The monster of suburbia: Observer BTK profile

[emad]

America's most notorious serial killer terrified a small town for 30 years. Now police have arrested a church-going family man they believe is responsible for 10 murders. Paul Harris reports from Kansas

Sunday March 6, 2005
The Observer

The wind blows constantly through Wichita's streets. It is a reminder that the city sits on what was once pristine prairie. When white settlers arrived the eternal howling breeze drove some insane. It was a phenomenon that preyed especially on women and children and was dubbed 'prairie madness'.

For the past 30 years another sort of madness has blown through Wichita. It was a very human insanity but its victims were the same. It was the BTK Strangler, a serial-killing monster who held the city in fear for three decades and took 10 lives.

Now, police believe, that monster has a face. It is that of a mustachioed, balding, middle-aged man. And he has a name. Dennis Rader, 59, a man previously known mostly as the local dog warden. Now Rader sits in a windowless cell charged with killing seven women, two children and one man. If he is BTK, his name will soon rise to the top of America's most notorious killers. Unfortunately that may have been the killer's intention all along.

BTK is a uniquely awful killer in the annals of American crime. His initials stand for bind, torture and kill. His victims were attacked in their own homes and strangled, sometimes as their children watched. Other times the children died too. Most bizarre of all was BTK's courting of the media. He wrote letters and poems to newspapers, taunting and ranting. He brazenly reported his murders to the police. But BTK was meant to be a thing of the past. His spree was thought to have ended in 1979. He was assumed to have died or moved away. Until last March. That was when BTK began writing again and confessing to new crimes. It brought fresh fear to Wichita, and focused the eyes of the world on Kansas.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1431485,00.html

[beyurslf]

1. Wichita and its suburbs have over half a million people.... hardly a

"small town"