BTK: The Man Next Door

On January 15, 1974, three older children came home from school in Wichita, Kansas, and found their parents and two younger siblings dead. The city had no suspect, no motive, and no idea that the man responsible would send taunting letters to the press, name himself, and then vanish for thirteen years — only to surface again because a newspaper article suggested people had forgotten him.

Dennis Lynn Rader spent thirty years as a church congregation president, a compliance officer, a Cub Scout leader, a husband, and a father. He also killed ten people across Wichita and its suburbs between 1974 and 1991. This episode follows the full arc of the BTK case — the murders, the letters, the long silence, and the extraordinary self-destruction of a man whose narcissism proved stronger than his instinct for self-preservation. The floppy disk he mailed to a television station in February 2005 contained, in its recovered metadata, his name and the name of his church. He handed investigators the evidence that convicted him.