by Kerri Rawson
For a moment, I didn’t remember what had happened.
I was on the floor in my living room.
Oh.
My brain stung.
There was a knock . . . FBI . . . your dad is . . . Dad isn’t.
My hands were shaking again.
I sat up, looking around, trying to figure out what time it was.
My eyes hurt—almost swollen shut from crying so much the day before.
I lay back down, rolled up sideways into a ball, covering myself to my ears with my heavy comforter. Nothing on God’s green earth that was covered in ice and snow was worth waking up for right now.
11:00 A.M.
SATURDAY
Midmorning, we were notified there would be a press conference in Wichita announcing my dad’s arrest. Cable news would carry it live, but we didn’t have cable.
Next thing I remember, our friends in Texas held their phone up to their TV so we could listen in. Darian put his cell phone between us on the couch and turned up his speaker. Surreal insanity brought to us by bouncing airwaves all over the country.
“BTK is arrested,” Wichita police chief Norman Williams announced.3
This was met with a good deal of cheering and clapping.
Why are they cheering? They’ve just taken away my father.
My shaking was getting worse; so was the stinging in my brain.
A bunch of speeches followed—politicians. The national news cut away after about ten minutes; no one mentioned my dad.
Later I read that forty minutes into the press conference, the commander of the BTK task force, Wichita police lieutenant Ken Landwehr, was finally given the chance to speak:
Shortly after noon yesterday afternoon, agents from the KBI, agents from the FBI and members of the Wichita Police Department arrested Dennis Rader, fifty-nine, in Park City, Kansas, for the murders of: Joseph, Julie, Josephine, and Joseph Otero Jr., Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian Relford, Nancy Fox, and Vicki Wegerle. He was arrested for the first-degree murder of all those victims.4
Not long after the press conference, he was also charged with the first-degree murders of Marine Hedge and Dolores Davis.
Ten.
Dad.
CHAPTER 25
Media Circuses Belong in Big Tops, Not Apartments
4:00 P.M.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2005
It’s becoming a circus here. We’re still trying to figure out if we should fly Mom to you or fly you here.” Uncle Bob called and was briefing me on the latest in Wichita, which had been quickly invaded by the national media.
The street I grew up on was swarming with sightseers, and the Park City police were trying to keep folks from helping themselves to my parents’ mailbox or whatever else they fancied from our yard.1
“Your mom is having a real hard time right now, so I’m calling to check on you guys. We’re working on a lawyer for your dad.”
“That’s a good idea. I don’t think this is going away.”
“No, we don’t either. It just doesn’t seem possible. Not your dad. We’re all very shaken; it just doesn’t make sense. But I’m with you—we need to make some plans. Your mom isn’t there yet. We need to be patient and take it slow.”
“Okay, things are quiet here.”
“We love you and Darian; we’re praying.”
Praying.
By Saturday evening, all the national news sites were having a heyday covering my dad’s arrest and alleged crimes, using the nice picture of him in his coat and tie from the church directory that had hung on my wall till yesterday.
I’d gone back to the internet—it was our main source of information, but I was trying to be more careful and stick to credible news. Unable to solidly wrap my head around what Dad could have done, I’d begun to blank on the crimes. Not recalling them, I’d read it over and over, tumbling into a cycle of disconnection, dissociation, then remembering, reinforcing.
My mind was continually trying to narrow—like someone was coming along and tucking a thick, fuzzy blanket around the edges—trying to dampen the effects of the incoming information. But I kept fighting against it, thinking if I only knew everything and could grasp it, then I wouldn’t feel so lost. Instead, I was piling harm upon harm, walking myself into a mental heap of trouble.
11:00 P.M.
Late Saturday evening, absurdity hit the internet and the news, mentioning a joke Darian made the year before on our family website, saying my night terrors “were gonna be the death” of him.
The cache had not cleared in near enough time.
I’d muttered half in my sleep about the pile of clothes in the corner of our bedroom looking like a little Mexican man. Now the internet thought I was a racist and assumed my mutterings had to do with the Otero family, who are of Puerto Rican descent.
Four members of a family, including two children, died, and this is what the internet comes up with?
Then I stumbled across this headline from CNN: “Report: Daughter of BTK Suspect Alerted Police.” The story led with:
The daughter of the man whom Wichita authorities arrested in the notorious BTK serial killings approached police with her suspicions and voluntarily gave them a blood sample, Wichita television station KAKE-TV reported Saturday night. KAKE quoted sources as saying the blood of 26-year-old Kerri Rader, whose father, Dennis, was arrested Friday, came back as a 90-percent DNA match to the BTK killer . . . police began surveillance on Dennis Rader after the results were determined.2
The daughter of . . . Whaa? I alerted police?
Blood sample? What blood sample?
The national news was saying I turned in my dad. The national news based this on local Wichita TV news—unnamed sources, no confirmation. No comment from the police.
I gave them two cotton swabs from my mouth. No blood.
