By all accounts, Rader was a doting father, the kind who would often romp in the family’s backyard, where he eventually built a massive tree house with the kids. He made sure his son became a Boy Scout, eventually earning the organization’s top honor of Eagle Scout, which had eluded Dennis back when he was a teen. But of course, back when he was growing up, the elder Rader had other things on his mind.
Kerri grew into an athletic girl, who eventually qualified for the Kansas state high school golf championships in 1996. Like her father, she had an insatiable appetite for horror stories. As she grew older, she devoured nearly every book she could find on monsters, zombies, ghosts, and ghouls. Whenever she finished one, her father would often walk into her room, pluck it off of her bookshelf, and read it himself.
But there was something else about Kerri that her father always found puzzling. When she was six or seven, she began being plagued by horrible nightmares that caused her to awaken in the middle of the night, shrieking in terror. Whenever this happened, her mother and father would plod into her room, sit on her bed, and try to convince her that it was all just a bad dream. Over time, Rader—who never had nightmares and normally drifted off to sleep within minutes of placing his head on a pillow—began to attribute Kerri’s night terrors with her love of horror books and movies. But still, he found it all quite curious. She didn’t just awaken, screaming, from her terrible dreams. More often than not, she awoke as if she were being attacked by something and were fighting off something or someone. Sometimes when her parents walked into her bedroom, she’d literally be pounding on a nearby table, or anything close to her, with her fists.
Although some might attribute this behavior to Kerri’s somehow picking up on the dark psychic energy of her father, I think the explanation might be a lot less far-fetched. For starters, I believe she might have stumbled onto Rader’s horrific stash of detective magazines and sketches of women in bondage. That, I had begun to understand, would be enough to warp any young, impressionable brain. I also think it would be safe to say that Rader was not as protective of his yearning for violent-themed books and movies as he should have been, and these obsessive appetites were unfortunately transferred into his young daughter’s mind. The fact that she never said anything to her father about her bewildering discovery of his stash isn’t surprising. Like most kids, the last thing she would have wanted to do was admit she’d been snooping in his stuff.
Kerri’s birth in June 1978 coincided with a slowdown in her father’s passion for murder. But in the fifteen months leading up to her arrival in the Rader family, her father had hunted down and murdered two additional women, bringing his total body count to seven. Shirley Vian, a mother of three young children, was garroted on March 17, 1977. Rader claimed the life of Nancy Fox on December 8 of that same year, just around the time Paula was three months pregnant with Kerri.
The convoluted story behind how Shirley Vian ended up as one of his victims started in “the early weeks of March,” Rader wrote in his journal.
“The uncontrollable Factor X is saying kill,“he wrote.
So Rader began once again to look for another victim. It didn’t take long to find one—a single mother who he’d seen on a few occasions at the Blackout tavern, the same watering hole where he’d met his buddy Bobby Ormston three years earlier. He’d dropped by the popular tavern after one of his night classes at WSU. It wasn’t Vian he spotted originally, however, but one of her neighbors. The neighbor was there with some friends, and Rader watched her, following her home on foot when she left. He soon began scoping out her house, trying to determine if she lived with a man or owned a dog.
On a couple of occasions, he walked the dimly lit alley behind her property. He decided to make his move on March 17, but reminded himself that he needed to remain “fexable” in case things didn’t work out. In the three years since Kathy Bright’s murder, he realized he shouldn’t be so bullheaded about his crimes. If the conditions weren’t right, he’d go home and wait for another chance. But if it “looks good—it’s a hit.”
Late that morning, he put on his tweed sport coat and a pair of dark slacks, drove into Wichita, and knocked on the front door of his intended victim’s house. No one answered. He turned to walk back to his car, but he spotted a young boy on the sidewalk, carrying a sack of groceries. Rader decided to use his “detective ruse” on the young lad and pulled a picture out of his wallet of Paula and his young son, Brian.
“Do you know if these people live around here?” he asked.
The boy told him that he’d never seen them before, then continued on to his house, located just down the street. Rader watched him, paying close attention to which house he entered. Ten minutes later, he knocked on their front door. When the boy answered, he flashed his pistol, told him he was a detective, and pushed his way inside, where he spotted the boy’s brother and sister watching TV.
In his journal, he noted how the boy’s mother grew frightened and nervous when he told her that he intended to rape her. The kitchen seemed like a good place to do it, he said. She begged him to first let her have a cigarette.
“I grant that,” he typed in his grammatically challenged account of the crime. But no sooner had she polished off the cigarette than she informed him that she felt sick. After glancing around the filthy, “junk”-filled house, the hyperneat and always organized Rader decided that it was no wonder.
He attempted to tie the wrists of Vian’s older son, but the boy began sobbing. Within seconds, his younger brother and sister also broke out in tears. “You got some place where I can lock your kids up?” he asked Vian. But before she could answer, he decided to put them in the bathroom and managed to prevent the kids from getting out by blocking one of the doors with a bed and using a rope to tie another door shut.
