Dennis Rader

his need for attention. It wasn 't long before he began mocking law enforcement and terrorizing the citizens of Wichita by sending letters and hints to the local media, hoping to receive credit for his vile acts. From the early 1990 's until 2004, Rader had seemed to take a vacation from his murdering, but continued to seek the limelight as he sent photographs, word puzzles and outlines for the BTK Story to local media. in 2005, he left a package with more clues including a computer disk that…

Correlation, from chapter one, is a measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other. There are two different types of correlation, positive correlation and negative correlation. Positive correlation is when two things either increase or decrease together at the same time. A negative correlation is when two things are doing the opposite of eachother at the same time. For example, as one thing increases the other will decrease at the…

Dodd, 2007). Yet Douglas’s initial profile analysis in 1979 failed to lead investigators to the killer by the time he retired in 1995, and it wasn’t until BTK resumed communicating with police in 2004 after falling off the grid in the 1990s that Dennis Rader was pinpointed as the man responsible for the horrific crimes. In “The Usefulness of Criminal Profiling,” authors Craig Jackson, David Wilson, and Baljit Kaur Rana state that their main issue with profiling was that Douglas’s claim to…

The first killer is Tommy Lynn Sells he is otherwise known as coast to coast. He claimed to have killed over seventy people but his story didn’t begin with the killing it is likely Sells would have had a promising future if it wasn’t for his jealous mother. After being born his aunt took him in to take care of him because his mother didn’t seem fit to raise a child. His mother got word that her sister was looking to adopt the boy, she put on a show saying she was ready to take her boy back and…

Have you ever thought about why we have serial murderers? According to the FBI (n.d.), “serial murder is the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events” (para. 14). Usually people with psychological disorders are more likely to commit such crime. These disorders, most of the times obtained during childhood, are pushing the person to kill the other human being, which is forbidden by all laws. The main causes as to why serial killers do what they do are…

In psychology we learn about many disorders such as Bipolar disorder, OCD, and Schizophrenia. The disorder that really caught my attention was Psychopathic disorder, a disorder in when one is suffering from or constituting a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior. Many adults and possibly children too suffer from this disorder, children are more to develop symptoms once they become a little older. It is estimated that 1% of the general population meet criteria for the…

Joe Ball, David Berkowitz, Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader. What do these names have in common? Joe Ball is a Texan often referred to as “The Alligator Man”, and is suspected of murdering over 20 women in the early 20th century. Berkowitz is the infamous Son of Sam, is infamously known for killing more than eight victims in a single summer. Edmund Kemper, or the Co-Ed Killer started murdering when he turned 15 years old. Dennis Rader murdered ten people in Kansas in a span of 17 years.…

Many people throughout the years have researched serial killers because they are so fascinating; however, not much is known about them. Serial murder has been a long researched topic among criminologists; some of which disagree about what the legal definition of a serial murder, which is, “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” (FBI- Serial Murder 9) The definition does not include the cool-down period like it used to but typically, serial…

however it has never been narrowed down to one person. After this case it the interest of serial killing calmed down meaning it was not as popular. In the 1970s and 1980s the notorious serial killings of Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, and BTK (Dennis Rader). The film Silence of the Lambs renewed public interest of serial killings. The majority of the public even law enforcement only gets the information about the killings over films. What they do not realize is that not all of it is true, so…

Evolution of an American Serial Killer Cruelty towards animals, arson, and enuresis. These three factors contribute to what is known as the MacDonald Triad. A method that was used to determine a serial killer in the making (Beck). Though this theory had been disproved, others have taken its place and evolved alongside the serial killer themselves. The first documented American serial killer dates back to the eighteen hundreds, or more specifically eighteen ninety-three, in Chicago, Illinois.…