Surveillance? Before the arrest? Nothing was making any sense, but now I was getting angry. Angry at the media. Angry at the silence from the police.
The anger took away some of the numbness, helped me to remember I was still breathing.
CNN was blasting far and wide that I turned in my dad. I didn’t.
Mrs. Hedge, I did.
I was six.
I need my bed.
SUNDAY
I slept in my bed the second night, but I woke up shaking again.
There was a knock . . . FBI . . . your dad is . . . Dad isn’t.
A vivid, detailed loop circled from the first day. It lasted for minutes, and I stared off into nowhere as it flashed. As my mind replayed it, I felt fear again—physically, like it was happening over and over, my chest seizing each time. It would come and go of its own volition, as it already had several times since Friday. I couldn’t seem to get rid of it any more than I could stop my body from shaking. I’d slept, at least to some degree, for two nights now, yet woke up still bamboozled.
Darian can see the shaking. I won’t tell him or anyone else about the loop.
After willing myself out of bed, I headed to the living room and asked Darian what the latest was.
“You don’t want to see the newspaper.”
“Why?”
“We’re on the front page.”
“You mean Dad is, right?”
“No. I mean us.” He gestured between him and me. “Us.”
Darian pointed to the Detroit Free Press sitting on his desk. “We have kids. Did you know that?”
Whaa?
He handed me the paper. At the bottom was an article about the daughter of BTK and her husband, who had two children and lived in the Metro Detroit area.
“Darian, how does the newspaper know where we live?”
“Darian, why does it say we have children?”
“Why do folks keep calling me the daughter of BTK?”
“Darian, I’m going back to bed.”
NOON
I convinced myself to get back out of bed. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have.
Darian said, “A reporter tried to offer my dad
a thick envelope stuffed with cash if he would give the goods on us.”
Whaa?
“He shut the door on them.”
“Also, a reporter offered money to my best friend in Wichita if he would videotape us somehow. He told them to hose off.”
I’m getting the feeling I’m going to need my bed a lot today.
Midafternoon, I heard a knock at our door.
Darian looked through the peephole and saw two local TV reporters standing in our hallway with a cameraman. The camera light was already on. They were already recording—waiting for someone to open the door.
“Kerri, I’m from Fox News. Channel 4 is out here also. I doubt we will be the last.”
I halted in the hallway and scrunched down like I was hiding. The world was buzzing white-hot again. My body felt like it was separating from my mind. My mind felt like it was separating from my body.
Father God? I’m not going to survive this.
Seized again with fear, I pressed up against the linen closet in the hallway, huddled up in a little ball, shaking. I wrapped my arms tight around my knees, trying to make myself as small as possible.
FBI questions, asking for my DNA, internet blowing up, cable news blasting out confusion, now cameras in our hallway—our locked hallway.
Shame washed over me like I’d done something wrong.
Our intercom buzzed. More reporters outside asking for BTK’s daughter.
Guilty as charged. I’m BTK’s daughter. No longer Kerri—she’s gone.
Darian was standing by the door.
On watch again.
He looked down our hallway, saw me disintegrating in front of his eyes.
He marched to his toolbox, grabbed a screwdriver, and disabled our intercom.
He came over to me. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch. We need to get you out of here—home—before this gets any worse.”
Home. Kansas. Not here, where cameras were in apartment buildings.
BTK’s daughter.
Darian called our local police and soon the police chief showed up at our apartment. The chief advised Darian as the FBI had: We shouldn’t talk to the media. Whatever we said could end up harming my dad’s case, harm my family.
Darian told him we wouldn’t be talking to the media and that I was shaking in our apartment right now, terrified.
The chief told the reporters and the camera operators and the news trucks they couldn’t be on private property or in private buildings, and then stationed a local police officer outside our building.
I was quickly developing a huge distaste for this circus and its clowns. But I began thinking the guys with the badges might not be so bad after all. Except the FBI—that was going to take some extra forgiveness and understanding.
3:00 P.M.
“We met with a lawyer. He told your mom, us, your dad is confessing. Told us how much your dad’s defense could cost.” Uncle Bob was on the phone again. “He recommended we let your dad rely on the public defenders.”
“Yeah. We can’t afford . . . I mean, whatever Mom thinks is best.”
“She agreed with the lawyer. She’s not doing well. We need to get you home, to be with her. She needs you, you need her.”
Mom and my grandparents were headed out of Wichita soon, to stay with family. We decided to fly me to Kansas City where I could meet my family in safety—away from Wichita, which was oozing reporters. My family paid for my airfare, and I was set with a connection through O’Hare on Monday, to home.
Home.
I don’t recall the rest of Sunday, except for two things. Our neighbors across the hall left a nice note on our door, offering to pick up groceries for us. And Darian told me twenty times or more I needed to pack.
Pack? Why? Oh, right. BTK’s daughter was going home.
