It truly sounds as if a decades-long search for a serial killer is definitely at an end:
The man arrested on suspicion of being the BTK serial killer has confessed to at least six slayings and might be responsible for as many as 13 – including one that could carry the death penalty, a source close to the investigation said Sunday.
Investigators, who suspect Dennis L. Rader in a decades-old string of 10 slayings, are looking into whether he was responsible for another three killings- including at least one that occurred after the restoration of the Kansas’ death penalty in 1994, the source told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Rader made the confession Friday, the day of his arrest, according to the source. “The guy is telling us about the murders,” the source said.
Police spokeswoman Janet Johnson declined to comment on the accuracy of the source’s statements.
Rader was being held on a $10 million bond in the deaths of 10 people between 1974 and 1991. Police had long linked the BTK killer to eight murders, but added two more after Rader’s arrest.
Now, the source said, police are investigating whether Rader was responsible for the deaths of two Wichita State University students, as well as a woman who lived down the street from another known victim of BTK, the killer’s self-coined nickname that stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill.”
Prosecutors had said initially they could not pursue the death penalty against Rader because the 10 murders linked to BTK occurred when Kansas did not have the death penalty.
The interesting thing about this case is he got caught because his ego got the best of him and he started contacting the news media plus sending materials that gave the police new clues if they applied new criminology techniques. So, in the end, this killer proved to be someone most people thought as an everyday neighbor (except for the tiny fact that he worked as a dog catcher — and was once spotted shooting a dog, which most neighbors and dog catchers don’t do).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.