The Chilling True Story Behind My Father: The BTK Killer

The Netflix documentary, My Father: The BTK Killer, out Oct. 10, profiles Kerri Rawson, the daughter of the serial killer Dennis Rader, who murdered 10 people in the Wichita, Kansas, area between 1974 and 1991 and was arrested in 2005. Rader frequently used the term “bind, torture, kill” in letters to local media urging them to investigate him, and he earned the nickname “the BTK killer.” He was finally caught when authorities traced a floppy disk that he sent to a news station in 2005 to a Lutheran church where he held a leadership position. While looking for other family members, investigators obtained Rawson’s DNA from a Pap smear she’d had at a Kansas hospital that matched Rader’s genetic profile. Rader is serving 10 consecutive life terms in prison for his 10 murders. The documentary builds on a memoir that Rawson wrote in 2019, featuring interviews with journalists and law enforcement who covered her dad’s case. Here’s how Rawson describes what it was like to grow up with Rader as a father and a look at how she has found new purpose in life by helping law enforcement search for other Rader victims. Finding out the truth In February 2005, Rawson was a 26-year-old substitute teacher and had a day off from work when police showed up at her door and asked if she knew that her dad was the “BTK” killer.  After police arrested her father, she remembers sitting around a table with her family eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, and her mother commented that it felt like her father had died and that they were gathering after his funeral. Initially, after Rader’s arrest, Rawson would just tell people who asked about her upbringing that she was estranged from her father, and then proceed to keep the conversation light and surface-level. In reality, “I was dying inside,” she says in the documentary. “I was hiding. I spent almost 10 years rotting inside after he was arrested.”  Back then, she remembers thinking: “I don’t know who my father is. What is he hiding? Was he using my family to hide? It’s hard to know who I am if every moment of my life was a lie.” What it’s like to be the daughter of a serial killer Rawson recalls that her father’s personality seemed to change after he was laid off from Cessna in 1973, but that he managed to be a loving parent, who let her be a tomboy and participate in his hobbies. “He’d let you get in trouble and get dirty,” she says in the doc. At the same time, there was another side to Dennis Rader, and his murder spree was just beginning. In January 1974, he strangled four family members, including two children, in their home. A few months later, he broke into a 21-year-old woman’s house and stabbed her to death. In subsequent murders, he’d save souvenirs from the victims, like underwear. Rawson says in the doc that she suffered as a child from night terrors, bed-wetting, and a fear of sleeping in the dark, and questions whether it “had something to do with a bad man in the house, like a home invasion. That’s what he did to victims, I never knew where that came from. I think my subconscious was trying to get it out of me since I was a little girl, saying, ‘hey, there’s a bad man’ in my house.” Based on her father’s mantra “bind, torture, kill,” she knew he had sexual fantasies that he was trying to fulfill with his victims. After Rader’s arrest, she found a notebook in which he wrote in the early 1980s about a bondage game in a bathtub that included her name, which raised another disturbing question for Rawson: “Did dad molest me in the bath when I was like 3?” she asks in the documentary. At the same time, she wrote a letter to her father that she read onscreen: “I didn’t know anything like everyone else until the FBI knocked on my door. I tried to tell them what a great man you are, what a wonderful dad you are…but they didn’t listen. We don’t know who that other man is but we love the husband and father, a man we know with all our hearts. I was wondering if something happened to you as a boy and if you wanted to open up and talk about it.” Rader sent her a letter back shortly after, without answering much of her questions, just emphasizing how much he loved her. In the doc, she describes a frustrating visit with him in prison for more than two hours in 2023 after not seeing him for 18 years. She asked him if there were any other victims, and he refused to respond, arguing that he just wanted to converse like normal fathers and daughters. When she asked him to explain the notes he made about her and a bondage game, he said it was just a fantasy and claimed that he never touched his family members inappropriately. Kerri Rawson’s life now The film ends with Rawson vowing to never go near her father again. In the final scenes, she is dining out with girlfriends she’s known since childhood—her circle of trust. “Everyone and their dog wants a piece of me—’can we write your dad?’— there’s very few people I can trust at this point who just want to get to know me,” she says. She declined media interviews for a long time and focused on being a stay-at-home mom, cooking for her kids and leading a women’s ministry. But even though she didn’t do interviews, she has received a lot of hate mail via email and Instagram, people threatening to kill her. Twitter trolls told her she would have no life and no career. And yet, she’s committed to advocating for crime victims and trauma victims. While no additional murder charges have been filed against Rader, she works with law enforcement whenever they are investigating whether he’s connected to other murders. “If my father has committed more murders, then we really do need to get to the bottom of the truth, and we need to get to it before my father passes away.” But most days, she says she doesn’t think about who her dad is, relaxing by watching TV and playing fetch with her dog. “I’m just me,” she says.