BTK serial killer’s chilling drawings released amid search for new victims
Investigators say they hope the images will prompt new information from the public
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Never-before-seen drawings from Dennis Rader, the self-proclaimed BTK serial killer, may hold the key to solving a missing persons case and several homicides.
The Osage County Sheriff’s Office released the chilling images that depict three different women who are bound and gagged in what appear to be barns, which investigators believe could be in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. The images are reproduced below.
The convicted killer is already behind bars for 10 murders that took place from the 1970s to the 1990s in Wichita, Kansas, but now law enforcement, and his daughter, claim there are many more victims.
Hundreds of Rader’s drawings and writings were recovered after his arrest in 2005, but Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden launched a new investigation in January and says the images may confirm more crimes were committed.
Last month, Rader was named the prime suspect in the 1976 disappearance of 16-year-old Cynthia Dawn Kinney in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and in the 1990 murder of 22-year-old Shawna Beth Garber in McDonald County, Missouri.
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The 78-year-old is serving 10 consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to 10 murders in 2005. He reportedly called himself BTK for the abbreviation “blind, torture, kill”.
Investigators believe Rader may have buried Kinney in a barn near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Her body has never been found.
Sheriff Virden told CNN about an anonymous call they received months after Kinney disappeared from a man claiming her body could be found in an old barn along the Oklahoma-Kansas border.
And just recently, law enforcement intercepted communications from Rader in prison that revealed there may be some hidden items in old barns, according to the sheriff.
“We’re hoping that releasing these, someone might recognize one of these barns or the unique features in them, or the closeness of the silo to the barn or possibly might have even found items that they didn’t know why were there that could be very important in this case,” Sheriff Virden told CNN.
“Even if the barn’s not there anymore. We would still like that information.”
One drawing shows a young female who is gagged and is sitting with her arms and legs bound, but it’s the black piping running through the barn walls that the sheriff points out.
“The reason you would have that is if you were moving livestock through there, that those bars would keep the livestock from hitting probably the tin or the wood on the outside of the barn so that if an animal hit it, you know, they wouldn’t go through and dent up the tin or knock the wood off the outside,” he told CNN.
Osage County, Oklahoma investigators believe this sketch could be linked to a missing woman last seen in southeast Kansas in 1991. Her name has not been made public in connection with Rader at this time.
“We know from things Dennis said on this exact photograph that it was a drawing he created from an actual barn,” Sheriff Virden told CNN.
A second drawing shows a female in a red top. She is also bound and gagged. The sheriff points out the barn with wood slats.
“That would be a barn that had wood slats. You know, possibly a rounded post but in that area of the barn what would have possibly a wooden floor, you know and a lot of times in tack rooms inside of barns or in feed rooms or storage,” he said.
“They wouldn’t leave a dirt floor because they didn’t have livestock in that area.”
The third sketch shows a female lying down in what appears to be a barn loft. She is tied to a staircase post that investigators are looking closely at.
“The support post appears to have a bracket and then a bolt that bolts through that to hold everything together,” Virden said.
Rader’s daughter Kerri Rawson has been working closely with investigators on her father’s case and has posted updates on her social media accounts.
She told CNN that her father loved barns and silos.
“My father absolutely loves barns and silos. Every time we drove around going camping, fishing, to college, he’d absolutely say this one – like he said, I want to retire here. And he would tease my mom about it,” Ms Rawson told CNN’s Jean Casarez.
“And then after he was arrested, we found out later that he had massive fantasies about those specific locations. So now we’re driving around trying to find those by my memory and noting them because we need to go see, is there anybody missing or buried there.”
She confronted her father for the first time in 18 years, visiting him in prison twice in recent months.
Rader is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. But she could not get a confession out of him.
“He’s literally sitting six feet across from me,” she said. “He hasn’t seen me in 18 years and he’s lying to me.”
She also talked about her father’s deteriorating condition behind bars.
“He’s rotting,” she said.
“He has scoliosis very severe. He’s in a wheelchair, he has no teeth left, so he doesn’t even look like he has a jaw,” Rawson said. “He went from this like vivacious man that was hiking with me right before he was arrested, to like an elderly man, you know, his legs wrapped with like bandages.”
Last month law enforcement dug up his former family residence, reportedly finding a “pantyhose ligature”.