. He told us, “Eggs never go bad—we ate two-year-old eggs on those troop ships and we were happy to have them.”

  After the war, Grandma had her eye on a checker at the Safeway grocery store. Granddad had his eye on her, too, declaring, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry” the first time he saw her in his checkout lane. It still seems up for debate who was chasing whom, but after a few dates, it was all settled. They married three months later in 1946.

  Mom was born in 1948, lived in Plainview her first few years, then moved to Park City, a northern suburb of Wichita, growing up three miles from Dad. As teenagers, Mom and her sisters, Sharon and Donna, helped out at my grandparents’ bakery in Wichita and ran the Park City Pool with Grandma.

  In August 1970, Dad, twenty-five, was just back from the air force. He was handsome and sleek in his dress blues, his dark hazel-green eyes crinkling when he smiled. Mom, twenty-two, was a long-legged looker in a go-go dress with dark brown eyes and cropped dark brown hair. They caught each other’s eye while standing in the fellowship hall after church let out.

  Mom would tell me, “When you know, you know.”

  Dad would say, “It was love at first sight, plus she drove a hot car.”

  Dad lived with his folks the next several months, attended Butler Community College, and worked part-time at Leeker’s. Mom lived with her folks and worked as a secretary at the Veterans Administration.

  My parents got engaged shortly after Christmas 1970, out in the middle of the frozen Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. Two months later, Mom’s red ’66 Chevelle, nicknamed Big Red, slid on an icy bridge a block from church and slammed into another vehicle. Mom broke her back, and Dad rushed to her side at Wesley Hospital, helping her through the recovery.

  In May 1971, friends and family gathered for my parents’ wedding. Mom’s sisters stood up with her, wearing sky-blue dresses and matching pillbox hats, holding white daisies. Dad’s brothers stood up with him, wearing ties and suit coats.

  Standing before the altar in the church where they met, my mom’s aunt sang “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Dad wore a white suit coat and flubbed the traditional vow of faithfulness, saying, “I plight me your troth.” After hearing the story so many times, I still don’t know the right way to say it. Mom recited her vows perfectly, standing ramrod straight, her high-collared white lace dress hiding a back brace.

  On the evening my parents wed, the sky grew dark and their wedding cake with blue and yellow flowers almost toppled over in the parking lot. The cake was saved from disaster and during the reception, Dad, with a mischievous glint in his eye, fed Mom too big of a bite. Mom, with bright, smiling eyes, politely covered her mouth with her hand and then returned the favor.

  Standing in the doorway of the church, Dad and Mom bid farewell to their friends and family with a wave. Then, hand in hand, they ran laughing through a shower of rice and rain out to Big Red, decorated with flowing streamers, trailing cans, and handwritten signs in white shoe polish, wishing love, luck, and happily ever after.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hope for Happily Ever After

  JUNE 1971

  After their honeymoon, my folks bought a nine-hundred-squarefoot, three-bedroom ranch—white with yellow trim—that was a block away from Mom’s parents. A mid-1950s brick home, it had an identical floor plan to the house Mom grew up in.

  Well on their way to the American dream, my parents tucked away their bone-white wedding china in paper-lined cabinets and bought kitchen appliances in the shade of avocado. Mom hung brown-and-cream wallpaper in their kitchen and sewed light-blue curtains out of durable fabric for their big picture window in the living room. Blue pitchers, handed down from Dad’s grandmother, Carrie, decorated end tables; records were stacked together next to Dad’s turntable. Mom was glad to have her parents so close and wistfully hoped to have children toddling around on her hardwood floors.

  While fin
ishing college, Dad took a second-shift plant job at the Coleman Company. He quit after graduating with an associate’s degree in electronics from Butler in the summer of 1972. He started at the Cessna Aircraft Company in early 1973, working in the electrical tool-and-die section, a job he enjoyed and that fit his growing skill set. Mom kept working at the VA as a secretary, her nimble hands flying over her typewriter and taking dictation in precise shorthand that would require an expert code breaker to crack.

  After work, Angelo’s became a favorite place to split a pizza, followed by a movie at the Crest. The first and last scary movie Mom saw with Dad was a rescreening of the 1967 film Wait Until Dark. I can imagine Mom, holding tight on to Dad’s arm, saying firmly, “From now on, I pick the movie.”

