Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Daughter of the ‘BTK Killer’ Breaks Silence in Shocking Netflix Documentary

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Daughter of the ‘BTK Killer’ Breaks Silence in Shocking Netflix Documentary · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're taking on a
• 0:04
  really chilling case, one you probably know, but we're flipping
• 0:06
  the script a bit. Yeah, we are deliberately shifting the focus, yeah,
• 0:10
  away from the killer Dennis Raider BTK, right, and putting
• 0:15
  it squarely on the people whose lives he just detonated. Yeah,
• 0:20
  his family, the secondary victims as they're often called.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: It's such an important shift because when the world found
• 0:25
  out that Dennis Raider, this pillar of the community church leader, Boyscott,
• 0:29
  Guy Pta dad right, the whole package was actually the
• 0:32
  BTK killer bind torture kill. I mean, it wasn't just
• 0:35
  a shock for Wichita, it was like a bomb went
• 0:38
  off inside his.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Own home, totally obliterated their reality completely, especially for his kids.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: So today we're diving deep into that, the really painful
• 0:47
  but honestly pretty defiant journey of his daughter Carrie Rossen.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, her story is it's something else. The core of
• 0:54
  this deep dive is that duality. You know, how Raider
• 0:58
  managed this split for over thirty years, terrorizing Wichita, Kansas
• 1:03
  at least ten confirmed victims, These incredibly sidistic planned out crimes,
• 1:09
  meticulously planned and at the same time he's playing dad, husband,
• 1:14
  church council president, even boy scout leader. It's almost impossible
• 1:19
  to grasp.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: The compartmentalization is just staggering.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: So our mission today really is to unpack the psychological
• 1:25
  fallout of that. Yeah, that kind of inherited trauma, the
• 1:29
  sheer scale of the.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Betrayal, and we're doing that mainly through Carrie Rawson's experience,
• 1:33
  especially as it's shown in this new Netflix documentary My
• 1:35
  Father The BTK Killers. Skyborgman directed it. It's out October tenth,
• 1:40
  twenty twenty five.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Skyboard, miss she did abduct it in plain sights,
• 1:43
  so you know it's going to be handled with a
• 1:44
  certain empathy. Definitely, carry herself said said that it just
• 1:47
  cuts right to the bone. It's hard to know who
• 1:49
  I am if every moment in my life was a lie.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that feeling that retroactive earthquake under your entire past,
• 1:57
  every memory suddenly feels toxic, you know, false.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: It's the ultimate betrayal, isn't it Having to somehow reconcile
• 2:05
  the dad who loved you or seemed to with this
• 2:09
  monster who terrified a whole city. It's profound cognitive dissonance.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, So let's really get into it. How did he
• 2:15
  pull it off for three decades? Yeah? How does someone
• 2:18
  maintain that kind of airtight psychological wall.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Well, to understand how the camouflage works so well, you
• 2:23
  kind of have to look at where he came from,
• 2:24
  and maybe more importantly, the stories he told himself. Dennis
• 2:28
  Rader born March ninth, nineteen forty five, Pittsburgh, Kansas, Okay.
• 2:32
  Eldest of four boys, and by all accounts, I mean,
• 2:35
  the sources described this perfectly normal, stable, very typical midwestern family,
• 2:40
  church going community. Involved. Nothing on the surface screamed future
• 2:45
  serial killing.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Right, No obvious flashing red lights in his upbringing.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Not really, which makes his own explanation or excuse even
• 2:52
  more interesting. Later after he was caught, he tried to
• 2:55
  pin it all on something he called factor X.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Factor X, right, I remember that, like it was some
• 3:00
  some outside force controlling him exactly.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: He talked about it like it was, you know, a
• 3:05
  genetic thing, some predisposition to evil baked into his DNA.
• 3:09
  Basically trying to dodge responsibility. Yeah, convenient, very but that
• 3:13
  just falls apart when you look at the sheer planning
• 3:15
  involved over decades. This wasn't some uncontrollable urgs that just
• 3:18
  seized him. It was nurtured, cultivated.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: How so, what were the early signs, Well.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: The classic markers were there, tormenting animals as a kid,
• 3:26
  which is, you know, a huge red flag for antisocial behavior.
