Her Father Is the B.T.K. Killer. She’s Helping to Close More Cases. (2024)

Kerri Rawson sees her life in two parts: before and after she learned that her father was a serial killer.

The before included camping and fishing vacations as a family; helping her father build a treehouse and working alongside him in the garden; going to church every Sunday. It also included verbal and emotional abuse, she said.

The after began in 2005. Ms. Rawson was 26. An F.B.I. agent knocked on her door and said that her father, Dennis Rader, had been arrested. He was accused of being an especially cruel and vicious serial killer, who had been murdering people for decades. He sent taunting letters and poems to media outlets and the police, calling himself B.T.K. for his merciless method: bind, torture, kill.

After years of therapy, Ms. Rawson, 45, is offering intimate details about Mr. Rader’s life to investigators who asked for her help solving cold cases that may involve her father. Her contributions in recent months have helped investigators identify him as the prime suspect in two unsolved cold cases: a missing person investigation and a murder. And there may be more.

“I have always just wanted to help,” Ms. Rawson said in an interview. “I wanted access to this stuff when I could handle it, because I knew I could maybe learn more. There were these missing puzzle pieces.”

Helping investigators is part of her healing process, she said, and a way of defining her own version of normal. In doing so, she has embraced many titles: writer, mother, survivor, trauma victim advocate. But one sticks out: daughter of a serial killer. She even includes it in her social media bios.