On Resilience: A Serial Killer's Daughter
On Resilience: A Serial Killer's Daughter
Consider this
It’s been two and a half months since my mom died at age 85 from heart failure. I still have some very bad grieving days, and yesterday was one of those. I tweeted that I was stuck “in the twilight zone between stage 3 (Anger & Bargaining) and 4 (Depression, Reflection, Loneliness) of the stages of grief and not a fan.”
Soon friends were tweeting kind replies, and one person’s kindness stood out. “Years of loss, grief on top of one another compounds,” Kerri wrote in part, “I’ve found even if I think I’m mourning the loss of ___, I’m sometimes processing decades in that sorrow.”
Her words meant a lot because I’m aware that, perhaps more than anyone I know, this friend understands how complicated and devastating grief can be. One day 18 years ago, her family fell apart in the most nightmarish way. Her father was arrested, partly due to evidence that included her DNA, and revealed to be one of the 20th century’s most infamous serial killers.
Before I was first hired to write for money, I had a crime blog. I’d launched it on a whim in 2004. There were a few factors at work in my decision to create the site. One factor was the blogosphere at the time bored me. I’m not apolitical. In fact, I’m very liberal and only getting more that way as I age. But all you could find on blogs in 2004 and 2005 was political blather, and I had nothing to add. On the other hand, I’d shared a true crime obsession with my mom since I was just 11 or so, and I realized as soon as I first launched a blog at all that you could find a lot to go along with breaking crime stories with just some better-than-average digital research chops.
Using my own acumen and research techniques I’d learned from my wife—a gifted genealogist and award-winning teacher with a doctorate in education—and my innate combination of fearlessness and cluelessness, I stumbled into scoops that received national attention. My first big notice, however, was for an ad hoc profile I’d blogged of a serial killer dormant since the 1970s (later, it came out that he’d continued into the early 90s), the BTK Strangler of Wichita, Kansas. He’d reemerged, sending new letters and packages to get the attention of the press and police.
I won’t go into the vast amount of obsessive research and thinking I did to come up with what I wrote. It was a lot. But I admit it now—publishing the profile was still an act of hubris I’d find absurdly stupid today.
Then, on February 25, 2005, Dennis Rader was arrested in Wichita. He ultimately confessed to being BTK. All his careful, meticulous attention to concealing himself was undone by a Boomer’s poor understanding of digital tools. Investigators in Kansas did understand those tools, looked in the metadata of a document he’d given them on a diskette, and found the document was written by “Dennis.” It was only a matter of time after that.
The AP found my profile, which I’d published shortly before Rader was apprehended, and the timestamp made one thing clear: I’d been right to an uncanny degree. For example, I’d correctly described what BTK likely looked like and guessed that he was someone who might appear to others as obsessive, uptight, and possibly personally difficult due to his compulsive personality (all true of Rader).
It wasn’t a heavy lift, and plenty of other writing about BTK by much more knowledgeable people informed my research and later backed me up. But while I do have confidence in my ability to analyze people, behaviors, and certain situations, I also think the attention I got from the biggest press service in the world was partly a product of just trying to find a new, digital-centric angle on the story. I got lucky.
And with BTK, law enforcement had no help from me. I was just some true crime gadfly. They’d caught his metadata and also used (without her knowledge) his daughter’s DNA to confirm he was their guy.
The rest is—to lean into a cliché—history.
Beginning with the Crime Library, which was a kind of true crime mega site at the time, I launched a writing career a few months after BTK’s arrest.
Save for the blog post recognized by the AP, my writing about BTK wasn’t significant. Still, I was surprised when Kerri Rawson, Dennis Rader’s daughter and the author of A Serial Killer’s Daughter, followed me on Twitter. I realized that the connection between Kerri following me and my writing about her father’s crimes was entirely in my head. She and I follow many of the same news sources and people, and she has an understandable and abiding interest in crime stories, particularly news about missing people.
Unlike far too many people who think they’re true crime mavens online, I made no assumptions about what Kerri was like. In fact, I wanted to reach out to her immediately when she first followed me to voice this—that I know one of the more neglected aspects of crime coverage has long been the impact on the families of criminals. If anything, the families who do get attention are the ones who often swear in the face of all evidence that there’s no way their mom, dad, brother, sister, son, etc., could’ve possibly committed the crime or crimes in question. I didn’t, though, figuring she dealt with enough weird-seeming people as it was.
But a family member in denial? That’s not Kerri Rawson. The opening of her book makes that clear:
On February 25, 2005, my father, Dennis Lynn Rader, was arrested for murder. In the weeks that followed, I learned he was the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), who had terrorized my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, for three decades. As he confessed on national television to the brutal killings of eight adults and two children, I struggled to comprehend the fact that the first twenty-six years of my life had been a lie. My father was not the man I’d known him to be.
Over time, I’ve been impressed with Kerri’s resilience and how she helps people seek attention for the missing and resolutions for unsolved cases. Raised in the Lutheran church, Kerri’s faith is still apparent, and more than any of this, following her on social media reveals someone honest in an unflinching way. Online, Kerri is open with her emotions and addresses some of the challenges she still faces—including sick people who want to somehow see her as part and parcel of her father’s nightmarish legacy.
I don’t have an infamous criminal in my family. There have definitely been criminals, and one, in particular, may well have had a hand in the deaths of at least three people between 1935 and 1945. That’s for another edition of the newsletter.
So I may be able to imagine how I’d react to such a thing better than many, but in the end, it’s still just imagining. And if that infamous criminal was my father? I don’t know, I might want to disappear.
But Kerri Rawson is empathetic and willing to offer off-the-cuff words of comfort to neurotic writers who also sometimes can’t help but display what they’re going through—like me, feeling especially raw while mourning my mom.
“We as humans are meant to pull, push, guide, lead, gently knock each over the head (stop doing that) as needed,” Kerri said to me over Twitter during our conversation, “You are not alone(,) and this won’t last forever.”
I thanked Kerri via DM, and she deflected, noting she wasn’t the only one who offered understanding and kindness, which was true. But as someone who has studied the toll crime takes on so many through the years and witnessed how wounded survivors of crime can be—survivors being a broad category that often includes the criminals’ families, too—I found her thoughtfulness and wisdom truly striking, and I wanted her to know that.
I also wanted readers of this newsletter to know.
When you see some huge breaking crime story in the news, remember the ripples from the act reach much further than we ever see, and countless people are changed.
I’m still reading A Serial Killer’s Daughter. It’s well-written and a rare window into one side of a huge crime story. The book and its author are also comforting evidence for me that our genes aren’t our destiny, something my father would disagree with—though he’s too old now for me to want to argue with him.
I’d recommend the book for that rare view alone, but getting a sense of the author, I think it’s worth a read to get to know her.