Kerri Rawson, daughter of the infamous BTK serial killer, confronted her dad in prison after a newly uncovered journal entry reveals he may have abused her.
Dennis Rader, 78, is serving 10 consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to 10 murders in 2005. He calls himself the BTK killer, which stands for “bind, torture, kill.” Oklahoma cold case investigators recently uncovered a diary entry from Rader suggesting he may have abused his daughter when she was too young to remember.
Ms Rawson confronted him in prison in October, she told audience members at CrimeCon 2024, according to Fox News. She said it was the fifth time she had spoken to her father since he went to prison.
“I sat feet across from you; you crumbled up, rotting away in a wheelchair, me standing tall and brave, and confronted you with the hard bare truth you had kept hidden from me for over four decades,” she said at the crime convention, giving a victim impact statement as though speaking to her imprisoned father.
“You denied it, gas-lit me, emotionally and verbally abused me, asked me what PTSD is; and then when I explained, told me, I had brought this all on myself,” she continued.
The journal entry was uncovered as Oklahoma investigators looked into the cold case disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney in 1976. They believe Rader could be responsible for the teen girl’s mysterious disappearance.
Ms Rawson, who helped police decipher her father’s journal where he recorded the torture he inflicted on his victims, found a passage that read: “KERRI/BND/GAME 1981,” according to Fox News. BND was Rader’s shorthand for “bondage.”
“My stomach twisted into white hot lightning,” Ms Rawson said of the discovery, per Fox News. “There it was, after four decades, hard proof that you, my father, had sexually abused me when I was a toddler.”
Meanwhile, police have attempted to link Rader to other cold cases.
In January 2023, the Osage County Sheriff’s Office launched a new investigation into hundreds of Rader’s drawings and writings that were recovered after his 2005 arrest.
“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 at the time.
Earlier this year, Rader was also absolved of yet another cold case initially believed to be connected to him: the 1990 murder of Shawna Garber.
