Trapping the BTK Killer

0:09I met Vicki in high school. It was like we were just meant to be. We had so much in common.

0:19That was my favorite song and to this day I'll crank it up in the car if I hear it. It just says something about, I guess, kind of like the way I thought of her maybe. There was never, never a doubt in my mind how much my mom and my dad loved us.

0:41My name is Bill Wagerly. I was coming home for lunch. I was working on that side of town. I figured why hurry and get home for lunch. I found Brandon by himself I thought. That was unusual for her not to be there with him. I kind of looked around I think for her and didn't find her. In normal life you don't expect something bad to be happening. She died by strangulation. There were a number of ligature marks around her neck. Why? Why her? You know, what did she do? What did we do? He's there for 50 minutes, probably before he discovers the body. There were definitely police officers that thought that Bill Wagerly killed his wife.

1:30Could that person be involved? You know, who else would have killed the wife? Did they ask you to take a polygraph? Yeah, I took a polygraph for them, and I also took one privately. And did that make them less suspicious? No, it made them more suspicious. Why? I failed both of them. So Bill Wegerly, for 18 years, had to live under the cloud of suspicion that he killed his wife? I don't think they put two and two together that this had anything to do with a serial killer. This is BTK. This is him. he killed my mom. Out of the Shadows.

2:14For three decades, Wichita, Kansas has lived with a murder mystery. Ten victims strangled without mercy and a faceless killer who called himself BTK. I've dealt with very, very cold-blooded killers, but none who have such a tremendous memory over this many years. I've never dealt with anybody like this. Hello, everybody. District Attorney Nola Folston is prosecuting Dennis Rader, the man behind the initials which stand for bind, torture, and kill. We have torture devices. He commented to me at one point, I'm sorry, I know this is a human being, but I'm a monster. You'll learn how Rader became that killer and the untold story of one family's horrific encounter with BTK.

3:04Bill Wagerly was victimized and tortured in this whole episode from the day that his wife died. The day that she was killed, it not only killed him, it put him under suspicion for a long period of time. Bill Waggerly and his children have been silent about what happened to them for 19 years. They speak for the first time.

3:35I remember seeing her across the hallway in school and just thinking, you know, wow. Bill met his wife Vicki when they were 16. She was just tall and slender and attractive, well kept. I mean, she was quiet. And you got married when? When we were 17. Young. Yeah. Sometimes it seemed like they were just, you know, two kids in love. When they were just 18, Bill and Vicki had a daughter, Stephanie. What do you remember of your mom? To me, it seemed like she was always happy and bubbly and, you know, easy going. Life was good. Eight years later, a son, Brandon, was born. My life revolved around her and her life revolved around the kids and me and her family too.

4:28Those were the important things to us. Then came a day so surreal that even 19 years later, Bill Wegerly still seems in shock. When was the last time you saw Vicki? when I left for work that morning, probably about 8 o 'clock. The date, September 16th, 1986. And I just remember kissing her goodbye, which normally I didn't take the time to do that, but that morning I did. While Bill was at work and Stephanie at school, Vicki was home. At one point that morning, she was heard playing the piano. She was also taking care of Brandon, who was then two. I was coming home for lunch just to see her and Brandon.

5:20I passed my car on my way home. Did you know it was your car? Yeah, I was sure it was my car. And could you see who was driving it? I saw a person driving it, yes. But not your wife? No. What happened when you got home? I found Brandon sitting on the floor by himself. Were you worried at that moment? I was concerned, yeah. I didn't know exactly what was going on, why Brandon would be there by himself. That's very unusual. What did you do at that point? I eventually went into the bedroom and discovered her on the floor. Vicki had been tied up and strangled. Then you start to put things together that the person that was in my car probably, I'm sure, did this, and I immediately called 911.

6:12But when police arrived and started putting things together themselves, they came to a different conclusion. Did they believe you? I don't think they did. That's because Bill failed those two lie detector tests. The individual that I hired to take the polygraph, he said he believed what I was saying was true. He said it's just the stress that I was under. Did you think it was possible you might be charged? It got to a point, yeah, I was fearful of that. Police never had enough evidence to actually charge Bill or anyone else. But the rumors persisted for years. I remember going back to school and my friends would tell me on the playground that my mom and dad said that your dad did it.

7:03That was tough, wasn't it? Mm-hmm. What would you say to them? I didn't say anything. We knew what the truth was, so it just made me more aware of who I was friends with. What about you, Brandon? Yeah, I had a teacher, I think, in middle school that had relayed to her younger son who had told me that me and my dad were bad people and it would stay away from us. Why? Because my dad killed my mother. As you two got older, did you wonder what had happened to your mom? Yeah. What would you think? Well, I can remember from probably age seven or eight, my grandma told me that she thought I was BTK. But at that age, that meant nothing to me.