  Dad also learned Mom wasn’t into camping after a night trying to weather a thunderstorm at Wilson Lake. Mom tells the story of huddling together in an army-green canvas tent that smelled like “a mangy ol’ mutt,” when a park ranger shone a flashlight on them, warning of an approaching tornado. She still says about that night, “I told your dad that was it. He was on his own to camp from then on.”

  I grew up on these stories: how my parents met, married, and spent their early, happy life together. These stories became canon in my life—solid ground I would anchor my own beliefs of the world on. I wish I could continue telling just these stories, right up to the ever-after. It’s what I was expecting, depending on.

  Dad desired his “good side, white hat life,” but he also wanted his “dark side, black hat life.”1 He went to great lengths over the next three decades to maintain these two lives next to each other, hiding his second life from everyone. Eventually, though, his second life caught up with his first, exposing its own terrible truths.

  Dad didn’t just decide one day to commit murder. The decision would build in him, growing over the course of his first twenty-nine years of life. After he was arrested, Dad spoke of hidden deviant behavior dating back to his early years: spying, stalking, breaking and entering, theft, animal torture. He told of an immense fantasy world built around violence, bondage, and sadism. He read about notorious criminals and idolized them—adding their narcissistic, murderous actions to his own evil ideals. He twisted all this together in his head: fact, fiction, half truths, downright lies. And out of it came his “Factor-X.”2

  He thought he could control it, stop it at any time, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  NOVEMBER 1973

  In the fall of 1973, Dad was laid off from the Cessna Aircraft Company. He liked his job. It paid well and losing it started a downward spiral within him that would lead to immense outward devastation. Angry, idle, and antsy, he escalated, breaking into area homes and attempting to kidnap a woman at the Twin Lakes Mall.3

  In January 1974, Dad murdered Joseph and Julie Otero and their two youngest children, Josie, age eleven, and Joey, age nine. The three older Otero children found their family’s bodies after walking home from school. Dad then became a wanted man who lived every day of the next thirty-one years as a betrayal—as a lie.

  After the Otero murders Dad started classes at Wichita State University (WSU), pursuing a bachelor’s degree in administration of justice. Studying law enforcement, Dad kept his own ironic, nefarious agenda hidden. Attending college became a cover story for Dad at times. He’d tell Mom he was headed to the campus library to study—while he was actually out trolling for victims.

  In April 1974, Dad murdered Kathryn Bright, a twenty-one-year-old, who lived near the WSU campus, and he fought with her nineteen-year-old brother, Kevin, shooting and almost killing him.

  That fall, Dad, seeking notoriety, contacted the Wichita Eagle, claiming responsibility for the Otero murders and calling himself BTK, for bind, torture, and kill. He also started working at ADT installing security systems, capitalizing on the fear and opportunity he created, and giving himself access and cover because no one pays attention to utility vans and work uniforms. Working days and attending evening classes, Dad was gone long hours and late nights. To get him through college, Mom often typed and sometimes even helped write his thesis papers.

  As my father studied justice and worked in security, he stole those very things from the Otero and Bright families. He also grew overprotective of his own family. Dad’s self-induced twisted insanity of overcaution and suspicion permeated my home for the next decades. We never had a security system, but we did have ADT stickers on the doors and thin metallic tape outlining our back door’s window—which Dad told me was enough to fool the bad guys. After his arrest, Dad said about this time, “I became overly defensive. I watched the road outside and had a loaded gun ready. I made sure our locked windows were secure, probably like everyone else in Wichita.”4

  My green-eyed, blond-haired brother, Brian, arrived on a July evening in 1975. After struggling for three years to conceive, my folks were thrilled to be parents. Mom named Brian after the pro football player Brian Piccolo, who fought a cancer diagnosis in the 1960s and who James Caan played in the 1971 tearjerker Brian’s Song. A few weeks later, my brother was baptized at the wooden baptismal font that stood in the same place my parents had wed four years before. My parents settled into family life as Mom left the VA to stay home with him.