With that out of the way, he wrote, he looked at Vian and said, “It’s time.”
She removed her blue housecoat and pink nightie, then lay down on her stomach, on top of the bed. In his entry, Rader noted that her head faced east and her feet pointed west. As he wrapped black electrical tape around her hands and arms, she vomited on the floor. He walked into the kitchen and fetched her a glass of water. She drank it and once again attempted to talk him out of raping her. Rader was unmoved by her plea and taped her feet to the railing at the west end of the bed, then continued wrapping more tape around her ankles and knees.
Suddenly the telephone rang. Vian explained that it was probably her friend, calling to inquire about when she should drop by to take her to the doctor. Something about the ringing phone caused the children to begin crying again.
“Plans changed . . . Plans changed,” Rader noted.
He wrote that in a flash, he looped a piece of cord around Vian’s neck, which seemed to surprise her. She moaned about the tension, begging for somebody to help her. But nobody could hear her except for Rader, who watched as her face changed from red to blue, then from purple to dark purple. He decided to wrap additional cord around her neck, observing that if he relied on what he’d originally used, she might “come too” in the same way that Josephine Otero had during his initial attempts to kill her.
After a few minutes, he pulled a plastic bag over Vian’s head, then tied her nightie around her neck to keep it tight. He masturbated as she thrashed atop the dirty sheets, her life slowly seeping away. Then he fled the house.
He ended his write-up of the murder with a lament over not being able to kill Vian’s children. If only he’d had more time, he fretted. If he had, he had intended to use “a rough hemp rope for the girl and more plastic bag for the boys.”
Nine months later in December, he struck again. This time his victim was a twenty-five-year-old woman named Nancy Fox, whom he first spotted in November while trolling the streets for victims. He quickly learned her name and that she held two jobs—working at a local law firm and at a jewelry store—by rifling through the contents of her mailbox.
In an effort to get a close-up look at Fox, Rader tracked her t
o the store and purchased some cheap jewelry out of a display case from a clerk; all the while he eyed Fox working in a back room. For the next month, whenever he had time, he stalked the young woman, hoping to learn her routine. On a couple of occasions, he cased the outside of her duplex, trying to find a good entry point inside. Twice he undertook what he called a “dress rehearse,” and in both instances he was prepared to carry out his intended crime “if everything was a go.”
The more he learned about Fox, the more he decided she fulfilled all the requirements of the perfect victim. Because of his first few nearly botched attempts at murder, he’d come up with a list of criteria that every one of his “projects” needed to fulfill: they needed to live alone, have an established routine, and not have a boyfriend, husband, or any close male friends who might interfere with things.
The victim also needed to be “cute” and of the right age—although he never specified in his journals what that age should be. It was imperative that she live in the type of neighborhood where he believed he wouldn’t stick out if he were observed or spotted. The location of her apartment needed to be such that he could break in without being seen by neighbors. But most important, the proper victim appeared to exude some ineffable quality that led Rader to believe he could “control her if things suddenly went to hell, like they’d had a tendency to do in the past.”
On the night of December 8, Rader decided he’d give what he called Project Fox Tail one more try. He told his wife he had to work late on a term paper at the WSU library. So after work he headed back to Wichita in her red Chevelle. Knowing that he had nearly the entire night to himself filled him with confidence.
It had been dark for hours when he parked the car a few blocks away from Fox’s apartment and walked to her duplex. It was 8:30 P.M. He was fairly confident that she’d still be at work, but just to play it safe he knocked on her front door. If she answered it, he planned on saying, “Oops, wrong apartment. I was looking for Joanne.” Then he’d flash his pistol, tucked away in his shoulder holster. Provided she didn’t go “ape shit” on him, he’d barge in.
But when no one answered his knock, he walked around back and quickly cut Fox’s phone line. He smashed out one of her back windows, climbed inside, and waited. When Fox finally did arrive home around 9:20 P.M., he waited until she walked into the kitchen before confronting her. She attempted to reach for the phone, but he informed her that he had a knife, and pulled open his jacket to reveal his magnum. He informed her that he wanted to rape her and threatened to hurt her badly if she tried anything funny.
Just like Shirley Vian, she lit up a cigarette and asked him why he felt compelled to do this. Fox remained calm and cool as the two stood in the kitchen. After she finished the cigarette, she looked at Rader and said, “Let’s get this over with so I can call the police.” On the way to the bedroom, she asked if he’d allow her to use the bathroom.
“Yeah,” he replied. “But you better not have any weapons in there or try to escape.”
Just to play it safe, he wedged a shoe in the door jamb.
After a few minutes, he instructed her to come out with her “main clothes off.” The first thing Fox noticed when she walked out of the bathroom, Rader wrote later, were the rubber gloves he’d just pulled over his hands.
