Dennis Rader was a married man with two grown children, a former Cub Scout leader, and president of his Lutheran church. He also-after a thirty-one-year investigation-was revealed to be the serial killer known as BTK, short for Bind, Torture, and Kill-his method for murdering ten people in the Wichita, Kansas, area between 1974 and 1991. After the killings, letters were sent to the police bragging of the killings and offering grisly details. Following a twenty-five-year silence, those letters and packages resumed in 2004, claiming responsibility for a murder for which he had not been suspected. DNA was taken from beneath the fingernails of a victim, and authorities gathered eleven hundred DNA samples, attempting to find the serial killer.
In one of BTK’s communications-a computer disk mailed to KSAS-TV-metadata from the Microsoft Word document revealed that the author was someone named Dennis, as well as a link to the Lutheran Church. Searching on the Internet, police were able to find a suspect: Dennis Rader. By obtaining his daughter’s DNA and comparing it with DNA samples found on the victims, the police were able to make a familial match-giving them enough probable cause for arrest. He has been sentenced to 175 years to life.
So to all of you who surf for Internet porn or spend your free time writing anarchist manifestos: Beware. You can’t ever really get rid of something on your computer.