Investigators search BTK Killer's former property in Kansas for connections to unsolved cases

Marlene Lenthang
Updated ·2 min read
Convicted serial killer Dennis Rader, known as the BTK strangler, walks into the El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kan., in 2005. (Jeff Tuttle / The Eagle via AP file)

Investigators have searched the former property of "BTK killer” Dennis Rader, the murderer who was convicted of killing 10 people in Kansas in a bloody spree from the 1970s to the ’90s, as the search for connections to unsolved cases continues.

Deputies from Osage County, Oklahoma, were in Park City, Kansas, on Tuesday searching a property Rader once owned. He remains incarcerated in Kansas following his 2005 sentence to 10 consecutive life terms.

"Our investigation has led to additional unsolved murders and missing persons that are possibly connected to BTK," Osage County Undersheriff Gary Upston said Wednesday.

He said the search was in a “possible connection” to the disappearance of Cynthia Kinney, who was reported missing from Oklahoma in 1976.

Rader had lived in Park City for years, and two of the murders he admitted to committing were in the area.

The site is now an empty field. Two concrete blocks were moved to allow investigators to dig, The Wichita Eagle reported. Investigators from the Osage County Sheriff’s Office, along with Park City police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, were at the site.

Rader, who called himself BTK, standing for, “bind, torture and kill,” was arrested in February 2005. He pleaded guilty in June 2005 to 10 murders from 1974 to 1991 in Wichita and Park City.

At his trial, Radar recounted how he led a double life: Before the public, he was a church congregation president and Boy Scout leader, while behind the curtain he wrote down violent rape fantasies, had “hit kits” — bags with rubber gloves, rope, tape, handcuffs and bandannas — and taunted police by describing his killings before he was caught.

Kerri Rawson, Rader’s daughter, was 26 and living in Michigan when her father was arrested.

“We went from being best friends to him walking me down the aisle, camping, hiking, moving me all over and taking care of me, teaching everything you’d want to know about the outdoors. We went from that to my 26-year-old self losing my father,” she said on NBC’s “Dateline” this year. “Having everything I knew about my father being told that it’s a lie.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com