Ant Randy

In 1985, Dennis Rader drove a woman's body to his own church and photographed it there. He was president of the congregation. Twenty years later the police traced a floppy disk to a computer in that same church, saved by a user called Dennis. Ten murders between 1974 and 1991, thirty-one years uncaught, and he had named himself BTK. He had asked the police in writing whether the disk could be traced. They told him no. He had his own vocabulary. The people he picked were projects. The bag was his hit kit. One of the ten lived on his street. Asked in court whether she knew him, he said they used to wave. "It wasn't anything personal. I mean, just a neighbor." His daughter later found out that the car he gave her to drive to high school had carried a body in the trunk. In 2004 he asked the police, in writing, whether a floppy disk could be traced back to him. Then he added two words. Be honest. They ran an ad in the local paper telling him it was safe. It was a lie. The disk came back carrying metadata. A computer at Christ Lutheran Church. A user called Dennis. The church website listed him as president of the congregation. In the video below the judge takes him through the last of the ten, and he answers like a man describing a job he used to do. He got 175 years. Rader later asked the detective why he had lied to him. "Because I was trying to catch you." Would you have lied to him?