A Serial Killer’s Daughter

by Kerri Rawson

  I remember being scared of having to sleep by myself that trip, even though my dad and uncle were right there and would have let no harm befall me. I also think I might have frightened myself with whatever paperbacks I’d brought along.

  I shared a tent with Dad the next year at the Grand Canyon, so I’m not sure why he was so opposed to it in the strip pits that spring break.

  Trying to put together a massive, decades-wide puzzle with gaping holes, I was discovering slivers of truth, but I was also coming up hard against myself and my memories. These new pieces of truth cut like shards of glass as I learned them, and imbedded dangerously into my soul as I forgot them.

  Coping mechanism. Dissociation. Survival. Self-preservation.

  In the spring, the national media blurted that DNA taken from semen left on eleven-year-old Josie Otero’s leg in January 1974 was matched on February 24 to my DNA taken from one of my Pap smears, leading to the arrest of my father the next day.

  My DNA also matched semen left at Nancy Fox’s apartment in December 1977, and scrapings taken from under Vicki Wegerle’s fingernails from September 1986.1

  Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  I remembered when Darian and I were home in December, Dad had asked him an odd question: “Can floppy disks be traced, like those folks on CSI do?”

  Darian, not sure what Dad was asking and not wanting to go into technical details, brushed him off with a quick no, even though Darian knew disks could be traced.

  Dad eventually ensnared himself with a computer disk he sent to the police in February. He had used the disk at the Park City Library and my parents’ church, where he was listed online as the president. His first name and the locations where he had used it were in the file properties. The police found “Dennis,” ran a search on “Christ Lutheran,” and had their man.

  After the police had my dad’s name, they started staking out my parents’ street. They were confident they had him but were waiting on DNA results to come back before they arrested him. In the spring, it was released to the media that the DNA they were waiting on was mine.

  Detectives had collected BTK samples from crime scenes in 1974, 1977, and 1986. In 2004, the BTK task force asked over a thousand men in the Wichita area to take a DNA test—voluntarily—to rule them out as suspects. It was nicknamed the swab-a-thon.

  From my understanding, I was the only woman swabbed to check against my dad. What I didn’t know was before I was asked to give a swab voluntarily, my DNA had already been taken without my knowledge. After detectives determined my dad was likely BTK, they discovered he had two children and I had attended Kansas State and lived in the dorms while there.

  They got a subpoena for my records at Lafene, the on-campus health center. When a detective arrived, he lucked out: I’d gotten annual Pap smears and had a biopsy done on a cervical polyp. He got another subpoena plus a court order for my tissue sample.

  The slide was taken to the KBI lab in Topeka, and on February 24, I came back as a 10/10 allele match to BTK.

  I was a college kid when I’d been told I would need tissue removed and biopsied. I was worried and scared till it came back benign. I was near the same age as Kathryn Bright, whom my dad murdered in 1974.

  Twenty-five years after Dad murdered a twenty-one-year-old near Wichita State, he was moving his twenty-one-year-old daughter back and forth to Kansas State. Six years later, my DNA would help identify him. (I still don’t know if that particular DNA came from a routine Pap smear or my biopsy.)

  My dad invaded people’s homes, bound and tortured them, murdered them, then caused even more violation after they were dead. I wasn’t being told this gently by the detectives who worked my dad’s case, who rummaged in my medical records. I was finding it out through the news along with the rest of the world.

  My brother and I were kids when my dad committed his last three murders.

  My dad was responsible for causing immense harm to his ten victims. He was also responsible for causing immense harm to my family.

  He betrayed us.

  Now I felt that the police had used me. They had accessed my private medical records without my permission.

  The media was hounding my family, making us feel as if we had done something wrong. (In fact, we would have qualified for victim support services in the state of Kansas, but I wasn’t aware of this until 2017.)

  In a few months’ time, I lost my faith in my father, I lost my faith in journalism, and now I was losing my faith in law enforcement. There wasn’t going to be much of anything left once Dad was done with us.

  CHAPTER 30

  Light Will Overcome the Darkness

  APRIL 2005

  Somewhere among the worst months of my life, my second major grief-filled descent into a pit of murky black began. Alongside the dull, thick walls that were trying to clamp down on my pain, came flashes of white-light panic, tinged with dark-red seething. My old bullies, depression and anxiety, were resurfacing and joining forces with a new brute—trauma. Which, in all truth, might have been an old tormenter of mine.

  Dad.

  Time began to fade in and out on me. My ability to keep it together came in spurts, and when I couldn’t, I drew hazy-gray blanks.

  Life divided. On the okay days, I taught, shopped for groceries, went to the Coney with Darian. We wandered around the Detroit Zoo, two of the rare few who visited in the semifrozen months. We looked like anyone else, but we were suffering.

  Trying to stay anonymous, Darian often reminded me to lower my voice when I talked about Dad in public. Over and over, I told Darian the terrible things the world was claiming my father had done, and he patiently let me. Out at dinner, we looked around, wondering if anyone knew who we were. Both of us trying not to utter the name BTK.