7:54BTK. Those initials and this symbol haunted Wichita, representing a phantom killer who had never been caught. Although it had been nine years since his last known murder, Vicki's brutal death seemed to carry his trademark. She had been bound and strangled, like all the others before her. January 1974. 1974, four members of the Otero family are tied up and strangled, including two children, 9-year-old Joseph and 11-year-old Josephine, who is hanged from a basement pipe. April 1974, 21-year-old Catherine Bright tied up, strangled, and stabbed to death. October 1974, in a note left at the Wichita Public Library, the killer took credit for the Otero murders and gave himself a name, BTK, for bind them, torture them, kill them.

8:56March 1977, another strangling, and this time, a witness. Six-year-old Steve Relford. What do you remember that day? I remember every time. Steve was walking home from the store with soup for his sick mother when he was confronted by a stranger. He stops me, approaches me, shows me a picture, asks me, did I know who it was? I said, no, sir, I don't know who this is. Steve ran home, but moments later, there was a knock on the door. Me and my brother rushed to the door. I beat my brother. I left a BTK in my house. BTK gave Steve and his two siblings a blanket and some toys. Then he locked them in the bathroom.

9:43The terrified children watched through a crack at the top of the door as their mother, Shirley Vyan, was tied to her bed and strangled. What do you remember of him? Was he tall? Ma 'am, I don't remember how tall. I don't remember how short. But I remember what his face looked like. It sounds like you feel guilt that you ever let him in your house. That'll be for the rest of my life. How could you feel guilty about it, Steve? You didn't have anything to do with this. Yeah, I did. I answered the door. December 1977, BTK bound and strangled 25-year-old Nancy Fox and added a twist. He reported the murder to police himself.

10:33Thank you. Yes, you will find the homer side at 843 South Pershing, Nancy Fox. Then the killer sent a chilling letter to a local TV station that read in part, how many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention? He apparently was pretty irritated by the lack of news coverage. Former Wichita police detective Arlen Smith says the city was in a panic. We worked it with a sense of urgency because nobody knew how long it was going to be before he killed somebody else. But then, in 1979, BTK seemed to disappear. So when Vicki Wegerly was killed seven years later, police focused on the most logical suspect, her husband.

11:23I knew there was an individual out there that did this, but to me it just seemed like they weren't looking for anybody else.

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12:46All the pain and the heartache and just miss her. What do you miss about her? Everything. I mean, even at 10 years old, you know, she was my best friend. I don't think people understand the difficulties that I had and the fears of just raising two kids. It was like Stephanie was my second mother. She stepped in and kind of took over. The Wegerly children not only lost their mother, Vicki They also had to endure the whispers and rumors about their father for 18 years Was there ever a time, Stephanie, that you thought your dad might have been responsible for your mom's death? Oh, no, absolutely not, never There's a kind of a cloud that rests over your head And, oh, there's Bill Wegerly, his wife was killed And nobody's ever found the killer And then on a March day in 2004, everything changed.

13:56It started with a letter to reporter Hirst Laviana. This is a copy of the envelope. Inside the envelope, a copy of Vicki Wegerly's driver's license and what appeared to be crime scene pictures of her body. I looked at the crime scene photographs and realized that they weren't routine crime scene photographs. They weren't routine because police didn't take them. The only person who could have was the killer. We do not have photographs of her seen because she was transported because it came in as a medical call. So EMS gets there, transports her out before police have arrived. For Lieutenant Ken Landwehr, who ran the BTK task force, the letter was a huge breakthrough.

14:42After 18 years, it cleared Bill Wegerly and exposed BTK as the real killer. This monster came into my home and took my wife from me. You know, took my life, our whole lives away from us as we knew it. And changed us as people for the rest of our lives. For the Wegerlys and all the families that lost loved ones to BTK, The horror came rushing back. We had gone on with our lives all these years, and then to have all of it come up again and to have to live through it all again was pretty hard. The return of BTK also shocked Wichita's district attorney, Nola Folston. Like everyone else in town, her life and career had been haunted by the faceless killer.