• 3:30
  Then later he got obsessed with true crime stuff, reading
• 3:33
  about it, studying it, he practiced basically started with peeping, voyeurism,
• 3:39
  petty thefts, honing those invasive skills. So no, not factor X.
• 3:43
  This was a slow burn, a deliberate path he chose.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: And that path led directly to the Otaro family in
• 3:49
  nineteen seventy four. Yeah, that first explosion of Islands was
• 3:52
  just horrific.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: January fifteen, nineteen seventy four. It still just a gut
• 3:55
  punch to think about. He broke into their home, quiet
• 3:58
  suburban house, masked, armed, and the attack was just methodical,
• 4:04
  chillingly control.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: He killed the parents, Joseph and Julie, and.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: The kids, Joey who was nine and Josephine eleven, bound
• 4:12
  and strangled all four of them.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: And the details of that crime they weren't just brutal.
• 4:15
  They were ritualistic, weren't they. They set the pattern for BTK.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, the binding was key, the staging. He initially tried
• 4:24
  to make it look like a robbery, but the real signature,
• 4:26
  the thing that showed his psychological need, was what he
• 4:29
  did to Josephine.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Right the detail about the basis.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: He hanged her from a pipe in the basement. I mean,
• 4:33
  it's just grotesque, pure sadism that served his needs, not
• 4:37
  some robbery motive. And then true to form, his narcissism
• 4:41
  kicked in.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: It's the letter started weeks later.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: Sent one to the press, and that's where he coined
• 4:46
  the name himself, gave himself the label bind them, torture them,
• 4:49
  kill them BTK. He announced himself.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: To the world and what followed was this, this terrifyingly
• 4:55
  long stretch seventeen years of killing. That's an incredibly long
• 5:00
  time to maintain this double life, this shadow existence.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: It really speaks to the depth of that compartmentalization, doesn't it.
• 5:07
  He hit at least nine more times between seventy four
• 5:09
  and ninety one, and if you look at the victims
• 5:11
  the methods, you see this pattern, this escalation, this need
• 5:15
  for absolute control.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Like Catherine Bright also in seventy.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Four, Yeah, she was shot and stabbed then you jumphead
• 5:22
  to eighty five Marine Hedge. He abducted her hog tighter,
• 5:26
  dumped her body in a ditch.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: The Key Wee Girl in eighty six. That one always
• 5:29
  gets me.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's deeply disturbing. Strangled her in her own home
• 5:33
  while her little boy, her toddler, was asleep nearby. The
• 5:36
  sheer audacity, the invasion of that domestic space. It's chilling.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: In the final confirmed kill De Laura's Davis in nineteen
• 5:43
  ninety one, that showed the same meticulous pathology.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: It did De Laura Davis. She was sixty two, a
• 5:48
  grandmother found under a bridge, and the signature was there
• 5:52
  a semen stained pantyhose used as a noose. His EMMO
• 5:55
  was always intensely personal, invasive.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Not like a detached hit man, not at all well.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: He chose victims almost randomly, sometimes pulled names from church directories,
• 6:04
  phone books, things people felt were safe. Then he'd break in,
• 6:06
  perform his rituals, stage the scene, and just melt back
• 6:10
  into his normal life.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: And the semen that linked the crimes early on, but
• 6:14
  DNA tech wasn't what it is.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Now exactly, so the link was there, but they couldn't
• 6:19
  pinpoint him, the police task force, the ghost hunters. They
• 6:23
  were chasing a phantom for years, agonizing for the community.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: The Greater wasn't content just with the violence, was he?
• 6:29
  He needed the attention, the spotlight. That narcissism just drove him.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, that need for control, for validation. It's textbook
• 6:39
  narcissistic sociopathy. He didn't just kill. He performed. Between the murders.
• 6:44
  He'd send these packages to the media, letters, creepy poems.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Drawings detailing his projects he called them.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, projects, and openly taunting the police, challenging them like
• 6:54
  that infamous note in seventy eight, Oh Death to Nancy,
• 6:57
  after he killed Nancy Fox, he sent it right to
• 7:00
  the Wichita Eagle. He wanted the fear of the notoriety.
• 7:02
  He fed on it.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: While living this completely mundane life. On the surface, the
• 7:06
  irony is just staggering.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: It's almost blackly comic, isn't it. While he's playing this
• 7:10
  cat and mouse game with the police and the media.
