Where Is Dennis Rader Now? Inside the BTK Killer's Life Today, Decades After Admitting to Murdering 10 People By Nicole Briese

Dennis Rader is still making headlines from behind bars.

The serial killer known as the Bind, Torture, Kill (“BTK”) Killer has continued to arouse investigators’ suspicion in several cold case murders since his 2005 arrest.

Rader — who killed at least 10 victims over the span of three decades, per The New York Times — famously taunted police with his crimes through letters to law enforcement and the media for five years from 1974 to 1979, when his communications ceased. He resurfaced in the public eye in 2004 after 25 years of silence, and less than a year later, he was arrested.

Now, Rader is the subject of the 2025 documentary My Father, the BTK Killer, which premiered on Netflix on Oct. 10 and features interviews with his daughter, Kerri Rawson. (Rader also shares son Brian Rader with his ex-wife Paula Dietz.)

“The man I knew could be good and decent,” Rawson told PEOPLE in January 2019. “I’m not forgiving him for what he did to those other families, but I am forgiving him for what he did to our family.”

So where is Dennis Rader today? Here’s everything to know about what happened to the man known as the BTK Killer following his 2005 arrest.

He killed at least 10 people

Rader was convicted of killing and torturing 10 victims between 1974 and 1991.

Rader recounted killing four members of the Otero family — Joseph and Julie Otero and their 9- and 11-year old children — on Jan. 15, 1974, by way of strangulation at his sentencing, per NBC News.

He also confessed to killing 21-year-old Kathryn Bright two years later, followed by Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox in 1977, according to the outlet.

CNN reported that Rader previously told Sgt. Tom Lee that he killed his neighbor, Marine Hedge, on April 27, 1985, before taking her body to the Christ Lutheran Church.

“He advised to me that she was going to the church alive or dead — either way,” Lee said.

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Rader, who was notorious for taunting police and media with letters with clues and descriptions of his crimes, also sent a letter to The Wichita Eagle in 2004 that included photos of Vicki Wegerle from the Sept. 16, 1986, crime scene and a photocopy of her missing driver’s license, per CBS News.

His last known murder occurred on Jan. 16, 1991, when he abducted Dolores E. Davis from her home and strangled her to death, according to the outlet.

He was arrested in 2005

After a nearly 30-year break in communication, in 2004, Rader began sending letters to The Wichita Eagle and other outlets with evidence.

Police ultimately tracked down Rader using metadata stored on a floppy disc, which Rader had sent to a local TV station. Authorities ultimately traced the disc to the Christ Lutheran Church, where he served as the congregational president.

From there, police were able to tie Rader to the DNA evidence left at the crime scenes, through his daughter.

“They found out I had had annual pap smears and they got a warrant for my medical records,” Rawson explained in My Father, the BTK Killer. “They needed to catch my dad. They needed to be safe about it and needed to do it quickly.”

Rader was arrested on Feb. 25, 2005, per KAKE.

He waived his right to a trial

Rader waived his right to a preliminary hearing in April 2005, per The New York Times. According to Steve Osburn, a lawyer for Rader who spoke to The New York Times, Rader was acting on the advice of his legal team.

Just as his trial was about to begin, Rader waived his right to a trial and pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder in June 2005, per NBC News.

When asked by District Judge Gregory Waller if he was pleading because he was guilty, Rader responded, “Yes, sir.”

He is serving 10 life terms in a Kansas prison

Rader was sentenced to 10 life terms in prison for his crimes on Aug. 18, 2005. The New York Times reported that his sentencing also included 40 years without the possibility of parole for the murder of his last known victim, Davis, in 1991. Kansas did not have the death penalty during the time of his killings, per the outlet.

Rader is still being held at the same El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas that he has been at since Aug. 19, 2005, per NBC News.

In October 2014, Rader told The Wichita Eagle in a hand-written letter that he was collaborating on a book with author Katherine Ramsland in an effort to pay “his debt” to his victims’ families.

“I can never replace their love ones, my deeds too ‘dark’ to understand; the book or movies etc. is the only way to help them,” he wrote at the time.

According to Rader, he was barred from profiting from his crimes by a previous court settlement.

Ramsland’s book, Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was released in 2016.

He has been a suspect in other crimes

In 2023, Rader was named as the prime suspect in the unsolved murders of 16-year-old Oklahoman Cynthia Dawn Kinney and 22-year-old Missouri native Shawna Beth Garber. While he was ruled out in Garber’s case in 2024, per The Independent, he remains a suspect in Kinney’s 1976 disappearance.

Kinney was last seen at the Osage Laundry in Pawhuska, Okla. A 1976 journal entry of Rader’s titled “PJ-Bad Wash Day” stated that he was watching a victim near a laundromat, though he has not been officially charged with a crime in relation to Kinney’s disappearance.

“We never close the door on a case just because it goes cold. And we didn’t want to rule him out, and we’re still not ruling him out,” Sheriff Eddie Virdin told FOX 2023 in February 2023 amid searches of the serial killer’s former property.

His daughter visited him in prison after 18 years

In January 2019, Rawson told PEOPLE that she hadn’t yet visited him in prison, but the two wrote letters from time to time.

“He’s starting to lose some memory and get a little dementia,” she said. “You can see it in his letters. He’s really worried about what’s going to happen to his body when he dies. He’ll write things like, ‘If you don’t write or communicate with me more, I’m going to give somebody else my dead body.’ ”

In the 2025 documentary, Rawson revealed that she visited with her father after 18 years with several investigators. According to the A Serial Killer’s Daughter author, the visit lasted for several hours, during which she asked if he had committed any other murders and expressed her feelings of rage over his crimes.

“It was like I wasn’t even like I was talking to my dad, it was like I was talking to a subhuman,” she said. “I don’t ever want to go anywhere near that person again. That’s not my dad. I don’t know who that is.”