15:39I was the same as anybody else with locking my doors, checking my phone, living in the same fear that everyone else was living with. Good evening. A new letter and new clues possibly from... Vicki Wegerly's driver's license was only the beginning. Throughout 2004, there was a frenzy of chilling BTK communiques as the killer scattered clues from past crimes all over the city. Teasing, puzzling, and frightening. KFDI. The FBI is now checking out a package that was found in a Wichita park. There were doll grams, little dolls, one with a noose around its neck. The killer posed the doll to represent the murder of 11-year-old Josephine Otero, who was hanged.

16:29He's perverted. He's a sexual offender. He is a pedophile. There were cereal boxes, BTK's sick play on the words, serial killer. He's got to be really twisted to have to manufacture these pictures. He is sexually benefiting as he's drawing this stuff. Why would he reappear after years of silence? Okay, are you ready? Police believe it was because of a writer named Bob Beatty. Hi. Excellent book. and the publicity surrounding his new book about the murders. This guy always wrote because he wanted attention. He writes to a television station and says, how many do I have to kill before I get some attention?

17:18Soon enough, the killer, seemingly jealous of Beatty, submitted his own book to police. And then he made a mistake. Inside another cereal box, he sent a note asking if he could send police a computer disk and still stay anonymous. So he wrote and he said, be honest with me, his words, be honest with me. If I send you a disk, will it be traceable? Put it in the newspaper, it'll be okay, Rex, and send it under this code number. Police placed an ad in the paper, just as BTK instructed. He, in turn, sent in a disk and was trapped. When it reached its destination, immediately it was forensically examined.

18:03In no time, computer experts traced the disk to a local church and a user named Dennis. A Google search did the rest, turning up a Dennis Rader, president of the Christ Lutheran Church. And I looked at this picture and I went, you have got to be kidding me. The ghost who had terrified Wichita for 30 years finally had a face. And what a face it was. BTK was, of all things, a dog catcher, a suburban family man with two grown kids and a tidy little house. It all seemed so normal. And then it was kind of like, he fits. He just fits. He fits the profile. He's every man. Everyone's gut said Dennis Rader, but police wanted the case airtight.

19:05They wanted DNA. They secretly obtained a sample from Rader's daughter. It was taken while she was in college. Blood? No, pap smear. The daughter's DNA was compared to semen left at some of BTK's crime scenes, and it was a close match. On February 25th, three decades after the BTK murders began, it all ended. One of the most notorious murders in American history was arrested in the most routine way as he headed home for lunch. It was so emotional. I can't tell you how emotional it was. It was so great. It was like, this son of a bitch is gone. He is out of here.

20:06This is BTK and your job is to get a confession from him. He needs to say what he did. Wichita Police Lieutenant Ken Lamweer spent his entire career preparing for this one moment, confronting the man he believed to be the serial killer, BTK. I wanted to clear all the homicides. I just didn't want to clear two or three. I wanted all of them. As Lamwear sat down to interrogate Dennis Rader, District Attorney Nola Folston watched from the next room. What was your first reaction? I thought he was a geek. I know that sounds terrible, but he was just... He was so full of himself. For the first few hours, Rader admitted nothing.

20:56Then Lamware took him by surprise and told Rader there was DNA evidence connecting him to six of the murders, including Vicki Wegerly's. Rader's skin was found under her fingernails. Then it was like the dam had broken. You could not shut this guy up. What was the most surprising part of the confession? The one that I will never forget is the fact of when he asked me the question, Ken, why did you lie to me? Why did you lie to me? And what's he talking about when he asks you why did you lie to me? He's looking at the floppy disk. He didn't think we could trace a floppy disk because he asked me that.

21:38Why did you lie to me? If you wouldn't have lied to me, I wouldn't have sent it to you. Because I was trying to catch you. And when I told him I was trying to catch you, he says, but we had such a good thing going. You and I had that rapport. He really thought that they would be honest with him? Can you believe that? They could have sold him to Brooklyn Bridge. From that point on, Rader eagerly spent the next 30 hours reviewing the last 30 years of his life. As he proudly confessed to murder after murder, Rader revealed a darker nature than anyone could have imagined. It's nauseating. He'd start going on and on and on about each and every one of his conquests.

22:26While Rader was confessing, investigators began turning up physical evidence against him. In his City Hall office, they discovered in plain sight a cabinet full of souvenirs from the killings, all neatly filed away. Rader called the stash his motherlode. He had all the original communications. He had all the evidence, all the trinkets, driver's licenses. All those things were all very neatly stored, all in binders. Inside Raider's tiny 900-square-foot house, investigators found another stash, a container in his closet full of what Raider called slick ads, sexual fantasy cards he made using magazine photos of women and young girls.