• 7:12
  What's his job. He's a compliance officer for Park City.
• 7:15
  Oh yeah, and part of his duties get this involved
• 7:19
  installing burglar alarms for people no way, Yes, advising residents
• 7:23
  on how to protect themselves from well from people like him,
• 7:27
  the ultimate home invader teaching home security.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: That's wow.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: It's fascinating, isn't it. How the ordinary, the civic minded,
• 7:34
  the completely boring persona was the perfect shield. It wasn't
• 7:38
  just a mask. It was like essential for his operations. Yeah,
• 7:41
  the mundane protected the monstrous.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: So that perfectly functional camouflage, that civic duty shield. It
• 7:46
  brings us right to the next part section two. Growing
• 7:50
  up Better a lie, because while Wichita was terrified inside
• 7:53
  the Raider house, it was something else entirely. That's where
• 7:56
  the real, the hidden devastation was happening for Carrie A.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the deceptive domesticity, it was just total. He married
• 8:03
  Paula Deets back in nineteen seventy one. Their son, Brian
• 8:06
  was born in seventy five, and then Carrie came along
• 8:08
  in nineteen seventy eight, right.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: When BTK was getting really bold with the letters and taunts.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: Exactly and outwardly picture perfect Americana. They took family vacations,
• 8:16
  Disney World, even backyard barbecues, Christmas pageants at the church.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: It sounds so normal. Carrie Rosen talks about him being
• 8:22
  like the fun dad. He was the bad who built
• 8:25
  treehouses and fixed bikes.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: Right, He wasn't distant. He was involved in forced bedtime stories,
• 8:31
  lead family prayers. He was performing the role of good
• 8:34
  dad just as meticulously as he planned his crime.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: The performance that's chilling.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: And Carrie, she mostly grew up during Raiders so called
• 8:42
  quiet period, you know, after the Wee Girl a murder
• 8:44
  in eighty six, when he went dormant for a while.
• 8:46
  So from her perspective as a kid, he was just dad.
• 8:50
  She idolized him. Why wouldn't she.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: But the darkness was literally under their roof.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Literally we know now he kept trophies, souvenirs from his victims, women, jewelry,
• 9:00
  their ideas. Photos he took hidden away in a locked
• 9:04
  box under the bed he shared with Paula, her mother.
• 9:07
  Think about that, the physical proximity of that, that evidence
• 9:11
  of his secret life right there in the heart of
• 9:13
  the family home.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: It's sickening. And Carrie talks in the documentary about looking
• 9:17
  back now and seeing things that seemed odd then but
• 9:20
  now they just screamed pathology.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: Right, Hindsight is brutal, isn't it. Things that were invisible
• 9:25
  to a child suddenly become these giant flashing red flags.
• 9:29
  She mentions how obsessed he was with true crime shows.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Like research or just admiring his own.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Work, who knows, maybe both seeking validation, maybe picking up ideas.
• 9:40
  Then there was the locked garage. He'd spend hours out there, tinkering,
• 9:44
  He'd say, But what was he really doing, making restraints,
• 9:49
  practicing nots aw And the business trips, frequent trips that
• 9:53
  looking back, seemed to line up maybe a little too
• 9:56
  well with unsolved cases or times he might have been
• 9:58
  scouting victims or dumb evidence.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: As a kid. You just accept it. That's just what dad.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Does, exactly. It's just dad's weird hobby, dad's job. You
• 10:06
  normalize it, which makes this next detail even harder to process,
• 10:10
  the point where it feels like the boundary between his
• 10:12
  two lives might have actually blurred. We have to talk
• 10:14
  about that journal entry from nineteen eighty one.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah, that one is deeply disturbing.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: It's maybe the single most difficult thing for Carrie Rawson
• 10:22
  to deal with, because it suggests Raider wasn't just compartmentalizing
• 10:25
  away from his family. He might have been thinking about
• 10:27
  incorporating them into his darkness.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: What did it say?
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: Investigators found it later a journal entry from nineteen eighty one.
• 10:32
  It just read caribin Game nineteen.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Eighty one, Carrie bind game and she was how old
• 10:39
  then three?