  Mainly for my sake. But maybe if I said it out loud it would become the truth: My dad is BTK—I’m BTK’s daughter.

  At one point we became stuck at the AMC, frozen in our seats after seeing Hostage, a movie with violent criminals, home invasion, and Bruce Willis trying to save the day.

  Darian looked at me. “Are you okay? I’m feeling sorta dizzy.”

  “I want to throw up.” I gripped the armrests while the credits rolled.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have seen this one.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think I can handle these types of movies for a while.” I paused, looked down at the floor, then back at Darian, saying quietly, “I saw Se7en with Dad at the Palace in early 1996.”

  “Oh. Just you?”

  “Yeah. Do you think he was trying to tell me something about himself? Taking me to that?”

  “Dunno.”

  “I saw Copycat at North Rock. Dad was impressed I sat through that one alone. We talked all about it when I got home.”

  “Did you know Red Dragon is supposed to be loosely based on your dad?”

  “No! Really? Heck. Saw that with him too. And The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal and 8mm . . . I could go on for a while.”

  “8mm? Wow. Well, come on, let’s get going.” He stood up, collected our discarded popcorn container and empty cups, then offered his hand and saw me out of the theater. We didn’t go to the movies again for a while after that.

  I kept rattling off serial killer and horror lore in the car, the same way a broken hydrant gushes water. “I read all those books too—the Hannibal Lector ones, Kiss the Girls, lots of Stephen King. Dad and I would swap paperbacks, suggest library books, talk about them.”

  “How old?”

  “Middle school? High school? Mom didn’t approve necessarily, but Dad let me read whatever I wanted to. I used to sneak-read her romance books under the covers with my flashlight. She finally gave up trying to stop me when I was about sixteen.”

  It always helped to talk to Darian. To say out loud what was running, endlessly running, through my head. Maybe, if I thought about it enough, it would feel like the truth.

  On the broken days, which were many, I went unseen. I didn’t te
ach. I slept till Darian called to ask, “What do you want for lunch? How about Taco Bell today?”

  Love neve fails.

  For better or worse, in sickness or in health.

  I would eat what he brought me, do who-knows-what for a few hours, and crash on the couch, napping till he arrived home from work. We watched TV in the evenings, or I cross-stitched, a new-old hobby, while he worked at his computer. We’d stay up late—our attempt to fend off the darkness—then one of us would mumble about bedtime and the other would follow.

  I’m not sure in what week of going through hell we found each other again as husband and wife, but early on, it became us against the world.

  After the arrest, my night terrors came back with a vengeance. Now the thing trying to kill me in the dead of night looked an awful lot like my father. I’d sit up, silently, searching around the room with my eyes, looking for him. Or I’d startle and scream, tugging on a poor sleeping Darian. “Da . . . Da . . . Dad.”

  “It’s not. Go back to sleep.”

  “How do you know?” I’d question Darian with accusation in my voice and knock things over on my nightstand reaching for my gigantic black Maglite or fumbling for the light switch on my lamp. “Oh. You’re right. No one here.”

  Dad is in prison. He can’t hurt anyone anymore.

  My heart would beat almost out of my chest and I’d shake; then within a few minutes, I’d find my courage and will myself to turn the light back off.

  Okay, nothing here, go back to sleep.

  Sometimes I’d fight off the bad guy, inadvertently knocking into Darian, mistaking him for my foe. I’d usually wake up enough to realize my error. “Sorry. Night wig-outs again.”

  He’d grunt. “Mmph, it’s all right. Sleep.”

  I’d always had night terrors. I didn’t know which night they’d come back, but at least they were a beast I knew. What I didn’t know was the loop. It was a new tormenter, and I had no idea how to shake it or when it would leave.

  Home was no longer home. It had been permanently fixed into my bones as the place where I suffered immense life-threatening fear and pain on February 25. It created white-hot emotional toil, looping, looping, looping.

  The FBI man knocked at my door . . . He asked for my DNA . . . He left . . . I never saw him again.

  Over and over.

  I was sure I was going crazy, though I continued to tell no one, not even Darian, who was trying to keep things together for both of us. I’m certain he also noticed his wife was continuing to fall apart in front of him.

  I don’t remember when, exactly, I landed back on a therapist’s couch. I don’t remember if I went because my mom talked me into it—she had started seeing someone in Wichita—if Darian coaxed me to get help, or if I waved the white flag of surrender myself.

  I don’t think I checked the suicidal-thoughts box this time, but I’m not sure about that either. I do remember taking in Dad’s letters, folded inside their envelopes decorated from jail, and removing them in my therapy session—something tangible to point to, to say this was really happening.

  Darian drove me. The office was in the community south of us, not far, but I wasn’t able to muster enough strength to drive myself, plus my sessions were in the evenings. I’d become super jumpy in the dark again.

  “The LORD is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?”1

  Darian would sometimes go in with me, scrunching up next to me on the couch. Other times he would wait the forty-five minutes out in the lobby and then we would go eat a late meal at Steak ’n Shake.