  Decades later, Dad commented about the gap in murders that began after my brother’s birth, saying, “We were now a family. With a job and a baby, I got busy.”5 Dad continued to stalk potential victims, though, and in March 1977, Dad murdered Shirley Vian Relford, a mom to three young children. In December 1977, when Mom was three months pregnant with me, Dad murdered twenty-five-year-old Nancy Fox. My dad was raising children, yet he chose to take another mother away from her own children. He was about to have a daughter yet took two more daughters away from their families.

  I was born early in the morning in June 1978 and baptized not long after. My name came from Dad’s grandma, Carrie, and I shared his middle name, Lynn.

  Dad continued to play games with the police and media as BTK—leaving my hometown and my mom fearful. Then he went silent, ceasing communication the day after my first birthday. He graduated from WSU and said after his arrest, “I got busy, being a family man, raising kids.”6

  But his Factor-X wasn’t ever that far from him.

  NEWS BULLETIN

  JUNE 1979

  Today, the man who calls himself BTK—for Bind, Torture, Kill—dropped off a letter at a post office in downtown Wichita.

  At 4:00 a.m., a man approached a clerk who was arriving to work. He handed her a letter and told her to put it in the box for KAKE, a local TV station. The clerk reported the man was around the age of thirty, clean-shaven, with his hair cropped short above his ears. He was in an odd outfit for summer, wearing a jean jacket, jeans, and gloves.1

  BTK is wanted for seven murders dating back to 1974.

  If you have seen this man, please contact the authorities immediately.

  CHAPTER 4

  Weave Among the Pines Like a Tomboy

  MAY 1980

  Patches, a wiggly orange-and-white Brittany spaniel puppy, arrived on Mother’s Day when I was near the age of two. She followed my dad all over our yard with me trailing right behind, and Dad would work to keep us both out of trouble. He’d lift me up, dust off my knees, and brush my face with his dark mustache, making me squeal, “Daddy, you’re bristly.”

  In the mornings, I’d stand in our hallway, peering into the bathroom, watching Dad shave off his overnight whiskers. Sometimes, seemingly abruptly, he would shave off his mustache or grow out his beard, and when I was very little, I’d wonder where my father had gone.

  When Dad’s eyes were the color of grass in the spring, it was easy to tuck up next to him while he answered my myriad questions. But as early as I can remember, being around Dad could be complicated. When his eyes turned dark—stormy like the unsettled sea—it was wise to stay clear till he was himself again.

  It could be hard to know who was coming home at six o’clock, who was driving up in
the white van with the red ladders and the letters ADT on the side. When Dad was gruff and sullen, it was best to have your shoes put away and to mind your p’s and q’s. After my dad’s arrest, my mom said, “Near Dad, it could often feel like we had to walk on eggshells.”

  Mom knew how to gently send Dad along, saying, “I’ll clean up dinner. Why don’t you go take care of the outside chores? Maybe Patches would like to go on a walk. Weather looks nice this weekend, might be a good time to fish.”

  I learned at an early age that if you could get Dad outside, his shoulders would straighten, the haunted look in his eyes would fade, and he would just be Dad again.

  When I was around the age of three, Dad temporarily turned my corner bedroom into a greenhouse. Over the winter, I helped Dad pick out seeds from the Burpee’s catalog, and in the spring, he set mint-green trays with speckled soil under fluorescent lights in my room. He rigged smaller lights in the attached shed, where I stood on my tiptoes on his small wooden ladder, peering into the trays to see what had sprung to life.

  As Dad’s garden continued to expand in one corner of our yard, he drew up blueprints for a treehouse in the opposite corner. On top of four redwood poles, a wooden platform slowly emerged, and we kids dangled our feet off it as Dad added walls and windows. Once it was tall enough for even Dad to stand in, he topped it with a slanted shingle roof, propped a tall wooden ladder in the doorway, and turned it over to my brother and me.

  I often tagged along with Dad on Saturday mornings to Payless Cashways, wandering up and down the aisles of tools, gadgets, and good-smelling lumber. Dad would select what he needed, lay it in the back of the car, and tie a red warning flag off the end. We’d drive home and get to work.

  MAY 1982

  When I was almost four, my dad’s parents—Grandpa Bill and Grandma Dorothea—arrived at our home, towing a small yellow-and-white trailer with their large, gold Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. We loaded the car up in the faint gray predawn light and headed south.