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Just a toddler? And the implication is horrifying. Was he
• 10:43
  fantasizing about binding his own daughter? Was this some sick,
• 10:47
  twisted game in his head? Maybe even a rehearsal.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: That's just unthinkable. Yeah, she confronted him about that in prison.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: She has It's an incredibly brave, incredibly difficult thing to do.
• 10:58
  But knowing Rader, his response is probably.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Predictable gaslighting denial pretty.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Much, according to the sources. Yeah, classic narcissistic gaslighting. He
• 11:06
  denies any sinister meaning, tries to brush it off like
• 11:09
  it was nothing, just a doodle, plays the victim himself.
• 11:12
  But for Carrie asking that question, even if she doesn't
• 11:15
  get a real answer, it's about puncturing that myth, you know,
• 11:18
  refusing to let him control the narrative of her own
• 11:21
  childhood memories, which that note just poisons.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: That carefully constructed facade, that whole world he built. It
• 11:28
  finally came crashing down February twenty five, two thousand and five.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: YEP, after thirteen years of silence and what brought him
• 11:34
  down pure ego narcissism. He couldn't stand being irrelevant.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Forgotten, so I reached out again.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: He did sent a floppy disc to a TV station.
• 11:44
  Thought he was still smarter than everyone, totally untouchableak mistake.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Tech had moved on massively.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: He had no idea about digital forensics metadata, the things
• 11:53
  that could pull off a disc. Now he basically sent
• 11:55
  them his own calling card.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: So what was the actual breakthrough for people who follow
• 11:59
  this stuff back? Detail is key.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: It wasn't like a witness suddenly appeared or they found
• 12:04
  his fingerprints somewhere new. It was the disc itself. The
• 12:07
  FBI forensic team. They dug into the file properties and
• 12:10
  buried in the menadata. They found that the document on
• 12:13
  the disc had been last saved on a computer at the.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Church, the Luteran Church, his church. And even better, the
• 12:20
  metadata included the name of the user who last saved it,
• 12:23
  Dennis Raider.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: Wow, just handed it to them pretty much, That tiny
• 12:28
  digital breadcrumb trail led them straight to him. It unraveled
• 12:32
  everything in.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: The arrest itself. The timing was just perfect, wasn't it
• 12:37
  In terms of his duality.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's surreal. They picked him up in his truck.
• 12:40
  He was on his way to a church council meeting.
• 12:42
  Of course, he was the absolute picture of the responsible citizen.
• 12:46
  And once they had him, the damn just broke. He
• 12:50
  confessed ninety minutes, just spilled everything, and not like reluctantly,
• 12:54
  no detective said, he described the killings with this chilling relish,
• 12:58
  like he was finally getting the attention, the credit he'd
• 13:00
  craved for thirty years. One detective famously said listening to
• 13:04
  the confession was like listening to Satan speak.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Wellita was probably relieved, celebratory almost I heard church bells rank.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there was this huge, grim sense of relief. But
• 13:15
  for Carrie Rawson, that news hitting her must have been
• 13:18
  like a physical blow. She was twenty six, newly married,
• 13:20
  living in Pennsylvania.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: And then the FBI shows up at her door.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Yep, knocks on the door, delivers the news your father
• 13:27
  is the BTK killer. Just like that, her world just ended.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: What was her first reaction denial.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Total denial, protective denial. She said, you've got the wrong man.
• 13:37
  He's a good guy, church president, you know, listening all
• 13:40
  the good dad credentials, of course, but then the evidence
• 13:42
  started piling up. The DNA match the photos. They found
• 13:46
  pictures of victims alongside her own baby pictures. That denial
• 13:50
  just shattered into pure horror nausea. The ground just fell
• 13:55
  out from under her, and.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: The family just imploded catastrophically.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: His wife of thirty four years filed for an emergency divorce,
• 14:03
  just wanted out immediately. Understandably, Brian, the son he basically retreated,
• 14:09
  went silent in Carrie, she cut off all contact, initially
• 14:13
  fell into this abyss of trauma, intense therapy, panic attacks,
• 14:16
  grappling with her faith, how could God allow this? And
• 14:19
  even suicidal thoughts. She said it best herself later, her
• 14:22
  whole life was retroactively murdered.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Retroactively murdered. That phrase, it just perfectly captures the unique
• 14:27
  kind of violence Raider inflicted on his own family. It
• 14:30
  wasn't just the shock, it was the poisoning.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Of the past exactly. It's a moral injury right on
• 14:34
  top of the psychological trauma.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Uh So, moving into section three, this is about how
• 14:39
  Carrie clawed her way back reclaiming her story, which involved,
• 14:43
  you know, a lot of therapy. Eventually advocacy and finding
• 14:46
  her own definition of forgiveness.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: The immediate aftermath, as you'd expect, was brutal, complex PTSD.
