Wichita serial murders (1974–1991)

Between 1974 and 1991, at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, were killed by a man who later identified himself as "BTK" (bind, torture, kill). The killings began on January 15, 1974, with the murders of four members of the Otero family — Joseph Sr., Julia, Joseph II, and Josephine Otero — who were bound and killed inside their home. On April 4, 1974, Kathryn Bright was killed and her brother Kevin was shot and survived. On March 17, 1977, Shirley Vian Relford was killed after her son was approached on the street and led the perpetrator back to their home; her three children were locked in a bathroom but not harmed. On December 8, 1977, Nancy Jo Fox was killed in her home. The perpetrator sent multiple taunting letters and communications to police, media, and a would-be victim between 1974 and 1979, describing crime details not publicly known and demanding media attention, before going silent for over a decade.

The killings resumed in the mid-to-late 1980s and were only later confirmed as the work of the same person. Marine Hedge was killed on April 27, 1985, near her Park City home; her body was found in a ditch on May 5, 1985. Vicki Wegerle was killed in her home on September 16, 1986, a case in which her husband was long suspected by some in the community before the true perpetrator was identified. Dolores Davis was killed on January 18, 1991, and her body was found under a bridge on February 1, 1991.

The case went cold until March 2004, when a letter was sent to the Wichita Eagle claiming responsibility for the Wegerle killing, along with crime-scene photographs and a photocopy of Wegerle's stolen driver's license — information that had not previously linked her death to the earlier series. Additional communications followed over the following months, including packages and postcards sent to media outlets and left in public locations. In February 2005, a floppy disk sent to a Wichita television station was found to contain deleted computer metadata referencing "Christ Lutheran Church" and identifying the document's author as "Dennis." Investigators traced this to Dennis Rader, president of that church's council. A court-ordered DNA test comparing a sample obtained from Rader's daughter to DNA recovered from under Vicki Wegerle's fingernails showed a familial match, providing grounds for Rader's arrest.

Rader was arrested on February 25, 2005, near his Park City home and was charged on February 28, 2005, in Sedgwick County District Court with ten counts of first-degree murder. On June 27, 2005, he changed his plea to guilty and described the killings in detail to the court. On August 18, 2005, he was sentenced to ten consecutive life sentences with a minimum of 175 years, Kansas not having enforced the death penalty at the time of the murders. He was subsequently incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas, where he remains held in solitary confinement.