The Daughter Of A Serial Killer Tells Her Story

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Kerri Rawson will always remember how her world fell apart when an FBI agent knocked on her door in February 2005 with terrible news. The agent told her that her father Dennis Rader, whom she viewed as a loving and protective man, was a serial killer. Her father had been arrested for committing 10 violent crimes in his community of Wichita, Kansas. Rader, known as the murderer "BTK" for the words "bind, torture, kill" in English which means "tie, torture and kill", what she did to her victims.

Rader committed the murders from 1974 to 1991. "It took me over 10 years to sit down with someone and talk about this," he confessed to PEOPLE in a cover interview. "No one wants to believe that his father can be capable of such monstrous things."

Now Rawson, 40, has written a book A Serial Killer's Daughter - or The Daughter of a Serial Killer - that tells of his experiences. Because she loved her father, it was very difficult for her to accept that he was a man capable of so much violence. Rader chased her victims, who lived near her neighborhood, and then slowly strangled them, tying their arms and legs with rope. The man kept memories of his victims, had drawings related to his crimes and confessed that when he was a child he tortured animals.

Rawson tells PEOPLE that when the FBI agent asked her if she had heard of the famous "BTK killer," she thought the agent was coming to warn her that her mother or someone in her family had been killed, but never imagined that she would come to tell her. that the murderer was his father. Rader pleaded guilty to all 10 crimes of which he was charged and is in prison with a 175-year sentence.

"I was just trying to stay alive and breathe," she recalls of what she felt after learning the terrible truth. "I was trying to recover from shock, telling myself that I would do anything not to be the daughter of a serial killer." In the new edition of PEOPLE, Kerri tells how she found peace after learning about her father's dark secret.