• 14:53
  She's talked about having panic attacks in grocery stores, just
• 14:56
  feeling unsafe everywhere. Intense anger too at the media, who
• 15:00
  were just relentless circling like vultures.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the media frenzy must have been unbearable.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and then that deep crisis of faith. How could
• 15:09
  the man who taught her prayers, who quoted psalms at
• 15:11
  church be capable of strangling women, plotting torture. It shattered
• 15:16
  her spiritual foundation.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: So therapy was obviously crucial helping her sort through not
• 15:21
  just the shock, but maybe things from her childhood that
• 15:23
  didn't make sense before.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: Definitely, therapy was key in unpacking not just the trauma
• 15:28
  of the revelation, but potentially repressed or minimized memories, things
• 15:32
  that might have been subtle signs of his pathology bleeding into.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Family life, like what specifically.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Well, she's mentioned these nighttime games involving ropes. As a kid,
• 15:41
  maybe just think dad's being weird or playful, But looking back,
• 15:44
  knowing btk's methods.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Oh god, it sounds like practice rehearsal exactly.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: It screams potential abuse or the very least a terrifying
• 15:54
  boundary violation. Recognizing those things, seeing them for what they
• 15:58
  likely were. That was an acagonizing but really necessary part
• 16:02
  of reclaiming her own reality and trusting herself again and.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: All that intense work, that journey. It eventually led to
• 16:08
  her first book, right, the twenty nineteen bestseller Yeah.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: A Serial Killer's Daughter, My Story of Faith, love and overcoming.
• 16:15
  It was a huge step putting her own narrative out
• 16:18
  there on her terms. That really laid the groundwork for
• 16:21
  her becoming an advocate, and.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: She didn't stop there. She has another book out.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: More recently, she does her twenty twenty four book Breaking Free,
• 16:27
  Overcoming the Trauma of My Serial Killer Father, and this
• 16:30
  one goes even further. It's less memoir, more like a
• 16:34
  toolkit for other survivors. She includes things like journaling pomps
• 16:39
  specific exercises, especially around faith and moral injury for people
• 16:43
  who've gone through similar betrayals, and she explicitly tackles what
• 16:47
  she calls forgiveness myths.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about forgiveness, because that's a really loaded
• 16:52
  term here. It's vital. People understand She's not like excusing
• 16:56
  it non at all.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: This is absolutely crucial. Her definition of forgiveness is entirely
• 17:00
  about her own survival, her own liberation. She says it
• 17:04
  very clearly. I forlave to free myself, not him. It's
• 17:07
  an internal act exactly. It's about cutting the emotional cord,
• 17:11
  refusing to let his actions continue to control her mental state,
• 17:15
  its agency. It ensures he doesn't win psychologically, even from prison.
• 17:19
  It's survival, not absolution.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: And that perspective, that hard won strength. It's made her
• 17:24
  a really important voice for other secondary victims, hasn't it
• 17:28
  people who often suffer in.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: Silence hugely important. She speaks at crime victim conferences. She
• 17:33
  puts a face to that specific kind of trauma, reducing
• 17:36
  the shame in isolation many feel.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: I remember seeing she reached out to the family of
• 17:39
  Rex Horman, the alleged Gilgo Beach killer.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was powerful. She publicly supported them in twenty
• 17:45
  twenty three, saying something like, I know what it's like
• 17:48
  to wake up to your father's mugshot. That shared experience,
• 17:52
  that empathy is incredibly validating for people caught in similar nightmares.