23:14What is wrong with this guy? His mind was totally fantasy-driven. Police theorized these fantasies allowed Raider to go years without killing and were key to his elaborate double life, a life in which the normal activities of Dennis Rader fed the ghoulish appetites of BTK. For instance, he told police he used a former job installing burglar alarms to enter homes and troll for victims. You always felt like he was very busy and, you know, whatever you got, just whatever you need, let him know because he's got things to do. Very busy man. Denise Maddox shared an office with Rader at the home security company ADT in the 1980s.

23:59Vicki Wegerly was killed in the middle of the day when he was working at ADT and when you were working with him.

24:10Which means he had to leave in the middle of the day and then come back after killing a woman and brutally killing a woman. When Rader admitted to the 1985 strangling of Maureen Hedge, a woman who lived on his own block, he told police he took the body to his church, where he posed and photographed it. It was the same church where he appeared to be so devout, he was elected president of the congregation. We just couldn't believe that they were talking about the Dennis Rader that we knew. Paul Carlstad has known Dennis Rader for 30 years. The dentist that came to church every Sunday, the dentist that was there to help in whatever way we wanted him to help, it just didn't make any sense.

24:59Rader also revealed that he slipped away from a Boy Scout camping trip in 1991 to strangle 62-year-old Dolores Davis. It was Rader's last murder. His fantasy is to take her to a barn, string her up, and then do some sexual bondage things with this dead body and photograph her. But Rader got caught in a snowstorm and dumped the body under a bridge instead. And it isn't until a couple of weeks later that her body's actually located underneath this bridge out in the county. and they find with it a mask, a plastic mask that's been painted, decorated with some eyelashes and lipstick and painted face on it.

25:46What made him think he had the right to take somebody that meant the world to me? So unjust. For Dolores Davis' son, Jeff, learning the identity of his mother's killer is a fresh outrage. What sick, perverted pleasure can you possibly get enjoying looking into somebody's terrified eyes as you strangle the life out of them?

26:24The BTK suspect will be back in court in about a half an hour. A court proceeding is scheduled at 9 o 'clock. Finally, Rader was forced to appear in public for the first time since his arrest. Sir, I have been advised, as your desire, to enter a plea of guilty in this case. Is that correct? Yes, sir. On June 27th, in a Wichita courtroom, he pleaded guilty to all ten murders. I used a ruse as a telephone repairman to get in their house. Raider's casual, cooperative tone in the courtroom seemed strangely at odds with the brutal murders he described. I was still kind of in a fog, I think. You know, it just didn't seem real that this person could do these things.

27:10And then, for me, it really hit home when he said he walked up to the door and heard the piano. As I approached it, I could hear a piano sound. Mm-hmm. That's when I knew that, you know, yeah, that was my mom that he hurt playing. Is that the first time you realized this really was the killer? Mm-hmm. But even as he was admitting what he did, Dennis Rader failed to answer the biggest question of all. What made him do it? I remember one of the detectives saying, the devil comes in an angel's disguise.

27:56It just still doesn't seem, it still doesn't seem 100 % real to me. Why not? That this normal look, you know, normal average guy that's married, has two kids, does all the normal stuff, that he could do such horrible things to so many innocent people. We know Dennis Rader did do these horrible things. The only question is why. I was able to speak with him by phone, and I met with him twice in jail. Cameras, however, were banned. This is what Rader told me. He says he grew up like any other child in a loving family and insists he was never abused. In fact, Rader's court-appointed attorney, Steve Osborne, admits he tried to find something, anything from Dennis Rader's past that could somehow explain BTK.

28:54We talked to the family some, and we didn't see anything that jumped out at us as abnormal. No trauma, no big event that would scar him or cause, you know, something like this to happen. Yet as young as seven or eight years of age, Rader told me and investigators, he became fascinated with inflicting pain on living things. He started with animals. As a young boy, he first became aroused when he was at his grandparents' farm. And they would kill chickens for feeding the family. And he became very fixated on the death of those animals. And it gets stranger. While other boys of his generation looked up to baseball players, Rader says his hero was Harvey Glattman, a serial killer who targeted young single women in Hollywood.

29:56He was executed in 1959 when Rader was just 14. But Glattman became an inspiration for the boy who would grow up to terrorize Wichita. Remember Annette Funicello? Rader told detectives, quote, She was my favorite fantasy hit target when she was on The Mouseketeers. Rader imagined how he would kidnap the star Mouseketeer and, quote, do sexual things to her in California. Rader told me that as he got older, he collected detective pulp magazines depicting women in bondage, that the act of tying up a human body became an obsession, an obsession that he managed to keep secret from everyone he knew, even when he began killing at the age of 29.