Armed with the new connection to the BTK case, police collected DNA from under the victim’s fingernails, and launched a campaign that tested hundreds of local men for a possible match. This victim had not been definitively linked to BTK until then. Over the course of 11 letters and packages sent by BTK during 20, law enforcement officials slowly began filling in the blanks.īTK’s first 21st century communique was a letter sent The Wichita Eagle that included crime scene photos and a driver’s license belonging to a victim from 1986. When BTK resumed his communication with the media in 2004, he overlooked a critical fact: this was now the 21st century, and law enforcement officers were becoming increasingly adept at forensic science. Just a jagged rip of loss and fear through the metropolitan area around Wichita, Kansas, where BTK had committed his murders. Over those 17 years, BTK terrorized the public by sending taunting letters to local media outlets and claiming to be driven by the same dark energy that guided Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler.Īfter 1991, however, BTK went silent, and the case went cold. But most people now know him by the name BTK, which stands for the method he used to systematically murder ten people between 19: Bind, Torture, Kill. Dennis Rader was an Air Force veteran, church council president, and Cub Scout leader.