• 17:56
  He's actively working to dismantle that inherited stigma because there.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Is a pattern, isn't there. Yeah, families of infamous killers
• 18:04
  often carry this this burden, like the Annabamber's brother or
• 18:08
  families of other serial killers. They didn't commit the crime,
• 18:11
  but they face the fallout.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: They absolutely do. Social ostracization, job losses, relationship breakdowns. The
• 18:17
  killer destroys more lives than just the direct victims. And
• 18:21
  Carrie's messages basically, we're victims too. We're all dealing with trauma.
• 18:24
  She's raising her own kids now with her husband Darien,
• 18:27
  advocating for mental health reform. It's a quiet but powerful
• 18:31
  statement against everything her father tried to destroy.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: And she's been pretty fierce about protecting her story and
• 18:36
  other victim stories from being exploited right especially by the
• 18:39
  true crime machine.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: Oh definitely. She draws a hard line against sensationalism. She
• 18:44
  famously criticized Stephen King's novella A Good Marriage, which was
• 18:48
  loosely inspired by her family's story.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: What was her issue with it?
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: She felt it leaned into victim blaming tropes, particularly towards
• 18:55
  her mother. She said, King turned my pain into pulp fiction.
• 18:59
  She's been very vocal, especially on platforms like x calling
• 19:03
  out the voyeuristic side of true crime, defending the need
• 19:06
  for survivor dignity over entertainment.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Okay, So that fierce protection of her story, that pushback
• 19:12
  against exploitation. It makes the new documentary My Father the
• 19:17
  BTK Killer even more interesting. Why go back there? Why
• 19:21
  put herself through that again on camera? Especially after the books?
• 19:24
  What's the final reckoning here?
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: That's the million dollar question, right, and the documentary itself
• 19:28
  seems to provide the answer. It's about agency, but also
• 19:31
  maybe a final strategic objective.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Directed by Skyborgman you mentioned known for empathy, right.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: Which is key. You know it won't be purely sensational.
• 19:40
  The film itself, it's about ninety three minutes, apparently blends
• 19:44
  new interviews with Carrie really digging into her perspective. Now
• 19:47
  with some of those chilling interrogation tapes of Raider himself.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, so you hear him?
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, apparently, snippets of him grinning while talking about newsism things.
• 19:56
  The contrast must be intense.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: But the focus isn't him, right, Unlike older docks that
• 20:02
  were all about getting inside the mind of BTK exactly.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: That's the critical difference. Previous specials like A and e's
• 20:08
  BTK Confession of a Serial Killer were very Raider centric. Here,
• 20:13
  the perspective shift is total. It's about the collateral damage,
• 20:15
  the unseen casualties.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: So Raider is almost background.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Noise in a way. He's the cause but not the subject.
• 20:23
  Variety actually praised Borgmann for giving voice to the unseen casualties,
• 20:27
  for humanizing the trauma without just making it grimm spectacle.
• 20:31
  The goal seems to be for the audience to connect
• 20:33
  with Carrie's resilience, not Raider's pathology.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, so if it's not just about retelling the trauma
• 20:39
  for its own sake, what is Carrie's mission in this film?
• 20:42
  Is it closure?
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Less emotional closure? I think she seems to have worked
• 20:45
  through a lot of that with therapy and writing, and
• 20:48
  more about operational closure, specifically trying to get information out
• 20:51
  of him about potential undiscovered victims.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Ah, the cold cases. He's hinted there were more, hasn'ty?
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: He has vague hints about me be an eleventh or
• 21:01
  twelfth victim, possibly down in Oklahoma. So the documentary apparently
• 21:05
  shows Carrie confronting him about this in prison visits.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: That must be incredibly difficult facing him.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: Again unimaginably hard. She's there demanding answers, demanding closure for
• 21:15
  other families, while he reportedly just smirks, deflects gaslights. She's
• 21:20
  not seeking reconciliation. She's on an intelligence gathering mission, essentially
• 21:24
  trying to force him to provide one last shred of
• 21:28
  value to the world he terrorized.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: But putting herself back in the spotlight like that, even strategically,
• 21:33
  it did stir up some criticism, didn't it? People online
• 21:36
  questioning and why she'd revisit it.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: It did. Some viewers may be wary of the true
• 21:41
  crime genre, called it trauma porn on social media, asking
• 21:45
  why reopen the wound after she'd seemed to find some peace.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: How does she respond to that?
