A new serial killer documentary is coming to Netflix. But this time, it’s not focusing on one of America’s most notorious murderers — but rather, his daughter.
The new doc, titled My Father, the BTK Killer, centers on Kerri Rawson, whose father, Dennis Rader, led a violent double life for 30 years. In the new trailer released on Monday, Rawson grapples with learning of her father’s double life, asking the question: “Did he really love us, or was he using us the entire time?” She also dives into the question of whether her father could have been involved in more crimes than the ones he was convicted of.
“It’s hard to know who I am,” she says, “if every moment in my life was a lie.”
This is not the first Netflix program to explore the BTK Killer. David Fincher’s narrative series Mindhunter, about the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, showed brief vignettes outside the main narrative of Rader (portrayed by Sonny Valicenti) behaving in strange, unsettling ways that hinted at his crimes to come. But while BTK makes his way into pop culture, and now a new documentary is coming to Netflix on Oct. 10, not everyone knows the extent of his crimes — or how he was ultimately caught.
Who is Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Killer?
Rader, who initially gave himself the moniker “BTK” due to his method of “binding, torturing and killing” his victims, murdered at least 10 people over a 30-year span, according to Britannica.
Born in 1945 in Pittsburg, Kan., and raised in Wichita, Rader presented as an upstanding member of society, though later would claim he had long had violent sexual fantasies and killed animals, indications of the violent behavior to come. He served in the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s and later married and had two children, including Rawson.
After a stint at the Coleman Company factory, Rader began working for ADT Security Services in 1974, staying with the company until 1989. During this time, he also volunteered with the Boy Scouts and at his church, where he became president of the congregation.
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Rader’s first known murders occurred in January 1974, when he strangled four members of the Wichita-based Otero family, including two of their five children. The mother, Julie Otero, worked at the Coleman factory. In April of that same year, Rader killed another woman who worked at Coleman.
Later on in 1974, Rader left a note in a library book, taking credit for the murders. The note, which was eventually recovered by Wichita Police, was also what inspired Rader’s nickname. Rader wrote in the letter, “P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code word for me will be… Bind them, torture them, kill them, B.T.K., you see he’s at it again.”
Rader killed five more women over the next 20 years. In 1977, however, he grew angry about the lack of media reports around his crimes, writing to a local TV station, “How many people do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention.” The note led to a widespread panic — but Rader was not caught, and the cases went cold. He killed his final known victim, an elderly woman, in 1991.
How was Dennis Rader caught?
In 2004, after a local news report ran a story claiming that the BTK Killer was likely dead or in prison due to inactivity, Rader sent evidence of his ninth crime to a reporter, per Britannica. For one year, Rader continued to taunt the media and law enforcement, sending souvenirs from the crimes as well as notes about the murders and other paraphernalia associated with the crimes.
But in 2005, police traced a floppy disk Rader sent to law enforcement back to his church, per NBC News. They then matched his DNA to evidence from the first murders and arrested him. Rader confessed and pleaded guilty in June of that year. Rader is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences at the El Dorado Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Kansas.
The BTK Killer in recent years
Rader committed his final known murder in 1991 — but his name has come up in connection with other cases. In August 2023, Rader was announced as a suspect in the death of 22-year-old Shawna Beth Garber and the 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old cheerleader Cynthia “Cindy” Dawn Kinney.
In September 2023, a BTK task force was created, which included individuals like TV journalist Nancy Grace, Golden State Killer investigator Paul Holes and Rawson herself. Though Rawson met Rader in prison for the first time since his conviction in the summer of 2023 and claimed that he may be involved in five unsolved cases, she resigned from the task force later that year, choosing instead to assist authorities as a protected witness.
So far, Rader’s potential involvement in these crimes has not been confirmed; he was ultimately ruled out as a suspect in the Garber case. However, a word puzzle that was originally sent to the police in 2004 was reinterpreted in 2024 by law enforcement, with clues possibly linking him to Kinney.
