The 20/20 episode “My Father BTK” tells the story of Dennis Rader, who spent decades tormenting Wichita, Kansas as a serial killer known as BTK, an alias he gave himself for “Bind, Torture, Kill.”
From 1974 to 1991, he killed ten people. The program interviews Charlie Otero, who was 15 when his parents and two siblings (age 9 and 11) were murdered in their home in 1974. Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, is also interviewed. She says “I still love my dad today” and keeps a regular correspondence with her father in prison. She explains that she’s “never corresponding with BTK. I’m talking to my father. I’m talking to the man that I lived with and loved for 26 years.”
With tears coming down her face, Rawson reads some of his letters on camera. “Hopefully someday your heart will mend and you can forgive me,” Rader writes his daughter, and “Life before the arrest was a good time, and the dark side took me away.”
Rader was arrested in 2005. He is serving ten consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility. Rawson’s book, A Serial Killer’s Daughter (SEE LINK ABOVE), is published by Thomas Nelson (a subsidiary of HarperCollins), the publishing unit of News Corp. that publishes Christian content including the book Heaven is for Real. 20/20 airs Fridays at 9 pm on ABC.
