WICHITA -- The signs that he was tightly wound were there for many to see. He signaled his powerful need for control again and again, but even the people who say he bullied them had no inkling that he could be the man police are now calling a serial killer.
Dennis L. Rader, the government inspector charged with killing 10 people between 1974 and 1991, may have been a Boy Scout volunteer and active church leader. But he was also known as an arrogant and harassing neighbor who bullied single women on his street, and an unforgiving supervisor who made life miserable for at least one subordinate -- another single woman.
Dennis L. Rader was a compliance officer in Park City, Kan.
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BTK Timeline
Jan. 15, 1974: Joseph Otero, 38, and his wife, Julie, 34, are strangled in their home along with two of their children, Josephine, 11, and Joseph II, 9.
April 4, 1974: Kathryn Bright, 21, is stabbed to death in her home. Police later conclude she was a BTK victim.
October 1974: The Wichita Eagle-Beacon gets a letter from someone taking responsibility for the Otero family killing and including crime scene details.
March 17, 1977: Shirley Vian, 24, is found tied up and strangled at her home.
Dec. 8, 1977: Nancy Fox, 25, is found tied up and strangled in her home. The killer's voice is captured on tape when he calls a dispatcher to report the crime.
Jan. 31, 1978: A poem referring to the Vian killing is sent to the Wichita Eagle-Beacon.
Feb. 10, 1978: A letter from BTK is sent to KAKE-TV claiming responsibility for the deaths of Vian, Fox and an unnamed victim. Police Chief Richard LaMunyon says a serial killer is at large and has threatened to strike again.
Aug. 15, 1979: Police get more than 100 tips in the first day of radio and TV broadcasts that repeat the voice of the BTK strangler from the 1977 recording.
April 28, 1979: BTK waits inside a home but leaves before the 63-year-old woman who lives there returns. He later sends her a letter letting her know he was there.
Sept. 16, 1986: Vicki Wegerle, 28, is strangled in her home.
March 19, 2004: A letter arrives at the Wichita Eagle containing a photocopy of Wegerle's driver's license and photos of her body. Police link it to BTK.
Feb. 26, 2005: After receiving several more letters, authorities announce the arrest of BTK. Police identify him as Dennis Rader, 59, a municipal worker in nearby Park City.
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"He nitpicked people to death. He was a total control freak," said Dee Stuart, a mayoral candidate in nearby Park City, where Rader lived.
Stuart said a friend of hers, whom she declined to identify, worked with Rader, a Park City compliance officer, and "filed grievance after grievance" against him. "She suffered through a constant barrage of belittling attacks from him," Stuart said. "No one was as smart as Dennis Rader."
Accounts such as Stuart's stand in sharp contrast to the descriptions of Rader that emerged soon after he was arrested on Feb. 25. Rader has been depicted as a selfless, churchgoing family man, so well-liked that those who knew him were flabbergasted by the news that he is an accused serial killer.
Rader, however, exhibited some classic antisocial traits -- superiority, narcissism and anger -- and was seen by some as a man imprisoned in a life he believed was beneath him, associating with people he believed were not up to his intellect.
His job was to enforce city codes -- animal laws, trash regulations, property maintenance -- and Rader took it too far, some said.
"He was mean-spirited and a coward," said James Reno, a neighbor who did battle with Rader for years over his treatment of neighbors. Reno said he called City Hall to complain about Rader several times and was always told "we'll look into it."
"He never messed with me," Reno said. "He always picked on the single women on the street who he could bully."
Rader is accused of killing 10 people, including eight female victims.
After the first slayings in the '70s, police and the media received taunting letters and cryptic notes with clues. The killer labeled himself BTK, for "bind, torture, kill." He liked to torment his victims, tie them up and then strangle them.
After 25 years of silence, the killer began communicating with the media and police again last year, sending photographs of a victim's body and leaving the driver's license that belonged to another in a park.
Few Close Friends
Over the past 25 years, Rader raised two children, held steady jobs, volunteered in his son's Boy Scout troop, earned a college degree in criminal justice and became the president of his church's governing council. But no one here could name close personal friends -- people he might have socialized with outside work. And none has surfaced to defend him.
Rader's pastor, Michael Clark of Christ Lutheran Church, said in an interview that he views the man he visited in prison last week as his parishioner -- not a killer.
