This presentation will give you an overview of how Digital Forensics helped to catch Dennis Lynn Rader, an American serial killer known as BTK (an abbreviation he gave himself, for "bind, torture, kill"), the BTK Strangler or the BTK Killer.

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How Digital Forensics
Caught the BTK Serial Killer

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Be it a text message, Google searches or GPS
information, a person’s digital footprint can provide
plenty of ammunition in the courtroom.
Here is a case where digital forensics played a
critical role in bringing about justice.

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The BTK Killer, Dennis Rader

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Dennis Rader was an Air Force
veteran, church council
president, and Cub Scout
leader.
But most people now know him
by the name BTK, which stands
for the method he used to
systematically murder 10
people between 1974 and 1991:
Bind, Torture, Kill.

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Rader was raised in Wichita, Kansas. He later claimed
that as a youth he had killed animals and developed
violent sexual fantasies that involved bondage.
Rader began his murderous spree by
killing an entire family of four, including
two young children.
Over the next two decades, Rader killed
five more women.

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Following the death of his sixth victim in
December 1977, Rader grew irritated by the lack
of media coverage.
The resulting coverage helped set off a panic. Rader
then waited eight years before murdering a neighbor
in her home in 1985.
In a letter to a local TV station he
wrote “How many people do I have to
kill before I get a name in the paper or
some national attention.”

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After 1991, however,
BTK went silent, and the
case went cold.
No fingerprints. No
eyewitnesses. No leads.
Just a jagged rip of loss
and fear through the
metropolitan area around
Wichita.

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In 2004, on the 30th anniversary of Rader’s first murders,
a local paper ran a feature in which it speculated that the
killer had either died or been imprisoned.
Rader responded by sending various evidence from his
ninth murder—notably a copy of the victim’s driver’s
license as well as photographs of her body to a reporter.

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The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of a
purple 1.44 megabyte floppy disk that BTK sent to
police. The floppy disk was immediately handed over to
computer forensic experts for analysis.
He didn’t consider that the information he included
could be traced.

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The forensic experts used EnCase software to examine
the floppy disk and found another Microsoft Word
document that was deleted on the floppy disk.
They recovered the document and after analyzing the
metadata found that it had last been modified by
someone named “Dennis” at Christ Lutheran Church.

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After police and FBI personnel
checked Rader’s background and
examined DNA evidence, they
were able to link him to the BTK
murders.
When BTK resumed his communication with the
media in 2004, he overlooked a critical fact: this
was now the 21st century, and law enforcement
officers were becoming increasingly adept at
digital forensics.

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Dennis Rader was arrested on February 25, 2005—over 30
years after the investigation had begun. In his
interrogation, Rader said, while confessing to all ten
murders he’d committed, “The floppy did me in.”
Dennis Rader currently resides in Kansas’s El Dorado
Correctional Facility. His earliest possible release date is
February 26, 2180.