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Head on? She made it very clear this wasn't about
• 21:53
  boosting Netflix ratings or getting more fame. She framed it
• 21:56
  as her definitive statement, her last word, basically saying I'm
• 22:00
  I'm doing this so everyone, especially the victims' families, knows
• 22:04
  I am done being the unwilling bridge to him.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: This is me drawing the line, taking back control of
• 22:09
  the narrative. Finally and completely.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: That seems to be the goal.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: So where is Dennis Rader today and what's Carrie's final
• 22:17
  take on his legacy, on the damage she did?
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: Raiders eighty now still locked up at El Dorado Correctional
• 22:23
  Facility in Kansas and by all accounts, completely unrepentant, still
• 22:28
  playing games like what. There are reports he makes these
• 22:31
  these creepy marionettes in prison sells them, apparently, still trying
• 22:36
  to exert some kind of control, maintain his notoriety. He's
• 22:39
  even petitioned to be executed. Really why, Probably just another
• 22:42
  manipulation tactic, but it's been denied. Kansas doesn't have the
• 22:45
  death penalty for crimes committed before it was reinstated in
• 22:47
  the nineties and his work before that, so he'll likely
• 22:50
  die in prison.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Still trying to control the ending. But Carrie's perspective suggests
• 22:54
  he failed in the long run.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: That's the powerful takeaway her final reflection. It's pure defiance.
• 23:00
  She said something like, he'll die knowing he broke us,
• 23:02
  but not how we rebuilt. That rebuilding, that survival. That's
• 23:06
  the ultimate counter narrative to his reign of terror. If
• 23:09
  you zoom out, her story really shows that healing wall,
• 23:12
  maybe never complete, is possible. And that survival itself becomes
• 23:16
  this act of defiance against that inherited darkness. She turned
• 23:21
  victimhood into advocacy hashtag tag outro.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: So, wrapping this up, what are the big takeaways for
• 23:27
  us for the listener? This deep dive really highlights some
• 23:30
  crucial things, doesn't it.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: It really does. I mean, first, just the terrifying reality
• 23:34
  of that kind of extreme psychological compartmentalization. How someone can
• 23:38
  maintain that deep split.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard to fathom. And second, the absolute necessity
• 23:43
  of like real intensive therapeutic support for secondary victims, people
• 23:47
  dealing with that kind of moral injury, that complex trauma.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: Absolutely critical. And maybe the most powerful point is Carrie's
• 23:54
  definition of forgiveness not as absolution for the perpetrator, but
• 23:56
  as self liberation for the survivor. It's about taking your
• 23:59
  power back.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: That's huge her journey. It really holds up a mirror,
• 24:03
  doesn't it, for anyone dealing with their own inherited darkness.
• 24:06
  Maybe you abuse survivors, people from families with devastating secrets,
• 24:10
  anyone betrayed in a way that rewrites.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: Their past exactly. The scars are real, the binds of
• 24:16
  the past. They leave marks, but her story proves they
• 24:19
  don't have to define your future. You can move from
• 24:21
  being a casualty to being well, being an advocate for
• 24:25
  your own healing and maybe others.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: It's a powerful transformation, and it leaves you thinking. Raider
• 24:31
  spent his whole life trying to control the story right,
• 24:34
  sending letters, creating the BTK persona, making sure he.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Had the last word, obsessed with his narrative.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: But maybe the final lasting legacy isn't BTK after all.
• 24:42
  Maybe it's Carrie Rawson, her survival, her advocacy, her insistence
• 24:46
  on speaking truth to that darkness. The voice he tried
• 24:49
  to silence is now defining the aftermath.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: It's a profound shift in power, isn't it. She broke
• 24:54
  her silence, but on her own terms, for her own
• 24:56
  strategic reasons, which leads to that final, really pro pocative
• 25:00
  question she implicitly raises.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: Right, when does reclaiming your story actually require you to
• 25:06
  break a silence you fought hard to build. What's the
• 25:09
  real cost and maybe the real reward of insisting on
• 25:12
  having that final, definitive word.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: It's that tension between peace and agency, isn't it? Something
• 25:16
  definitely worth reflecting on as you think about Carrie Rawson's
• 25:19
  incredibly complex and courageous journey