BTK: the serial killer nearly caught by subliminal messages
It’s very easy to laugh at hapless cops trying every seemingly stupid idea they’ve got to try and catch someone, but when there’s a serial killer on the loose and real people are dying, it’s very easy to get desperate.
At that point, it’s not out of the box thinking to try and “match wits” with a foe, Sherlock Holmes style. Not just because matching wits with a serial killer is often a fruitless endeavour, since they rarely have any, they just get lucky. No, trying out strange ways of bringing down a serial killer is less the work of maverick detectives going against the grain and more throwing anything at the wall in a panicked attempt to stop people from dying.
Before you start believing that the cops are the noble force that TV and films want you to believe they are, this is oftentimes more motivated by getting rid of negative press than actually preventing deaths in their community. After all, serial killers are pretty much always allowed to be as prolific as they are because cops can’t be fucked to investigate reports made by women. However, I’m not sure you can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and if something does help put a man like Dennis Rader behind bars, I’m all for it, whatever the ulterior motive.
Because Dennis Rader is the kind of person who shows that there really isn’t any such thing as inhumanly evil. Humans are capable of the worst acts that anyone can imagine, and Rader ran the gamut of those acts over multiple decades of activity in Wichita, Kansas. Gaining the nickname the BTK killer for his methodical, almost identical method of murdering ten people over that time. Binding them. Torturing them. Killing them.
If you were put in charge of bringing him in, you’d try some weird shit too.
How was the BTK killer caught?
People got especially desperate to bring Rader in because for decades, his case was a cold case.
From 1974 to 1979, Rader took credit for his murders, making sure that no one else went down for them and sending letters to the police and to the press filled with details that only the perpetrator would know about the killings. This turned the cases into a media frenzy, with people desperate for answers from the Wichita police about why they weren’t able to catch this person taunting them, Zodiac-style.
In 1978, close analysis of Rader’s letters showed that whoever the BTK killer was, he watched the TV station KAKE-TV, a Kansas mainstay for decades. Thus, permission was granted for a stunt that had never been tried before. A subliminal message was planted in one evening’s KAKE-TV news broadcast as a way of convincing the killer to turn himself in. For barely half a second, a screen was inserted into the station’s news broadcast that was a direct message to the killer.
It was a white frame with the words “Now call the chief” written in the top left-hand corner above a pair of upside-down glasses that were found at one of the BTK crime scenes. Police had hoped this would unconsciously convince the perpetrator that they had figured out his identity and were coming for him, thus he should turn himself in beforehand, but it was unsuccessful. No one called about the frame. It’s unlikely Rader even saw it.
Rader was eventually caught, but not until 2005. Had he not decided to begin messing with the police again with technology he didn’t fully understand, he would have gotten away with it scot-free.