As usual, he did his best not to alarm his victim and used his standard line: “I don’t want to leave prints . . . I’m wanted by the cops in a couple of other states.”
After instructing Fox to lie down on the bed on her stomach, he snapped a pair of cold steel handcuffs around her wrists. She turned her head, straining to look up at him.
“Why do you want to do that?” she asked.
“I don’t want any scratches or problems,” he said.
He walked across the bedroom and pushed the door closed. “Leave it open,” she pleaded. He ignored her and quickly went to work trying to pull her sweater off. She begged him to leave it on. His heart was pounding as he fumbled to pull off his shoes, pants, and shirt, then tied a yellow nightgown tightly around her ankles and gagged her with a pair of nylons.
“Has your boyfriend ever fucked you in the butt?” he asked. But she just lay there, ignoring his question, no doubt hoping to get all this over with. It thrilled him, he wrote, to see that he had an erection. Before he knew it, he was tugging her panties down to her knees with one hand and grabbing his black leather belt off the floor with the other. In a flash, he slipped it over her neck and pulled it tight, trying to be careful not to use so much force that he killed her.
Fox’s fingers managed to grab hold of his scrotum, and she squeezed it with every ounce of strength she had left in her. Rader felt no pain. Instead, he wrote, the sensation of “[my victim’s fingernails] digging into my balls . . . increased my sexual thrill.” He pulled the belt tighter and watched as Fox began to pass out.
As her eyes fluttered shut, he released the tension on the belt and waited as she came to. Bending over her, he whispered into her left ear that he was the man who killed the Otero family, along with several other women in Wichita. He then informed her that “she was next.”
Despite nearly being choked to death moments before, Fox was conscious enough to quickly realize that she was in terrible trouble. Once again, she struggled as best she could against her attacker, but it was no use. Rader pulled on the belt with all his strength. After a few minutes, Nancy Fox was dead.
He looked down at her body and masturbated into her nightgown. Afterwards he loosened the belt, then tied several pair of panty hose around the young woman’s neck. Then he unlocked the handcuffs and bound her wrists with red panty hose. He got dressed, tidied up the apartment, and rummaged through her possessions, looking for some suitable mementos, finally settling on her driver’s license and several pieces of her lingerie and jewelry.
The last thing he did before leaving was to crank up the thermostat again in the belief that it would cause Fox’s body to decay at a faster rate, no doubt making her autopsy more difficult. Rader probably learned about this in one of his criminal justice classes at WSU. He’d been told that one of the ways to determine a victim’s time of death is to take his or her temperature with a rectal thermometer, then check the degree of rigor mortis in the body. Room temperature does have an effect on the rate of decomposition, but in many ways this didn’t matter because Rader had no real link to the victim. Instead, this sort of measure would ordinarily be an act for a killer who knew the deceased and wished to alter the estimated time of death in order to establish an alibi.
By the next morning, the suspense was killing him. When the hell were the cops going to find her? When was the news of his latest kill going to hit the media? He hadn’t slept much the night before, and the moment he awoke he grabbed that morning’s issue of the Wichita Eagle and scanned it for some mention of Nancy Fox. His scrapbooks were stuffed full of articles he’d torn out of the local papers, discussing his previous three murders, and he no doubt was looking forward to adding to his collection. But he could find nothing about the murder in the Eagle. Suddenly it dawned on him that even if the cops had discovered her body some time in the night, it probably would have happened far too late to make the deadline for the morning paper.
He got dressed and drove to his job at ADT. At the time, he was working as a crew chief, overseeing the installation of a fire alarm in a large building in downtown Wichita. On the way there, he stopped off at a restaurant with a few of the guys from work and picked up some cinnamon rolls and coffee. That was when he spotted the pay phone on the side of a mini-market on the corner of Central and Saint Francis streets. For the next hour, he couldn’t get the image of that damn phone out of his brain. He was dying to pick it up and tip off the cops about what he’d left them in that apartment on South Pershing Street. Even though he knew it would be a stupid move and that his voice would probably be recorded, he couldn’t help himself.
No sooner did his men begin working on the fire alarm job than he announced that he needed t
o head back to the ADT office and pick up some supplies. A few minutes later he was standing beside that pay phone, telling himself that what he was about to do was both careless and bold. “It’s probably the kind of thing you do when you’re younger, the kind of thing you don’t do if you really think things through,” he said years later. But at that moment, the fire burning inside Rader was far too hot. He picked up the phone and dialed the police dispatch number.
“You will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing,” he told the dispatcher. “Nancy Fox.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman on the other end of the line replied. “I can’t understand you. What is the address?”
At that point another dispatcher, who had been monitoring the call, interrupted: “I believe 843 South Pershing.”
“That is correct,” the man said. Then the phone line went quiet.
Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer Page 25