PART V
Seek Refuge
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
—PSALM 91:1–2
CHAPTER 26
Respite Can Be Found Thousands of Feet in the Air
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2005
In the early morning of the fourth day, Darian carried my bag down our apartment stairs, opened the door to our cold, dreary garage, and quietly placed it in the trunk of the car.
“What happened to our Powercat tag?”
“I removed it. The KSU frame on the back tag too. I didn’t want it to give us away.”
Oh.
“You ready? I checked outside a bit ago—I think we’re in the clear.”
“Ready, I guess.”
“Once we get you home you will feel a bit better.”
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”
I held my breath as Darian slowly backed the car out of the garage and turned up the small, steep hill to the parking lot in front of our building.
Clear. No news trucks waiting for us.
We both let out an audible sigh of relief.
“See? We’re okay.”
As he turned out on the main road, I kept looking behind me—checking to see if anyone was tailing us.
“We’re okay. No one back there.” Darian turned and looked at me with a slight smile and a shrug, trying, trying, trying to cheer me up.
I reached over and patted his leg. “Okay. We’re going to be okay.”
Maybe if we said it enough to each other, we would eventually believe it.
I stared out the passenger window as we drove south on I-275 to the airport. The earth was frozen and bleak, but at least I was out under the sky and not stuck in the tiny apartment where we had ridden out the past few days. And we had a plan, were doing something, anything—finally.
Darian rolled my bag into the airport and waited with me while I checked in, going over last-minute instructions. “I know you flew two months ago, but this is your first trip on your own and . . .”
And . . .
He hugged me tight at TSA. “Love you.”
“Love you.”
He waited till I got through security and then with a wave he turned and left.
I was on my own, surrounded by hundreds of folks scurrying up and down the concourse, all of them unaware the daughter of a serial killer was among them.
Not long after sitting down at my gate, sipping a hazelnut latte, I heard a familiar voice. I looked up to the massive TV hanging down above my head to see a family friend from my parents’ church giving an interview to CNN. He was standing in as the church’s spokesman.
There was ticker running fast at the bottom: BTK . . . Wichita . . . Dennis Rader . . .
My God. Is this what it’s been like for the past three days?
. . . church president . . . guy next door . . . father . . . I looked back up and stared with my mouth open at a photo of my dad from Sunday. He was in a neon-orange jumpsuit, tired, sullen, angry, disheveled. Scowling.
He’s going to be peeved about that ugly mug shot.
I looked around the concourse; my dad was on every TV screen.
My hands started twitching.
Dear God. I’m not going to survive this.
My face blazing bright red, I scrunched up small in my hard plastic chair, hanging my head in shame.
What if someone knows who I am? Who I belong to?
Then I heard his voice—Dad. A video of him “speaking cop,” curt and official, in his dark-brown winter compliance officer coat and ball cap.
My hands were now violently shaking.
It was a clip from an interview he gave four years ago for a local Wichita TV station, KSN: “The dogs are somewhat territorial as well as vicious, and we’ve been trying to round them up and corral them as best we can.”1
Like John Wayne—his boyhood hero.
He sounds like he did when he called in the murder of a young woman in ’77.
“You will find a homicide . . . Nancy Fox . . . That is correct.” Nancy was twenty-five years old.
Come, Lord Jesus. Come.
“God is my rock . . .”
Bits of Psalms were running in my head again.
I scrounged around in my carry-on, grabbed my black MP3 player and headphones, blasting A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay in my ears. And I ducked behind my thick book: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a favorite to escape in. Survival.
“. . . in whom I take refuge.”2
I don’t remember getting on the plane, but I do remember scrunching up against the cold oval window and an off-duty attendant sitting a seat away from me, leaving a heaven-sent gap between us. I do remember taking off, feeling freedom with the sweet whoosh of the plane lifting, and tears rolling down my face as we rose above the murky clouds, finding rare bright-blue sky as we turned toward Chicago.
BTK’s daughter was going home.
Sharp, warm white beams bounced off the windows, warming my face.
“The LORD is my light . . .”
I don’t know what’s waiting for me at home. More CNN?
Dad.
Michigan is far away from whatever is coming.
“. . . and my salvation—”
But Mom needs me.
And I need her.
I don’t know if I can do this. If I’m strong enough.
I’m not.
“. . . whom shall I fear?”3
God? Can’t I stay up here forever?
As peace rushed by outside and tears splotched the dog-eared pages of my book, I twisted a soggy white tissue around my fingers.
A gentle voice interrupted my grief. “Would you like some chocolate? I picked it up over in Japan.”
The attendant had a kind face to match the voice and handed me a chocolate bar.
“Thanks.”
“Sure. You okay?”
I don’t know how to answer that. Dad is . . . I’m going home ’cause . . . “Okay. Going home for a family emergency.”
That works.
“Ah. Sorry. I hope everything works out.”
Works out. Yeah. Not this time.
I turned my back more to him and leaned as close as I could into the window, putting “Worlds Apart” by Jars of Clay on repeat in my ears.