Defendant's darker side emerging in serial killer case

WICHITA -- The signs were there, but few saw them. He signaled his overpowering need for control to many, but none knew the scope of his rage.

Dennis L. Rader, the government inspector charged with killing 10 people between 1974 and 1991, may have been a Boy Scout volunteer and active church leader. But he was also known as an arrogant and harassing neighbor who bullied single women on his street, and an unforgiving supervisor who made life miserable for at least one subordinate -- another single woman.

''He nitpicked people to death. He was a total control freak," said Dee Stuart, a mayoral candidate in nearby Park City, where Rader lived.

Stuart said a friend of hers, whom she declined to identify, worked with Rader, a Park City compliance officer, and ''filed grievance after grievance" against him. ''She suffered through a constant barrage of belittling attacks from him," Stuart said. ''No one was as smart as Dennis Rader."

Accounts such as Stuart's stand in sharp contrast to the descriptions of Rader that emerged soon after he was arrested on Feb. 25. Rader has been depicted as a selfless, churchgoing family man, so well-liked that those who knew him were flabbergasted by the news that he is an accused serial killer.

But others say that Rader exhibited some classic antisocial traits -- superiority, narcissism, and anger -- and was seen by some as a man imprisoned in a life he believed was beneath him, associating with people he believed were not up to his intellect.

His job was to enforce city codes -- animal laws, trash regulations, property maintenance -- and Rader took it too far, some said.

''He was mean-spirited and a coward," said James Reno, a neighbor who argued with Rader for years over his treatment of neighbors. Reno said he called City Hall to complain about Rader several times and was always told ''we'll look into it."

''He never messed with me," Reno said. ''He always picked on the single women on the street who he could bully."

Rader is accused of killing 10 people, including eight female victims.

After the first slayings in the '70s, police and the media received taunting letters and cryptic notes with clues. The killer labeled himself BTK, for ''bind, torture, kill." He liked to torment his victims, tie them up, and then strangle them.

After 25 years of silence, the killer began communicating with the news media and police again last year, sending photographs of a victim's body and leaving the driver's license of another victim in a park.

Over the past 25 years, Rader raised two children, held steady jobs, volunteered in his son's Boy Scout troop, earned a college degree in criminal justice, and became the president of his church's governing council. But no one here could name close personal friends -- people he might have socialized with outside work. And none has surfaced to defend him.

Rader's pastor, Michael Clark of Christ Lutheran Church, said in an interview that he views the man he visited in prison this week as his parishioner -- not a killer.

''Let me make it very clear that I'm not challenging law enforcement. It's very possible [he is the serial killer]. If that's a fact, we'll accept it and move on," Clark said. ''All I am saying is I don't know the man they call BTK. I know Dennis Rader . . . I could ask him to do anything at this church. He would light the candles, work the sound system, usher."

Paul Carlstedt, who worshiped with Rader for 30 years, said the arrest is ''beyond comprehension for me. None of us will ever be the same again. I've thought back and asked myself `Is there something he did, some word, some deed that could shed light?' I can't find one thing.

''. . . We prayed here for the capture of BTK. We didn't know he was among us."

Carlstedt said that he always viewed Rader as someone who could be counted on. ''Here's the kind of guy he is: Last week, he couldn't make the Wednesday service because his mother was ill, so he and [his wife] Paula brought by the salad and the spaghetti sauce because he said he would."

Bob Smyser, who has known Rader for 35 years through the church, said that ''every time I came up to the church to do stuff -- wash windows, fall cleaning, Dennis was there. I mean, how do you judge relations in your life after this? How you deal with everybody?"

Neither Carlstedt nor Smyser socialized with Rader outside church. Both knew little about his personal life. Rader's brother, Jeff, did not return a reporter's telephone call seeking comment. At Rader's home, the shades were drawn and no one answered a knock on the door.

Police investigators and psychologists had long concluded that the killer thrived on attention and the knowledge that he continued to elude law enforcement. If Rader is BTK, he became so cocky that he once killed a woman who lived on his street and on another occasion called 911 to report a slaying he had committed.

Little has emerged about Rader's wife and children. Paula Rader was a founding member of the church and sings in the choir. Their daughter, Kerri, is married and earned a degree in education from Kansas State University. Their son, Brian, is in the Navy, undergoing submarine training.

On the modest street of A-frame homes where the family lived, some neighbors said they despised Rader. He would harangue them for tall grass, loose dogs, or branches piled in a driveway. He once criticized a woman for putting her trash cans out on the wrong day.

Two neighbors said that he was particularly hard on a woman who had both arthritis and cancer. He repeatedly fined her for not keeping her lawn properly cut.

''He knew my mother couldn't get around, and he would come down the street and measure her grass, and if it was a little bit over he'd write her a warning or a citation," said Joshua Thomas, who moved into the house after his mother died.

''What little power he had, he abused. He was a very petty man," said Reno.