Inside BTK Killer Dennis Rader's Life in Prison

In 2005, Dennis Rader, a local church leader and Air Force veteran in Wichita, Kan., confessed to one of the most infamous cold cases in American history: He was BTK, a serial killer who murdered at least 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. The initials stood for “bind, torture, kill.”

It was Rader who resurrected his own cold case after over a decade of silence, sending letters, packages and a floppy disk to local radio stations and newsrooms. Police were able to track him down, leading to his confession and a guilty plea in court.

Prosecutors charged Rader with 10 counts of first-degree murder, and he was handed the maximum sentence: 10 consecutive life terms with the possibility of parole after 175 years. The death penalty was never considered because Kansas did not have capital punishment at the time of the murders. At the sentencing hearing, victims called him a “monster.”

“This man needs to be thrown in a deep, dark hole and left to rot,” a sister of one of Rader’s victims said.

His earliest possible release date is estimated to be 2180.

Rader was taken in August 2005 to El Dorado Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in El Dorado, Kan., that first opened in 1991 to resolve overcrowding in two other state prisons. It is the largest prison in Kansas. He has never left and has become its most infamous inmate.

Despite El Dorado’s initial purpose as a solution to overcrowding, the prison has been chronically understaffed. In 2017 and 2018, budget cuts and conditions there led to prison protests where inmates took control of several sections of the prison and burned a building.

Rader has been a rather well-behaved inmate. He has only three citations on his disciplinary record since his sentence: two related to mail and one in 2019 for violating “published orders.” In 2006, his good behavior gave him the privilege to watch TV and listen to the radio, allowing him to keep up with the news. (In 2019, he called President Donald Trump the “worst ‘president ever!’”)

In 2022, TMZ obtained 2012 letters from Rader where he described his daily routine, including birdwatching and enjoying cold coffee. He kept active by running in place or doing push-ups inside his cell, and thought about his family: “miss them dearly, not a minute goes by each day I [am] not thinking of them.”

He also described books he was reading: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Fear Index, both of which describe the type of gruesome murders with which Rader may be well-acquainted.

Today, Rader is a physically frail, wheelchair-bound man in his 80s. Despite this, he has spent all his life in prison incarcerated under solitary confinement, which the prison calls “special management.” This incarceration segregates him from the general population and greatly restricts his movement, only allowing him out of his 8-foot-by-12-foot cell, which he has dubbed “El Caverna,” for one hour a day, five days a week.

Kansas sends more inmates to solitary confinement than the national average, with one in 10 inmates currently under that classification. 

Visitations at the facility are limited. Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, who assisted the investigation against her father and has since become a crime victims’ rights advocate, did not see him for years after the sentencing, keeping in touch only through letters, which he sent whether she replied or not.

“He’s starting to lose some memory and get a little dementia,” Rawson told People in 2019. “You can see it in his letters. He’s really worried about what’s going to happen to his body when he dies.”

But after 18 years, she visited with investigators looking to see if he was involved with other cold cases from Oklahoma. 

“He was literally crying, so happy to see me,” Rawson recalled in the documentary My Father, the BTK Killer.

However, Rader wasn’t interested in discussing the crimes. He was upset, Rawson said, that she didn’t want to talk to her father, Dennis Rader, but to the killer, BTK.