  My therapist pointed out I was grieving. I was allowed to grieve and needed to let myself do so, even though Dad was still alive and had caused an immense amount of harm. I was full of guilt and shame over what he had done and didn’t always think I had the right to mourn his loss from my life.

  Grieving the loss of the father I loved, grieving the loss of the man I never knew. Grieving for him, for my family. Grieving for the lives he took. Grieving for their families.

  During these awful months, I realized I wasn’t just running the details I was learning of Dad’s murders and my own FBI trauma loop; I was also repeating the promises of God found in Scripture. I wasn’t just stuck in the darkness; I was also clinging to the light.

  “The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”2

  “The LORD is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?”3

  Sometimes they would jumble out of order: God is my rock and my salvation, whom shall I fear?

  The verses would cut through the darkness, and I had begun to teach myself not only to repeat them silently in my head but to utter them quietly under my breath when I was afraid. Especially in the dark.

  “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”4

  They brought me strength—defiance. Determination. The will to continue on. In the worst moments of my life, I was turning toward my faith in God, without even realizing at first that I had.

  Sometime during these terrible months when I had nothing left—no ability to open my Bible—God gave me an image of him: Under me was his strength, a large, impregnable black rock he set me upon. Around me and in me was his Spirit, an impermeable shield of light. And over me, waving high, was his banner: “Let his banner over me be love.”5

  PART VI

  Stand on Your Rock

  He makes my feet like hinds’ feet, and sets me upon my high places. He trains my hands for battle, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.

  —PSALM 18:33–34 NASB

  CHAPTER 31

  Long Distance Can Offer Sanity

  April 17

  Dear Kerri,

  We start on pre-arraignment next week on April 19. The dog and pony show will start! Media and rest is a mess!

  My attorney has planned on wavering the state. There will be a non-guilty plea enter at some point; that will give us time to review more evidence. At some point, we will make final plea. So much for all the legal.

  I finally got to move into a Pod with 12 Inmates, I call them the “Dirty dozen gang.” The system interviewed each for security risk and my high-profile status. They are a bunch of nuts and good guys. I learning their names and becoming Pod friends. One of them cutting hair this AM did a great job. I have my own chair-table (territorial) and everyone else does in the day-common-room. We share our meds, watch TV, play cards. I yet to play chess, although others play it every day. We also horse around, joke and carry on out here. As they say, “Do the time, and don’t let the time do you.”

  The Dirty Dozen said, since I arrived, they have had special privileges. Although we have more cell shake down, enforcement of Detention Rules and the PD have been more official. I think because they know at some time I will speak out to the media, and they want to have their act covered or cleaned up.

  We did get some fresh air last night. My first since arrest. Some guys hadn’t been outside since September. Oh, it felt so good to breath fresh air and see the blue sky, half-moon. I had to be in chains but that, I am used to now. They chain me up as I move through the building. At arraignment, I will have leg chains and 50,000-volt shocker in case I get out control. I do get a lot of respect from the Dirty Dozen.

  Mom said you haven’t got any more mail from me? I don’t understand? I have mailed out at least two or more letters. Could the FBI, be holding them? Grandma Dorothea fell and was in hospital? Can you or Mom let me know? So helpless!

  I started envelope drawing. I hand draw some for Dirty Dozen. That is how we survive, help each other out. Trade. Hot chocolate, candy bar, Cheetos, tea, Tang, coffee, are basic need every day.

  I’m amiss with news from family. I hope all is okay. I’m sure the media will be heavy again, sorry, forgive me.

  Love,

  Dad

  APRIL 19


  Dad’s first court appearance, a pre-arraignment, only lasted minutes, which made me chuckle, imagining all the national media that had flown in for it. He wore his nice gray suit and a smart gray-and-yellow tie Mom and I had given him for Father’s Day one year. My mom and I wanted my father to look appropriate for court, not to appear in an orange jumpsuit. Understanding it was important to us, Uncle Bob went to our house and selected suits, dress shirts, matching ties, and shoes for my dad.

  My father was a criminal, but no matter what he had done, he still deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. He was called a monster, not human; it was said he should face the chair. It was brutal hearing folks knock my dad, calling him names, mocking him.

  I understood this anger. He took ten lives, and there was absolutely no dignity or respect about what he had done. He should be in prison the rest of his life. But he was still my father, and while continuing to be torn apart inside, I quietly tried to support the man I knew through his arraignment and trial.

  Let the truth be the truth.

  I should’ve showed up at court and sat behind him, been there for him. But I was afraid. And I was ashamed I didn’t have the strength or courage. I didn’t want to be exposed by the media circus. I didn’t trust the police, who I felt had used me.

  And I couldn’t imagine facing the families. They were one block of solidarity—they all lost someone they loved to him. They deserved justice.

  My family was separate. We were his family. We would stay clear.

  The best I could do, could handle, would be to follow Dad’s court appearances online, checking news sites later that same day. I’d sob while reading through the details, carefully studying the photos of my dad, trying hard to hold on to what—and whom—I was losing. His suit hung looser, his belt was cinched an extra notch, his beard had grown out, his hair was a bit longer than I’m sure he preferred, and his face was haggard. He was aging overnight.