The infamous BTK killer’s own twisted journal entries may link him to the decades-old unsolved disappearance of an Oklahoma teenager, according to law enforcement.
“Laundry Mat were [sic] a good place to watch victims and dream,” Dennis Rader wrote in a 1976 journal entry titled “PJ-Bad Wash Day,” an excerpt shared by the Osage County Sheriff’s Office last week showed.
“The Brunette was the target,” he added, noting that he was “out of town until things cool down.”
Rader, 78, was sentenced to life in prison in 2005 for a series of 10 grisly murders that terrorized the Wichita, Kansas area for 20 years. He is known for viewing his criminal behavior as projects, CNN reported.
He also tied the laundromat incident to an chapter in his unfinished manuscript, which is believed to describe all the murders or assaults he viewed as successful, Osage County Undersheriff Gary Upton told the outlet.
Authorities now believe that Rader’s bizarre writing may refer to the June 1976 disappearance of Cynthia Dawn Kinney, who was last seen at her family’s laundromat in Pawhuska, CNN explained.
Rader, who was 31 at the time, was allegedly spotted leaving the laundry place with two women around the time the high school cheerleader vanished, Sheriff Eddie Virden told KOCO earlier this month.
Pawhuska is about two hours from Park City, the Wichita suburb where the suburban dad of two lived and owned a home.
Rader’s journal entries and manuscript were seized by investigators when he was arrested in 2005, CNN said.
For nearly two decades, detectives have pored over the entries for possible clues to unsolved crimes in the area.
The Osage County Sheriff’s Office obtained the materials from Wichita police in January, Upton said.
Over the past several months, local investigators have pored over the materials searching for possible links to cold cases that match Rader’s modus operandi, he continued.
Rader – who dubbed himself “BTK” for bind, torture, kill – is a sexual sadist who frequently stalked, tied up, and sexually assaulted his victims before killing them.
The journal entries and other evidence prompted Osage authorities last week to dig up the site of Rader’s former home, where they found multiple “trophies” from at least one woman in a “hiding hole,” Upton confirmed.
The investigators also found chains and C-clips that could be used to restrain a person’s limbs, he added.
There were also discoveries that the team is not sharing publicly, he explained.
A previous search earlier this year unearthed a troubling “pantyhouse ligature.”
Rader’s last known victim, Dolores Davis, was notably strangled with pantyhose.
Last week, Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, said her father is refusing to cooperate with efforts to uncover any other possible crimes, including Kinney’s abduction.
“It was the first time he ever dropped his mask and became BTK in front of me,” she told Ashleigh Banfield of visiting Rader at the El Dorodo Correctional Facility this summer.
“He’s very unhappy with what’s going on,” she said of the new investigation.
“My father does not want to be put in a van and woken up in Oklahoma in a holding cell for, you know, the kidnapping of Cynthia Kinney. He wants to live his life out at the prison that he’s at.”
Rawson told CNN that she has been “offering assistance” to investigators as they continue to look into her father’s crimes.
“I will continue to partner closely and heartily support all (law enforcement) agencies and offer my volunteer assistance,” she wrote.
“Let’s keep working together to solve these cases for these families. They deserve all that we can give them. We can join together to put our mark on modern inter-agency cooperation and modern forensics.”
