BTK Serial Killer Dennis Rader’s Former Home Searched By Police Looking For Cold Case Connections

Police in Oklahoma are currently digging up a vacant lot where the home of the serial killer Dennis Rader, better known by the nickname BTK, once stood in Kansas.

Police Dig Up BTK Former Property 

People Magazine reported that Rader has previously confessed to brutally murdering 10 people between 1974 and 1991, earning himself the moniker BTK, which stands for “bind, torture, kill.” Investigators have long believed that Rader had more victims than just the ten he’s confessed to killing, however.

Oklahoma deputies said on Tuesday that they were digging up the lot in the hopes of finding potential connections to other cold cases.

“The Osage County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to follow leads in unsolved missing persons and murder cases possibly related to BTK,” Osage County Undersheriff Gary Upton told CNN.

Park City Police Chief Phil Bostian said that the sheriff’s department had asked the local public works to remove some cement on the property, which is now owned by the city, so that they could dig below it.

“The theory is he could have placed evidence of cases under stone pavers under the metal shed he built in the early to mid-90s. Like drivers licenses in jars,” said Kerri Rawson, Rader’s estranged daughter. She added that investigators had dug a hole where Rader’s shed had once stood on the property.

Police Investigating Rader In Missing Teen’s Disappearance

Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden told FOX 23 that he and other investigators visited Rader, now 78, last month at the Kansas prison where he has been serving multiple life sentences for decades, spending around three hour speaking with him.

One of the cases that Virden and his team were hoping to get answers on was that of 16-year-old Cynthia “Cindy” Dawn Kinney, a high school cheerleader who went missing in 1976. She was last seen leaving a laundromat that was owned by a relative, according to The New York Post.

“Wichita is only a two-hour drive from where our girl disappeared,” the sheriff stated. “And the time frame also lines up.”

“We never close the door on a case just because it goes cold,” Virden added. “And we didn’t want to rule him out, and we’re still not ruling him out.”

It was actually Rader who brought up Kinney’s name to a reporter before police could ask him about her.

“We never specifically asked him about Cindy Kinney,” Virden said. “He’s the one who specifically named her, and that was when he reached out to contact a reporter in New York about doing a story about us interviewing him in prison last month.”

While he was still on the run, Rader enjoyed reaching out to Wichita-area TV stations to give grizzly details about the murders that he was committing.

“We know this is how he likes to reveal information,” Virden said. “We can’t help but think he’s possibly up to his old way of doing things again of revealing information to law enforcement through reporters.”

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‘He Had Reasons To Be Down Here’

At the time of Kinney’s disappearance, Rader had ties to both the Boy Scouts and to a security company installing alarms in Oklahoma.

“He had reasons to be down here,” Virden said, adding that a bank located across the street from where Kinney worked was installing ADT alarms, the company Rader worked for, when she went missing.

“He said he recalled being in Osage County and in Oklahoma before many times, even with family,” Virden said of their prison conversation. “He told us he was laying low in 1976, and he wasn’t doing any killings up there at that time. A victim had met up with a sketch artist, and the drawing was so good, it spooked him, but that doesn’t mean while he wasn’t doing anything in Kansas, he could have easily driven down here and done something especially if he had work down here.”

Virden concluded by saying that after speaking with Rader, he hasn’t yet decided if he thinks he was involved in Kinney’s disappearance.

“We don’t want to stir up false hope in the friends and family, but this is something that needs to be explored,” Virden said.

Find out more about this in the video below.

Related: North Dakota DA Reduces Charges for Man Accused of Killing ‘Republican Extremist’ Teenager Cayler Ellingson

Rader’s Estranged Daughter Speaks Out 

It wasn’t until 2005 that Rader was finally arrested for his crimes, and his daughter Rawson previously talked about what it was like to find out that her father was a serial killed.

“It took more than 10 years before I could even sit across from someone and even talk about this,” Rawson said in a 2019 interview. “Nobody wants to believe their father could be capable of such monstrous things.”

“I was just trying to stay alive and breathe,” Rawson added. “Trying to recover from the shock, telling myself over and over that I’d do anything not to be the daughter of a serial killer.”

Watch Rawson talk more about this in the video below.

BTK is one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, so it would not be a surprise to find out that he had more victims than just the ones he’s confessed to killing. Should this be the case, we can only hope that police are able to get to the bottom of it, because the families of these potential victims deserve answers.